Get Ready

Just getting you ready for a ginormous announcement

next Wednesday!

*Spring, please show up so we can believe again that you really do exist

Grocery Store Grace

 

I’m devouring Michelle DeRusha’s book, Spiritual Misfit: A Memoir of Uneasy Faith. Seriously hoping MD writes a hundred more memoirs for me to laugh my way through and reflect upon. I love the way Michelle writes. (More on this another day.)

In Spiritual Misfit Michelle depicts some grocery story accounts that hit close to home. I’m talking baseball ball cracking the window to smithereens close to home. Michelle shares of a run in with an intrusive woman at the grocery store she’s dubbed Owl Spectacles. Good ole OS has a thing or two to say about Michelle’s children.

Man, have I been there.

Picture this. I’m hustling my youngest (three at the time) into Stop & Shop to buy lettuce. Yup, that’s all I needed. I agreed to bring a salad to a get together in T minus two hours. It had been months since my husband and I had done anything considered social. I was desperate to get out of the house sans children.

Of course I allotted myself the smallest window of time to purchase the one item I couldn’t find in my fridge, the item essential to a salad—lettuce.

Let us go, then, I said to the young skipping child. Not two feet into the store, right near the shiny apples, young skipping child turned on me. Feel free to imagine the spinning head from The Exorcist. I know I was. Flailing. Low guttural noises spewing. Well, not quite. But you get the gist.

Along comes a spider (scratch that) a cheerful elderly woman who apparently wanted to do nothing but help assist me with my little “problem child.” I briefly explained my predicament, already frayed (or couldn’t you tell by I HAD TO GET OUT OF MY HOUSE comment above) to the Mother Teresa lady.

She gleefully offered to watch young swinging one while I dashed to snatch up a bag of lettuce. I hesitated, then thought, If only there were more women like her in the world. I reasoned, they’d remain within eyesight the entire time. I grabbed the greens, watching Mother Goose calm my child with Julie Andrews attentiveness. As I prepared to bolt, I thanked the woman profusely, gushing over her unexpected kindness. Meanwhile, I worked to grasp young slippery one in the same breath.

I must have thanked her too profusely because this is when she got all passive aggressive on me. I’m warning you, it isn’t pretty.

“Well,” she huffed, “You’re certainly not going to win the mother of the year award.” She stared me down as though I’d dropped my child to the bottom of a well instead of spontaneously deciding to put my faith in the Mother Teresa kindness of a stranger.

Then I did what most women would want to do at this moment. I slammed my fist into her . . . Okay, so no, I didn’t. I cried. That’s what I did. I tackled my child, somehow made my way to the checkout aisle, and whipped out my credit card with tears streaming down my cheeks. The checkout clerk said something nice, but of course that didn’t stay with me.

Fake Mother T’s words did. I internalized what she said. And I felt small. I could have recited the following lines from Spiritual Misfit word for word four years ago standing outside of Stop & Shop.

“But it was people—people with their comments and their judgments and their good intentions—who taxed my ability to behave as I should. My fellow human beings made the whole Christian attitude thing very, very difficult to achieve.”

I hated that I let Fake Mother T’s words sink so deep, hated that I’d handed over that power, hated how I was so skilled at internalizing everything—even the lies and things that sliced into me.

After reading Michelle’s grocery store tribulation it hit me. This Stop & Shop slaughter was an opportunity for me to grant grace, not only to Fake Mother T, but also to grant myself some grace.

Three takeaways from this post:

1.       Buy Michelle DeRusha’s book.

2.       Beware of Fake Mother T’s trolling the produce aisle at the grocery store.

3.       Know that every interaction, every hurt, every lingering sadness presents an opportunity to grant grace and to finally let go.

So tell me, do you have any grace-filled grocery store stories?

“Grace does not make sense. It’s not supposed to make sense. Grace cannot be calculated or formulated…it is all grace. It is all a gift. Life itself is grace. And when it comes to grace, the word deserve isn’t even part of the equation.” ~ Spiritual Misfit: A Memoir of Uneasy Faith

“To live by grace means to acknowledge my whole life story, the light side and the dark. In admitting my shadow side I learn who I am and what God's grace means.” ~ Brennan Manning

I Wish You Had Never Been Born

Two days ago I came across an article with the words “Wish . . . Had Never Been Born” in the title. I immediately flashed back to my preteen years, hearing these words shouted at me an incalculable number of my times by my strung out, mentally ill older sister. She wishes I’d never been born. Ingrained in me. Wrestled through. Words that stuck.

More than twenty years later, The New Yorker releases an article with a similar statement from Adam Lanza’s father regarding his son. Peter wishes Adam, his son, had never been born.

And while the sight of those words pierced me to my core, I can attest to how heartrending it is to be related to someone with a destructive mental illness. The embarrassing arrests. The suicide attempts. The lashing out I feared would or could one day lead to murder. As shocking as they sound, I will not judge Peter for his words.

The Newtown tragedy hit close to home for me for other reasons. It occurred in my native state the year all three of my girls were attending elementary school. Adam murdered twenty-six people.

Just as with the shootings at Columbine, everyone scuttles about what the parents did wrong. What could have been done to prevent these heinous acts? Good questions to ask. But sometimes more problematic to answer than it might originally seem.

A year or so ago I read an article listing all the ways a troubled actress had been acting out. Toward the end of the article the reporter wrote she just wished the actress’s family would be more involved, would help her straighten up. When I set the magazine down, I was overcome with a mixture of anger and guilt.

Don’t people get it? Don’t they see that we’ve done everything we possibly can? This is an illness! There are some situations that don’t have simplistic remedies. Some causes that can’t be pinpointed adequately enough—satisfying the need for someone to blame.

This brings to mind Defending Jacob, an excellent book club choice, portraying a father having to come to terms with what he believes about his own son’s guilt in a local murder case.

And it challenges my thoughts about how we as a culture need to continue to get more honest about mental illness. We need to be mindful enough to know that most people struggling with mental illnesses won’t walk into a school and mow down dozens of children. However, also be conscious enough to realize how haunting and disturbing it can be to live with someone whose mind is sick.

We need to stop blaming, work harder to understand, engage in honest dialogue, seek help when or perhaps even before necessary, and empathize more than we judge.

One of my book groups recently discussed Still Alice, a novel about a successful Harvard professor who begins to demonstrate early onset signs of Alzheimer’s. In one scene Alice expresses her shame about what she’s dealing with, how if she had cancer people wouldn’t be afraid to sit next to her as though it were contagious.

I wish I could fix my sister’s illness. Wish I could bring her back to the vibrant young teenager I remember her as before all kinds of chaos infiltrated and shattered her mental understanding of the world.

Sometimes I wish I could slide into her shoes to fight her demons off for her. But I can’t. And there is no easy fix, no easy cure for her. This breaks my heart every second I’m alive.

It is with unending gratitude that I can say I’m thankful I was born. And I’m grateful my sister was born, too.

 I may not understand why our roads are paved so differently. But I don’t have to understand.

I just have to do as Bono My Bono sings, “Walk on, walk on.”

 

*I realize Alzheimer’s disease isn’t a mental illness, but included the Still Alice point because people often treat anything influencing the brain, as opposed to the body, differently.

Writing Gets Physiological

As writers we tap into our inner child more often than we think. Every time we sit to write we act out a rendition of the beloved, “Head, Shoulders, Knees, & Toes.” Don’t believe me? Read on to see how.

We use our HEAD when we. . .

Let our imaginations run wild. There’s no brain like a writer’s brain. We’re constantly absorbing. Loved ones doubt we’re listening, but in actuality we’re not only listening, we’re taking mental notes about every facet of the environment around us. When we bang out words on the keyboard we’re transferring splices of these notes from brain to page. Synapses unite!

We use our SHOULDERS when we. . .

Use those painful experiences that have made us feel like we’ve carried the weight of the world on our backs. We’re more equipped to empathize with our characters when we’re honest about what has triggered royal cricks in our own necks.

We use our KNEES when we. . .

Walk the walk. When we practice our craft.

Knees are one of the largest, most complex joints in the body. There are ligaments in the knee that keep bones from sliding backward, forward, or from side to side.

Writers get physiological in the knees when we refuse to go BACKWARD with our work and our careers. We push on. We develop skills. We learn during every committed writing session.

We also take care not to shift awkwardly FORWARD. We don’t rush the process. By taking needed time we honor the story. We don’t simply throw in a quick fix or a convenient save. We respect the organic evolution of the narrative.

Writers are knee-conscious as our ligaments keep us from crunching from SIDE TO SIDE. We do this when we focus on our own craft. Avoiding the comparison trap keeps us from rubbing others the wrong way.

Knees also have cartilage that works as shock absorbers. In the current publishing climate we need a lot of shock absorbers.

We use our TOES when we. . .

Take what we’ve learned out in the world and incorporate it into our manuscripts. Our toes enable us to use life experiences—the miles and missteps our shoes have tromped. Each step or misstep offers ripe material. Oh, the tales our toes could tell. Bunions, hammertoes, warts  & all.

When is the last time you got physiological as a writer?