joy [blogs] to the world

Booby Monster

2011-06-27T17:01:00.000-06:00

Two days after I gave birth to Anders, Pete told me he had made plans for Valentine's Day. We would drive into Chicago for the weekend, leave Anders with Pete's parents, and go to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin for a romantic getaway.

My initial response (which I had the presence of mind not to voice) was, "Are you crazy?" I was in the same robe I had put on minutes after Anders was born and I was sitting on packs of crushed ice. Valentine's Day was a little far from my mind. But I sensed my husband's fragile concern that our son, whom he already loved more than life itself, had stolen me, and that our our marriage would never be the same. So I said that it sounded like a fabulous plan, that I was already looking forward to it, and that six weeks would give me enough time to get nursing established, introduce a bottle, and store up enough milk for 24 hours away. Then I spent five weeks quietly stewing over the fact that six weeks wasn't long enough to do any of those things.

Long story short, everything came to a head the day before Valentine's Day, but we put our problem-solving experience to good use. Pete's parents agreed to come to Grand Rapids (saving us the trip into Chicago), and we went on an abbreviated version of our overnight getaway in town. To my surprise, I had a wonderful time and Anders did just fine. So when Pete and I moved to Chicago last month we decided that we should make it a point to go on an overnight date once a month.

The only problem is that our easy-breezy six week old who sucked any nipple you put in front of him (or any nose or pillow or hairbrush handle, for that matter) is now a six month old with awareness and preferences. And he prefers mommy's breasts over bottles. "Prefers" is perhaps too flexible a word. Anders prefers breastfeeding to bottles the way that Cookie Monster favors cookies over, say, poison-soaked cabbage. At least that must be what Anders thinks that I'm trying to feed him through Dr. Brown's nipple.

I think it happened when we moved. We moved from Grand Rapids to Chicago, unpacked our belongings, put Anders in a rental car, drove for four days to Idaho, settled into a new apartment, then left him with a baby-sitter he had never met. It was a lot of change for a four month old--I don't blame him for wanting some consistency and mommy-time.

The first day that we left Anders with the baby-sitter I left a full bottle and gave her instructions on when to feed him. Four hours later we came home. The first thing I noticed when we walked in the door was the bottle sitting on the floor, full. Then I saw Anders sitting on the sitter's lap, grunting, with his hands clasped together and a very intense frown on his face. She told me that he refused to eat the bottle and that he had been sitting on her lap for a half hour. I took him to the other room to nurse him immediately, knowing he was a couple hours overdue.

As soon as he latched on, he gripped my breast as if to say, "If you want this back, you're going to have to pry it from my chubby, dimpled little hands." His eyes were crossed and serious for those first few moments when he didn't get anything. When the milk came in, he raised his eyebrows like an orchestra fan listening to a particularly celestial strain of music. He smiled at me, milk dribbling out the corner of his mouth, then contentedly went back to work, happy as Cookie Monster with a mouth full of chocolate chips. He hasn't taken a bottle since.

I gave him a month to get adjusted to his new home here in Illinois, and just recently we've tried the bottle again. We've read a few things and have gotten lots of advice, but so far he's just not buying it. And honestly, I'm okay with it. Because moving is a lot of change for a twenty-four year old. No matter how hectic my day, no matter how many class or work deadlines I'm stressed about, no matter how much I'm missing friends or my house, no matter how many questions I have about what the next few years hold, whenever my little boy looks up at me with that deeply content "I'm-at-home" look, I feel the same way.

Royal Envy

2011-04-30T22:21:00.020-06:00

I know the Royal Wedding is like, so last weekend, but I'm still reeling a little. Why? Because until 2 a.m. MST, Friday morning, I didn't know that princesses were real.

I mean, I've been to Buckingham Palace, but it looked like a museum. I've seen footage of Diana and I think she was wonderful, but she wasn't really during my time and she didn't live happily ever after. Hence, I always put "princess" in the same make-believe category as the sparkly pumpkins and helpful woodland creatures who accompany her. When people asked me if I wanted to be a princess when I grew up, I assumed they were patronizing me like they were when they asked if a fairy took my front tooth. No a fairy did not take my tooth. It turned grey and my mom tied it to a doorknob, then she gave me a quarter for it while I was sleeping.

So what in the heck is THIS?!

Or this?!

Or this, I ask you!

Let this last weekend be a lesson to little girls everywhere. You really could be a princess when you grow up, and you should decide now if you want to pursue that. Otherwise you'll fall in love with a handsome and charming but nonetheless common man, and you may find yourself with plenty of happiness in your life but absolutely no pageantry. I don't have any practical advice for you (and neither will your guidance counselor), but I assume your first step will be to move to England. You'll probably also need etiquette lessons from Julie Andrews.

For the rest of you who are either already married or too old to wait for Kate and William's future son, here are some ways to incorporate some Princess into your life:

- Give yourself an arbitrary title. Based on the town I grew up in, I wish to be called the Duchess of Carpentersville.

- When you see a cute guy walking behind you this summer, drop your flip-flop and wait for him to hand it to you. He may think you're a little gross for continuing to walk barefoot, but just explain that you couldn't slow down because your Jetta was about to turn into a summer squash.

- Wear a tiara to work.

- I hear Kate and William don't have any maids in their country home, so continue to not have any maids.

- Drink tea every day.

- Plan a dinner party and ask everyone to talk very softly and to be very boring.

Now let me hear your Duchess titles!

We're There Yet.

2011-04-28T14:34:00.004-06:00

I blog and journal best when I have very little to write about and lots of time to stare into space and think introspectively about a particular experience or thought. When I'm actually doing things, it's much harder to focus. This is why my blog details my thoughts on finding a vintage electric fan at Goodwill and getting a pap smear, but says nothing about moving away from my best friends, unpacking my belongings at my in-laws house, or going on a road trip to Idaho to embark on the journey that Pete and I have been working toward for five years -- all while working part-time, taking classes full-time and breastfeeding a four-month-old bottomless pit. When you notice that I'm blogging a lot, assume that I've been sitting on my couch in my pajamas for about a week and invite me over for coffee.

So if I were to rewind the last month and be a good blogger, here are some of the things I would have written about:

- Having a garage sale is a ridiculous idea, unless you have a good friend to do it with.

- If your marriage can survive the first three months post-partum, it's probably safe to start planning your Golden Anniversary.

- Breastfeeding is God's way of encouraging moms to sit and rest and cuddle with their babies every three hours, but it's easy to distort that time into something it shouldn't be, such as an opportunity to practice daily life as an amputee.

- It's better to have pursed, invested, loved and moved than to have sat in the back of a church for four years.

- Moving is kind of like dying in that everyone takes the time to make you feel indispensable right before you're going to dispense.

- Wind farms are beautiful.

- I don't like the term "missionary wife," and when I explained why to the MAF candidate committee members and they agreed with me, I got a good feeling about the next decade of my life.

So there. This entry was like calling an old friend who I haven't talked to in a while to catch up. Now I feel like I can open up a new post to write about how an ink pen got into my washing machine this morning and ruined my favorite pair of new jeans, and how this changed me a little bit for the better.

Winter Joy

2011-02-22T14:11:00.007-06:00

Even though I was born in the middle of winter and have lived in the Midwest my entire life, I do not accept winter as a legitimate season. I must have accepted it as a kid, because I have memories of my mom slathering Vaseline on my face before sending me outside to jump in the snow. But I remember these things like I was a different person in a different life. Who would hurl herself willingly into a pile of snow? I guess the same person who would ride her bike down steep hills without holding onto the handle bars -- another memory I cannot reconcile with my current self. The person I am today would never let go of the handle bars on a hill. The person I am today sits inside and complains about snow while sipping tea.

Last year I started to see my hatred for winter as a character flaw. No matter how I looked at it, basically I had a sucky attitude about a reality that I wasn't willing to change. (It seems like you live where you do because you have to, but really, if you have about $65 you can physically remove yourself from winter and go south by bus.) I was tired of stomping my boots and cursing the snow-laden heavens for three months months every year. But rather than simply not complaining, I decided to try something even more challenging. I decided to enjoy winter.

You should have seen me -- it was so cute. I had no idea how to start loving winter, so I just did all of the things that characters in Christmas movies do. I made hot cocoa and watched old movies and wore cute gloves and scarves. I snuggled on my couch, I read books, I looked out my window and smiled contentedly at the falling flakes. I also made a private blog in which I wrote about how charming and enjoyable winter is.

All of this took me about five hours. And it was only late November.

So last winter was okay. This winter, however. This winter I really figured it out. The very best thing to do if you want to avoid winter altogether: have a baby. Better yet, have a baby in your house so that you don't even have to go outside to get to the hospital.

Think about it. When you wake up for work at 6:30 on a really dark, ugly winter morning, what do you really want to do? You want to quit your job and climb back into bed for as long as you please. You want to stay in your pajamas and have people bring you food on the couch. You want to hang out with friends, but you don't necessarily want to get dressed or go anywhere. You want to take naps and eat chocolate and not look in any mirrors.

Having a baby in the winter is like a dream come true. I thought that I didn't want a December baby, but I couldn't have timed it any more perfectly. The holidays ended, I had a baby, and now I just looked outside and it's February 23. I'm just ready to start interacting fully with the outside world, and it's time to go on vacation to South Carolina! When I get home, there might be grass.

But the best thing about having a baby in the winter (in case you aren't fully convinced that pushing an eight pound human out of your private place is worth the winter escape)...

... You get to fall in love and cuddle all day long.

Poopsie Daisy

2011-01-19T13:56:00.007-06:00

Yesterday evening found me feeling like the world's most capable new mom. Pete was on his way home from work. I had homemade chocolate chip cookies cooling on the counter. The house was tidy. And my sweet newborn was dressed in an adorable outfit that I had made myself out of a shrunken wool sweater. She's relaxed, she's rested, she's artsy: Supermom.

I finished feeding Anders, burped him, then spent a few minutes cooing at him. We were gazing into each other's eyes when I saw him scrunch up his little nose and furrow his little brow. Then I heard: SPLAT. SPLAT. SPLAT. Splat. Sp. Lat.
.
I took him to the changing table, hoping for the best and cursing my decision to put him in a disposable diaper for the evening. Sure enough, the poop had leaked. And leaked. It was all the way up his back and seeping through the multiple layers of his handmade outfit.

I pulled the onesie over his head, trying to not drag the mustard-like feces through his hair. I stripped him down and brought him over to the bathroom. Thank goodness we had left the inflatable tub inflated. I set it on the floor and placed him face down in the empty tub, which he loved. (Not.) I then took a washcloth and sponged down his back and head.
.
I was ready to cuddle him up in a towel when I saw something a little concerning... is it... yup! He peed! My son was now facedown in his own urine. I rinsed out to the tub, flipped him over, and sponged down his front side. WAAHHH!!!! WAAHHH!!! WAAHH!!! (Roughly translated: "I want to go back to the womb!!!") Ordinarily I would have had the space heater running for ten minutes before bathing him, but he should have thought of that before he pooped out of his shoulder blades.
.
As soon as he was dried and dressed I heard a knock on the back door. This is the part of the evening that found me humbly thanking God for friends and community. Because behind that door was a friend with impeccable timing and a home cooked meal. Maybe Anders' hand-stitched outfit was ruined for the evening, maybe my bathroom looked like someone had torn through with a leaf blower, and definitely we were going to be a little late for small group. But by golly, there was dinner on the table.

Birth Story

2011-01-06T19:18:00.020-06:00

As soon as I titled this post "Birth Story" I remembered that my last post was titled "Birth Plan." It's nice to have a plan, but I prefer a story. It's hard to know how to begin or end this story, though. There are so many points in time that I could consider the beginning and the final push was certainly not the end. I guess I'll start with the day I went into labor and see where things go.

Wednesday the 29th I had an urge to get out of the house and get as much done as possible. I went to the mall and spent my gift cards; I went to the craft store and stocked up on a lot of yarn; I went to the Family Video and rented a handful of movies; I went to Meijer to buy groceries for the week; I went to Babies R Us to get some final items. As I was checking out of Babies R Us I thought, "I'll go home, make some dinner, put away these newborn diapers, and settle down on my couch to watch movies and knit for two weeks." My due date was three days away, and I fully expected to go ten or more days late.

Just as I was getting dinner on the stove around seven, I started to feel some contractions. I figured they were a response to all of the walking I had done that day. My midwife had told me to "welcome" the cramps that I would be feeling prior to labor as I began to dilate, so I welcomed them and ate my dinner. We watched a James Bond movie and the contractions continued. Towards the end of the movie I was sitting on the floor and rocking around in circles, still insisting to Pete that they were just "practice" contractions that would go away. He wasn't convinced.

After the movie I called my midwife, Yolanda, just to tell her what I was feeling. She asked me a few questions and said, "Well, I think we might have a baby tonight!" I said, "Really, you think so?" She laughed. "I don't know. You tell me." I still didn't think I was going to have a baby that night, but it was nice to know she was home and waiting for my next call.

The instructor of the Bradley birth class we attended had mentioned several times, "If you go into labor in the evening, go to sleep!" So Pete went to bed around eleven and I stayed on the couch, trying to doze. I'm not sure if I actually slept, but I did get nicely disoriented. Looking at my midwife's notes, I see that I called her again at midnight to tell her that the contractions were strong and five minutes apart, but apparently I told her I still didn't want her to come over. I vaguely remember saying, "I don't know what you would do if you were here. Get some more sleep." I dozed in and out of contractions and then took a shower.

Pete had been in and out of the bedroom to check on me, and at three in the morning he told me my contractions were two minutes apart. "Seriously?!" I couldn't believe it. We hadn't even told our moms in Chicago to start driving up for the birth, and my contractions were two minutes apart. Pete called our parents and started cleaning the house -- something I had made him promise to do if I went into labor while the house was messy. Meanwhile, I called Yolanda and told her to get her shoes on.

As soon as I hung up I felt a movement and a sudden heaviness -- he had dropped. "I feel like pushing," I told Pete. I didn't see his response, but I imagine that woke him up out of any grogginess. At this point I was on my knees, draped over the side of the couch, swaying my belly in circles. My deep breathing was slowly becoming more vocal. At the height of some of my contractions, I found myself exhaling through my teeth (as I had learned in class) to lessen the pushing urge.

.
Fifteen minutes later I heard Yolanda's voice in the kitchen just as I was (loudly) nearing the peak of a contraction. She swooped into the living room and put a warm, lavender scented towel on my lower back. It smelled wonderful. It hurt like hell. "Don't touch me!" I yelled, wishing I had the vocabulary to add, "But thank you, it smells lovely."

As soon as the contraction was over she whisked me over the bathroom and told me to sit on the toilet. I sat on it backwards so that I could rest my arms and head on the back of the tank. As soon as I sat down I heard a rush. Pete and Yolanda were putting plastic and sheets down on the bed, so I yelled over, "My water just broke!"

And with that -- it was on. I don't really remember what it felt like, but I do remember that it sounded like a herd of cows mooing in my bathroom. I couldn't control the intensity of my moans, but I could control the pitch, so I kept my voice low like I had read in Ina May's books. (High pitch noises make you tense up; deep and low noises have the opposite effect.) Sometime during this chorus of cows, my friend Kelly arrived and helped Pete and Yolanda set up.

I only remember being on the toilet for a few minutes, but the notes say that I was in there for over thirty. Once things were ready, Yolanda moved me over to the bed to check my dilation. Then she said, "Okay, Joy. With this next contraction you're going to breathe in and out twice. Then breathe in a third time, hold the breath, and push."

"What? I'm pushing?" The whole time that I had been in the bathroom I knew I was in transition, but somehow I hadn't fully accepted that I was in labor. "So, I'm really actually in labor?" Pete and Kelly half laughed, half smirked. "You're definitely in labor," Yolanda said.

Suddenly Yolanda's beeper went off, and she said, "I am so sorry. I have to go make a call." I pushed with Pete and Kelly on either side of me. When Yolanda came back I asked, "Do you have another birth tonight?" She nodded. "Two other births, actually. I've never had three births at one time." All throughout my pregnancy I had this nervous inkling that she was going to have multiple births at the time I went into labor. What I didn't imagine is that she would be at my birth and calling back-up for the others. I was so thankful that she was there that I didn't mind when she would leave the room to coordinate back-up for her other births.

Pushing was difficult, but I was so thankful to finally be doing something that it felt like a relief. After each contraction Yolanda checked heart tones and reported that he was doing well. About ten minutes into pushing she said, "I'm hearing cord tones where his neck is, and he's getting sucked back up after each push, so I'm pretty sure the cord is around his neck. This is really common and his heart tones are recovering just fine, but we don't want him to stay here forever. You'll have to really focus and push."

We found the most effective position for me to push: Pete and Kelly each held up one leg and Yolanda held both of my hands to pull me up for leverage. I felt stronger than I ever have before -- I couldn't believe what I was doing. At the same time, I had never felt so weak. Towards the end Yolanda asked Pete to turn the space heater on, and I said, "No! Don't move, Pete." She looked at me and said, "It will only take a moment, and the room needs to be a little warmer for the baby." Pete let go of my leg and I let out a big growl (Kelly does a great imitation if you're ever interested); it hurt so much to have that leg unsupported. No one else could do the work for me, and yet I needed every person who was there.

After about 40 minutes of pushing Yolanda gave me some final instructions and helped me focus as intently as possible. I had planned on pushing with ease and grace -- none of that panting and grimacing that you see in movie labor scenes. But with the cord wrapped around his neck and what turned out to be a crooked presentation, I pushed for 45 minutes. With everything I had, I pushed.

And then suddenly -- completely out of the blue -- there was a living, squirming infant laying across me. My infant. Mine. I watched him quickly turn pink as he started to cry. I stroked his back and fingered his little feet. I smelled him, I cuddled him, my heart broke open in gratitude for him, and all in that same instant, I loved him. He was here.

Pete and I exchanged, "Can you believe we did this?" looks, and I saw the spaced-out look of amazement in his eyes -- an expression I still see when he looks at Anders now, two weeks later.

After everything was said and done (read: after I plopped out the placenta), Yolanda stayed to do some basic things. But seeing as how she had two other births in process, she left me in Kelly's capable RN hands to attend one of the other births. Back when I had decided to have a home birth, I wondered if I was going to miss having the constant care of nurses and doctors after the birth. I guess God led me to invite the right people to be there with me. I had a house full of people attending to my every need, and everyone who was there loved me and loved my baby. It was the best care I could have asked for. Nicole came over quickly after and I lounged around with her and Kelly. An hour or so after the birth they helped me to the bathroom. On the way back I started feeling a little dizzy. The next thing I knew I was sitting up in bed, carrying on conversation. "Do you remember fainting?" Kelly asked me. I had no memory of it, but apparently I had collapsed right into Nicole's arms. I decided to stay put in bed for a little longer.
The next few hours were a blur as family and my friend Beth arrived from Chicago. Pete and I drifted in and out of sleep with Anders.

Today is exactly two weeks after the birth, and it will be my first day washing a dish or heating up my own lunch. My mother-in-law stayed with us for the first few days, then my mother came for nine days. I've heard the term "Mother the mother" in regards to how a new mom should be cared for. I was thoroughly mothered by both my mothers and some dear friends. Now Pete is back at work and Anders and I have plans to nap, nurse and cuddle, watch movies and knit while friends continue to deliver meals.

Everything about Anders' birth was a miracle to me, and an experience I will remember for the rest of my life. I am in awe of God's amazing design for birth and new life. I thank Him continuously for the healthy delivery of my wonderful son, and for the incredible husband, family and community that I've been blessed with. My heart is full.

Birth Plan

2010-12-22T12:56:00.009-06:00

This December finds me wrapping presents, roasting a leg of lamb, and preparing for the birth of my first son, who was conceived not-so-immaculately in Bethlehem over Easter. I started thinking about Mary a lot while I was there, and my connection with her has grown over the past nine months to a level that's probably inappropriate for a protestant.

Friends are starting to ask me whether I'm nervous about the birth, and I am. I've never done anything like it before. For as much as I've read and learned and asked, I can't know what to expect. What I really want is for everything to go according to my plan. So much of life is learning to roll with the punches and adapt and make new plans... but I want to wake up with some mild contractions on a morning when my house is clean. I do not want to be the fifth person in 30 years who my midwife has to call back-up for due to a birth already in progress. I want to labor for about eight hours, and I want to deliver my baby at home and hear him cry in no more than three seconds. I would prefer that all of this happen on either December 28 (for the tax benefit), January 1 (for the 1/1/11 birthday), or January 9 (exactly one week past my due date, giving me a week to relax without work or school).

I wonder if Mary had a birth plan, or a set of ridiculously specific expectations, like I do. If she did, I can't imagine it included going out of town at nine months pregnant. It also probably didn't include barn animals. But she had the same promise I have, the same promise you have, which is that no matter what happens or how different things are from expected, God is with us. It's a promise that He fulfilled through a birth some two millenia ago.

He's Here!
The Nativity, from Luke 1 -2
By Sally Lloyd Jones, The Jesus Storybook Bible

Everything was ready. The moment God had been waiting for was here at last! God was coming to help his people, just as he had promised in the beginning. But how would he come? What would he be like? What would he do?

Mountains would have bowed down. Seas would have roared. Trees would have clapped their hands. But the earth held its breath. As silent as snow falling, he came in. And when no one was looking, the darkness, he came.

There was a young girl who was engaged to a man named Joseph. (Joseph was the great-great-great-great grandson of King David.) One morning, this girl was minding her own business when, suddenly, a great warrior of light appeared -- right there, in her bedroom. He was Gabriel and he was an angel, a special messenger from heaven.

When she saw the tall shining man standing there, Mary was frightened. "You don't have to be scared," Gabriel said. "God is very happy with you!" Mary looked around to see if perhaps he was talking to someone else.

"Mary," Gabriel said, and he laughed such gladness that Mary's eyes filled with sudden tears.

"Mary, you're going to have a baby. A little boy. You will call him Jesus. He is God's own Son. He's the One! He's the Rescuer!" The God who flung planets into space and kept the whirling around and around, the God who could do anything at all -- was making himself small. And coming down... as a baby.

Wait. God was sending a baby to rescue the world?

"But it's too wonderful!" Mary said and felt her heart beating hard. "How can it be true?"

"Is there anything too wonderful for God?" Gabriel asked.

So Mary trusted God more than what her eyes could see. And she believed. "I am God's servant," she said. "Whatever God says, I will do." Sure enough, it was just as the angel had said. Nine months later, Mary was almost ready to have her baby.

Now, Mary and Joesph had to make a trip to Bethlehem, the town King David was from. But when they reached the little town, the found that every room was full. Every bed was taken. "Go away!" the innkeepers told them. "There isn't any place for you."

Where would they stay? Soon Mary's baby would come. They couldn't find anywhere except an old, tumbledown stable. So they stayed where the cows and donkeys and the horses stayed.

And there, in the stable, amongst the chickens and the donkeys and the cows, in the quiet of the night, God gave the world his wonderful gift. The baby that would change the world was born. His baby Son.

Mary and Joseph wrapped him up to keep him warm. They made a soft bed of straw and used the animals' feeding trough as his cradle. And they gazed in wonder at God's Great Gift, wrapped in swaddling clothes, and lying in a manger.

Mary and Joseph named him Jesus, "Emmanuel" -- which means "God has come to live with us."

Because, of course, he had.

elephant wannabe

2010-11-19T08:08:00.017-06:00

I have always known that I wanted to have a baby. What I didn't expect was how much I was going to love being pregnant. I don't know why -- my mom always had great pregnancies, and most of my friends seemed to enjoy pregnancy, too. I think I listened to the worst of everyone's experiences, watched a few too many sitcoms, and assumed that my pregnancy would be a compilation of all of it. I figured I would be crabby, emotional and irrational all the time... but according to Pete, I have been "more emotionally stable" than my non-pregnant self. (Okay, there were a couple meltdowns, but they were few and far between.) I thought I would look down from my positive pregnancy test and see stretch marks, but I'm almost eight months along and still in the clear. I thought my skin would explode into a pimplish frenzy, but my skin actually improved. I thought I would be exhausted all the time, but... well, yes. I've been exhausted all the time. That's par for the Joy course, though. And pregnancy is a terrific excuse for a nap.
The first time I talked with my midwife I was about twelve weeks along, and she said something that stuck with me. She said, "You're going to love pregnancy. The first one especially is just magical. But eventually the time will come when you'll have to let go of pregnancy and do the work of giving birth." Yesterday at my appointment I told her that I really hadn't believed her at the time. I said, "I'm still banking on the idea that something in these last few weeks will make me want to get this thing out of me, even if it means labor and then months of sleepless nights."

She said, "Well, even though you will probably get uncomfortable in the final days, you may never have that 'get this thing out of me' feeling. But here's the carrot I'll dangle in front of you: For as much as you love being pregnant, you are going to love this next part. You're going to love interacting with your baby and seeing him grow. You're going to love breastfeeding. You're going to love motherhood." (Yolanda has a way of making me feel better about stuff. I hope her calming effect works during birth, too.)

So here I am in the final weeks, and even if this is supposed to feel like the longest part, the holidays will probably whisk them away faster than I can ask, "Pete, will you rub my shoulders?" (Even if you have a very comfortable pregnancy, you should definitely take advantage of nine months of unlimited backrubs.) The pregnancy and labor books next to my bed are slowly being replaced with breastfeeding and baby care books, I'm stocking my pantry, freezing meals and washing baby clothes. Also, I'm trying to imagine that motherhood may be as enjoyable and exciting as these last few months have been.

* Photos are by Beth Laurren Photography, except for the last one. :)

STOP MAKING ME UGLY!

2010-09-08T16:41:00.009-06:00

Today I spent roughly twenty minutes accusing Pete of making me ugly. This happens every two weeks when we take my baby bump picture. I look in the mirror, and I'm not ugly; I look at Pete's picture of me, and I am ugly. So it stands to reason that it is his fault.

Sometimes he makes me look like I forgot to apply makeup or do my hair:

Sometimes he forgets to move the camera strap:

Sometimes he makes me look pasty and crazy:

And sometimes he gets bored and forgets which bump he's supposed to be documenting:

But every now and then, he stops making me ugly and lets me be a cute pregnant lady:

(23 weeks, baby!)

Our Firstborn Shall be a Son

2010-09-01T21:36:00.013-06:00

If there were any part of Pete that wanted to wait until the birth to find out the sex of our child, I beat it out of him with my bare powers of annoyance.

"What do you think it is, a boy or a girl?" I would ask at various times during the day. (Pete never claimed to have any intuition about the sex of our baby, which bothered me to no end. Once I pointed out that he should have intuition, since he was the one who determined the sex. "I'm sorry," he said. "I guess I wasn't really paying attention at the time.") He wouldn't ever answer my question, so I would follow it up by asking, "Do you think it's a boy?" to which he would nod in response.

"Really?"

He would shake his head.

"So you think it's a girl?"

He would nod.

"But you just indicated that you think it's a boy."

And so on. We repeated this exchange no less than three times a day for fifteen weeks, and then scheduled our ultrasound for the very first day that they allowed us to schedule it. I devised a brilliant scheme: the ultrasound tech would put the "results" in a sealed envelope for us to open with Pete's family at the reunion in Lake Geneva that same day.

The ultrasound went really well, but no sooner had we walked out of the office when I noticed a big, obnoxious, telling grin beaming from Pete's face.

"YOU KNOW!" I said, shaking the envelope in my hand. "HOW DO YOU KNOW?"

He shrugged.

"Did you see something on the screen?"

He shrugged.

"You don't know."

Shrug.

"HOW DO YOU KNOW?!"

In the end, the joke was on Pete, because the "female" that he saw on the screen referred to ME. He spent all afternoon imagining life with a daughter -- pink, dolls, pigtails, a wedding aisle -- and then we pulled "It's a Boy!" out of the envelope and he about fell over. It was an emotionally taxing day for Pete, followed by an emotionally taxing weekend for me, as the tech's office was closed and I couldn't call to ask why Pete had seen "female" on the screen. We sorted it all out by Tuesday.

So it's a boy! I knew it all along, anyways, and here's why: I have always been a boy magnet. Baby brothers flocked to me, one at a time, four in a row. Just look at the chubby-cheeked baby boy perfection I was surrounded with:

See what I'm saying? It only makes sense that a boy magnet would also be a boy-making machine. Our firstborn shall be a son, and judging by the boy-genes I have been bestowed, he's gunna be a cute one.

So bring on the blue stripes, miniature sailor outfits, and the quarter-sized sports equipment; bring on the trucks, the cars, the Thomas the Tank Engine and all of his friends; bring on the guns made out of everything including lunch items, the pitch-perfect machine gun noises that I still can't make, and the spit-infused sound effects to elaborate hot wheel crashes. Ask or tell me anything about your penis, little boy, and I'll respond without a blink... although I may spend a few minutes laughing into a pillow behind a closed door. If you look embarrassed about your underpants (and I know that look well), I'll look away until you get into the tub. My cabinets will always have a sufficient amount of Band Aids and peroxide, and my feelings won't be hurt when you lurch out my arms when daddy gets home. You know why? Because I am a pro at this. I got this one. You are one lucky little boy, and I already already feel like the luckiest mom in the world.

Quickening

2010-08-19T16:46:00.009-06:00

It has only been in the last 194 years that women have been able to hear their baby's heartbeat, and only in the last 52 years have women been able to see their unborn child on a screen. (The stethoscope was invented in 1816 and ultrasound technology was approved for screening pregnant women in 1957.) But all women of all time -- Eve, Sarah, Hannah, Mary, Catherine the Great, Lucille Ball, my mom, your mom, and so on -- have been able to feel their babies move inside them. Perhaps for that reason alone, the little nudges and movements I've felt in these last few weeks have been the most amazing experience of my pregnancy thus far.

Three weeks ago I was sitting on my couch next to Pete when I felt an unfamiliar pang in my stomach. "I think the baby just moved!" I said, and then I held very still. "I felt it again!" I said, and Pete paused our movie.

"Sweet!" he said. "I felt it a few days ago when I hugged you, though, so it's not the first time."

"For the last time, you did not feel the baby move," I said. "It is impossible for you to feel it before I do."

"Why? I told you you were pregnant before you knew."

"I know, and you don't get to take this one away from me," I pouted. "I get to feel it first. Next thing I know you'll be in labor before I am."

"No thanks." He visibly quivered at the idea. "So what does it feel like?"

I sat very still again and waited until I felt it. "It feels... not like I thought it would. One of my books said it would feel like bursting bubbles or 'darting minnows,' and my midwife said it would feel like a faint nudge of a fingertip. This feels like... actually, it kind of hurts."

It was gas. You would think I would know what gas feels like, but I'm a lady, so I don't really get gas. Pete, if you're reading this, shut up.

A few days later, it was unmistakable -- a gentle little flop and then a tap on something deep inside me. I giggled and pressed on my stomach; I called Pete over to see if he could feel it, which he couldn't. (It looks like he won't be laboring for me, after all.) For the next two weeks I announced every time I felt the baby moving -- about three or four times a day -- and then I grabbed Pete's hand and pressed it on my tummy.

"Feel that?" I'd ask. He would shake his head. "How about that?" No. "You had to feel that one, come one." Uh uh. Once he said, "Well, I feel something... really faint... wait, nope, that's my heartbeat pulsating in my fingers." I made him pause computer games and flight simulators to feel my stomach. I woke him up from a nap once, which was a bad idea.

Last night we were drifting asleep when I felt the baby and knew -- just knew -- that it was strong enough for Pete to feel. He was nearly asleep and I didn't want to wake him up, but I had to. "Pete? Pete, wake up, I know you could feel this." He mumbled something and I took his hand, pressed it against my stomach, and waited. The baby jumped and Pete's eyes flew open. "I felt it! Wow, that was a big one!" He waited a little more and felt another kick. It was a milestone, a triumph, and even though he was probably too sleepy to remember it, I always will.

In her book Gentle Birth, Gentle Mothering, Sarah Buckley references a study on maternal bonding with unborn babies. The study concluded that women who have ultrasounds report higher levels of bonding with their unborn child compared to women who do not have ultrasounds, but only before they feel movement. After quickening, technology makes no difference in how bonded a woman feels towards her baby. Even though I'm looking forward to my 21 week ultrasound tomorrow, and even though I have a recording of my baby's heartbeat set as my ring tone, I treasure these movements as the most pure connection that I have with the life inside of me.

"Are you going to find out?"

2010-08-05T08:56:00.005-06:00

Until I got pregnant, I wasn't aware that all pregnant couples belong to one of two camps: The Waiters and the Finder-Outers. The lines are clearly drawn, and while both sides are prepared with a mini pitch, the Waiters will always win on account of passion.

"DON'T DOOOOOOO IT," they wail, as if they just found you on the edge of the Golden Gate Bridge.

"But there are so few surprises in life," they implore sadly.

"The not knowing really strengthens you in those last few pushes," mothers reason. Then they add with a loud whisper, "And you get better stuff at the shower if your guests don't know what you're having."

But my all time favorite response came courtesy of our friend Mike. No one else ever put it quite this way, although the sentiment underscores the entire Waiters' case. "You'll ruin it," he said. "You'll just ruin it."

By the sly look on his face when he said it, he obviously knew that it would get to my head. Will I ruin it if I find out? I wondered. Would the knowledge of this baby's gender remove all of the mystery of life, leaving me with a dim, mundane existence? Would my shower guests buy me enough 0-3 month dresses for a flock of baby girls, but no thermometer? Was I going to run out of steam during labor, throw up my arms and say, "Well, I know it's a boy. No sense in pushing it out now," and then die in labor with my baby boy (as expected) stuck in the birth canal? My death would be (regrettably) no surprise to the Waiters, who had predicted this scenario, and they would talk about it the way you might discuss the death of a drunk race car driver. She found out, they would murmur to one another at my wake, their voices full of pity and condemnation.

Well, probably not.

My camp of Finder Outers isn't very passionate, and we're unified only by our impatience or our nerdy urge to "plan ahead" with appropriate colors. But, on behalf of all the peeking parents out there, I would like to offer my response.

First: Which surprise-filled reality are we comparing this this one to that deems life lacking in surprises? I for one am surprised on a daily basis. Sometimes Pete walks up behind me without my knowing and touches my shoulder and I spit my water all over the keyboard while falling out of my chair. Just today a dog ran into the street and I almost got in an accident. Occasionally I get a call from Family Video and am surprised to remember that I never returned that movie that we never watched, resulting in over $15 of fines. Some mornings I wake up with an enormous pimple that I didn't even feel coming.

Okay, so those are all bad surprises, but I'm sure there are plenty of good ones, too.

Second: Finding out doesn't take away the surprise, it just shifts the surprise to a different point in time. I can see why it would be fun to find out at the moment of birth, but personally I like the idea of spreading out the fun. We're going to have the ultrasound tech put the "results" in a sealed envelope, then we're driving to a family reunion and opening the envelope over dinner. This should provide at least twenty minutes of excitement, followed by months of anticipation and calls from my mother-in-law saying, "I saw an infant train conductor outfit today and couldn't resist!" At birth you have the excitement over the gender mixed in with the exhaustion and the rush of birth, followed by months of green and yellow onsies.

But ultimately, it's up to each person or each couple, and I say more power to the Waiters. I for one can hardly wait the 15 remaining days until my ultrasound. I think I'll set the envelope on the dashboard and stare at it during the entire drive to Wisconsin, just to tantalize myself with the surprise.

(I forgot to mention a third camp of couples: The Finder-Outers-Who-Make-Everyone-Else-Wait. Though they may have pure intentions, this group always comes off a little smug. Their mantra is, "We just want to keep something for ourselves." I never really know how to respond to that. Is an apology in order? "I'm so sorry that we the people have taken away so much from your pregnancy. I'm glad you are reserving some of it just for yourself." (?) Please, if you are going to find out but not tell anyone, don't tell people that you are finding out but not telling them.Find an appropriate way to dodge the question, and dodge it, lest I buy you lots of toys and stuffed animals that aren't on your registry just to make you angry.)

Just a spoonful of crazy helps the hormones go down

2010-07-17T08:14:00.013-06:00

Yesterday I had my first official hormonal pregnancy breakdown. It went something like this:

Pete was in the living room as I was looking through pictures of fetal development. I found an amazing, high-tech, biology-book worthy photograph of a baby at our stage of development, and marveled at it. I look at these pictures every other week or so, and so much happens in that amount of time that it amazes me.

I set the photo as our desktop background (replacing a glamor shot of an airplane flying over water) just as Pete walked into the office. I said, "Pete, look at this amazing picture. Can you believe that's how developed our baby is right now?" He looked at it and said,

"Ugh. That looks like a dead baby. And please don't change my desktop background."

(Okay, now that I'm writing this, I'm starting to think that my following reaction was completely justified. Well, almost.)

Feeling a rare sort of rage creeping up from my toes to my chest, I silently stood up and walked to the dining room, where I began rearranging piles of magazines on the table. I do this when I'm upset -- I pretend to clean things. Pete has forbidden me from pretending to clean the kitchen when I'm angry because he often has to play interference, catching plates and glasses that I accidentally drop.

Pete followed me into the dining room and said, "Okay, you're upset. Tell me why."

I took one of the magazines off its new pile, walked silently to the living room, sat on the couch, and pretended to read.

"Okay, you are very upset. Tell me why."

Since I was pretending, I decided to pretend that I was an adult and, rather than act out on the anger I was feeling, ask questions to understand where Pete had been coming from and why he had such a morbid reaction to a beautiful picture. I opened my mouth, took a deep, calming breath, and burst into tears. "What is WRONG WITH YOU?!?!?!?!" was my first resolution-seeking inquiry.

Pete took a step back. "Okay, now you're unreasonably upset. Go ahead."

"I am NOT being UNREASONABLE," I informed him, wiping snot from my nose and attempting to focus my eyes. The rage had reached my head now.

"Joy, it isn't a picture of our baby. And why do you look so crazy? You've been so good throughout this whole pregnancy... even more emotionally stable than when you're not pregnant. Where is this coming from?"

I stopped blubbering and snotting and coughing and eye-darting as he finished his sentence. This is what shock feels like, I thought. I gripped my magazine. "I want to throw this magazine at you," I said. "I want to THROW IT AT YOU but it wouldn't HURT ENOUGH!!!! More emotionally stable than when I'm not pregnant?!"

He started laughing. Laughing. He probably wouldn't have done so if there were any sharp utensils lying around, but since all I had was my magazine, he laughed at me. "Yes, you've been very stable. I hear all these stories about crazy pregnant women, and I thought, 'Holy cow, Joy's going to be a trip.' But you've been great! And I'm just saying, let's not go down this road here. Let's just go back to Super Pregnant Joy."

By now I was sobbing and hyperventilating again. "So because I'm pregnant, my feelings don't matter right now," I wailed. "And I suppose when I'm you know, uh, SCREABING [that was supposed to be screaming, but snot was in the way] in LABOR, you'll just tell me to, I don't know, walk it off or something."

He hiccuped a little trying to suppress his laughs.

"And for another thing," I said, "It's not your desktop. It's OUR desktop."

"What are you talking about?" He looked bewildered. "What about the desktop?"

"YousaidthatIshouldn'treplacepicturesonYOURdesktop," I blubbered, the sobs rising and rising. "Butit'smydesktoptoo,weShareit!!!"

"Joy! Just tell me why you're so upset."

He waited until my eyes stopped darting around my head, until my sobs settled into a slight sniff, until some of the anger seeped out of my ears and the ends of my toes.

"I was excited over what I think is an amazing picture," I said. "I didn't care what you thought about the picture, but I wanted you to be amazed at how developed our baby was. I wanted you to say things like, 'Look at its fingers! Look at its nose!' And you should have figured out that it was important to me, because I had made it the background photo and I called you over to look at it. And finally, you should never say, 'dead baby.'"

Pete nodded. "Okay, I understand now. And you understand that I did not intend to hurt you or to say anything bad about our baby. I love our baby. Our baby is great. That wasn't our baby. Whatever I said about the picture probably came from a place of ignorance. I don't know how they take those pictures, okay? I know now that it was really a live baby, and that white ghostly stuff was... I don't know... the placenta? You're laughing now because I said that was the placenta, so see? I'm ignorant. And I'm not going to tell you to 'walk off' the labor pains. And it is our computer, not my computer, you're right."

"Just.... stop talking," I said. "And we'll be find." [That was supposed to be fine, but there was some leftover snot in the way.]

Ivonka

2010-07-03T00:57:00.004-06:00

Here I am, up at three in the morning, regretting that massive nap I took this afternoon. Exhausted but restless, I've been crocheting flowers in the silence for nearly two hours without a single coherent thought passing through my mind. Till, out of nowhere, I hear myself think,

"It made me sad today when you looked at the cover of Town and Country and said to Pete, 'Ugh. I can't stand Ivonka Trump.'" (God does a killer impression of me.)

He hardly ever speaks to my thoughts in first person like that, and I am disappointed that it was a word of correction instead of something encouraging. So now I've just been crocheting my flowers, feeling sad about how much disdain I feel for Ivonka Trump. Where does that come from? Wherever it does, I don't like it. Maybe God will chime in with something a little more upbeat, like, "Great job with those flowers, Joy."

The ones I'm crocheting, that is. God's probably also sad that I can't grow flowers.

Framed Photos

2010-07-01T20:21:00.019-06:00

Tonight I gathered all of my mismatched framed pictures to make an arrangement on a bare wall. A few of the pictures are from when Pete and I were dating, some are from our engagement, others from the wedding, and so on. Right when I thought I was finished, I spotted a 2 inch frame that was exactly the right size for our 10 week ultrasound picture.

Pete hammered the nail and I hung the picture; it was almost too small to notice. "Just imagine how many pictures we're going to have of this mysterious person," I said. "School photos, birthday parties, vacations, holidays, graduations... And all we have now is this."

And then I realized that this is probably the last time that many of those pictures of Pete and I will every be on our wall. Couples with kids just don't display multiple pictures of themselves kissing on park benches or dancing at their wedding. Most of them will get tucked away into albums as we make room for the kids' portraits and family pictures, just like my pictures of friends and high school and Europe made way for these.

If beginnings weren't this much fun, I'd spend a lot more time crying over endings.

*photos http://www.sarahbarlow.com/

"Beauty" and Melanoma: Only Skin Deep

2010-06-29T13:57:00.012-06:00

This is your square friend Joy here, reminding you that when someone says, "Wow, you look really tan," the proper response is not, "Thanks, you look great, too." (Unless that's how you would respond if someone said, "Wow, your skin looks irreversibly damaged on account of either your vanity or carelessness.")

You would think that tanning would be as out of fashion as smoking by now (actually, in the real fashion world, it's completely out of vogue), but I still hear things like,

"I don't need sunscreen because my skin doesn't burn."

"Storing up my Vitamin D for the winter!"

"My shrink suggested that I try a tanning bed for my SADS."

(And my personal favorite)

"I'm going on vacation in a couple weeks, so I'm getting a base tan. To be safe."

Facts:

- Everyone needs SPF 15 or higher with UVA/UVB protection whenever he or she goes into the sun (even if it's winter or a cloudy summer day), regardless of race, skin type or skin tone.

- Vitamin D: Get it before 10 am. Otherwise it's like drinking a 1,500 calorie shake for the calcium.

- Your shrink is not a dermatologist.

- There is no such thing as a safe base tan, regardless of what the girl at the tanning salon (who is, interestingly enough, also not a dermatologist) says. Tan skin is damaged skin, even if it's in preparation for a vacation somewhere where "the sun is different than it is here." When you go on vacation, you should be applying sunscreen every two hours, staying out of the sun during the hottest part of the day, and wearing thin, long sleeve shirts and a hat when the sun is unavoidable.

We all know why, right? 1 in 5 Americans... most preventable kind of cancer... melanoma, squamous cell... basal cell... this 32 year old woman. Okay. I thought so. Just making sure. Renew your committment to protect your health and preserve your beautiful skin! Suntans are not a cute way to express your cool retro style.

Home Plate Advantage

2010-06-10T13:01:00.024-06:00

The sheer volume of decisions that you have to make before you have a baby is on par with planning a wedding. Wedding planning is simply making decision after decision, day after day, until suddenly you're naked in a hotel room wondering what you've gotten yourself into.

Right now I'm baby planning. Thankfully I have nine months instead of the five short months of my engagement, but the decisions feel a little more weighty. I could probably list 65 decisions that I've made in the last five weeks, some of them without a second thought, but many of them in consultation with my mother, a friend, and at least three reference books.

One of the decisions that I'll have to make soon is whether I want to give birth in a hospital or at home. I met with both the home birth and the hospital-based midwife last week; I liked both of them, and I don't feel any closer to making the decision. It feels like it should be obvious, but I don't think I've been quiet for long enough to know what I really want.

My mom had two babies in the hospital and three at home, and I attended the final two. I remember them feeling so natural and comfortable. With the last one, my mom made blueberry pie ahead of time, which she set it out with whip cream after the contractions started. I remember checking in on my mom, eating some pie with my dad in the kitchen, reading my novel in the living room, watching Isaiah emerge into the world, and then eating some more pie. The midwives were there the whole time, but everything seemed to go according to my mom's timetable. No one told her what to do or when to do it; she just disappeared into another world inside herself and had a baby.

I liked the whole experience, but I always assumed that I would have my babies in hospitals. I admired my mother's hippie, granola ways, but back then I also found them odd. Well, I still think she's a tad odd. Not only did my mom have her babies at home... she wants us to host her wake at home. "Everyone goes other places to do everything," she lamented to me once. "They go someplace else to eat dinner, they go someplace else to worship, they go someplace else to have babies, they go someplace else to be dead in a room. When I die, just put my casket on the kitchen table and invite people over." My mom is by no means a hermit--she just thinks your home should be where you live, not a place for you crash after you do your living somewhere else.

So that's my mom, and maybe it's me too, minus the notion of my casket on the kitchen table. I think I've come to terms with all of the really important things to consider with home births and hospital births, and as I quiet myself to figure out what I really want, I'm left to consider these items on each pro list:

- If I have the baby at the hospital, I'll get to press a little button when I need something.

- If I have the baby at home, there will be pie.

Stirrups and Sonograms

2010-06-03T20:07:00.020-06:00

Today Pete saw more of me than I have ever seen of myself. Today Pete watched me get a Pap Smear. I knew he would. I knew there was no way he was going to stand by my head or blur his eyes and make nervous conversation. I told him exactly what was going to happen while we were waiting for the midwife.

"Guess where this metal beak looking thing goes," I challenged him, raising one eyebrow. Pete rolled his eyes. "It's pretty obvious where that goes."

"Well, I bet you don't know what that does," I said, pointing to a large machine-type object. "What does that do?" Pete asked solemnly. I readjusted myself on the butcher paper and smoothed out my gown. "Oh, oh you just wait." I had no idea what that did.

Amy came in and introduced herself; we chatted for about twenty minutes before she put the gloves on. I told her that Pete has a curious nature, and she offered to give him a front row show.

"See that?" I heard her say to Pete after the metal thing went where it obviously goes. "That's the cervix. That's what's going to dilate to ten centimeters." She made a wide gesture and I said, "Really? That big?" She looked at her hands and said, "Well, no, more like this," and shortened her hands to indicate a space that looked wide enough for a Grade A jumbo egg to fit through.

Pete's head disappeared for a moment. "That's it, right there?" He had no idea what he was looking at, I'm sure. As soon as the exam was over Amy said, "Now I'm just going to feel around a little..." and suddenly her gloved hand was up there. Up, up, up there. "Yeah, I'd say that's about a ten week uterus," she said. Pete swallowed. It echoed.

Amy finished and left the room and I got dressed. "What did you think?" I asked Pete. He nodded a few times. "Fascinating," he said. "It was something." His eyes were a little wider than normal and he didn't seem to be blinking.

A few minutes later we followed Amy to a larger room with dim lighting and impressive machinery. Amy hadn't been able to find the heartbeat with the Doppler, so she wanted to get a quick peek with the sonogram. She put some jelly on my tummy, pressed something cold against my skin; my heart flickered with the screen. There was my baby's head resting in a cradle of shadows; there were my baby's arms and legs flailing in liquid, computerized motion. "I see it!" Pete said, marveling at its head and appendages. I tried to hold still, but every time the little bean on the screen waved, I giggled. "It's a beautiful baby," Amy said, satisfied with the heartbeat and the measurements.

I forgot all of my reservations about high frequency waves--I wished that I could just sit there with my beautiful baby all evening, waving and giggling. I see you, I told the baby through telepathic powers that I've developed over the last ten weeks. You don't know it, but I see you, and even before I saw you, I loved you.

"Okay, I'm convinced," Pete said proudly, and the screen went dark.

(This is just a stock picture--I haven't scanned mine yet. Picture something like this, only 100x cuter.)

Genesis

2010-05-15T15:37:00.008-06:00

Making a baby is a certain culmination of being human, in that it's biological and natural and the way that we propagate our kind. But it doesn't feel biological, natural or human. It feels God-like. And not in the amusing Bruce Almighty kind of way, but in the, "What did I just. do?" kind of way. (That's what I imagine God said on the seventh day, after he had a cold one and a minute to think about it.)

One of the verses I'm most boggled by is Genesis 6:5. "God was sorry He had made man." It's not boggling to me that He regretted making man; I imagine there have been other periods in history that God was grieved to the point of total regret. I'm boggled, of course, because of God's vantage point. In the moment before he decided to make man in his image, what was He envisioning? What did he see beside the faulty trajectory of his children's hearts, the knowledge that some would turn out very badly, the price they would cost, the ways they would grieve him? Or rather, what did he write on the "pro" list that made the difference? Sometimes I judge God for creating humanity even though he could see ahead to the Holocaust, but here I am making a baby after the Holocaust happened. God knew Hitler was to come; I know that Hitlers are out there for the making. Our vantage points are not altogether different.

But anyone who has ever acknowledged the artistic element to their being understands that creation has very little do with items you can name on a pro/con list. Creating something feels a little like magic and also like obedience. It feels like a precarious privilege, and making a baby feels like the most dangerous thing I have ever done. It's like painting something with my eyes closed for the Queen to hang in the main foyer--I'm blindly going about my masterpiece. I'm more nervous than if I were writing a song to sing in front of a million people. I'm more sheepish telling people that I'm pregnant than I would be to tell people I write poetry. (I do not write poetry, by the way. I just imagine that's a sensitive thing to tell people, based on the anxiety that I feel when someone tells me they write poems.)

The only thing I'm sure of is that I'm doing something kind of wonderful. I know because yesterday I rubbed my belly and whispered, "I can't wait to meet you" to bundle of diving cells in the shape of a seahorse, and then turned to God and said, "Please. Please." Like it was the most important thing. Like I already knew that it was good.

"[We're] not that innocent..."

2010-04-21T08:26:00.054-06:00

I recently read the most fascinating essay, and confident that there are no children who read my blog, I am going to write about it. Kids, if you're reading this blog, go outside and play Boxcar Children on the porch like I did when I was your age. Oh, how do I know how old you are? It doesn't matter! I played Boxcar Children until I was a legal adult. I cut my lip on my chipped "Ben" cup, otherwise I'd still be drinking out of it.

The essay is titled Afternoon of the Sex Children. It was written by Mark Greif, published in n+1 in 2006, then published again in The Best American Essays of 2007, which is clearly a misleading title. It should be American Essays Robert Antwan Liked Best in 2006. Nevertheless, hats off to editor Robert Antwan, because Best American Essays a very good series and Afternoon of the Sex Children was a very good essay.

The essay started, of course, with a discussion of Lolita, and whether Nabocov was a pedophile. Greif acknowledged all of the common literary interpretations that let Nabocov off the hook, but said that he felt they aren't honest about the real controversy. The problem with Lolita is that it's too vivid, too real. The author was too capable of sexualizing a twelve year old girl, too skilled at assuming that mindset for the sake of narrative fiction. But Greif credited Nabocov with something he is not usually credited to be: a social critic. "We are in the afternoon of the sex children," Greif writes. "Nabocov only saw the dawn."

Twenty pages about youth and sex later, Greif got down to his main point. Maybe child molesters and rapists are not an anomaly of our society, he suggested, but rather the worst product of our society.

Think of it this way (and this is my own analogy, so don't blame Greif if it's flawed): What is the worst reduction of a society that over-emphasizes thinness and that parades skin-and-bones models in its magazines? The most tragic product of that culture is someone who starves herself. It seems too far a stretch, too incomprehensible, except that it's real and is far more pervasive now than in previous centuries. Anorexia and other eating disorders are psychological illnesses, but we accept that our culture breeds the disease, which is why we're seeing so much pressure on media and fashion to stop featuring unhealthy models.

Perhaps even more dramatically than we esteem slenderness, we prize youth--both the season of youth and, when the season has past, the appearance of youth. So, what's the reduction of a culture that idolizes youth and that now sexualizes childlike images for adult purposes? The worst product of that society may very well be adults who have sex with children.

Just look at us. Every magazine cover has a headline promising the tricks to a youthful look, women are throwing botox parties in mass attempts to erase the proof of years, and an entire generation of men now think that the "Catholic school girl look" is sexy. Out with the naughty librarian hiding behind her glasses; in with the schoolgirl hiding behind her books. It doesn't follow that every man who likes a plaid skirt is sexually interested in the minors who wear them, but it follows that some of them do. Doesn't it?

Sexual fascination and abuse of children is perverse and infuriating--seemingly too far a stretch from our obsession with unlined faces and youthful bodies. But perhaps our society has infected our worst and most dramatically punished criminals--the ones who Oprah interviews in a three part series, the ones who I shake my head at in utter confusion and disgust. Me who has worn braids and knee high socks at the age of 23, and who already slathers on eye cream. Even if it's the speck in your eye and the plank in another, if you look closely you may be horrified to discover that both the speck and the plank come from the same diseased tree.

Greif believes that it's basically too late for us--or, rather, he admits that it's too late for him. He's too immersed. But maybe we can lay the groundwork so that our grandchildren have a healthy frame of reference in order to scrutinize and criticize our distorted attitudes towards age. It would have to start by a remaking of our sexual value system and by prizing the qualities of adulthood over the qualities of childhood. Sophistication is sexy. Experience is sexy. That proof of laughter around the mouth and eyes is sexy.

And is it hardly worth mentioning that, biologically, the procreating years start in youth and peaks in one's 20's? If there's anything that our sex-crazed and pill-popping culture is perhaps right about, it's that sex isn't just about procreation. Ladies, think of how exciting it would be to be in your 30's, perhaps even after you've bore children, and to know that your sexiness is just starting to form, not just starting to fade. That your most alluring attributes have something to do with maturity, with grace, with wisdom--not the shiny hair or taut flesh of your youth. Maybe we would spend more time developing those attributes that only improve with age, rather than mourning the loss or fretting the impending loss of vitality that diminishes.

Sexuality is a treasure for our children, intended for them to blossom fully into in adulthood; it's not a quality of youth for adults to exploit for our own doomed purposes. Perhaps our distorted attitudes about age are abusing both the gift of sexuality in adulthood and, for many victims, the gift of innocence in childhood.

Agenda

2010-03-31T04:58:00.008-06:00

You know how you can get into a car and drive, then arrive at your destination with no memory of the journey? That's how I felt when I landed in Israel. I have no idea how I got here.

A few months ago Kathy said, "We're going to Israel, and we want you both to come. Will you?" For two people who read the Bible, watch the news, love history and love to travel, Pete and I were shockingly uninterested in Israel. I always assumed that if I went, I would go in my 60's--I guess because most of the people who go to Israel seem to be in their 60's. But who would be crazy enough to pass down a free trip to Israel? We said yes immediately.

A couple months after that, Pete interviewed for a new job. The person he was interviewing to replace was leaving for a two week missionary evaluation, and the company informed him that they wouldn't hold his job for two weeks. When Pete brought up the Israel trip during the interview, his soon-to-be boss said, "We might be able to get you one week off. Possibly. Maybe." Our flights were already booked and the trip was nearly three weeks long, but not taking the job wasn't an option. He took it.

As our the trip approached, we started to look at our finances. It dawned on us that we weren't going to be going on a free trip; we were going on a trip that cost three week's wages. The timing was rotten. We were preparing to pay nearly $4,000 in taxes, after which we would be officially broke. Suddenly we were going on an extravagant trip to a place we weren't very excited about, and Pete didn't even have the time off work.

It happened this quickly:

One week before the trip, Pete's boss managed to bring in an out-of-work instructor to cover Pete's students.

Five days before our trip we had our taxes done, and we found out that our tuition credits added up to an $800 refund, not a $4,000 payment.

We got on a plane.

On our overnight stay in Galilee, our little group lingered over dinner and talked about the journey leading up to this trip. Pete and I talked about the time off work and taxes, and what a miracle it all seemed on this end of it. Then Jon said something that I've been contemplating ever since. He said he senses that God is calling people who have no agenda for Israel to come to Israel. For the first time, I felt like I understood why I'm here. I came with absolutely no agenda. You can call it prophetic ignorance or a nuanced view, but I have very little opinions about Israel and its politics. I didn't come to minister to Israel. I didn't come to bless or be blessed by Israel. I guess you could say that I came to experience it, but I didn't have any expectations about what I would experience. A few days before we departed, Kathy had asked me what was on my list of things to do in Israel. No such list existed.

Everything about this trip is so far removed from how I typically travel and anticipate travel, which makes it easy for me to believe that God really did invite me here. I didn't choose to come. I don't even know how I got here. God brought me here without an agenda, and he wants me to listen for His. This trip has been the single most important (and timely) lessons in missions and life that I have yet learned: Listen. Listen, listen, listen. If you get the invitation, by all means, go! But then sit and listen. Experience and listen. Ask questions and listen. Pray and listen. Ponder what it means to listen until the word 'listen' has lost all meaning, and then listen some more. It's a discipline to perfect yet never achieve. Listen.

The other night Pete and I were in bleachers watching a basketball game between the Orthodox Club and the Muslim Club. Pete leaned in and asked, "So, do you want to move here?" I said yes, immediately. Maybe we'll move here someday, maybe we won't, but our ears are more open now then they were before. God can take me anywhere now, and I won't be surprised when I land and say, "I have no idea how I got here."

The Dead Sea

2010-03-27T13:45:00.004-06:00

It's friggin' awesome.

Dead Sea mud... on sale for $30 just a couple miles from the sea. Yeah right.

It tastes like salt gargle, stings like rubbing alcohol, and feels slick as slime.

Take a seat in the Dead Sea.

The Heart of Purity

2010-03-25T23:52:00.006-06:00

Maybe it's because I'm traveling in Israel with my mother-in-law, but I've been thinking about Ruth lately.

A couple days ago Kathy asked our group if we think that Ruth and Boaz slept together when the Bible says that she "laid at his feet." For those who have even briefly studied the context and the language of that verse, the general sentiment is usually, "It would be nice to think that they didn't have sex, but it sounds as if they did."

As I've been mulling this over and reading Ruth's story, I have a new attitude towards Ruth and her illicit night in the sack. It doesn't matter whether Ruth had sex with Boaz, because the heart of purity is not adherence to a stagnant set of rules. The heart of purity is obedience.

"One day Naomi her mother-in-law said to her, 'My daughter, should I not try to find a home for you where you will be cared for? It not Boaz a kinsman of yours? Tonight he will be winnowing barley on the threshing floor. Wash and perfume yourself ... when he lies down, note the place where he is lying. Then go and uncover his feet and lie down. He will tell you what to do.'" Ruth 3:1-4

"'I will do whatever you say,' Ruth answered." Ruth 3:5

"The Genealogy of Jesus ... Boaz the father of Obed, whose mother was Ruth." Matthew 1:5

Was Jesus crucified at a bus station?

2010-03-25T10:54:00.017-06:00

I have 13 days left in my trip to change my mind, but I won't: the Garden Tomb is my favorite place in Israel. When you walk into the garden through the gate on the stone pathway, you're surrounded by flowers and shaded by rubber trees and palm trees. Our tour guide led us over to a platform at the edge of the garden, next to a small cliff.

"We do not know for sure that this is the place of Jesus' crucifiction and tomb," he said. "Millions of people think so, and there is compelling evidence that suggests that it is. But first I will tell you what we know for sure: Jesus Christ died, he was burried, and in three days he rose as our Savior and Lord. That's what we're sure of, and the rest is useful speculation."

Here is the Biblical criteria for the location of the cross and tomb:

Jesus was crufied outside of the city at a place called Calvary (Gargatha), which means simply "The Skull." He was burried at a nearby garden, which was owned by a rich man. The tomb was sealed by a stone, which we know from archeological evidence was an unusual type of tomb.

Here is how The Garden Tomb fulfills that criteria:

It is located outside of the city. The little "cliff" has indents that make it look like a skull (you can still see the two eyes, but the mouth is now covered. Nothing else tells us that it was known as The Skull, but it is an intriguing observation). The garden is adjacent to the skull-like cliff, and was owned by a rich person. (They know this because of the water system and wine press that they excavated.) And finally, archeologists know that the tomb is at least 2,000 years old, and though it is missing the stone that sealed it, it has grooves which would have acted as a track for a rolling stone.
Even though this can't be counted as evidence, I definitely felt a certain power and presence in the garden, unlike anything that I've felt at the other holy sites.

So what's up with the bus station? As it turns out, the image that we have of three crosses on a hill is entirely unlikely. Everything that historians know about Roman crucifictions suggests that Jesus would have carried a cross, but would have been nailed to a tree near the street, at eye level. The Romans did this to make a point to the passerbys, who could look directly at the person suffering. (The point being, Don't mess with the Romans.) If so, and if this was the location of Jesus' death (on the street level of The Skull), then Jesus died at what is now a bus station.
"This isn't a holy site," our tour guide said. "It's a bus station. We don't have much information about the place of Jesus' death and resurrection... it's as if the disciples weren't very occupied with the geography of it all. Any why would they have been? They had their Jesus back. This is, at the very least, a useful image of Jesus' death and resurrection. The important thing is that we serve a living Savior. Even if this isn't the right empty tomb, the right one is also empty."

What do an Orthadox Jew and C.S. Lewis have in common?

2010-03-24T14:39:00.017-06:00

"First of all," he said, "You did not come to Israel because you chose to. You came because you were invited. And the blessings you are going to receive will run so deep that you will not be able to explain it to anyone back home, and you will hardly be able to discuss it amongst yourselves."

The seven of us were sitting on stools in a gift shop, listening to Moshe. Moshe is an Orthodox Jew, psychologist, book author, scholar and business owner who regularly closes his doors and turns his gift shop into a discussion room. Moshe wears regular clothing and a kibba (that head cap thing); he's short and lively and laughs easily. He speaks perfect English, and he speaks it quickly. Clearly he has a lot more to say than he has business hours to say it, and roughly five minutes into his introduction, I felt a dull panic knowing that I wouldn't get to hear everything that I needed to hear from him.

The discussion: What do Orthodox Jews and Christians have in common? Where do we disagree? And is possible that we each get a better look at the big picture when we seek to understand one another?

Moshe turned out to be one of those blessings of Israel that we were all touched by and have hardly been able to discuss. I recorded most of the conversation and took notes in a fury, but the recording is faint, my notes are jumbled, and all that I'm left with is a deeper understanding. Here are some of the highlights that I've managed to process and reflect on:

- Christians and Jews share the same language but often have different definitions and meaning behind the language. He said that the average Jew does not know that Christians believe that Jesus was God. We must have looked a little dubious, (after all, Jesus' deity is central to our doctrine), but he repeated, "If you told an average Jew that Christians believe that Jesus was God, they would correct you and say, 'No, they believe he is the son of God.' To them that means that he was man, sent by God; a prophet."

Another misunderstanding: When Christians talk about the Law, they describe it as a burden that they are glad to be free of. Moshe explained, "The Jew has no context for that. What could be more wonderful than fulfilling the wishes of your beloved?" He gave an example of when his pregnant wife woke up late at night craving an orange, and they had no oranges in the house. Moshe drove all over town until he found a market that was open, and then he didn't just buy one orange. He bought so many oranges that they eventually had to throw some away. His beloved wanted an orange; he brought her a bushell of oranges. Nothing is more fulfilling to him than fulfilling her wishes, and that is how the Jew feels towards God and His law.

- The Jewish understanding of blood sacrifice is different than ours. To them, the sacrifice was never about covering our sins for God's sake. "Cover them how?" He asked. "As if anything is hidden from God? No, our sins do not separate God from man, they separate man from God." He explained that blood sacrifice was a gift from God to man that, in effect, covers our sins from ourselves so that we could return before the presence of God feeling made clean. (This reminded me of the story of Eden, when Adam and Eve hid from God. God wasn't suddenly blocked from Adam because of sin--he came looking for Adam just as he always did. Adam was the one hiding in shame, and because he was ashamed, God gave him clothing to wear.) Moshe explained how this meant that the Jews were never expecting a final blood sacrifice from their Messiah--for them it's about continual repenting and covering and entering.

- The Jewish doctrine of hell is drastically different than ours. Moshe said he doesn't believe that God is interested in eternal punishment, but in eternal instruction. (This reminded me of God's character in the Old Testament, which of course is His same character today.) He described two levels of hell. One sounded a lot like my understanding of purgatory: the lost person realizes his or her mistake ("And that realization burns like a fiery flame," Moshe added); then God takes the next step in instruction and redemption. Doug said, "It sounds like you're describing a God of second chances when it comes to salvation." Moshe responded, "I'm describing a God of third and fourth and fifth and eternal chances."

The second level of hell occurred when a person was truly lost. He didn't explain what 'truly lost' meant, but I suppose this would be a person who was not interested in God's second or third chances. At that point, he said that the person would simply, "Poof!" cease to exist. No hellfire, no flame, just total absense of being.

I jumped in. "What you're describing sounds a lot like C.S. Lewis's description of hell from The Problem of Pain," I said. "He believes that a soul cannot exist when separated from God, so eternal separation from God would mean ceasing to exist." Moshe nodded and said, "Yes, actually, Lewis' belief about hell is remarkably similar to the Jewish belief." (You gotta love an Orthadox Jew who can quote C.S. Lewis, which he did, several times.)

Moshe's understanding of hell ressonated so deeply with me that I could feel my eyes welling up throughtout that part of the conversation. I told Moshe, "The God you are describing--a God of eternal redemption over eternal punishment--is exactly the God who I know and love and follow. And the hell you are describing is the description that I've adopted in my heart, even though the Christian doctrine I've been taught doesn't support it."

- Finally, I asked Moshe what the Jews make of the ressurrection. His first point was that ressurrection does not indicate deity (as there are other examples of resurrection in the Bible). I asked him, "What does it mean to you that Jesus rose from the dead?" He said, "It means to me that something very big happened, and I don't understand it entirely." He didn't apologize for being vague, nor did he seem to be waving off my question.

"One of my favorite verses in your New Testament is in 1 Corithinans, when Paul speaks of seeing in part now, and later in full," Moshe said. "In other words, we are all going to be surprised. If you're not surprised, then you're not walking with God. Doctrine will never surprise you, but God will always surprise you."

If I hadn't chewed over that last part, I think I would have left the conversation today thinking that I was surprised by doctrine: the way our doctrines differered, where they collided, how they sometimes seemed like pieces to the same puzzle. But I think what surprised me the most was that in listening to an Orthadox Jew--really listening, and sometimes truly understanding--my faith in Jesus Christ deepened, and my view of the Father expanded magnificently. Doctrine can't do that. God did that in me.

"It's all about the Father, isn't it?" Moshe said, standing up from his stool to open the shop and greet his customers. "Everything that Jesus ever did was for the Father. He didn't come to bring glory to himself, but to show us the Father."

Mary's miraculous, squirting breast milk.

2010-03-23T13:27:00.008-06:00

Back when I worked at the hotel, one of our regular guests was an Israeli businessman who would pull up a chair and chat with me in the evenings. When I told him that I was going to be visiting Israel, his eyes lit up. He started telling me all of his favorite places that he wanted me to visit. When I asked about the food, he took a deep breath, then exhaled. "You're a Christian, yes?" he asked, rhetorically. "Then you're want to go to all of the Jesus things, I know. The hill where the sheep boys went loony, the place where Jesus disappeared up to wherever. But after you do all that, go to here..." he wrote down the address of a restaurant, "and order this..." he wrote down a name of a dish. "It will change the way you think about food."He wasn't exaggerating about the food: it's incredible. But after visiting even just the few holy sights in our first day of touring, it has changed the way I will read the Bible from now on.

I expected the holy sights to bring my faith to life, but it has done something else, too. It has brought my faith down to earth. I had very definitive pictures of certain places, probably based on the curriculum and coloring books that that my Sunday School teacher used, and everything is different. The shepherds hill? It's a rocky little hill right next to Bethlehem. Seriously, you can walk from the hill to the manger in about twenty minutes. I know, because we did. I had never thought of it before, but the angles must have appeared in a vision to only the shepherds, because otherwise the entire city of Bethlehem would have seen them.
Every holy sight has a church built on top of it. We hired a tour guide to lead us through the church on top of the grotto/stable where Jesus was born. The church is divided into separate worship places for Assyrians, Catholics, Greek Orthodox, and maybe a few others, most of whom were performing services. There was a service taking place in the stable, so we weren't allowed to enter. Our guide brought us to the door and said, "There was a hole here... I know it. Ah!" We each took turns peeking into the hole, and I decided that I preferred it that way. I saw just enough to see it, and not enough to completely alter the way I have always imagined it.
We were going to visit the Herodian, but decided to stop home for a quick nap, which turned into a four hour jet-lag recuperation. After we woke up, the ladies decided to go to the market, with Nikki leading the way through Bethlehem at night. (Nikki is a 21 year old missionary who lives in the Father's House by herself. She seems to know half the town of Bethlehem, and they all seem to love her.) We walked for over an hour in the streets and allies, stopping occasionally for fruit or dry goods or pastries. (Oh, the pastries. Oh, oh, the pastries.) Every door was open to something fascinating: men in barber chairs getting a shave, men in Islamic dress bowing in rows, shop owners smoking and arranging their merchandise. I tried to take it all in while cars honked and flew past us, sometimes barely missing my toes.

And that was basically my first real day in Bethlehem. We came home and ate pizza downstairs (who knew that pizza in Israel could rival pizza in Chicago?), played cards, drank tea.

Oh, the breast milk thing. I typed that title and forgot to incorporate it into this entry. Our tour guide at the stable church told us a lot of stories "from tradition," (as he said), which he did not buy into as "a practical man." Among them: before Mary and Joseph fled with baby Jesus, Mary accidentally squirted some breast milk on the wall, and all of the stones turned white. "This is from tradition," he reminded us. "But, like I said, I am a practical man. So, you know. There you go."

Bethlehem Blackout

2010-03-23T12:02:00.009-06:00

Here is how I imagined Israel: brown, dusty land with brown, dusty buildings and a few brown, dusty plants. When people said, "Take lots of pictures!" I thought, "What could be more boring than looking at other people's pictures of dust?"

I didn't know this before we arrived, but we are here during the only "green" month of the year. When we got into the van and drove through Jerusalem at sunrise, here is what I saw: lush, green land laced with pink flowers and palm trees. Palm trees! Some of the roads were lined with deep green bushes or feathery grasses; one road was lined with these peculiar, short trees that Kathy told me are olive trees. The buildings are all made of white stone that glistens in the sunlight, and because of the hills, they look like there are stacked on top of one another. Jerusalem looks like a holy city on a hill in Florida.

Now, Bethlehem. Bethlehem is how I imagined Israel, although it rained a lot before we came, so it isn't dry and dusty. A few months ago I read a National Geographic cover story about crime in Bethlehem, and throughout our travel days I started to sense that we shouldn't broadcast that we were staying there. I wasn't sure what the fuss was about until we made it to the checkpoint--a series of booths and lines and turnabouts that were difficult to fit through and a puzzle to do so with luggage. Ingoing wasn't bad, but the outgoing "line" was a huddled mass of hundreds of Arab men penned in by chicken wire that wasn't holding up very well. We squeezed through groups of men who had been pushed out line. Finally we made it to the checkpoint, at which point I realized that no one had looked at my passport.

After a short cab ride, we made it to the Father's House and claimed our rooms. Pete and I have a bedroom, bathroom, living room and kitchen. One whole wall is a window that overlooks Bethlehem.At around five, everyone had scattered for various reasons--to pick up the rental van, buy a phone card, take a walk. At seven I became aware that I was alone in an open apartment building at dark in a National Geographic cover story location. Then I remembered Liz. I walked into the hallway and called her name a couple times. She stuck her head out of the door, looking relieved. Liz is exactly my age and is traveling with us to help Kathy coordinate meals and logistics.

A few minutes later we were playing cards in my living room, and the lights went out. Thinking that the switch had flipped on its own, I felt around on the wall for the light switch. That's when Liz pointed out that the entire city was black. "Maybe we should lock the door," I suggested. My door is difficult to lock even with ample lighting, so we decided to go to her room. We started down the dark hallway when we saw someone with a flashlight. "Jon, is that you?" I asked. A stranger pointed his flashlight at us, said something in Arabic, then hurried up the stairs. Liz and I grabbed each other's hand and stumbled back into my room. Eventually we got the door locked, and we pulled up chairs to the window to look over dark Bethlehem and a well-lit Israeli settlement. Apparently this happens about twice a week.

Everyone seemed to come home from their errands at once, and we realized that we hadn't eaten in fifteen hours. We walked downstairs to the restaurant (Jon and Nikki are friends with the owners) and the cooks made us cheesy chicken sandwiches with olives on the grill. You know how anything tastes good when you haven't eaten in fifteen hours? Well, delicious food after you haven't eaten in fifteen hours is an other-worldly experience. We ate sandwiches and Mediterranean salads to candlelight. And even though we cheered when the lights came back on, we all admitted that it had been more fun when they were off.

Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows His name.

2010-03-22T08:27:00.008-06:00

"What do you think of Amsterdam?" I asked Jon. "Honestly?" he responded, raising one nostril. We had just eaten an incredibly expensive breakfast next door to a XXX shop that was open at eight a.m. on a Sunday.

Our flight to Tel Aviv was at 8:00 p.m., so we had nearly an entire day to enjoy Amsterdam after a night of no sleep. We walked through the streets, trying to take in the sights and architecture, but mostly trying to not get run over by bicycles. At around noon, Pete and I were sitting outside Anne Frank's house when we saw Kathy, Zack and Jon duck into a shop. It was a little cold outside, so we crossed the street to join them. Outside the shop we were greeted by two young adults, and inside the shop wasn't a shop at all. I've come to expect this of my mother in law. She was probably a mile away when she smelled the hippest church plant in town. Or, perhaps, the only church in town.

Inside about fifty people were standing and watching a streamed-in Hillsongs church service. Neat rows of illuminated liquor bottles lined one wall. I've heard that most of the churches in Amsterdam have been turned into shops and restaurants and bars, so this image was simply way too cool. As the pastor paced a stage in England, the young Dutch cosmopolitans responded with clapping and sounds of agreement. A familiar worship song started and nearly everyone's hands went up, including mine.

This trip is something of a spiritual pilgrimage. We are going to stay in the town where Jesus was born, walk the streets that he walked, and visit his empty tomb on Easter morning. But on our layover in a quaint post-modern wasteland, we walked into a bar, and I knew: we were standing on holy ground.

The Fan of my Dreams

2010-02-25T11:10:00.015-06:00

I live a pretty sreamlined life, but once in a while I go a little crazy over something specific. For one week I went beserk over a pair of yellow driving shoes that I couldn't afford (see http://joyblogstotheworld.blogspot.com/2008/10/joy-ride.html). A few months later I found a knock-off pair for $15, but by then I was over my lust for golden suede, so I didn't bother.

A few months ago I was looking through a design book and I saw a vintage fan. You know, the kind they don't make anymore because of the risk of decapitation? They're so rad. I obsessed over them and went to all of my local thrift stores, but the only ones I found were online and over $75. I gave up in hopes that I would jinx it, the way you stop looking for love and then immediately meet the man of your dreams.

But it wasn't until I completely forgot about the fan that it showed up yesterday at the Salvation Army. It was in perfect vintage condition, which is to say that it's not so perfect that it looks like it came from Urban Outfitters. I stood there under the harsh white lights, surrounded by a bunch of crappy floral prints in even crappier (word?) frames, with Celine crooning "It's all coming back to me" over the radio. (Actually, I can't remember if that song was actually on the radio, or if she just started singing in my head.) It was $29.99, which is about $15 more than the price tag attached the the fan of my dreams. I tried to get it for less (isn't it fun to haggle with charity?) but I bought it for $29.99. Which, if you want to justify it, isn't any more expensive than a new fan. Pete said the exact same thing in utter confusion when I came home toting an old fan in the middle of February.

After I explained the fan, after I put the fan in three different places before determining it's location on top of the fridge, and after I sat and stared and sighed at the fan, Pete said, "Do you know how much I love to see you happy?" I turned and stared and sighed at him. "I do. And do you know how much happier you make me than a fan?" He said that he did. I sat and stared and sighed at it some more, then said, "I hope I don't chop my fingers off in that thing." Pete didn't look up from the computer.

"Of course you will, darling."

But take heart, because I have overcome the world.

2010-01-22T22:12:00.008-06:00

Elizabeth grew up in a Christian home in southern Asia, graduated from school, and wanted to earn money for her family before continuing her education. Tricked by her aunt, she was sold into a brothel and starved for three months in a cell before she gave into her owner's demands. She began to pray on her knees for God to rescue her, and the other girls laughed. "God can't hear you in a place like this," they said. When International Justice Mission rescued Elizabeth and 21 other girls from the brothel and brought their perpetrators to justice, they found this writing on Elizabeth's cell wall:

"Psalm 27:1-3. The Lord is my light and my salvation--whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid? When evil men advance against me to devour my flesh, when my enemies and my foes attack me, they will stumble and fall. Though an army besiege me, my heart will not fear; though war break out against me, even then I will be confident."

I've been researching human trafficking for a few months, but each time I hear the facts, I'm surprised. Tonight I heard Jim Martin from IJM speak at Kuyper College's Global Issues Summit.

Here were the facts, again, which surprised me, again:

- Human trafficking is the third most lucrative trafficking industry (following drugs and arms), and the fastest growing criminal industry.

- Human Trafficking is a $32 Billion industry.

- There are 27 million slaves in the world today, which means that slavery is a greater issue today than it ever has been in the past.

Some common misunderstandings:

- "Human trafficking only happens far away." (In fact, it's happening in rural America and in our cities.)

- "The problem is too overwhelming--we can't do anything about it." (In fact, people are rescuing victims and bringing criminals to justice.)

- "As sad as these statistics are, this cause can only distract the church from it's true mission, which is saving souls." (Among many others, Jeremiah 22:16: "He defended the cause of the poor and needy, and so all went well. "Is that not what it means to know me?" declares the Lord.)

Some complicating factors:

- There is a lack of social demand. We take every opportunity to look away and remain ignorant, or we deny what we see.

- This issue is different than poverty, AIDS or natural disaster relief in that there are people committed to fighting back against our advances.

- The church in large branches has abdicated its responsibility.

At the beginning of Jim's lecture he presented a short documentary film, and after it ended, he asked us for one-word responses that described what we were feeling.

Anger
Hopelessness
Confusion
Despair

Members of the crowd named about 10 more, and then I shared mine:

Fear

When confronted with injustice and evil, timidity has always been my response. My tears of compassion have always been mixed with tears of fear; a heartbeat of excitement over serving in missions has always been followed with a beat of anxiety. And I felt fearful again as I watched the film and heard the stories of young girls who were forced to have sex with 30 men a day, or children whose hands were beaten if they didn't meet their quota at the end of a 13 hour work day. But after I listened to Elizabeth's story, after Jim walked us through scripture that covered each of our one-word responses, after I got in my car and asked the Lord to speak to my heart, I realized that my fear was gone.

My fear was gone, and in its place I felt commissioned, empowered, and like nothing will ever satisfy me unless I get to deliver good news to the poor. I felt bravery, compassion and love, and at the same moment that I felt each of those things, I realized that they were indistinguishable from one another, because perfect love casts out all fear. I felt Jesus asking me to stop holding back with my questions, and to stop joining David Bazaon as he "ponders the weight of the apple/compared to the trouble we're in." I've pondered the weight and the trouble and I haven't discovered any satisfactory answers, but God is restoring his creation and Jesus is building his kingdom, and I'd really just rather be doing that stuff.

Psalm 27:1-3 has long been a favorite passage, but I used to read it like this, "The Lord is my light and my salvation--whom shall I fear? (The murderers, the rapists, the persecutors, and the drunk drivers.)" The Lord is my Light has long been a favorite worship song, but I had only heard it sung at youth rallies with a couple thousand American teenagers raising their hands under strobe lights. Seeing a photograph of Psalm 27 written in a foreign language on Elizabeth's cell changed the entire passage for me. The Lord is my light and my salvation--whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid? When evil men advance against me to devour my flesh, when my enemies and my foes attack me, they will stumble and fall. Though an army besiege me, my heart will not fear; though war break out against me, even then I will be confident.

fall is here, hear the yell

2010-01-07T18:26:00.006-06:00

My first conversation with Dugan was in September of 2003 around a campfire in Green Lake, Wisconsin. I passed the guitar to someone else, and suddenly he was sitting on the bench next to me. He said, "I was in that tree over there, watching you sing. You're good." I tilted my head to the side, raised one eyebrow, and turned to face him.

"I mean," he continued, "I wasn't WATCHING you from a tree. I was just in a tree. Watching... You." He lurched into an imitation of a creep who sits in trees and watches girls, which was intended to assure me that he himself was not a creep who sits in trees and watches girls. It worked.

"Hi, I'm Dugan," he said.

"I know," I said. "We've met before. On my birthday, actually."

"Really? I have no memory of that."

"That's okay. You wished me a happy birthday at the time."

"Good," he said. "I'm glad to hear it."

"Why were you in a tree?" I asked.

The next evening, in the middle of a small field surrounded by tents and campers, I had my second conversation with Dugan Sherbondy. I had mentioned at the campfire that I had never seen a shooting star, so we were staking out the sky until I spotted one. We talked for hours about everything. I guessed his middle name on the first try, with only the letter "E" as a clue: Earl. (He's still impressed, six years later, or at least pretends to be when I ask, "Hey, remember how I guessed your middle name on the first try?")

That night I returned to my cabin convinced that Dugan and I would simply nod to each other across the church auditorium, or else fall in love and spend the rest of our lives together. So when he called me two days after the retreat, I assumed it was the latter.

After about a week of phone calls, coffee shops and movies, I felt a pang of confusion. I was was crazy about him, sure. But instead of the fun tension that usually accompanies that era of a relationship, there was just... fun. One evening I started what was doomed to be the first of many mental debates with myself over what he was thinking and feeling, when--out of nowhere--he interrupted my thoughts to tell me what he was thinking and feeling. I was totally off-guard.

"Listen, I've been thinking," he said, putting the car into park. "I'm really enjoying hanging out with you, and I want to keep hanging out with you, but I'm not interested in dating you. How, uh... how do you feel about that? Where are you at? What do you think?"

Still surprised, I started to nod. "I... think... that's great. Really. Thanks for telling me. I think we're on the same page."

"Okay, good. I hope I didn't make things uncomfortable? I just prefer to over-communicate whenever possible."

"Really, I appreciate it," I said. "I'm not used to it, but it's good."

And it was good. I had never had any guy address our friendship so straight-forwardly. I continued to fall head-over-platonic-heels for Dugan, and a while later I reconnected with someone else who had a flair for open communication: Pete Neal. He asked if he could walk me to my car and then said, "I like you, and I'd like to spend time with you. What do you think? How do you feel about me?" Having had my eye on him for years, I responded with a demure translation of, "Hell yeah." Two weeks later we were dating--fun tension and all--and two Septembers later we were married. Dugan emceed our reception and introduced us as Pete and Joy Neal, and this past October I stood for Dugan as he married Lindsay.

Mystery in a new relationship is fun, but mystery shouldn't be confused with confusion, clever deceit, or misunderstandings, all of which are the key ingredients in the romantic comedy plot line. Nearly every romantic comedy would be rolling credits within 20 minutes if the main characters had a real conversation at the right time, but we'd ask for a refund on our way out of the theater. ("Everyone stated their feelings clearly, no one sobbed to her best friend, no one made a fool of herself--preferably on stage or at a crucial moment in her career--roughly 15 minutes before the explosive yet finally honest conversation that solved everything. What kind of crap entertainment was that?")

Dating and marriage is hard work sometimes, and meaningful friendships with the opposite sex usually require "over-communicating whenever possible." But when I meet someone who I know I want to ally myself with for the rest of my life, (whether it's someone who came down from a tree to talk with me, or someone I want to sit in a tree with while k-i-s-s-i-n-g), it's worth the effort and the honesty it requires.

Dugan picking me up at my house.
2004, maybe?
An improvement, definitely.
This was the first time I met Lindsay, and within half an hour I had sent Dugan a text message from across the room: Marry her. I once told Lindsay that I had kept Dugan around in hopes of meeting her; which, now that I know her, would have been a totally decent ulterior motive.
= 1,000 words.
Pete and Dugan reindeer humping.

One of D & L's visits to Grand Rapids

My Morning of Zen

2009-11-03T19:27:00.022-06:00

Tuesday morning I participated in my first ever yoga class. Apparently I was obvious about it. I set my mat down twice before settling on a spot near the door, and I peeled off my socks while inspecting the foux wood floor for visible signs of wart fungi. It was then that Kathy, the instructor, asked, "Is there anyone here who has never taken a yoga class before?" Everyone in the class seemed to know each other, so they all turned to me.

"This is my first class," I said, "unless you count the DVD Yoga for Dummies." The class responded with a chattering of amusement that blended with the sushi restaurant music playing in the background. Then we began.

As I crossed my ankles and rested the back of my hands on my knees, Kathy reminded us of the intentions of Yoga, and encouraged us to determine our own intentions that morning. "When you are holding a pose and finding difficulty in balance, what do you want to call to yourself? Later in your day, you might need that very same thing, and this is your preparation." I decided to call "grace" unto myself, thinking it a very multi-purpose word since it is used in both ballet and theology. I questioned whether it was too Judeo-Christian for 6:00 am yoga, but since we weren't sharing our words out loud, and since I was in the East Studio at the YMCA, I stuck to it.

I thought I was doing really well, but then the warm-up stretches concluded and I immediately screwed up the first pose: Downward Facing Dog. Kathy quickly came to my rescue. "Move your hands out further. Further. Further. Your legs are quite long. Further. Beautiful." I pictured a Pekingese forming a triangle with its hip alignment, balancing on all four paws. Then I called grace unto myself.

My mornings have always been a battle, and typically I emerge barely on-time, barely ready, never triumphant. I just haven't figured out how to successfully wake up. Occasionally I determine to read my Bible and pray first thing in the morning, but I'm so incoherent that I once opened my Bible only to realize that I was studying Merriam-Webster's dictionary. I can't read. I can't remember whether I've already shampooed my hair. But apparently I CAN imitate a disjointed Pekingese. And after pressing my ankle on its opposite knee and gradually bending that knee to a ninety degree angle, I could even pray. The last time Jesus and I had a good conversation in the morning was after I fell asleep at the wheel and woke up very grateful to be alive.

"Think about the things you are grateful for," Kathy said as we lay flat on our backs. Suddenly she was unfolding a blanket and stretching it over me. "You look cool," she said, and even though I didn't feel cool, the blanket felt nice. Under the blanket, with my palms turned up and my toes extended, I realized that I had just replaced my snooze-alarm routine with yoga. I had found my morning stride. I had found grace for the morning.

That is, I had found grace for Tuesday and Thursday mornings from 6:00 - 7:00. As far as the rest of the week is concerned, I suppose I could try dunking my head in cold water or popping in Yoga for Dummies.

Even though we ain't got money...

2009-09-29T07:06:00.004-06:00

Six months ago Pete and I would often say to ourselves, "We may have a tight budget, but at least we're not in debt!" It was a mantra, and like most mantras, it helped.

Then we borrowed money from parents to buy a car. I took a closer look at the loan that I had taken out for one semester of school. Pete had dental surgery sans dental insurance. Then he fell over playing frisbee, and after receiving the hospital bill, doctor's bill and radiologist's bill, we took a gander at our deductible. High.

Yesterday Pete found out that it's going to cost over four hundred dollars to register our car in Michigan. He came home and said, "I need you to say something nice. I'm discouraged about money." I thought about it a moment and then said, "At least only half of our debt is stuff that we're paying interest on." This mantra didn't end with an exclamation point like our last one did, so I don't think we'll be repeating it frequently or with the same level of snobbery.

I tried again. "Hey, listen. Either we'll pay off our debts, or we'll die first and it won't matter." I felt immediately depressed by this, but Pete seemed oddly consoled. "I never thought about it that way," he said.

"OR!" I said, "How about this: we don't have money, but I love you."

He smiled. "How about we just stop worrying about money and become hobos."

"How do you become a hobo?"

"Well," he sid, "You put some of your things in a sack, tie it to a stick, and then walk around."

"That sounds easy enough," I said. "Can we have a baby and strap it to our backs?"

"No, just us."

"Okay. Just us."

So Deep I Love You

2009-07-02T07:20:00.012-06:00

Two minutes out of getting out of bed this morning, I clicked through my facebook notifications and saw a video from my brother's trip to Madagascar. So Deep I Love You is a terrific title to a video, so I clicked play and watched about twenty African teenagers swaying back and forth, singing and harmonizing to my brother's group.

So deep I love you
So deep I do
Because Jesus died and
He loves me and loves you
So deep I love you
So deep I do
Because you are so precious
In the eyes of the Lord

No matter what weakness has led you astray
No matter what sins you have made on the way
Jesus Christ the Lord
Died for the whole world
And rose again to give you the power to win

You are a winner!

Just like this: click, I'm watching my brothers and sisters in Africa singing songs of love to family from another continent. Even though I haven't met them, so deep I love them this morning. And even though they can be tools for lesser purposes, so much I appreciate airplanes and video cameras and internet this morning.

I cried instantaneously after starting this video; I slept so little last night that I had probably been doomed to cry over my cereal bowl. I'm grateful that I got to cry over this instead:

No matter what weakness has led you astray, no matter what sins you have made on the way... Jesus Christ the Lord died for the whole world, and rose again to give you the power to win. You are a winner!

Locked Out

2009-06-25T20:07:00.011-06:00

If my month were a book and last week was a chapter, I would title it Locked Out.

It all started when my dear friend and boss stuffed my keys into her purse before heading to the U.P. for the weekend. I discovered their absence at 11:00 p.m. After a call to my husband (who had gone to bed 3 hours prior) and a call to the cab company, my evening ended at 12:15 when a friend picked me up from work.

The following day I lost the key to the house where I was staying for the week.

The next day I went to see a few apartments and three of the landlords had key problems. One had to call the previous tenant to ask them to come with their key; one broke into the top apartment to unlock the main floor. The third landlord said, "Huh. My key isn't working." I said, "I could have told you that hours ago."

That same day I called Matt to tell him that the church office key wasn't in it's usual spot. He said, "Yes it is, I saw it last night." I said, "I took everything out, and it's really really not." He said, "Well it's in there! Okay! Bye!" and hung up. (But he was the friend that picked me up from work at midnight, so we're not even a little irritated with him.)

I waited on my car for my friend to get home with the car opener (since I lost her only house key).

I waited on my car for my husband's boss to arrive with my house key (since mine was in my friend's purse).

I waited, I waited, I waited.

In frustrating moments like these, I like to comfort myself by weaving meaning into what seems pointless. I'm usually pretty good at it, too, so I was surprised to come up nearly blank. Oh, I dug up a few little analogies about doors and keys and knocking and opening and master keys and loose keys, etc., though nothing worth mentioning. Then I thought to myself,

"Self? Dearest. Perhaps you need to spend a little less time weaving meaning into your daily life, and a little more brain power remembering to put your KEYS in your PURSE when you get to work, rather than leaving them strewn about the office." Which turned out to be the mundane moral to last week's story.

If You are Bored

2009-05-29T10:56:00.007-06:00

My mother is a woman of signs and labels. My childhood was mostly coordinated by postings throughout our house: labels on the foods we were allowed to eat, charts of our rotating chores and responsibilities, directions on how to sort laundry loads on the washing machine, sign-up sheets for household projects, and so on.

This week I was happy to see a new sign on the Towers refrigerator.

The goal of a Christian is not to be entertained, but to be busy at work for the Lord. Because God has blessed me with time this summer, here is a list of things I am going to do:

1. Read a list of books recommended by friends
2. Keep a journal
3. Plan a late fall vacation
4. Go camping with Pete
5. Get a head start on my fall classes by reading recommended books
6. Study the Word
7. Cook
8. Go berry picking; can preserves
9. Spend time developing friendships
10. Play guitar
11. Finish my little book about my first year of marriage
12. Memorize my list of Bible verses for the family competition

And perhaps:

13. Learn Hebrew, a la Rosetta Stone. I haven't committed to it yet, but I'm almost there.

Good Friday

2009-04-11T13:15:00.013-06:00

7:00 pm on Good Friday found me in the church kitchen helping Glenda prepare communion. "We're only supposed to cut these pitas in half?" she asked. "Not smaller?"

"That's what Matt said," I shrugged. Matt walked appeared in the doorway, so I clarified his instructions. "You said in half, right?"

"Yes. Half."

Glenda: "Only half?"

"Half."

"Maybe people are getting in groups and breaking from the same piece," I said to Glenda, who was halving whole-wheat pitas with one eyebrow raised, still dubious. But then I noticed the juice. Individual servings of juice in plastic, barrel-shaped containers were being carried in baskets to the auditorium.

The baskets were spread out under the cross on the stage, and the congregation was released to receive the elements. I selected a piece of whole-wheat Jesus, a barrel of his blood, and sat on the floor against the back wall.

When I was eight years old my mother explained the Eucharist. "We think of communion like a symbol," she said. "Catholics believe that the bread really turns into Jesus's body, and the juice really turns into his blood."

I noticed a potential concern. "Like, after you swallow it?" I asked. "Or while it's still in your mouth?" Jesus digesting in my stomach--perhaps. My childlike faith had accepted far greater mysteries. But Jesus stuck between my teeth? Jesus in my toothbrush that night? Mom said she was pretty sure that Catholics chewed the bread and digested the Jesus. But the next time I took communion I swallowed the juice-soaked bread whole, just in case.

Confession: I have ever since.

I'm pretty sure that the bread remains bread and the juice remains juice, not because I can't swallow the miraculous, but because Jesus is the Metaphor's biggest fan. "This is my body" and "this is my blood," he said. Your body is a temple, I am the vine, my sheep know my voice. I swallow the bread whole because purple, soggy bread isn't something I savor; I swallow it whole because it's difficult for me to metaphorically chow on my savior's flesh. The substantial carnivorous snack before me, however, was not going to go down in one gulp.

I broke off a piece of pita (his body, broken by me) and sipped the juice (his blood for my sins). I heard the tops of juice containers popping all around me and saw bread lifted to lips (his life in ours). When do the carbohydrates absorb into my blood stream? I wondered. And as always when I think about digestion or any other body function, I marveled at the complexity of it. Then I ate another bite, drank another drink, and marveled at the simplicity of it: Eat food. Live. This is my body, he said. This is my blood. I'm doing this. I'm remembering him.

“I am the bread of life. He who comes to Me shall never hunger, and he who believes in Me shall never thirst.”

I rarely eat breakfast on Sunday mornings before church, and when the small purple morsel hits my stomach, I'm reminded how hungry I am. I finished my pita and juice on Friday feeling full, my spirit satisfied with the bread of life.

Hurricane hits Detroit

2009-04-02T14:44:00.019-06:00

In an interview with Wood TV news on Tuesday, March 31st, Jennifer Granholm compared the Detroit auto crisis to a natural disaster. She did not use an appropriate simile: This crisis, like a tornado, formed under a specific set of conditions and then struck suddenly. Nor did she employ an corny metaphor: The tectonic plates of Michigan's economy have been shaken.

Granholm said that she is pushing for support of the auto companies and families, because "this is our Hurricane Katrina... so we need a response that is like that."

Katrina victims could empathize with Detroit families who have lost their jobs and homes. But in the interest of everyone involved, the governor shouldn't be drawing comparisons between foreclosed homeowners and rooftop survivors, between an unemployment rate and a death toll. And perhaps the government's response with helicopters, food and shelter (reportedly inadequate as it was) should look different than the government's response to a failing business and its employees.

This is the American automobile industry and these are struggling families; I hope the government can assist both where it should. But there are about 600 miles between Michigan and the ocean, which is roughly the same metaphoric distance between Michigan's economy at the tragedy of Katrina.

http://www.woodtv.com/dpp/news/Gov_auto_troubles_Michigans_Katrina

Lifelong Sport

2009-03-19T17:55:00.023-06:00

Every year I vacation on Hilton Head Island with Pete's family, and every morning on the Island we take a tennis class with a bunch of retirees. I can't think of any group more fun than old people with health and money. This year my favorite was Jim.

Jim is in his early 80's. He pumps his arms at a 90 degree angle, as if running a great speed, while shuffling his feet with a good-natured smile. Jim's hearing aid was out of whack this week; often the entire class had to join forces in getting his attention. Jim would forget about a fly ball long before it hit the ground, inevitably two inches from his feet. When it did hit the ground, his entire body would jerk in shock. Then he'd toss his hand and walk away as if to say, "Ah, I've made it this far."

Yesterday we practiced signals. I played opposite of Dick and Lennie. Our instructor, Rem, was on my team.

"Make the signal, acknowledge the signal, serve the ball," Rem told our opponents. Lennie made the signal behind his back to Dick, who acknowledged the signal and wound up to serve. "Wait!" said Lennie, who turned around to ask Dick a question, while keeping his "fake" signal in tact. Rem and I shared smiles at this senile moment, pretending to be oblivious. It was all the same because Lennie didn't fake once the ball was served. (a) Lennie didn't know what the "fake" sign meant, (b) Lennie forgot to fake, (c) Lennie is very clever.

At the end of class Rem reviewed signals. "This is stay," said Rem, making a fist. "This is move." He opened his palm flat. "And this," he said, making devil horns out of his pointer and pinkie, "Is fake."

"What's this?" Asked Jim, pointing his middle finger to the sky with a grin.

I have always heard that tennis is a game for life, but until I mentioned the sentiment to Dick, I didn't quite grasp its totality. We were sitting on a bench, me watching and him waiting to rotate in.

"Oh yeah," Dick said. "My wife and I have several friends whose spouses died on the court." He chuckled a little.

"Seriously? On the court? How?"

"Heart attacks, that sort of thing. One hit a return and then just fell over right there. Right there in the middle of a match." Dick seemed to think this was nearly hysterical, his friend hitting a ball and dropping dead before its return.

I don't understand how I'll play the same game at 80 that takes the breath out of my 22 year old lungs, but I like the thought. I'll play it differently, of course. Right now I swing my racket every which way and run cross-court to return. The old people I played with this week mostly hit what comes in their direction, strategically. They also mostly beat me.

Dick and I were still laughing over his friend. "I hope he made the point!" I said, and Dick slapped his knee a little in response, which I found charming. On the court, Jim's first serve his the net. He drew another ball from his pocket and tossed it above his head, his racket back and ready.

Messy Cars

2009-02-21T10:50:00.029-06:00

Last week I decided to become a Clean Car Person. It's a lofty goal, as any stranger who has glanced at my backseat could tell you.

I know of four groups of Messy Car People. One group is the Just Plain Sloppy. The second group is Moms--women who used to keep clean cars before resigning themselves to a higher calling. The third group consists of Students and Small Apartment Dwellers.
.
Historically I have belonged to this third category. When I was going to school full-time and working at Olive Garden the rest of the time, my backseat served as a library/wardrobe. When I later moved into an apartment with a startling lack of closet space, I would actually bring items from the apartment to store in my car. Pete would ask, "Where are our photo albums?" and I would answer, "Left side of the trunk towards the back." (This is a lie. Pete never asks to look at our photo albums.)
.

The fourth and final group is Randy Peterkort. There may be others who have reached this sophisticated level of messiness, but he is the only one I have met in person. I once spent a road trip testing 75+ pens for ink and reading aloud from 25+ Indiana antique store pamphlets. In the end he reluctantly agreed to part with 30-some inkless pens and four pamphlets (duplicates). To reward my efforts I selected treats from his dashboard candy shop; to rejuvenate my intellect (dulled by the ink testing and and pamphlet reading) I studied the Constitution of the United States. Randy has a copy in the middle counsel, next to the Declaration of Independence and a back-stash of Tizzlers.

Now, I am not choosing to be a Clean Car Person because I think it is intrinsically better than being a Messy Car Person; on the contrary, I think there are many seasons in a person's life when it isn't logical to keep a clean car. It would have been inefficient to continuously stock and clear my car of books, aprons and ties. For what, a clean car while I slept? Cleanliness and organization only makes sense to the point that the efforts don't outweigh the benefits.
.
Moms and other busy people who keep a clean car may be serving their aesthetic visual preferences (which is right and fine), but they aren't necessarily more productive for doing so. And I can't think of any reason why being comfortable in order is better than being comfortable in mess. Just think of all the times you could have used the Declaration of Independence while driving! I can't think of any, so I appreciate your help illustrating my point.

The "cleaner is not intrinsically better" truth also applies to living rooms, closets, drawers and desks. The one exception is a clean kitchen, which is superior in every way to a messy kitchen. I definitely want to become a Clean Kitchen Person.

I am choosing to keep a clean car because I enjoy a clean car and because it makes sense in this season. A clean car lends a certain calmness and a feeling of put-togetherness that (though perhaps artificial) feels nice. A clean car is a special kind of luxury, one I can afford at this point in my class-less, olive garden-less, child-less life. Also, I am a part-time service rep and an online student, which makes a clean car one of the only luxuries I can afford.

Next week: "Becoming a Rich Person."

The Customer is Sometimes a Manipulative Liar

2009-02-19T10:12:00.018-06:00

(QUIZ)

Q: Suppose you check into a hotel for a three night stay. On the second morning you receive a receipt under the door, signifying the end of your stay. What do you do?

a. Call the front desk and say, "I'm supposed to be checking out tomorrow, not today."

b. Pack your bags, go to work, and tell your boss (who set up the reservation), "They kicked me out of the hotel!"

Q: Suppose your employee shows up to work with his luggage and says that the hotel "kicked him out." What do you do?

a. Ask the employee, "What happened, exactly?"

b. Call the hotel and throw a righteous fit at 8:45 in the morning.

Q: Suppose the front desk representative explained that the hotel did not "kick" the guest out, though did put a bill under the guest's door, due to the (apparent) incorrect departure date. The incorrect departure date could be the fault of either you (the boss who set up the reservation) or the fault of the reservations office; regardless, the guest approved the (incorrect) departure date at the time of check-in, and the hotel is more than happy to extend the stay of its guests. What do you, the boss, do?

a. Recognize the misunderstanding, apologize for your employee's rather embarrassing and dramatic response, request that another night be added to the reservation, and assure that your employee can return to the same room.

b. Email a hotel manager and express your outrage over this situation in which, essentially, nothing happened.

Results:

If you answered mostly (a), you are a reasonable person who plays by the logical rules of goods and services. If you answered mostly (b), congratulations! You make a sucker out of everyone in the (a) category, and win $20 off your nightly rate.

Lily, Jee and Pee Pee

2009-02-16T07:09:00.008-06:00

Here is the thing with children: they don't pretend to like you more than they like you.

Lily likes me fine, but she loves Pete. I mean, I monitored my phone the entire day that her mom was in labor with her, I baby-sat just so that I could spend time with her, I crocheted a blanket for her birthday and bought her a valentine's day gift, but you know: whatever. Pete has a BlackBerry with some very entertaining ring tones, and I can't compete with that, apparently. Which is fine, really. It's fine!

One of three things is going on here:

1. Lily, in an act of solidarity with me, is buttering up Pete, knowing that he needs an extra push before having kids. This would explain why she crawls out of my lap, climbs into Pete's lap, and leans in for a kiss. In fact, if Pete agrees to having a child anytime in the next five years, I will credit one year old Lily.

2. Lily has a crush on Pete. This would also explain the kissing.

3. Lily somehow knows that I monitored my phone the entire day that Lily's mom was in labor. Lily senses that I was excited about her before I even knew who she was, before I even discovered that she is exceptionally cute and charming and funny. And while she (I'm sure) appreciates this level of unconditional love, it probably makes her feel good to have earned Pete's affection, which is solely based on the fact that she is cute and charming and funny.

Lily said my name first: "G." Or: "Jee." I prodded her for weeks to say my name, then one day when I wasn't at the house, her dad found her walking around with a toy phone saying, "Hi, Jee. Hi, Jee." Ever sinse then she has greeted me with a "Hi, Jee." Pete has never encouraged Lily to say his name, which he reminded me of several times after we walked in her house last week and she called out, "Hi, Pete!"

In the car on the way home, Pete said, "You know, we don't even know what "Jee" really means. I mean, I suppose she could be saying your name. But did you notice how she said my name just at the sound of my voice? She hadn't even seen me yet! And I don't think she ever spent an evening dancing around, saying your name over and over, did she?"

This is why I couldn't be happier about Lily's new nickname for Pete.

"Hi, Pee Pee."
"No, Lily, my name is 'Pete.'"
"Hi, Pee Pee!"

It sure does curb the jealousy pangs.

I'm Cold.

2009-02-05T13:18:00.010-06:00

Yesterday, in response to my continuous whining and chattering about the cold, Pete suggested that every fall I make the following announcement:

"Pete, I would like you to know that I am going to be cold for the next five months. If at any point you are wondering whether or not I am comfortable, you may assume that I am not."

I am cold from roughly October 16 to March 29, and sometimes well into April. I wake up cold, I get out of the shower cold, I drive to work cold, I make dinner cold, I go to bed cold. My feet are cold, my arms are cold, my fingernails are cold. Even now at work, with no one else here to turn the heat down from the 79 degrees that I have cranked, I am cold.

The reason I can be cold in a 79 degree room is because winter emanates from my insides; it settled there when it settled in West Michigan. Winter is stored in my belly and slowly released in a steady stream of discomfort. While I may be able to layer against the Michigan winter, there is nothing I can do about the winter inside. Sometimes tea helps, but only in the temporary way that a cough drop soothes a sore throat.

And so I find myself, every year, in this race to cure winter. I make lists of the things that I like about winter (which is actually what I am supposed to be doing right now), I try to meditate in a frigid car the way a monk meditates after setting himself on fire, and I lean heavily on my fantasy life, which these days always includes a palm tree.

As for the ultimate cure (moving south), I am starting to suspect that God has me and the rest of the north under a curious delusion in order to keep us here. Case a point: Why haven't all the homeless people in Chicago walked to Miami by now? You see, there's a disease called winter and a delusion that keeps us bound to it. So we just hang around here and talk about the problem of winter for five months, until summer comes and everyone instantly starts complaining about the humidity, like idiot goldfish.

However, I feel I am on the cusp of a breakthrough, that I just may rid myself of this delusion in time to save myself. Though I may love you, I probably will not be able to help you. I imagine all southerners make a pact with God in order to maintain the weight and balance of the globe, so that they can continue living winterless lives while the north slips on its front porch in early December and falls into a black hole called Cold. And I plan to keep that pact if it is a necessary precondition.

Pete, just in case you've forgotten: I'm cold.

Pilot's Wife

2009-01-17T15:22:00.009-06:00

About a year ago I read a novel called The Pilot's Wife. I read it because it came recommended by my mom, and also because I am a gigantic idiot. Any story about a pilot and his wife living long lives together before he dies of non-airplane related causes would NOT be in paperback and would NOT be an Oprah pick. And this book was both in paperback and Oprah's book club.

The story begins with the crash of a commercial plane at the fault of the pilot, whose wife later learns of his secret life including another wife and family in France. The story didn't affect me on a personal "I hope that doesn't happen to me" level, because my husband flies mainly what are called smallish planes, and he flies them to nearby locations. If he had another family stashed in, say, Lansing, I probably would have heard through the grapevine at Meijer by now. But the one little chapter in which she receives the news of the crash was reason enough for me to have passed up the title.

Last week I came home from work and walked over to the maintenance shop to ask Pete what his plans were for the evening. Dan, his boss, told me that he was flying with his student, and that they had flown to Claire. I found a couple more guys in the flight lounge and asked them what time Pete had left for his flight.

"He left at two," Chad said. Then, "Have you, uh, heard from him at all?"

"No..." I said. "Why?"

"Well, I might need his help swapping planes in a hanger. Let me know when you hear from him, okay?"

An hour later I was chopping vegetables and trying not to look at my watch when Nate knocked on the door. I greeted him and asked him why he had stopped by. "Pete and I are hanging out at 5:30," he said, peering into the living room, expecting to see Pete. So it was then, around 5:30, that a dull sick feeling started to grow in my middle parts.

I called Chad and asked him what I should do next, but he did the next things for me. He called the airports to track down his flight plan, then called me back to tell me that Pete wasn't following a flight plan. Nate hung around as gracious company and I chopped all of the vegetables that I could find in my house. Another hour passed, and suddenly I could no longer distract myself from the fact that my husband's plane had been missing in a snow storm for three hours.

It was then, mercifully, that I got news: Pete's student had called a friend to tell him that they were grounded and waiting for someone to pick them up. The only remaining question was, Why had Pete's student called a friend while Pete had still not contacted me? Strangely calm, I knew their had to be an explanation. There was, and it was this (in a ten step sequence):

1. Pete flew to Claire with his student, Scott.
2. Pete and Scott set out from Claire to return to Lowell, whilst forgetting Pete's cell phone.
3. Pete and Scott became surrounded by storm cells, and eventually decided to land the plane in a potato field.
4. Pete and Scott screamed, high fived, and hugged each other after successfully landing the plane in a potato field.
5. Later, at the potato farmer's house, Pete tried in vain to remember my phone number.
6. He tried in vain to remember his parents' numbers.
7. Pete remembered his childhood best friend's phone number. Mr. Searles answered.
8. Mr. Searles didn't have Pete's dad's number, but he did have Mr. McGowan's phone number.
9. A very confused Mr. McGowan gave Doug Neal's phone number to Pete.
10. Papa-in-law Neal gave his son my phone number.

"Joy,I'msorryi'msorryi'msorryi'msorry..."

Sometimes you find yourself in a situation when you know there are multiple potential outcomes and only one good one. I fell asleep that night thinking that of all the possible outcomes of the day's events, I was given the very best one. I was given the outcome that will never be in paperback and which Oprah will never read, unless Oprah is a blog surfer, which I doubt.

Rejoice!

Messy Snow

2008-12-19T17:28:00.016-06:00

Pete pulls up to the Meijer entrance and opens my passenger door from the inside; I kick the slosh off my red boots and throw my bag in the backseat, after retrieving the greeting card from my purchases. It is not a very good card, but I am an hour late to work on account of the snow plow getting stuck at the end of my driveway, so I didn't have time to browse. The front of the card shows two rather adorable cartoon elephants, one giving flowers to the other with her extended trunk. It says, "Some friends make your day better..." (the inside:) "... and some friends make your life better. Thank you for doing both." It's for my boss, Renae, on her last day of work. My handwriting is hopeless on these slippery roads.

"I love this song," I say to Pete, even though he already knows how much I love this song. "I know," he says, even though he knows that I know that he knows, which is why he is playing it. I am trying to invert the u and l in wonderful (which I have spelled "wonderflu") when he says, "I have a confession to make."

"Oh yeah?"

"Yeah. Okay. So, you know how I don't like a lot of the music you like, and how I'll make fun of it?"

"Yes."

"Well, sometimes when you're not with me, I listen to it. Not because I like it, but because I miss you. That's my confession."

It is one of the sweetest things he's said to me. "Pete. That's one of the sweetest things you've said to me. I wish you would have said that to me some other time, because right now I need to finish writing this card." I can't think of the next sentence to write, so I stare at the elephants. Suddenly my face is contorted and I'm crying. I'm crying thinking about my husband listening to music that I love while he pines for me. And I'm crying because I finally realize that today is Renae's last day.

It's not just that she's a great boss. It's that my boss has been making my day better for two years. It's that on my first shift, Renae casually said, "I feel like I've known you my whole life instead of a few hours," which was exactly what I had been thinking at that particular moment. It's that Renae can sing either "Delta Dawn" or "One Day at a Time, Sweet Jesus," and I immediately laugh, every time, for reasons that remain funny even though I've long forgotten them. It's that though I claim to like change, the truth is that I count on a few mainstays amidst the change, and Renae was a mainstay. Realizing that she is leaving while I think of Pete listening to Regina Spektor (whose voice grates on his nerves) is unbearable from a dry-cheek standpoint.

Crying would be sweeter if it didn't streak my face with mascara. The snow would be lovely if it weren't getting mauled by dirty tire tracks. This whole day has been one big mess of a storm, starting with the snow plow getting stuck in our driveway. It's been a mess of a storm, and I'm blessed to be weathering it.

.

Home is Where Your Airplane Is

2008-12-05T20:32:00.009-06:00

Ever wonder what it would be like to live at an aiport? Me neither. But now I know.

This is how it happened:

When the door of opportunity in Virginia was closed, Pete and I decided to peek into some other doors. In particular, we were looking for doors that didn't belong to smallish one bedroom loft apartments with no closet space. So I called a landlord through a connection and started dreaming about a little two bedroom duplex in Grand Rapids.

Then Pete said, "Would you consider living at the airport?"

I said, "No."

Then the deal maker: "It's free rent."

I snapped my finger in that "gosh darn" fashion, because of course I should consider anything with free rent, even if it is an airport in smalltownville.

We walked through two flight offices, a little cubby room dubbed "the cave," a "parts room," an empty room with various large outlets, and a bathroom with a toilet and stall shower. These rooms were all my blank canvas, Pete explained, for (respectively): an office, a bedroom, a walk in closet, a living room, a kitchen, and a bathroom.

"But there's no oven, sink, fridge, or countertops!"

"Uh huh."

"I could maybe deal with this shower for five months, tops."

"Joy, you're going to be a missionary."

"I could fix it up however I want?"

"However you want. Except, no weird colors on the walls. Eventually intern guys will be living here."

So we went out to lunch and ran some calculations. Within a few days we had a fridge, countertops and oven for a total of $100... at which point I considered possible careers in craigslisting. A little later, Pete's family came and helped me put paint on the walls. Two weeks after that, Bethany drove up because I told her I needed help sewing. What I really needed was my best friend and a little sanity. She provided both.

"It's cute, hun. It's going to be really fun. You will totally survive."

"Beth? Did you see the shower stall?"

"It's cute, hun. It's going to be really fun. You will totally survive. Let's get to work."

And after weeks of work and a sad goodbye to apartment 302, we moved in.

Last night Pete and I finished dinner, played some cards, then settled into the living room for The Office. I turned off the overhead lights and opted for our two floor lamps, which is when Pete said, "Hey! You did it! This is a living room!" I surveyed the work of my hands, and agreed. The "oyster shell" walls glowed warmly, the bookcase was filled with colorful spines, and my favorite craig's list find--an eleven foot couch--stretched out before us. It was home. We finished our hot chocolate and our episode, and then Pete said, "Let's go to bed."

So we stepped out of our living room, passed three airplanes on our left, and walked up the stairs to our bedroom.

Home is wherever I live with Pete. And right now, home is rent-free.

(Pictures to come.)

Practicing Hospitality

2008-11-10T10:09:00.012-06:00

(Pictures from Thanksgiving 06)

My mother is the best hostess I know. She's relaxed, she can delegate, and she can cook. But most of all, she has an authentic desire to show hospitality without at all needing to impress her guests. I wish that her attitude had been passed down through genetics; instead, I watch my mother in her role as a hostess, and I take note.

These are the notes I have taken thus far:

1. When it comes to the guest list, view your home as a duffel bag, not a suitcase. My parents home is relatively small, and there were times when our three bedrooms and one bathroom made our family of seven seem like a party with an inflated guest list. But the square footage of her home never seems to sway my mom from inviting that one extra person. In the summers, she would throw backyard barbecues with upwards of 75 people. For my 16th birthday, we fit some 40 people in our house.

Every November Pete's family joins my extended family in giving thanks, and we set up rented tables right on through the living room. Last year, after admitting that the house was going to be packed, mom invited a WalMart employee named Jose who didn't have anywhere to go for the holiday after his divorce. This year my brother is bringing three international students home with him, who otherwise would spend the holiday at the school. It only took five minutes of brainstorming before we figured out the new seating arrangements. A suitcase may only have so much room, but you can always reconfigure the items in your duffel bag to make room for one more.

2. Don't apologize for the state of your home. Before any party, all of us were given chores so that the house would be in proper condition for company. But as soon as I would start freaking out my brother's bedrooms, mom would say, "Joy, they are coming to our home and this is our home. Just do the chores I gave you." This isn't to say that she keeps the door to the disastrous closet open for viewing. But if someone were to accidentally open the closet in search for the bathroom, she wouldn't begin blushing and mumbling about the difficulties of raising five kids and working full time. She would say, "The bathroom is the door at the end of the hall."

This point is intricately tied into the reason my mother is such a great hostess. "If you apologize for your home," she once told me, "it's because you're trying to make yourself feel more comfortable. And you do so at the expense of your guest's comfort." An apology for the state of your home doesn't put your guest at ease; instead, it places a burden on your guest to make you feel at ease. Every now and then I slip and start making excuses for my apartment, but almost immediately I picture my mother rolling her eyes. So I shut up and ask if I can get anyone something to drink. I'm trying to get better, but it's hard.

3. Always use proper signage. My mother is a big believer in signs and labels. A week before any event, the signs begin appearing throughout the house. Most are attached to various food items and say things like

For party or

Don't eat, this means YOU or

BEN, IF YOU EAT THIS
SO HELP ME GOD.

Other signs include chore sign-up sheets, which I always tried to happen upon first so that I could reserve the most desirable chores (think: dusting the living room v. cleaning the fridge). And on the day of the party, she puts up signs to help facilitate.

Don't take off your shoes, socks may get wet from tracked snow! and

When not in use, keep bathroom door open.

When deciding if something would make an appropriate sign, ask yourself, "Is this addressing a question that more than two people will be asking?" (such as whether or not to take off shoes), or "If people leave the bathroom door closed, could it get stinky?" (Yes.)

And finally,

4. Never underestimate the transforming power of candles. As soon as the first guest pulls up to the house, mom hands someone a lighter and directs him or her towards every exposed wick in the house. Once the task is complete, the bathroom smells of something warm and vanilla, the living room is aglow with festivity, and the carpet never looks quite as dated. Sometimes she accidentally buys a bad batch of candles, and the evening ends with sooty stains all over the walls and ceilings. But that always seems beside the point after a fun evening with friends.

Invite that last person, clean but don't mask your home, use signs when they help, and light candles even if they're cheap. It's not exactly a winning episode of the Martha Stewart show, but it's how I want to practice hospitality.

Joy Ride

2008-10-23T08:03:00.015-06:00

You know how Jesus was tempted in the wilderness? Well, I am currently being tested on page 73 of the new J. Crew catalog. It helps to know that Jesus understands what I am going through.

Just for some background on this story, let me say this: I am not a shoe person. I do not buy shoes. The following is a list of my entire shoe inventory.

- Black Mary Jane heals
- Brown flats that I wear to work
- Black boots that my mother gave me for my birthday
- Gym shoes that I bought at Wal Mart for under $15 in high school
- Tennis shoes that my parents-in-law gave me for Hilton Head Island clay courts
- Champagne heals that I wore to my wedding
- 3 pairs of Old Navy Flip Flops

I have spent approximately $30 on shoes this year, and about $60 on shoes in the five years prior, combined. Shoes simply are not a priority for me. However.

About a year ago I read about driving shoes. Some character in some book put on a pair of driving shoes, which I thought sounded pretty cool. So I looked up driving shoes online, and I fell in shoe love. It was the kind of shoe love that I thought was only possible in fairy tales or for my friend Bethany. Driving shoes are kind of like moccasins, kind of like loafers, and they look so comfortable. I started daydreaming about throwing on my pair of driving shoes, tying a scarf in my hair, and leisurely walking through a bookstore or the supermarket. All of my mundane life seemed much cooler in a pair of driving shoes.

Over this last year, my vision of these shoes has morphed into something very specific, the way years of looking at wedding magazines formed a mental design of a dress that nobody happened to make the year I got married. Tumbled leather or suede (I'm talking about the shoes again, not the wedding dress), gold buckle, minimal detail. Yellow. At first I thought white, which would be more practical. But a deep, mustard, perfect yellow... yes. Yellow.

And so yesterday, as you can imagine, I almost dropped the J. Crew catalog when I flipped open its center page, and there on page 73 was a pair of suede, gold buckled, simply detailed, deep mustard-yellow driving mocs. My name was on it. Literally. The top of the page reads like this:

--JOY
----RIDE
---OUR NEW ITALIAN
------------DRIVING MOCS

The glossy page seemed to turn suede as I fingered over the image. Behind the yellow shoe was a perfect white driving shoe, which I paused to admire before returning my gaze back to the golden object of my desire. After a few moments of unfettered lust, I reluctantly skimmed the 5 pt. font in the bottom left corner until I found the price.

In the wilderness, Jesus said, "Get behind me, Satan."

On page 73, Joy said, "Well, if I divide that price by the number of times that I'll wear them..."

After about three minutes of mental justifications and false entitlement arguments, I gave up. Now I'm just staring at the page that I've torn out and hung over my desk in a method of self-torture. It's not about whether it's okay to buy nice things for yourself, or whether my friends are right or wrong to buy expensive shoes or lots of shoes. There are plenty of things that I could stop spending my money on. The only thing that this comes down to is the fact that the shoes are too expensive, and that I should not buy them. And that's really the end of that.

After a lifetime of Loreal commercials telling me that "I'm worth it," it's hard to remember that I don't deserve good things. I don't deserve any of the good things in my life, and I don't deserve these shoes; everything that I have and that I buy is a gift. Someday I will probably buy a pair - not because I deserve them, but because I'm at a different season in my budget or find them on sale. For now, page 73 is serving well as a free piece of wall art.

Satan is nipping at my heals, but he's not biting off any yellow suede.

Settling

2008-10-16T18:42:00.014-06:00

I like to live on the edge as much as the next girl. In fact, I think I like life on the edge even more than the next girl. When Pete asked me if I would marry him, the underlying question was, "Do you mind living in Grand Rapids while I fly airplanes for an undetermined amount of time before I take you and our children to a yet-to-be determined continent for another undetermined amount of time?"

And I said, "Show me da RING!" (Actually, that was the underlying meaning to the sweet "yes" that I gave him.) Living in the moment is something that I signed up for, and something that I take pleasure in.

But after five months of limbo, here is why knowing where I am going to live for the next three years is so much better than not knowing where I'm going to live for the next three years:

Because in every way, it is.

Hands down, no contest, it is so much better.

Today Pete got the We're Going in a Different Direction letter that he's been dreading from a flight company in Virginia. By all accounts he should have gotten the job. They said they were hiring, he has the experience needed, he went to apply face-to-face, the interviews went well, and they've been encouraging him all along to finish his requirements. The only thing that would make sense of it is if God actually answered our prayers for a clean "no" if the job wasn't best for our marriage and our future.

There are a lot of reasons why this job was potentially bad for our marriage and our future. For one thing, Pete would have had to travel up to three weeks at a time, and I'm sorry, but we sucked at long distance relationship. 14 hours is a long car ride from your family, friends and support system, especially when you're thinking of having your first baby in the next couple of years. And the surveillance work that Pete was going to be doing... well... he told me once, casually, that it wasn't "the safest thing" that he could be doing. So if any of those things would have caused unnecessary damage (or, you know, death) I am deeply thankful for the We're Going In a Different Direction letter that Pete got in the mail today. And he seems okay, too.

The first thing that we decided to do is update our car registration. Next, we're going to move to an apartment with more space and a washer and drier, because two years is a long time to live in essentially one room with hardly any clean underwear, let me tell you. After we update our car registration and move to a new apartment, we're going to go ahead and get really attached to a lot of friends, instead of preparing to say goodbye. And in January, we're both going back to school.

Knowing where you're going to live is so much better than not knowing where you're going to live, especially when you get to live next to a church you love, a community you've invested in, friends you enjoy, and an afternoon's drive from family.

And to top it all off, I woke up this morning knowing exactly who I am going to vote for.

I haven't felt this settled in a long time.

Autumn

2008-10-05T17:13:00.012-06:00

Every fall I think about getting older. My birthday is in December, but December is when I occupy my mind with hateful criticisms of American consumerism. By mid-December I am considering donating all of my earthly possessions save a bowl, a spoon and two outfits; by December 21st I am rushing to the mall, realizing that I've waited too long to knit 17 scarves or learn how to write decent poems. So my birthday month is much too busy to contemplate the fact that my finite life is progressing with alarming consistency.

Autumn is a better season to think about aging, anyways. As kids, fall was like a group birthday when you and all of your friends instantly turned a grade older. But more importantly, it is during fall that you can turn onto a street and see that a tree has turned flame orange overnight, even though you know it must have shown signs of changing on all the previous days that you passed by. If that doesn't capture the same shock of aging then I'm not sure what does. Time moves visually through fall; nature glitters robustly, then dies at warped speed.

As a teenager, I decided that I would rather fear 'dying young' than 'aging'. To fear dying young means that I drive carefully; to fear aging is a very helpless feeling. So I try not to text while I drive, I put on sunblock, and I look forward to each new age. Now that I've passed all the young milestone birthdays, 30 is the next big birthday to consider.

I asked my mom if she was depressed on her 30th birthday, and she told me that she wasn't been depressed at all; in fact, she had been quite pleased with herself for turning 30. I think I already know what she means. If 21 was when I started to feel like an adult, 30 is when I expect to feel like an honest-to-goodness woman whom people should really take seriously. 30 is the age that I'm going to start subscribing to magazines. I'm holding out hope that my voice may deepen a little, as though I have a slight cold. I also hope to wear glasses when I'm 30, but only for reading.

It's still about 8 years too early to think about which magazines to subscribe to, so this autumn I'm taking a step back and sizing myself up and my current age: 21. 22, come December.

What am I in my early 20s that I will never be again? Is this the thinnest that I'll ever be without having to diet? Is this the most carefree my marriage will be before retirement? Is my last chance to travel Europe with Pete, and stay in Greece by myself after he returns home? Are these my last couple years before I am a mother, and thus my last couple years to draw untroubled breaths? I don't want to breeze past my early 20s before truly understanding what they offer me.

This past Friday, Pete and I went to a high school football game at East Grand Rapids. On our way back to the car, Pete held my hand even though it was pulled up into the arm of my fleece. He always gets nostalgic about high school because he loved those years. I loved many things about my teen years, but high school was not one of them. "I would do High School all over again," Pete said, and I agreed. I would do High School all over again - but this time I would join tennis, write for the school newspaper, and relax a little about my grades. Pete would do high school all over again, I suspect, exactly like he did it in the first place.

I want to look back on my early 20s and know that I would do it all over exactly as I did it in the first place, starting with the little vacation we're taking this weekend to enjoy the fall colors. Soon the trees will give into winter, crisp and golden, leaf by leaf. And I will be happy that I spent time and gas money to drive by them in their glamor.

6:00 am.

2008-10-03T08:31:00.006-06:00

No one has ever accused me of being a morning person, but if they did, I would be ready to go toe to toe with my accuser. Because the facts are on my side.

FACT:

This morning Pete woke me up as we was leaving for work, and I looked up at him with the same puffy, bewildered eyes that I always greet him with early morning, along with my bad-breath kiss for which I always apologize.

But this particular morning, something was wrong. Terribly wrong. There was this... this... strange sensation in my neck! It felt like, sandpaper? No! Well, kind of. But also like I had swallowed something very sticky, like honey, followed by a mouthful of teeny tiny thorns.

"Pete! There's something wrong!"

"What's wrong?"

"I can't - I can't tell. It's like..." I swallowed twice, very intently. "It's like I swallowed something terrible that sticking to the sides of my neck and it feels AWFUL."

He waited a moment, then asked, "Do you have a sore throat?"

I contemplated this.

"Yes. I have a sore throat. That's right."

Pete: "Well, I hope you feel better."

"Thank you."

And this is why I don't think I should for any reason be forced to wake myself before nine in the morning. Because before 9, I forget words and basic concepts, which I think are very important in knowing when and when not to panic, especially when you wake up feeling like you've just gulped a handful of teeny tiny thorns.

Campaign Advertising

2008-09-25T08:02:00.025-06:00

In one of my previous posts, my good pal Nick corrected me and said that the campaigns are not spending millions of dollars to earn my vote, because I don't live in a swing state. Either Nick forgot that I live in Michigan, or else he was plain wrong. I do live in a swing state, as evidenced by the yellow glove in the above map, wikipedia, CNN, and the fact that I have been subjected to a mind-numbing volume of campaign advertising.

Every commercial break contains at least one ad that starts with "I'm Barack Obama and I approve this message," and another that ends with, "I'm John Mccain and I approve this message." Obama sound authoritative, "I'M Barack Obama and I APPROVE this message," whereas McCain comes off rather matter-of-factly: "I'm John McCan and I approve this message." Sometimes the commercials run back-to-back, so it sounds like this: "I'm John McCain and I approve this message." "I'M Barack Obama and I APPROVE this message."

Now, see, when it comes to suffering the reprecussions of approving these sometimes less-than-factual messages, I think that Barack Obama has a better strategy. He approves the commercial before it even airs. I think that this is in case it turns out to be a total crock, he could always say, "Well, I had approved a different message, but then they played that one instead. I did not see that one coming." Whereas John McCain is sitting there in black-and-white with heroic lighting bathing him from the window, having heard the message we all just heard, and then he approves it. Later when reporters probe, "Senator McCain, we all know that Barack Obama did not vote for 'comprehensive sex education for kindergartners,' and that the same article quoted actually said that you didn't have an impressive education record, either. Did you really approve that message?" He has no choice. He has to say, "Actually, it is true that Obama voted for comprehensive sex education." This digs him deeper in a hole, which is why he should be approving those messages at the beginning of the ad, like Barack Obama, who I suspect is saving the I-didn't-see-that-ad-coming tactic for a real doozy.

Here is what I think. I think that if these two men (who worked together in the Senate to reform campaign finance) really want campaign finance to be reformed, and if they want an election to be won based on the issues, then they should get together for a grande latte and make a pinky-swear pact that they will not run any more commercials. Seriously. No one is becoming better educated by a 30 second commercial skewing the facts and then three days of talking about which parts exactly were "almost true" and which parts were "pants on fire" (a phrase that I read in USA Today which is still providing me with amusement).

This campaign advertisement business has been a supreme waste of my t.v. viewing time. Just buy some stage makeup and have a DEBATE already! (But remember not to buy that same blush that Al Gore wore. He looked like a pretty little girl. Just a peach-ish hue will do fine, gentlemen.) If campaigns were run on radio broadcasted debates and stump speeches (I mean real stumps, like find-a-cut-down-tree-and-stand-on-its-stump speech), I would be a happy voter. Of course, back when that was campaign strategy, I wouldn't have been allowed to vote. So I suppose I should be a little less picky.

My point is, television commercials are no place for real issues and hard truth, and we all know it. I mean, you don't see reporters asking the CEO of Cheese-Its, "Is it true that you really run over an entire city with a gigantic ball of cheese in order to get all of that cheese-y flavor into one little bite?"

The Story of Monday

2008-09-24T10:10:00.019-06:00

There are some stories that need to be told, and some days that need to be preserved in memory. This is not that kind of story, and this past Monday was not that kind of day. But I'm going to tell it, regardless, because it was such an entirely useless day that I feel I need to put it to some kind of use, if not just as material to practice telling stories.

"The pizza should be out of the oven at 7:30," Pete said at 7:20 pm on Monday.

"You'll be out of the shower by then, no?" I asked. The apartment was stifling and I had no desire to go near the hot oven that had been 'preheating' for the entire hour that I had been at Target.

"Yeah, I should be out of the shower by then."

"Pete?" I asked.

"Yes?"

"I have a request. No, a demand." I sat on the bed, crossed my legs, and tossed the Target bag aside. "I demand that you play the High Society Music."

The High Society Music is a wonderful trick that I just discovered Pete can do. We had been watching the John Adams story, and Pete started "playing" along with the music in a party scene. He motioned like he was playing a little flute, then a little tiny mandolin of some sort, and a bunch of other instruments that I don't know the names of but always hear in the kinds of movies where men in wigs are dancing. Soon Pete started making noises like the instruments, and then his eyebrows raised really really high on his forehead, and it was just about the most fantastic spectacle I have ever seen: him humming and whistling and pantomiming about 10 instruments at once.

"I demand that you play the High Society Music," I said again. "Right. Now."

"Joooyyy," he groaned. "I'm not going to play the High Society music. I'm going to shower."

"No! Play it!"

Reluctantly he started playing a little air flute, then slowly added new instruments, until he was playing an unidentifiable brass instrument with a great amount of gusto. I laughed and laughed and laughed and rolled on the bed and laughed some more. Soon we were both laughing and being altogether silly, and a whole slew of inside jokes and bits started pouring out, until it was 7:30 and the pizza was ready.

Pete said, "Okay, go get the pizza. I'm going to shower."

"I don't want to get the pizza," I said. "Will you go get it before you jump in the shower?" He laughed, scurried into the bathroom and locked the door. I was instantly furious.

I knocked on the door and yelled over the noise of the shower, "I'm not getting the pizza! You said YOU would make the pizza! I always end up getting it out. I'm hot and I don't want to go near the oven."

I went back to sorting my Target items. 7:31. "I'M NOT GETTING THE PIZZA!"

7:32: "I told you, I'm NOT getting the PIZZA. It's BURNING!"

7:34: (Knock, pound, knock): "I told you, I'm not getting the PIZZZAAAA!!!"

I heard the shower turn off, and Pete said, "Wait. You mean the pizza is still in the oven?"

"Yes."

"You didn't get the pizza out of the oven?"

"No. I did not. Just as I've been telling you."

"Joy! I can't hear anything in the shower!" He got out of the shower, wrapped himself in a towel and went to get the burnt pizza out of the oven. "Thanks a lot," I heard him mutter as he stepped back into the shower.

By then I was feeling pretty stupid. But I still had my pride, unfortunately. So when Pete got out of the shower and asked, "Okay, now why didn't you get the pizza?" I was fully prepared to stand by my actions.

"Because I am hot, and the oven has been preheating for an hour. You said you would put in the pizza an hour ago. I came back from Target and it was thawed on the counter. You could have put it in the oven before you got in the shower, and I TOLD you that I wasn't going to do it. You got in the shower anyways, and I didn't take it out of the oven."

"So you let our dinner burn out of spite."

"Well, you ran into the bathroom even though you knew I didn't want to take it out. And I thought that was spiteful."

"Joy," he said patiently, as though I were four (which, at this point, could be logically argued), "Even if I were spite-ing you, why would you want to spite me?"

"Because, Pete. I'm not a better person than you. I'm just the same or worse."

At 9:00 pm on Monday I put a pan of brownie batter in the back of the car. I hadn't had time to bake them since we had made two frozen pizzas, but I would put them in our friend's oven and we'd have hot brownies halfway through the Heroes premiere. Pete got into the driver's seat and we made conversation as he turned out of our apartment complex, onto East Paris, and eventually onto 44th st. "Now," he said, "It's one of these little neighborhoods on the left."

"You have the address and directions, right?" I asked.

"No. I've been here before."

I took a deep breath. "Pete, we came here one time a year ago. It was daytime then. And we were coming from a different direction."

"Joy, it's fine. Well, it's not this one..." He turned back onto 44th st.

"Would you please call Joe?" I asked.

"I don't have my cell phone with me."

"Fine, I'll call." I looked through my purse, then remembered that i had changed jeans just before stepping out the door, and my cell phone was in the pockets. "So," I set out to clarify, "You are driving in the dark, depending on your memory from a year ago, and you didn't check to make sure you had your Blackberry with its nifty Mapquest feature that we are paying $30 a month for."

40 minutes later we pulled back into our driveway. The brownie batter had slid to one side of the pan. We walked up the stairs to our apartment and returned calls to let our friends know that we were alive. Barely.

"Well, what do you want to do?" Pete asked.

"I want to go to Family Video and get the next season of Seinfeld." So we went to Family Video, but they didn't have the next season of Seinfeld.

10:30, back at home, Pete presented me with my catalog that had come in the mail. He said, "You know what I think? I think that you should look through this catalog and get anything you want. And I'll pick up extra hours at work to pay for it. You work really hard and I'm sorry about tonight, and I want to do something to make you feel happy."

I leafed through the catalog at the wide-leg jeans that I've wanted and the winter coats and blouses, boots, cardigans.

"I'm sorry I let the pizza burn."

"I know."

"I really wish you would plan ahead with things."

"I know."

"I'll try to stear away from the $200 coats, even though they're really cute."

"I said 'anything,' Joy."

Softly, meekly: "Will you play the High Society music?"

"No, I'm going to bed." He started up the stairs.

"But I DEMAND it!"

Other People's Customers are Jerks, Too!

2008-09-17T20:33:00.009-06:00

As Layla (a blogger friend I've acquired) would quote Eliane (of Seinfeld) in saying, "I'm the QUEEN of confrontation!" (Or did Seinfeld say that of Elaine? Help me out, Layla.)

Apparently I love confronting rude behavior so much, I am now seeking opportunities in society to confront OTHER people's customers. I don't know why I haven't thought of this before! I can say whatever I want to whomever I want, AND I don't have to worry about poorly reflecting my company.

I came to this delightful realization at the post office the other day, when I was waiting patiently to weigh and send my envelope. The man in front of me asked for a label to put on his envelope. The post woman said, "I'm sorry, Sir. I can give you a pen to write directly on your envelope, but I can't give you a label. The post office is making a lot of price cuts to keep postage as low as possible."

I thought: That is nice. I'm sick of postage going up. I'm glad they are doing all they can to keep it down. But the man in front of me said, "Well. You're really cheap, aren't you? I think that's really cheap of you to not give me a label. I've been getting labels at the post office for years."

The post woman said, "I'm sorry sir, but it's a mandate from the top. I can't give you a label, but I would be happy to lend you a pen to write directly on the envelope." (We all have to pause here and wonder: Who puts labels on their envelopes?)

I was visibly rolling my eyes and groaning at this point, hoping to make enough noise that he would turn around. But when he continued on, I interrupted.

"Excuse me, sir," I said. "She is not cheap. She is working for a company that is cutting costs." I said this before he even turned around, which he eventually did. He looked at me like I was crazy, even though he was the one asking for a label to put on an envelope.

"Did you say something?"

"Yes. She is not cheap. She is working for the government, and the government doesn't want to give you any more free labels."

This is when the gentleman glanced down... not to look at my chest (which would have been further reason to put him in his place), but to look at my name tag.

Joy Neal
Guest Services
Staybridge Suites Hotel

So the moral of the story is, if you don't want to reflect your company while out in public, take your name tag off.

I Guess I'm Allowed to Blog about Political Stuff, Right?

2008-09-05T17:34:00.021-06:00

What is it, 60 days till the election? I'm still one of those registered, undecided voters who both campaigns are spending millions of dollars and working themselves into frenzies to win over.

I used to make my decisions based solely on the issue of abortion, which was the only one I was certain about. But it's becoming increasingly difficult for me to vote even based on that singular issue. According to my calculations, we have had republican presidents in the white house for 24 of the 35 years since Roe V. Wade was instated, and it has remained in tact. And while I am entirely opposed to Roe V. Wade, I am compelled by the potential of the democratic platform to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies and provide more support for mothers who chose to keep their babies.

I have one comment and one concern, and then I'll shut up (for now):

Comment: I think both sides of the argument need to be more fair when arguing. Pro-lifers are not driven by a perverse desire to inflict suffering on poor, single women or victims of rape and incest. By that same token, I don't believe that pro-choice advocates are go-lucky murderers, content to know that fully born babies of unwilling-to-be-inconvenienced-parents are being left to die in utility rooms. I don't believe that Barack Obama is a go-lucky murderer who is content to know that fully born babies are being left to die in utility rooms*. I do think that he strongly wants to protect Roe V. Wade, and I strongly disagree with him.

*http://factcheck.barackobama.com/factcheck/2008/08/19/fact_check_born_alive_1.php

Concern: I believe that our abortion-rights law reveals the poor moral state that our country is in. But the reality is that without Jesus, people are without hope. Women are going to have abortions whether they are legal or not, or women are going to continue having babies who they didn't want and won't adequately care for. I believe in the right to live; I also believe that babies have the right to be fed, loved, and parented. I admire John McCain for his pro-life voting record. But I'm confused as to why republicans (including John McCain*) continually vote against safe-practice and teen-pregnancy education.

*http://www.ontheissues.org/John_McCain.htm

Abstinence is an obedient response to God and his Word, but it doesn't seem practical to base our national policies on that conviction. My public high school had an "abstinence only" approach to education; we also had a "Student Parents" club with over 20 members in my senior year - and those were just the teen parents who had decided not have an abortion, and who had also decided to join the club. Abstinence is the only sure-fire way to prevent unwanted pregnancies, but I don't think that abstinence-only education works in lowering the rate in unwanted pregnancies. Liberals seem to be the leaders in providing education and resources to lower the rate of unwanted pregnancies. Also, they are more willing to put money into programs (welfare, health care services, etc.) that could support a woman in choosing to keep her baby.

Overturning Roe V. Wade is only one of the ways to improve the situation at hand, and the least likely to be accomplished. Thus: I want a candidate who believes abortion is wrong, who will talk about it fairly, who will lead the way in providing education and resources to lower rates of unwanted pregnancies, who will improve programs designed to assist women in difficult financial situations, who will simplify adoption processes, and who will appoint a pro-life supreme court justice.

And while I'm naming my terms, I would also like this candidate to have a platform that favors the poor, the religiously persecuted internationally, sex slaves, and the environment. Solid plans to tackle the energy crisis and the national debt would also be appreciated, as both ENERGY CRISIS and NATIONAL DEBT sound very big and bad. And don't get me started on the WAR, because I have no idea where to start, and I don't think anyone knows where to end.

Childlike

2008-08-23T19:37:00.009-06:00

Evan is a boy who I baby-sit, and my primary beef with him is that he doesn't play correctly.

For example: last time I took him to the Children's Museum, he refused to play with the bubbles, instruments, and craft supplies, and instead planted himself at the rather dull sandbox near the entrance. So the following morning, I took him to the Meijer Gardens and charged straight towards the giant sand play area, complete with construction scoopers that you sit on and man with handles.

But Evan didn't want to play with sand. Evan wanted to push his stroller up and down the same sidewalk, mowing over an occasional rare flower.

"Evan, do you want to go play with the sailboats and water?"

"No, I want-a push my stroller."

"Do you want to go back to the sand-box?"

"No, I want-a push my stroller."

"Do you want to go climb in the big FUN treehouse?!?!"

"No! I WANT-a push my STROLLER!"

Sometimes Evan doesn't listen, which is a common enough issue at two years. Sometimes he kicks, which drives his mother mad. But what really gets under my skin is the fact that Evan plays however he wants to play. Not with bubbles, craft supplies, big sandboxes or the big FUN treehouse. He does what he wants to when he wants to.

I hardly ever play exactly like I want to when I want to. Even when it wouldn't really matter... I still feel the weight of what I should do, even how I should play. I should watch the movie that we rented instead of watching 8 reruns of Friends. I should read my book instead of People magazine. I should play cards with Pete instead of suggesting that we jump in the pool afterhours. Sometimes I need to get very quiet to even determine what it is that I really want to do, what will actually relax and recharge me.

I want-a push my STROLLER!!

The Whites in 143

2008-08-03T13:36:00.005-06:00

This is my new least favorite thing: watching an old man cry while his wife screams in pain as she's lifted onto a stretcher with a broken hip.

Mr. and Mrs. White (who are approximately 200 years old) moved into our hotel for a 90 night stay. It wasn't more than two minutes after they checked in that they called the front desk with their first request. Could we remove the french doors separating the bedroom and living room? They're just in the way.

It wasn't more than ten minutes after they checked in that Mr. White came to the front with (what he deemed) a Very Big Problem. His key to the room wasn't working. "Well, that's an easy-to-fix problem!" I said, cheerily, as I reauthorized the key card. "You may have put it near a cell phone, which deactivates the card."

"Well, the card is in my pocket with my cell phone," Mr. White said.

"Yup, that'll do it!" Forced patience.

"Well, where will I keep my cell phone now?" He asked.

"You can put it anywhere or in any pocket that isn't with your room key," I suggested.

"I'm going to put them in the same pocket. I don't believe you." Now he was teasing me. I smiled.

Two mornings later I got a phone call from 143, it was Mr. White, and he asked me to call an ambulence. I called 911 on my cell as I rounded the corner to the room. Through the french-doorless entryway was Mrs. White, lying crookedly on the ground. "You have something under the bed, and I tripped on it," she said.

"Vivian," said Mr. White, "You tripped on the bed legs. Every bed has legs."

"Well," she said gently, without even a hint of accusation, "They must stick out more than most. I tripped and fell across the room, and now I can't move." The back of her hand was laid in a Scarlett-O'Hare fashion across her forehead.

Mr. White was pacing, so I suggested that he wait for the ambulance near the south-east entrance where I had directed them. I called the houseman to wait by the front door, just in case. And then I sat with Mrs. White.

"Are you starting to feel a little more pain?" I asked, and she nodded.

"Would you like me to pray with you?"

"Oh, would you dear? Thank you."

I took Vivian White's soft hand in mine, and prayed a slow, short prayer. When I finished, about 7 men were piling in the room with a stretcher, and Mr. White was right behind them. I left as they started lifting her and as she started crying out. As they rolled her out of the room, she reached for my hand and patted it with her other. "Thank you, dear. You're a sweetheart."

Mr. White was trying to get the door closed behind him, but a walker was in the way. "I'll make sure the door is closed, Mr White," I told him. He nodded, and walked out to his wife as fast as I've ever seen a 200 year old man walk.

The Customer is Often a Jerk

2008-07-31T06:26:00.005-06:00

.

I was checking a woman into the hotel, and she handed me her Visa credit card. Then she asked, "Now, if I want to put the last night on a different card, what would be the best way to go about doing that?"

I had to think about it for a moment, because there are a few ways to go about doing that, and I couldn't remember the best way. In an act of 'pondering, I placed the tip of the edge of the corner of her card to the bottom on my chin, and said "hmm..."

"I'm sorry," she said, "But are you touching my credit card to your germ-y face?"

I was stunned. I looked at her disgusted face, and I removed the tip of the edge of the corner of her card from the bottom of my chin. I said,

"Oh, I'm sorry, I wasn't thinking. Oh... and uh oh... it looks like I accidentally touched it with my filthy fingers, too."

In other words, Go Dig Yourself A Hole.

.

MAX

2008-07-26T15:31:00.003-06:00

I was reading through some old stuff and found these last two little pieces about Max, Pete's bird... thought I'd post em. They actually go before "Animal Hospital Walls," but oh well. The bird is dead. Chronology doesn't matter so much anymore.

January

MAX

Max is Pete's Cockateil that he's had since he was 12 years old, after his dad accidentally killed Max 1 by leaving the blanket over his cage while the family vacationed. Birds don't eat in the dark, so Max 1 starved himself in a dark cage. The story of Max 1 is very tragic, but Pete's dad made up for it by buying Max 2, who looks just like Max 1 but turned out to be a girl. Maxine is her full name. She reaped the benefits of her predecessor's demise and was taken on the family vacations.

About two months ago, Pete noticed a small growth on her left wing. She'd had one before, but it had fallen off shortly after it developed. This one did not fall off. It grew to the size of a jelly bean - and not like the yummy little Jelly Belly kind, but like the big, sugary, nasty kind that grandmas set out around Christmas. It surpassed the size of the Christmas jelly bean, and then Pete got nervous. He researched bird tumors online. Most of the forums said to take her to the vet. Others explained that it would be highly unlikely for a bird of her age to make it through any kind of surgery. Another suggested that he tie off the growth and let it die, which he did. The growth turned dark by that night, and shortly after Max began pecking at it. Max now looks like a warrior that has barely survived battle. The left side of her face is coated in dry blood, and her growth is inexplicable. Pete cleans her off as best as he can and he continues to tie off the growth because it is dying. Unfortunately, Max may as well.

Pete dressed for work tonight in my favorite pinstripe button-down and blue tie. I asked him if he was Okay, and he said Not really. Then he asked me to take his picture with Max. We closed the closet doors for a basic background, and he carefully extracted Max from her cage. Lifting his finger level to his face, he positioned her so that her good side faced the camera and he smiled. It was a proud, sad smile: a man and his bird. He smiled again, a tender smile, and I took that picture too. I said, One more, and this time he couldn't lift the corners of his mouth very high. He looked at Max, and I captured that sweet exchange. And then he started to cry. He put Max back in her cage and I held him while we cried together. I tried to wrap my arms around both the 12 year old boy that picked Max out in a pet store and the 24 year old man that now is worried that she's suffering and that he's not doing the right thing.

I prayed and thanked Jesus for seeing the small parts of our life, and asked him to alleviate any pain that Max may be feeling. I asked for wisdom as to whether or not we should put her down tomorrow, which I know is all Pete will be thinking about while he works tonight.I promised to call him at work if anything happens, and I told him to be at peace. Max is now huddled in the corner of her cage, sleeping, I hope. And even though I never wanted this bird in the first place, and even though I know she has never liked me, I wish with all of my heart that I could mend her and give her back to Pete.

See? I would say. All better, now.

BIRD IN A PINK COFFIN

I took off my boots and ran upstairs to the sound of Max's wings flopping in her cage. She was tossing as if some invisible force was throwing punches and beating the shit out of her. Her head craned back into an unnatural arch and then she suddenly stopped, panting. I called Pete to tell him that Max had seizure, but he walked in the door before he could pick up.

Pete sat with Max, his bird of 12 years, as she continued to have seizures in ten minute intervals. I couldn't watch, but I returned upstairs now and then to put my arms around him as scratched the back of her neck with his fingertip. After about forty-five minutes he looked at me and said, "I guess I should kill her."I looked at Max and her bloody tumor; she was shivering slightly and looked scared. I looked at Pete and his full, watery eyes. He looked scared, too. I called animal hospitals, but the only one open past six didn't accept birds. I googled terms like: "most humane way to kill a bird" and kept clicking, hoping to find something that didn't suggest cutting off her head.

Finally I called the pet store in Chicago that Max came from, and talked to a bird expert named Julie. She suggested that we put Max in a box, tie up the box, and place her in a freezer. The cold would drop her body temperature so drastically that she would quickly fall asleep, and die shorty after.

The only box I could find around the right size was a Victoria's Secret gift box leftover from a wedding shower. It was a little big, so we lined one side with a bag of frozen peas, then laid one sheet of paper towel along the bottom. We put on our shoes and coats, and Pete grabbed his wallet. With a last goodbye, we placed her frail bird body into the pink coffin, tied it with a ribbon, and placed her on the bottom shelf of the freezer. We ran down to our car, and went out to eat with our friends as planned.

Two hours later, I was giving our friends a tour of our apartment. I came back downstairs and gave Pete a hug and asked how he was doing. He hugged me back and said uncertainly, "Well. Max is still with us. " I lurched out of his arms and covered my open mouth. "Yeah," he said, "I opened the box, and she peaked her head out as if to say, 'Hi. Can I come out of the freezer, now?'"

Max is now sitting in her cage and responds with a whistle whenever Pete says her name. The tumor is still there, and so is the fear that her seizures will start up again. But as far as I can tell, the freezer cured our bird.

The freezer cured our bird.

We put our bird in the freezer.

We placed Max in a lingire box, tied it with a satin ribbon, and set her on the bottom shelf.

"It shouldn't take very long," Julie said. "Her body should fall asleep within ten minutes, and shortly after, she will die. This is probably the least traumatic way to handle it."

The Joker Devotional

2008-07-22T22:32:00.006-06:00

Every time the Joker was on screen, my insides were thrilled. I found myself moving my tongue briskly in my mouth, just to see how he did it. He must have practiced that one trait for days; I hadn't nearly perfected it by the end of the two and a half hour film.

The Joker was the reason I loved and hated the film. Without him, it wouldn't have had much depth. But the depth that he provided was one I wasn't willing to take in; I left feeling more compelled by darkness than by any shred or subliminal theme of goodness. I left feeling like goodness was the surface, simple cover up for the greater reality of evil.

There was one monologue in particular, near the end, when the Joker is talking about chaos. I remember the essence of it, if not a few direct quotes:

No one is fearful of anything that fits into the plan, "even if the plan is terrible." If it were announced that a truck of soldiers was going to blow up tomorrow, you wouldn't panic. There would be no chaos, because it fits into 'the plan.' But threaten "one little mayor..." and suddenly there is chaos. Because things aren't going according to plan.

This is why I hated the movie: the personification of pure evil was the most clear thinking and insightful character. Because he's right.

My fears all revolve around those things that are out of my control. I don't truly fear things like failure, because I feel like failure and success are within my control; I would regret failure, but I do not fear it. The things that I fear: death of a loved one, physical pain, being tied down and tickled, my own death.... these are the things that I can't control.

The Joker only confirmed what I already knew, even before I sat to watch The Dark Knight.

To release myself from fear is to release my control. And when I truly submit myself to the Lord and His will, I am free of the chaos waiting just outside my own plan.

Getting the Love You Want

2008-07-16T22:04:00.010-06:00

As I was checking in an elderly couple at the hotel, the gentleman glanced at my book laying down on the counter. "So," he asked kindly, "are you getting the love that you want?" He was referencing the title.

This would have been somewhat embarrassing, but I was actually able to tell him that I in fact am getting the love that I want. "My husband and I are taking a marriage class," I explained, "and this is the book it's based on."

"A marriage class?" His wife asked. "Well isn't that wonderful, dear." She looked at her husband. "John, isn't that wonderful?"

Before Pete and I married, we read a lot of books about marriage and we talked a lot about our relationship. Regardless of how in love and perhaps blind we were, a rational part of us wanted to make sure we covered all of our bases so that we wouldn't make a terrible, binding mistake. It was exhausting being so passionately in love while remaining open to the possibility of breaking it off and seeing other people.

Once we finally got married, it was like a huge weight had been lifted. The decision had been made. And for once, it was nice just to be in a relationship without constantly having to analyze it and weigh it and discuss it. So we didn't read any books, and we didn't talk with any older or wiser couples. We just ate breakfast and went to work and watched movies and had a lot of sex. Bliss.

Now, about a year and a half later, it's time to start discussing our relationship again. We're taking a class with our church based on the New York Times bestseller, Getting the Love You Want. Each class starts with a "romantic interlude," which this week entailed of whispering to your spouse a memory from the first time you made love. Pete whispered so quietly there that I could barely hear him myself. I think I caught, "You looked beautiful, and it was kind of complicated."

Next we watch videos of Hendrix and Helen, who are married, but maintain several separate professional last names. Helen has so many last names that I can only assume she kept her mother's, her father's, and her ex-husband's, but chose not to take Hendrix's. Hendrix and Helen both are prototypes of male and female psychologists, in that he has glasses and a beard and she has an unruly head of curls. They sit in opposite chairs and they demonstrate the Couple's Dialogue.

The Couple's Dialogue has three parts: mirroring, validating, and empathizing. I will now demonstrate a dialogue that Pete and I practiced with at class.

Joy: I would like to tell you about a dream that I had last night.

Pete: What you are telling me is that you had a dream last night which you want to tell me about. Did I get that right?

Joy: Yes. I had a dream last night that I was eating breakfast with Abraham Lincoln, and he was just now leaving office in 2008.

Pete: So, in this dream, you were eating breakfast with Abraham Lincoln. It struck you as odd that he was leaving office in 2008.

Joy: Almost. It didn't strike me as odd in the actual dream. But I think that it is odd now that I am consciously thinking about it.

Pete: So Abraham Lincoln was leaving office in 2008, but this did not seem odd in the dream. Did I catch that?

Joy: Yes.

Pete: Is there more?

Joy: Yes. In the dream, I asked Abraham Lincoln what he was planning to do after he left office, and he said that he was going to move to New Zealand because their stock market was good, as well as the weather.

Pete: In your dream Abraham Lincoln conveyed his plans to you, which were to move to New Zealand because of the better stock market and climate. Is that right?

Joy: Yes.

Pete: Is there more?

Joy: Well... now that you ask... I'm remembering that I had a hard time falling asleep last night. And at some point I thought that maybe I should take a sleeping pill. Thinking about sleeping pills made me think about that commercial with Abraham Lincoln and the groundhog who are missing from people's dreams because these people can't sleep. So I think that's why I had a dream about Abraham Lincoln.

Pete: If I'm getting this right, you thought about Abraham Lincoln before you went to sleep, and you think that may be the reason that you had a dream about him.

Joy: Yes. Also, I think that I couldn't fall asleep last night because I took that long nap. So maybe I should cut back on naps and just depend on a good night's sleep.

Pete: Is there any more?

Joy: No.

After Pete summarizes the conversation in whole, he asks, "Did I get all of that?" And then I say, "Yes, I think so."

Joy: Yes, I think so.

Pete: Well, I think that makes a lot of sense that you would dream about Abraham Lincoln after thinking about him. And I also think it is valid that you may have slept poorly because you took a nap. I feel your dilemma, because I think I sometimes don't sleep as well because of the naps that I take. If you want to try skipping your naps, I'd be happy to help you in any way that I can.

THE END

So, basically, the Couple's Dialogue is a great tool to make sure that the one partner feels respected and heard-out before the other partner tries to either defend him or herself or offer solutions. It is also a great tool to drive you a little crazy.

Of course, what it is actually good for is providing structure around heated discussions. "I would like to tell you about a dream I had last night" is one thing; "I would like to tell you about how you made a complete fool of me in front of everyone" is another. It takes great patience to parrot back, "So what you're saying is that you felt as though I was being a jerk to you and trying to expose you in front of everyone," instead of saying, "Honey, you got this all wrong; it was a joke." You can always just wait until there is no more, and say, "I would like to have a dialogue about why I think that you should lighten up a little."

Helen, Hendrix and Abraham Lincoln aside, it feels really good to be back in our groove, analyzing and fine-tuning our relationship. Marital bliss can get a little boring. Sometimes you need to throw in some couple's dialogue to spice things up.

- January 08

Intellectual Vanity

2008-07-09T12:04:00.003-06:00

Often when I read mindless entertainment like The Devil Wears Prada, I find myself folding the cover back when in public. I do not do this with titles like Les Miserables or The Corrections.

.

Clean House

2008-07-09T12:02:00.003-06:00

Whenever I clean a room, a small part of me believes that I've really done it this time, that the room will stay in a perpetual state of clean.

.

Dream Lives

2008-07-09T11:52:00.006-06:00

I always love when I show up in someone else's dreams. It makes me feel like I'm secretly living extra lives.

.

2 Stories Worth Telling

2008-06-29T17:36:00.011-06:00

WORDS OF WISDOM, PERSISTENCE.

A friend of Pete's and mine, Dominick, is a helicopter pilot looking for a job, which as you may imagine is difficult in Grand Rapids. A few months back he was driving home and he sensed very clearly from God that he was supposed to turn left on an upcoming street. He turned left, and God pointed out a house that he had never seen before. He heard God tell him to knock on the door, so he knocked on the door. No one was home and Dominick left.

A couple months later, Dominick felt very strongly that he was supposed to go back to the house. This time the man was home, though he was thoroughly confused as to why a young man with a Swiss-German accent was at his doorstep. The owner of the house turned out to be a Christian who believes that God can speak to people like Dominick. He also happens to work for Air Med in Grand Rapids. They had an awkward conversation, and they said goodbye.

After the man shut the door, Dominick knew that something wasn't complete. He asked God, Was that it? And God said, That wasn't it. So Dominick knocked on the door for the third time. This time, the man gave Dominick a number of a contact person, but warned that the company hadn't hired a new pilot in the 15 years that he had worked there. Dominick called the contact person and learned Air Med was officially looking for a new helicopter pilot. His application is in process.

AGAINST THE ODDS?

Some friends of ours are praying for a second child. They were told the first time around that they would not be able conceive naturally, but God blessed them with their beautiful son.

They have been praying and considering In Vitro this time around, and have felt peace through every step of the medical process. At an appointment last week, the doctor reiterated that their chances of conceiving naturally were slim to absolutely none.

"Like I tell everyone in your situation," he said, "I have only heard of one couple who concieved naturally with this particular condition." He rummaged through some files in the back, and returned with wide eyes. "And you were that couple."

---

Why would God tell Dominick to knock on the door of an empty house?

And which is further against the odds? Their chances of conceiving a baby? Or: the doctor relaying an impossible statistic, unknowingly, to the one couple who had experienced the impossible.

Vacation

2008-06-25T20:22:00.005-06:00

It is important to be hard-working and productive, but I have profound admiration for people who take vacationing seriously. Because it is a serious matter. Vacation requires an entire rearranging of your scheduled life; you must cancel weekly appointments, create special outgoing voice mails, and otherwise arrange for your absence. Vacation requires an understanding that everything can and will go on without you, the way it will when you die. As I said, vacation is a serious matter.

My husband's parents are vacationing role models. When Doug (my father-in-law) was going through graduate school, him and Kathy lived in a double-wide trailer and spent their college loan money on travels. My husband has no early childhood memories of video games (they didn't own a system), but he has seen every state minus Alaska and Washington. He also has been to Disney World 21 times in his 24 years (which, yes, I agree is excessive).

The best thing about spending your time and money on vacations, I think, is this: unlike material things that break or burn or get phased out, you will hardly ever regret a vacation. Even the terrible ones where you get into fights and break your ankle just turn into funny stories. So even though it's more difficult to plan a vacation than buy a new entertainment system, the memories never become out of style, and their value only increases as life moves on and seasons change.

I call that investment, not spending.

Heaven and Birthdays

2008-06-21T02:35:00.005-06:00

For my 8th birthday I had a tea party. By noon on December 14, the table was set with a white table cloth, flowers, a platter of pink cupcakes and my mom's eclectic china set. I looked at the beautiful spread, admired my floral dress in the mirror, and threw up on the kitchen floor out of sheer excitement.

I've cooled down a little since then, but I still anticipate things pretty intently, and I enjoy doing so.

Which is why I hate surprises. At least, the kind of surprises when I know something is coming but can't know what it is. It's juvenile, it's silly, but it's true. My husband wanted to surprise me with our honeymoon location, but there was no way I could have let that happen. I annoyed him to a breaking point and never regretted it. We poured over travel books and I bought about a dozen bikinis that I haven't worn since.

I think this is why it's hard for me to anticipate heaven. Heaven is like God saying, "Listen, I'm planning our honeymoon. That's all I'm telling you. Nope - no pictures. Nope - no travel books. I'm not even going to tell you if it's tropical."

He probably figures that if I knew, I would throw up all over the kitchen.

StatCounter

2008-06-19T16:18:00.002-06:00

I am so thankful that Sarah Barlow convinced me to get StatCounter, because otherwise I would never have known that people have accessed my site after searching the following phrases on Google:

Living like Anne Shirley

1 Month of Starvation

(and:)

I'm pooping out water whats wrong with me

(Don't worry person who is pooping out water! I can't tell who you are, so you have nothing to be embarrassed about. And I'm sorry that my blog didn't have any information about what is wrong with you; I suggest you eat more fiber and see a doctor.)

Pleasant Boundaries

2008-06-14T18:44:00.006-06:00

Growing up, I had neighborhood boundaries that marked the precise lot of land that I was free to roam. My world was squared in by a fence, a street, a sidewalk and the top of a hill. Within the boundaries were my house, my best friend's house, my bike-riding sidewalk, a yard to play tag, a porch to play Boxcar Children, and a green electric box to stand on and shout, "I'm QUEEN OF THE WORLD!" when my parents weren't watching.

I was content with three of my four boundary lines; I didn't have any real desire to cross the road or sidewalk or jump the fence. But one summer I grew a particular resentment towards the line that separated me and the hill. Despite my passionate plea, my parents failed to grant me an extension, and I was resigned to standing at the top and staring forlornly at it's exotic, descending enticements. My friends were overjoyed to exploit their liberty by running, skipping and rolling like barrels to the bottom while I watched.

Eventually I was allowed to go to the bottom of the hill, at which point I realized that my friends had been pretending to have a lot more fun than what the hill really had to offer. But I remained suspicious of boundaries and what they might be keeping me from, particularly boundaries like time and money that keep me from traveling more, giving more, and spending more time investing in more relationships. I understand boundaries that keep me from sin, but why are there constraints that keep me from good things in life?

Boundaries will always exist around the finite things in life such as time and money. But what I'm learning is that boundaries are necessary in order to explore the infinite within the finite.

I can introduce myself to every single person in my town, but I will never know my husband Pete all the way through.

I could visit every country in Europe, but I will never be able to experience and learn everything about Atrani, Italy.

I could give away every dollar that I make, but I will never get to the end of what it means to be generous.

I could roll like a barrel to the bottom of the hill, but I could never stop finding ways to play in my front yard.

Psalm 16:
Lord, you have assigned me my portion and my cup.
You have made my lot secure.
The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places;
surely, I have a delightful inheritance.

Animal Hospital Walls

2008-06-12T06:24:00.005-06:00

01-04-08.

I've only been in a veterinary clinic once before, but I remember a similar motif to the one I visited today: uncoordinated wall colors, and random framed drawings of assorted household pets. We were the only ones in the waiting room, but it still took about five minutes for Pete to sign papers authorizing the euthenatia, and another five for the vet to prepare. I started at one side and worked my way around the walls of the animal hospital.

First picture, first question: why would someone draw a picture of such an ugly cat? He or she must have really loved the cat. Still, wouldn't this artist realize that even though she loved the cat, no one else would value a framed picture of such a hideous looking creature? An inscription was printed on the bottom right corner of the matting: It's always hard to lose a family member. Thank you for easing my pain. With love, Cindy.

I moved on to a picture of a man with a fishing pole, glancing over his shoulder to his trailing dog. It was the very picture of man and his faithful companion - I don't know when artists will realize that this picture has been painted a thousand times over. I told Pete my theory that a dog is everything a man wants in a woman: good listener, rapt audience, non-argumentative, adoring. He nodded but didn't smile.

Across the room was a bulletin board smothered in animal-themed note cards and holiday pictures. One picture was of of a 30-something couple and seven rottweilers. I wondered if this couple had security issues or if they couldn't have children. The names of the dogs read like a top-10 baby names for the past ten years: Emily, Isabelle, Ethan, Ava, Michael... I decided that they couldn't have children. They looked really happy. The Christmas card said Happy Holidays from the Wilson Family!

The private waiting room was the color of a kiwi and had a couch covered in animal fur. Pete sat on a stool and I sat on the arm of a chair. "She was a good bird," he said, and I agreed. The vet came back with Max, who was still moving slightly but quickly stiffened in her hands. "She went to sleep very easily," she said. "I don't think she had a lot of blood left."

We wrapped Max in a cloth and placed her in a box. We thanked the wonderful vet who had said all of the right things and carried Max with such care. I glanced again at its walls covered by the affection of a rare breed of people: animal lovers. I thought, If I were to make an addition to these walls I would inscribe this verse:

Matthew 10:29: Are not sparrows sold for two pennies? Yet not one of them is forgotten by God.

I have always had a somewhat sarcastic bent towards animal lovers. Yet somehow, I think their Christmas cards and ugly cat drawings - and our tears over Max - illustrate a small portion of God's love for his creation.

His eye is on the sparrow.

.

Dreams of Jesus

2008-06-11T21:39:00.004-06:00

.

When I was a little girl, my mom would push my hair back with the palm of her hand and pray over my dreams. "Father, give Joy good dreams," she would say. "Dreams of Jesus."

I don't remember very many dreams of Jesus Himself, but most of my dreams were fun and colorful; I feel fortunate that I escaped childhood nightmares. What I have suffered most of my life have been pre-sleep nightmares. I've had them off and on ever since I was about 12 years old.

My pre-sleep nightmares occur when I get into bed and close my eyes. An image will come to my head - sometimes from a movie, other times from an article or book, and sometimes just from the recesses of my brain (those are the scariest). The image is of someone doing something terrible and atrocious and painful to me or someone I love. Usually I am in another country, and it is tied up in missionary work.

I don't really trust God to keep me safe. Pete said, "I'm trusting that God will take care of us in whatever way that He sees fit." I said, "I don't really know what that means." Sees fit? I trust someone if I think that he will take care of me and protect me to the best of his ability. God has the ability to keep me and my family safe, but the truth is, He may or He may not. And He hasn't promised to keep me safe; in fact, he promises that there will be hardships.

Right now, I care about my body and my emotions and my life more than I desire to glorify God. If bringing God glory required me to be abused or tortured, I'm not sure that it would be worth it to me. I would wish that I had stayed home.

But I'm going because I don't want that to be the case. I want to somehow see outside of myself; I want big picture vision. I want faith. I want to trust. Maybe I'll never trust that God will keep me safe, but I want to trust it's really worth it. I want to trust that I have a strength available to me that isn't my own.

I think that my dreams have been very much protected my whole life. I don't fear sleeping. These images that I allow myself to fall asleep to... I have control over that. I can take control over that. I can fight them, change them, refuse them.

I want to get into bed and have good pre-sleep dreams. I want to fall asleep to visions of Jesus.

.

Poop Water

2008-05-25T15:25:00.005-06:00

I woke up at 10:30 am and calculated the hours before I had to leave for work. Pete had just fallen into bed three hours prior after his overnight shift. I kissed him lightly and scooted out of bed. I brushed my teeth, washed my face, and went to the bathroom.

The last part of this daily routine, however, turned out to be a colossal mistake. Because if you ever have spicy chili for dinner, you can pretty much bank on the fact that the toilet is not going to work in the morning. If you also ate the greasy appetizer, you should probably just find an outhouse or secluded bush. Which is exactly what I wished I had done as I inspected the toilet tank and began plunging a swamp of dirty poop water.

After about ten minutes of plunging and pulling on ever lever in the tank, it became pretty apparent that I wasn't getting anywhere. So I took a break and checked my email. Around 11:00 I went back into the bathroom, secretly hoping that poo fairies would have snuck in and taken care of it for me. Instead, I realized that the toilet bowl was slowly filling with more water. I plunged it down to a safe level, trying to use my peripheral vision to make sure that I was plunging accurately. I nearly barfed at the site of my own crap. 20 minutes later, I was angry.

"What's wrong with the bathroom door?" Pete asked.

"I slammed it," I said. "That's what's wrong with the door." I didn't care how juvenile I was being.

"Why would you slam the door?"

"Because I've spent half my freaking morning trying to get the freaking toilet to flush, and it's disgusting and I can't do it, and I need help." I plopped on the bed with childish dramatics. Then I followed him to the bathroom.

"Okay," I said, "but can you fix it without looking in the toilet bowl? Just, you know, lift up the tank lid and figure out what's wrong."He looked at me a little sideways. "Joy, why does it matter if I look in the toilet bowl? It's just poop. Do you think your poop is more gross than my poop?"

"Yes. I do."

He was being extremely patient. "Well, I want to help you, but eventually I'm going to have to look to make sure it's not overflowing."

Very suddenly, my face contourted and I started to cry. I cried big, loud sobs. I cried hiccups, gurgles, and spilling tears. "It's just so gross, and I don't want you to see it. I need you to fix it but I don't want you to see it. It's disgusting, nasty poop water and it's probably more gross than anything that has ever come out of you."

"Are you really crying because you don't want me to see your poop water?" he asked. I nodded yes, and he pulled me into a hug. Then he started laughing. He laughed big belly laughs... rolling and overflowing laughs. This made me sob even harder, so we stood together in the stinky bathroom, him laughing and me crying, and meanwhile the basin continued to fill up little by little. He took the tank lid off and began filling it with a lot more water than I had thought necessary. Then he pressed the flusher and lifted the lid to the toilet bowl. He saw me cringe and said, "Joy, it looks just like my poop water." The swamp began to swirl, and then it dissapreared. I can't imagine a dessert wanderer would breathe a deeper sigh of relief than I did at the sight of clean water. It gurgled up triumphantly and settled in the bowl

Sometimes I need someone to help me with my shit, but don't want them to actually look at my shit. It doesn't really work that way. What I need is for someone else to open the toilet bowl and then hold me.

"Your humantiy looks just like my humanity," I need to hear. "And I can help you.".

License and Registration, Please

2008-05-20T21:14:00.007-06:00

I've been driving a car with expired registration for nearly two years now, and let me tell you that life as a fugitive has been rough. In the past when I saw a police officer in my rear view mirror I would simply check my speed and remind myself to keep a special eye out for stop signs and school buses. (Because, of course, the only time you don't notice the big yellow bus in front of you is when there is a police car behind you). But now that I've had this neon-reflective sticker on my license plate with the numbers "06" irrefutably printed, everything is completely out of my control.

I know it doesn't have to be like this. At least, I know this at a cognitive level. But between my out-of-state move, the missing title and registration to my car (as well as my missing birth certificate, passport, marriage license, and every other documentation proving that I am alive), I have started to lose hope of this process ever resulting in current license plates. Probably it will end when the government finds out that I don't exist, and they put me in exile or something, after I file my taxes, of course.

The bright side is that I have become an immaculate driver through this experience. This is because I treat every vehicle as though it were an unmarked police car, even the mini-vans with hand smears on the windows. All that this has really done is piss off the people behind me as I drive precisely one mile under the speed limit at all times. But the hand-smeared mini-vans have had no reason to pull me over and smack me with a ticket for expired plates, that's for darn sure.

My husband has joined me in my life of crime; his plates expired just a couple months after mine. I suppose some couples have worked out who the responsible one is going to be, but we're still battling it out to see who will cave. He did get pulled over the other day. I was in the car with him. When the lights starting swirling and he pulled over into a lot, I patted him on the knee and said, "I'm right here, honey." What I was really thinking was, Thank God we took his car, because he is going DOWN. In the end, the officer gave him a Promise to Comply, which is just like a Super Duper Promise with a dotted like to sign on. He'll probably get his plates taken care of, and I'll be forced to continue my unlawful ways alone.

Irregular Postings

2008-05-20T21:01:00.004-06:00

Maybe now I'll get on the ball. I just read my comments from my Anne posting two months ago and realized I missed out on $90 tickets and an excuse to go to Prince Edward Island. I didn't think anyone read my blog, and come to find out that the production peeps from Anne and Gilbert the musical did.

I think one post a week sounds manageable. You can count on it. (I'm talking to you, Samantha, you encouraging and pesty woman, you!)

Suave and Death

2008-05-20T20:37:00.007-06:00

As far as shampoo goes, I usually buy knock-off brands or Suave, which is basically a branded knock-off brand. (As an aside, it bothers me that Suave now has commercials, because I imagine they hiked the price a couple cents without my noticing for their new marketing campaign.) A couple months ago I was browsing the hair care aisle and I decided, against all of my childhood training, to treat myself with a pricey salon brand. I would use it only once a week, I decided. I chose Mondays, because it feels nice to start the week off clean and pretty. Suave and I would maintain our routine the other six days.

So every Monday around 6:00 am, I would rub approximately 25 cents worth of shampoo into my scalp, which really is a lot if you think about the people living for less than a dollar a day. And since I stayed faithful to my rationing schedule, the bottle seemed to last a long, long time. The line of liquid didn't seem to be diminishing at all. In fact, I started to think that it was like the endless bottle of oil that Elijah gave the widow; in a way I actually accepted this could be true.

But a couple weeks ago I noticed that the bottle was getting lighter. And then very suddenly, it was empty. I shook the bottle upside down and bewilderedly poured the last bit of expensive-smelling potion onto my palm. It was as I tossed the empty bottle onto the bathmat that I came to a new conclusion within myself:

Someday, I am going to die.

The eternal bottle of oil is my soul; as it says in Psalms, eternity is written on my heart. But on this earth, my Mondays are numbered just as finitely as my shampoo.

anne shirley

2008-03-02T19:15:00.015-06:00

I admit that I am prideful about the natural color of my hair. This is not because I think the color itself is anything altogether special. Plenty of other women have auburn heads, and some even have eyebrows to match, which I do not. No, I am proud of my hair color because of how I attained it. When I was 12 years old, I gave myself red hair using only the power of my imagination. It happened in a moment of deep connection with Anne Shirley of Green Gables. And it hasn’t washed out since.

I wish that my miraculous transformation occurred as I was reading Anne of Green Gables, but truth be told, I prefer the movie. This is partly because Meghan Follows embodies the character of Anne Shirley so honestly, and also because Prince Edward Island, (to quote Anne), "is more beautiful than even I could imagine it." Also, the first sentence of the book runs exactly 152 words long, and I do not believe that a sentence of that magnitude was ever permissible, even in Canadian literature.

Watching the movie is nearly a half-day commitment, and one I never made half-heartedly. Even in my early days of Anne, around the age of eight, I would plan out my viewings with great intention, and would pause only for bathroom breaks. Despite the poor quality of VHS tapes, I remember feeling entirely transported into her world from my living room couch.

In fact, the feeling of transportation was so complete that I reflect on Anne's story as though I lived it alongside of her. I remember sitting next to her at the orphanage as she stared into the windowpane at the friend she had made in her reflection. I remember ducking under the blossom-laden branches as she rode from town to Green Gables, soaking in the sights of Prince Edward Island for the first time. I remember feeling like the future bloomed with promise when Marilla told her that she could stay at Green Gables. I remember the flame in my girlish heart that lit up when she met Diana and finally had a true friend. I remember feeling a different kind of flame in my heart when Gilbert first entered the scene.

Anne lived her story repeatedly throughout all of my girlhood. And eventually I realized that I was not simply living alongside of her, observing her. Eventually, my memories read as though Anne was looking into the windowpane, and my face was the one reflected. And the fact that I would say something so dramatic is mere proof that Anne is somewhere inside of me, or that I am somewhere inside of her.

There was one detail that Anne and I thoroughly disagreed upon. Anne considered her fiery head of hair something to despair, while I thought it a gift to be coveted. Here is how it happened:

I was 12 years old. I was lying on the couch, holding a glass of 7up while a pan lay poised on the floor in case I needed to hurl. Anne’s eyes were glazing over as they often did when she imagined the world differently than it was. She could imagine she had a “beautiful, rose-leaf complexion,” she said, and “starry, violet eyes.” But then she looked straight into reality and said, “But I cannot imagine my red hair away.” I thought for the umpteenth time how Anne's hair perfectly reflected her passion for ordinary life, and how lucky she was to have it. And while Anne couldn't imagine her red hair away, I closed my eyes and imagined myself with hair that glimmered like a new copper penny.

That summer, mysterious red highlights began forming out of my brown hair. And by August, someone called me a red head for the first time. "You think my hair is red?" I had asked. My friend looked at me suspiciously and said, "It is red. Right?" I agreed, "Yes, it's red. I just didn't know if anyone else could see it." I had successfully imagined my red hair into existence. Actually, the result of my imagination was more of an auburn, which is what Anne had always hoped would eventually come of her hair. My eyebrows are still a dark brown, and I'm not sure if that means that the red is temporary. But I've had it for nearly nine years now.

Shortly after I married last September, I watched Anne of Green Gables and the sequel, Anne of Avonlea, for the first time in nearly two years. For some reason, I felt close to tears throughout the whole film. I cried at the appropriate times, like when Matthew dies or when Diana is forbidden from seeing Anne. But I also cried at parts that I had never cried over before. I cried when Josie Pie falls into the lake and Anne says with jealousy that it would be "such a romantic experience nearly to drown." I cried when Anne gets Dianna drunk on what she thought was raspberry cordial. I cried when Anne nearly did drown as she acted out a scene from poetry in a little boat.

It wasn't until the end of the sequel that I understood exactly what was going on inside of me. At one point near the end, Anne tells Marilla that she is “18 now, and just as stubborn as ever.” And the last scene finds Anne and Gilbert standing on a bridge at the onset of their overdue romance. It was then I realized that I was older than Anne for the first time, and that I had just spent five hours mourning the end of my childhood with her.

I still see traces of Anne inside of me, but when I watch Anne of Green Gables, I am remembering when my life ran parallel with hers. In that sense, I miss Anne. And this is okay, because every season eventually moves into our memories so that a new one can unfold. And maybe someday I will have a daughter who I can share Anne with. If she doesn't connect with Anne in the same way, that will be okay too, because this world is full of characters who we can find parts of ourselves in.

At the end of the first of the first tape, Diana is forbidden from ever associating with Anne again, and they swear to be secret bosom friends for all of eternity. With tears running down her blotchy, tormented face, Anne asks Diana for a lock of her black tresses. Diana wails, "I don't have any black dresses!" and Anne says, "I mean your hair." Diana snips off a lock of her hair, which Anne tucks into her pocket before they depart to live separate lives.

Of course, my adult self knows that my red hair was genetically destined to reveal itself in the summer that I was 12 years old; perhaps the sun drew out highlights that had been forming all year. But the girl inside of me likes to believe that they are locks of Anne's tresses that she gave to me at a time when our lives coincided. I believe that I imagined my red hair into existence. And the Anne inside is proud of the creative power of my imagination.

priority(s)

2007-12-10T12:11:00.002-06:00

.

I use the word "priorities" more often than I use it's singular form: priority. You wouldn't think it, but the words really have two different meanings. Priority means "highest in importance." There can't be more than one thing that is highest in importance. So we use the word Priorities to mean "important things."

Priority, when made plural, loses its meaning.

I should have but one priority.

Psalm 27:4
One thing I ask, and this one thing I seek;
that I may dwell in the house of the Lord
all the days of my life,
to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord
and seek him in his temple.

One. Singular. Thing.

Priority.

.

scars and secrets

2007-12-10T00:13:00.003-06:00

.

There are two pieces of information that I request from him on a nearly bi-monthly basis. One I request right before he falls asleep, in hopes that delirium might make him uninhibited. I pull the blanket over our heads and say, "Tell me your secrets."

So far, I haven't asked him at just the right moment before sleep, because he always responds with, "Joy, I don't have any secrets. I've already told you all of them." One time I told him just to make some up, which he did. They were all either boring or unbelievable. I fell asleep unsatisfied.

My other favorite thing to ask him is where the scars on his hands are from. I usually notice them at the dinner table, and I find them personal, endearing, and manly. One is from the time he jumped off the stage at high school and caught his hand on a music stand. Another is from his watch when it got pulled in a game of football. He can't remember what the other three are from, but I keep asking him in case he suddenly remembers.

I have a feeling they are from a secret government mission that he has yet to tell me about.

.

end of the month starvation

2007-12-10T00:10:00.003-06:00

.

I haven't quite figured out our food budget. Actually, I have figured out our food budget, but I haven't really implemented my knowledge and made the right decisions. As a result, we tend to eat steak and asparagus at the beginning of the month, and bagels with peanut butter at the end of the month. My body seems to be adjusting to this cycle.

It's not that there isn't money in the spending account, in the gas account, the savings account, one of the other 11 "accounts" we have arranged on a spreadsheet. It's a matter of discipline, of principle. With the right amount of planning, I can make substantial meals for one month on the budget we determined.

In my world, "giving up" looks like an extra bottle of peanut butter in my shopping cart. I currently have two in the pantry.

.

ordinary days

2007-12-10T00:08:00.000-06:00

.

Predictable:

Like the inflection in a newscaster's voice.

Bland:

Like the wall color of a new condominium.

Uninteresting:

Like a story from Chicken Soup for the Cat Lover's Soul.

Repetitive:

Like every movement under the sun.

.

I don't know where, I don't know why, I don't know how
But your love can make these things better.

- Jars of Clay

.

accomplishment

2007-12-10T00:06:00.000-06:00

.

I've discovered that I can only use the word accomplished in a singular situation. "I have accomplished my goal to finish my school assignment due today." I never actually feel accomplished, in a global sense. There is always something else to be done. No matter how satisfied my brain feels as it drifts off to sleep, it awakes the next morning with a whole new set of goals. I can make lists and I can check items off. But I am never accomplished.

I think about how writers or other professionals are often deemed "accomplished." I wonder if any of them, at the end of their career actually feel like they got it all done. I suppose it comes down to knowing your purpose. But how do you put a limit on your purpose? There has to be a limit if it's going to be realized.

Even when Jesus said, "it is finished," he didn't mean all of it. I guess in a sense, he did: salvation is here, it's done. But he wasn't FINISHED finished. He sent his spirit so that we could continue the work and join in on the story that is still unfolding.

I find rest in the fact that eternity is written on the hearts of man.

I don't think I'll ever feel entirely accomplished. I think that is because I was made for eternity.

.

The blog spirit moves me

2007-08-26T15:10:00.000-06:00

I don't know why, after three months of silence, I decide to post.

I'm reading Crime and Punishment right now. By "reading," I mean that I have a bookmark between the fifth and sixth page where I left off a week ago, and I carry the book with me everywhere. I don't think I will ever progress much further, because most places that I go have some other kind of reading material that is preferable, such as a brochure or phone book.

I am certain that some writers purposely make their readers work very hard. Is it for the benefit of the reader, who then feels a great measure of satisfaction in the drudgerous effort she applied to the act of reading? Or are some writers simply so arrogant that they think their work is actually worth all of the effort?

I'm sure it is worth the effort. But for now, a spankin new issue of the yellow pages is in, and I'm afraid C&P will just have to wait.

Autumn Wedding

2007-06-05T20:22:00.001-06:00

Proud lines curl

'round fathers sad smile

White girlhood trails

down grassy slope aisle

Home Again

2007-05-27T17:30:00.002-06:00

After a tearful realization of how little time I've had with my brothers, parents and friends back home since I moved... I tore apart my work schedule and gassed up the car! (By "tear apart" my work schedule, I mean traded shifts like a responsible mad woman.)

I can't wait! Monday night thru Friday morning. Time itself can be luxurious when it feels extensive.

Here's something to think about (and then tell me): Which do you prefer, a hot shower in the winter or a cool shower in the summer? You can only pick one, and tell me why :)

I like a cool shower in the summer, because it reminds me of being a kid and all the long, sweaty hours I'd spend running around the neighborhood (within my boundaries, of course). Whenever I get out of a shower and feel humid all over again, I know I'm right in the thick of summer.

.