Paying Attention (22): celebrating monotonous monogamy

In this season that my time is called for in places other than writing new posts, I've been following an idea my good Father gave me to  ponder and notice again the words I've already written once.  I've discovered this practice allows me to keep praying the beads of memory in this sacramental life.

On Monday Brian and I celebrate our 24th wedding anniversary.  Unbelievable. I am the first person to understand the unearned favor and fragile nature of this gift . 
In honor of long-love, here's a little compilation of posts I've written on the subject.

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in honor of monotonous matrimony (originally posted 06/02/2010)

June 5, 1970 was the day my parents made vows.  That's forty years of obedience in the same direction.  As the oldest child -- and precociously perceptive at that -- I noted each dip in the ebb and flow of long love. The romantic hilarity and teeth-gritting shouldering on the vows demanded.  As an adult, I've walked with Brian nearly twenty years in their footsteps.In the same way they've followed in the 64-year-old worn-down path my grandparents are travelling.

Sometimes the love is fierce as hate and sometimes it is supple as a half-awake midnight caress. It is hard-fought and exhausting in its familiarity.  It is insistent to remember one face, one form, one essence only, and no other.  It is cisterns and wells of living water and tromps through vineyards. Pomegranates and gazelles and all that.  My beloved is mine and I am his.  

Glorious monotony.

My grandmother said, "My back doesn't bend anymore!"  

My grandfather said, "Mine does!"

when did you first notice the one you love? (originally posted 10/16/2013)

A little video from the time I was talking with my grandparents on their 67th anniversary and being really nosey about their love and marriage business. 

-- Three Generations of monotonous monogamy --

(and honeymoon babies) 

Paying Attention (21): remembering Margaret's mom

In this season that my time is called for in places other than writing new posts, I've been following an idea my good Father gave me to  ponder and notice again the words I've already written once.  I've discovered this practice allows me to keep praying the beads of memory in this sacramental life.

In the past few years, the first week of November has become a memorial week, appropriately ushered in by All Saints Day.  One year ago during this week we said good-bye to our dear friend Trey.  Five years ago this week I watched my friend Margaret say good-bye to her mother.  I am grateful for the lessons I've learned watching dear ones grieve.  Today's post is what I learned watching Margaret and her father say good-bye to Peggy.

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on grieving again (originally posted November 14, 2009)

I'm thinking about grief again.  In fact, the subject keeps coming up everywhere I turn. Several of my friends are mourning the loss of a loved one, some are mourning the loss of relationship and a few are mourning the loss of certain childhood privileges - for example unconditional love from a parent or ever hearing the words I love you from any trusted adult in their growing up years.

Our nation grieved the loss of thirteen soldiers last week.  We lose soldiers all the time, but we sit up and take notice when they are lost on our own soil at the hands of one of our own countrymen.  This waste of life haunts us and we try to figure out how to lament nobly and adequately without upsetting our entire emotional landscape.

My friend Margaret lost her mom this week.  For over six years since her mom's diagnosis of ovarian cancer she has tried to imagine what these days would be like -- when would they happen, how would she respond, what would moving forward without her mom cost her family?  I wonder if she'll really ever be able to answer those questions?

A week ago -- on a Friday morning -- we visited Margaret's parents, Toby and Peggy.  We arrived at their home and tried to enter the reality of their long goodbye.  We walked around their house and behaved as if we'd been invited over for a spaghetti supper -- noticing pictures on the wall, wandering around the space, making small talk.  To me the whole house seemed lopsided, almost dizzying in its architectural imbalance.  None of the weight of lovely furniture, books, china, or beloved piano could balance the floors that seemed to literally slope down the hall toward Peggy's bedroom.  For many long months the entire center of their universe was located in that bedroom, their energies absorbed in the tasks of comfort and homely care, love and unexercised grief.  It's as if the gravity of their weighty love drew us in.  We walked the long hallway into Peggy's room and encircled her with hymn-singing, small talk, Scripture-reading, prayer, laughter. 

We are rusty in our hymns, the four of us friends.  But we worked through The Church's One Foundation, Great Is Thy Faithfulness, and others, trying to read the old black notes moving up and down between sharps, flats and naturals on the page.  We laughed to ourselves that we'd be in a position to sing these great old songs to the man and wife who'd mastered them their whole lives.  Peggy was certainly humble to receive our gift with no look of horror at our missed notes in her lovely, large blue eyes.  I noticed her eyes most when they were fixed on Toby while he spoon-fed her ice chips.  I'm not sure I've ever seen such naked trust in an adult face before. 

The whole love between this husband and wife -- its gritty, imperfect reality -- was far better than any movie story of love I've ever seen.  I'm thankful I got to tell Peggy how much I'd learned from her dying.  How much I learned about the value of long years with my husband.  About the charity that suffers through horrors as well as delights.  The charity that causes one spouse to sleep in a recliner chair next to his wife's bedside for night after long night.  I also learned -- again-- the violence of death.  The sturdiness of our insistence on living is one miserable bugger to someone who is suffering and ready to go to her true home.  Everything is ready, everyone is ready but that body that insists on trying to cope with suffering and go on living.  Eventually, death comes and does it grim work tearing families apart.  I learn each time to embrace the glory of Christ's resurrection more. 

I'm thankful for last Friday morning with Peggy and Toby and Margaret and Lori and Andrea and two-year-old Katie.  Eventually we swum back out of the gravity of that room and walked back up the hall toward the piano.  We sang more.  I'm thankful for my new friend Brian Moss who gave us his sheet music to the Psalms that have been sustaining Margaret all these long days.  We were asked again later that week to sing another Brian Moss song at Peggy's funeral.  Between that and an old Don Wyrtzen anthem that Toby requested, once again, we novices felt humbled to sing for this musical family.  And we slid back and forth between the extraordinary extremes of grieving and giggling at the absurdity of it. 

Margaret, I'm saving up some funny stories for you.  It's occurred to us that your mom might have been able to laugh along with our fumbling, stumbling attempts to sing for her family this week.  I know the day will come for you to laugh, too. 

In the meantime, tears.

for my first best friend

for my brother Todd on his birthday (re-posting from last year)

The missionary neighbors who lived upstairs rolled us around the yard in their shipping barrel.

Our vagabond days*

for my brother on his birthday

We'd hide in those years, Todd and me, inside the best places
in the parsonage —sneaking up from our first floor, certain

mother or others didn't know. While she vacuumed, we tip-toed
up the back stairs of the mud room peering for Lady Chatterly**

the African Parrot chattering Bible verses to her missionary family
whose teenaged son shot BB pellets into our father's tomato garden.

We lived as sheltered vagabonds then, roaming the church halls
in shared clothes from the missionary barrel, slipping through the cribs hung

on nursery walls, the wooden bars for a make believe zoo. The church bell at
noon announced our father's lunch at the formica table in our little kitchen.

Later, in the low glow of a Mickey Mouse night light, our day tucked
in with bed time prayers. I prayed with Daddy for Jesus to come

into my heart -- and yours.  When you decided to postpone your salvation
I chattered night-light altar calls from my bed to yours. Only half mindful

of your wellness, electric whispers in the passion of my conversion, more due
to the fact that you were my first -- and best -- friend. 

*adapted structure from a poem by by Bernadette McBride

**where my memory fails, I make up a few details

Paying Attention (20): retelling the road rage story

In this season that my time is called for in places other than writing new posts, my good Father gave me an idea:  Ponder and notice again the words I've already written once, keep praying the beads of memory in this sacramental life.  I've  moved from a chronology to just the "Paying Attention" part of this project -- to this little confession I shared last year, same week.  You get to play along if you'd like!

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road rage [a mini story]

Tell a mini story about something you regret.

Short answer?  I flipped off a guy behind me at a stop sign.  While my kids were in the car with me.  And my daughter was in the driver's seat.

Yes.  I did that.  And I deeply regret it.

Truth is, it felt really good to spend my anger on someone, a stranger.  The man had driven behind us for a few blocks and blasted his car horn at my daughter at two different stop signs.  I'm not sure what was bothering him.  Maybe she wasn't pushing through the intersections as quickly as he'd like.  Either way, he did more than blow his horn, he pushed my buttons.  Big time.

I have not cried behind the steering wheel or cussed more in traffic than the past two years since I've been learning Austin roads.  In short, they infuriate me.  I'm not sure why, exactly.  Many of Austin's roads are notoriously confusing, congested, convoluted. 

Then there's the matter of my own exhaustion.  Insecurity as a mom of teenaged girls and college boys.  If I remember correctly, we were also running late to get somewhere. Probably a church event.

I honestly thought I was protecting my daughter, spinning my head around like a horror film character, crooking my elbow and letting the middle digit stand tall. And it felt really, really good.

Until I noticed my daughter's face.  Instead of feeling protected, she felt embarrassed, stressed, piled on.  I did not help her one bit.  

Then I remembered that the man blasting his car horn at us was also a parent.  There was a baby in a carseat in the back seat of his vehicle.  

Later in the week I remembered that killing in my heart is killing period. My anger was fueled by a thirst for violence.  I wanted violence to happen and this man is the one I decided to spend it on.  

Forgive me my trespasses.

And in your forgiveness, would you help my daughter and me laugh at this together some day?

[epilogue]

Since I first wrote this post, not only did Kendra get her license but so did our youngest daughter, Natalie!  We are done forever teaching people how to drive!  I am (hopefully) done forever using violent hand gestures while sitting in traffic.  

I don't think Kendra and I have laughed yet about this story.  Still too soon, I guess.

source

How about you?

Tell us a mini story about something you regret.

A Chronology of Paying Attention (18): winning the Brian Murphy lottery

In this chronological remembrance, we're in the newlywed years.  Lord, have mercy (and thankfully He did!)  Today I'm re-sharing a poem I wrote for my husband's 43rd birthday last year. ...............................

43 years

A poem* for my husband on his birthday

Ninety-two, ninety-three, I most remember   

As the winter a blizzard shut us in and we are   

Broke from a hard two years as newly wed  

Where the meager provision of being   

Student, employee, father for our first born

Son and now another one on the way, we've

Neither a degree nor cash. Dreams die in   

Fatigue and bank accounts give way as you and your    

Muscle and sweat and hope fall in to make   

A loss. We lived in two bedrooms down the   

Hallway from kind friends in their nice  

Neighborhood. Or that has all really   

Happened and we go to Johnson City where,   

Thanks to Rick Jindra and Steve Conroy,   

You get a job cleaning cars at Dependable   

Auto Sales. It’s all a backwards dream, a slog

To get a life and home before the next

Arrival of another son, your dogged days 

Of honor. A church acquaintance  

Has encouraged us that giving when we   

Don't think we have anything to give keeps the   

Scarcity of our mindset overwhelmed by

The bounty. I love the mentors, at least I   

Think I do, in their wisdom, their attempt   

To find ways for us to find a living from the WIC   

Office. Otherwise the early years seem   

Like a country music ballad. A stunned   

Twenty-something man runs from school to work   

And home up three floors of the apartment house on Frederick Street,

Chasing a toddler with the second-born in hot

Pursuit where otherwise you sat up late writing  

Required lines, planning for your next degree  

And child, a daughter. We were waiting to get our   

First salary and listening to the Yankees win the pennant

On the radio. You worked, you dreamed, you wrote the   

Fifty-two pages of your thesis, the new baby  

Arriving near the end. I slept on the couch and  

healed and nursed and cried while you stayed up

Thirty-six hours straight, determined. Then that   

Summer there is the day of the great Teaching Job   

Offer, we move to Conklin -- Richard T. Stank

Middle School, beloved George Schuster  

Down the hall. You read “Goodnight   

Moon” to your children and Teddy Roosevelt

To your students, and Rick Patino for the team.   

Then it’s winter again. My water breaks   

And we head back to Lourde's Hospital   

And we welcome another daughter, and   

Sometime just about then you must have almost   

Seen yourself as others see or saw you,   

people like Dr. Jagger and Scott Gravelding, but could not quite   

Accept either their affirmation

Or their equally anointed naming. Uncertain,   

Afraid, you kept at it. A few years later
Crisis and pain and forgiveness fall in to make   
A calling. You lived into yourself, a man named.   

You are still the father, student, teacher, much the same,
but now also mentor, pastor, friend.
Now you are happier, I think, and older.
Those of us lucky enough to know you say
That we have won the Brian Murphy lottery.

*ADAPTED FROM "YESTERDAYS", 

A POEM BY ROBERT CREELEY

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In this season that I do not have time to write, this is the idea God gave me:  For me to ponder and notice again the words I've already written once, to keep praying the beads of memory to discover this sacramental life.

Won't you join me?  

I'd welcome your company along the way.

A Chronology of Paying Attention (17): the time we got mac & cheese for a wedding gift

Apparently I've not written much about my high school years in this blog. I seem to be skipping from middle school era to marriage and motherhood.  Let's be honest -- that era was pretty short.  Today I'm re-sharing a post I wrote as a follow up to to the short essay I wrote for Think Christian in response to Chipotle's viral ad.

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source

Twenty-two years ago -- and only a few months after our wedding day -- my husband and I knocked on the door of a church acquaintance’s apartment.  She’d invited us to join her and her three sons for dinner.  It was her wedding gift to us.  We were touched.  

We’d never been to her home before but we knew a good bit of her story.  Her on-again, off-again husband lived in prison.  Each time he got out he promised to sober up, quit the drugs and be her man.  Each time he left her jobless, pregnant and broke.  

Since her quiet invitation following service one Sunday I’d tried to imagine what dinner in her home would look, feel and taste like.  She weighed probably less than 100 pounds herself and I wondered what sort of food she had to offer.

We arrived to her hot kitchen, children and their toys cluttered bare floors.  She stood over a pot on the stove, stirring bubbling water.  On the counter a blue and gold box, cardboard lid ripped open, stood our entree:  Kraft Macaroni and Cheese.  

Frankly, I was relieved.  We knew this food.  It gave us something in common. Turned out the entree was the entire meal, we sat where we could find a seat, television blaring and enjoyed creamy noodles and awkward conversation.

It's one of the best gifts I've ever received.

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In this season that I do not have time to write, this is the idea God gave me:  For me to ponder and notice again the words I've already written once, to keep praying the beads of memory to discover this sacramental life.

Won't you join me?  

I'd welcome your company along the way.

A Chronology of Paying Attention (16): my family line of honeymoon babies

Apparently I've not written much about my high school years in this blog. I seem to be skipping from middle school era to marriage and motherhood.  Let's be honest -- that era was pretty short.  Today I've excerpted a post I originally titled Flying a Kite in a Hurricane and posted in August 2008 and again at Micha Boyett's One Good Phrase series:  One Good Quip (You Trust God to Keep You Safe at Night, but You Still Lock the Doors).

three generations of wedlock -- all 3 of us brides giving birth to our first baby about 9 months following the moment this photos were taken

My parents' parents didn't talk about sex. My parents began the conversation, but either they weren't speaking above a whisper or I wasn't listening. I managed to have my first son three days shy of nine months from the first time I ever had sex. When he was born I still wasn't sure I'd ever had it. I didn't care. I flew the kite of that beautiful baby boy for all the world to see.

We have a history of honeymoon babies in this family. It's pretty much legendary now. Possibly all this hushing up about sex has something to do with it. So I called my mother-in-law, the medical professional, from my honeymoon hotel room. Possibly we should know something about birth control, we thought. Of course, it was most likely too late by this point. Brian and I had spent about a half hour discussing it once during our engagement. He'd heard somewhere that the Pill could be dangerous so I blundered my way through my first ob/gyn visit and left holding some oddly-shaped doo dad that I was too embarrassed to let the family doctor know I hadn't understood the first thing about. (that thing is supposed to go where?)

During my growing-up years, the oldest child of six, my parents continued silently in their quest to limit the number of mouths they brought into existence. My dad's pastor/pauper paycheck and my mother's exhausted bouts with clinical depression probably had something to do with this. As far as I know now the only people offering advice were radical feminists and post-war baby boomer pious surbabanites. Not a lot of help. God kept sending them new kites of their own to fly. 

There comes a point when kite flying in stormy weather scares the hell out of you, but sometimes you know you're not the one controlling the string.

On the verge of being a mother myself, I had my first experience with mixing theology and sexuality. Experience is probably a gentle word. More like got bashed over the head by it. It was the era of the Pro-Life Political Movement and the Homeschooling Revolution and Operation Rescue and all that. 

The rhetoric blustering around me was heavy on the ideology, light on the theology. In this fear-filled cocoon, the Church had taught me that sex could be shameful.  Not only was losing one's virginity the unpardonable sin, paradoxically so was limiting the number of one's offspring. 

Soon enough we'd figured out how to "plan" baby number two, all without the aid of chemicals (or weird-looking doo dads), thank you very much.

Now I had self-righteous rhetoric on my side and I felt like I'd stumbled into the right "camp". Sometimes, you just get lucky and the storm's blowing the other way, you know? 

But idealism about family planning doesn't mean a speck when you've spent the day laying aside your every need as a human being to meet the needs of the arrows in your quiver and the nights sleep-walking from marriage bed to crib to toddler bed, only to end up slumped over a nursing infant and waking up thankful you didn't smother it to death. 

Idealism did not last through the storms of reality for me. And then I had baby number four. I'd been married six years. I was 26 years old. We'd been making a real salary for less than a year. I was tired.

So we, Brian and me, got interested in science real quick-like. The information was easy to come by, even before Google. Of course, we covered Theology, too. It consisted of getting sage advice wrapped in euphemisms from my grandmother and mother. The same women who didn't talk about sex were full of wisdom when they saw me teetering on the edge of the looney-bin. I am grateful to them to this day. 

You trust God to keep you safe at night, but you still lock the doors. 

I was more than relieved to agree that this must be true, even if it wasn't terribly deep. When you're teetering on the edge, sometimes a quip will do.

So we blundered and bumbled and stumbled our way through these ideas and truths about what it means to enjoy sex and to create children and to avoid creating new children and in the middle of all that uncertainty and shame and hushed and unspoken questions, I was schooled in the deepest theology of all:  that God is sovereign and full of grace and forgiveness. That it is not my wisdom or understanding that brings out the best in God. His expectations for me are surpassed by his delights. 

I do not deserve these four divinely created images of the one true God -- Andrew, Alexander, Kendra and Natalie. I do not deserve to be living in joy and harmony with my amazing, unplanned siblings and their own burgeoning families.

I will hold the end of the string - flying the beauty and hilarity of this gift of family that came down as lights from Heaven.  I'm hopeful for my own kids to know better than Brian and me the Church's better nature, the language of welcoming life founded in the nature of the Giver of life.  All of this while retaining a child-like trust that refuses to take our ideals too seriously.

And, in the middle of the blustering hurricanes, I will laugh as Abraham and Sarah at the holy absurdity of it all.

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In this season that I do not have time to write, this is the idea God gave me:  For me to ponder and notice again the words I've already written once, to keep praying the beads of memory to discover this sacramental life.

Won't you join me?  

I'd welcome your company along the way.

A Chronology of Paying Attention (15): mourning friends

there was the time you called me up and met me with your tandem bicycle 

we rode eight miles back to your house then

picked out all the rocks in the yard by your swimming pool

because your father wanted it.

only then we collapsed on the grass

and I cried next to you because he had broken up with me.

there was the time your uncle died

and I couldn't find the Polish church and almost missed

you singing at the funeral

but I walked in right in the middle of the song.

when you sat back down in the hard pew

next to me I held your hand

because I didn't know what else to do.

there was the New Year's Eve our house

caught fire and my babies' clothes

all smelled like smoke.

you said come over and bring your laundry.

you took the bags from me at your front door

and told us to sit on your couch and take a nap.

you covered us in the red and blue quilt.

there was the Sunday night at church

i was so mad  i banged the door handle 

to leave the room in the middle of the meeting.

when I came back to my seat even though I didn't want to,

you reached your arm back through the crack between the

maroon and metal chairs and touched your hand to the top 

of my shaking knee. and then i sat still.

there was the Friday morning we drove to your

parents' house instead of sitting at the dining room table

in Endwell to pray.

we brought sheet music and you brought out the 

hymn books and we tried to find all four notes in the harmony

while we stood around your mother's bed.  she smiled at us and 

craned her neck to the spoon your father held out with ice chips.

we played her piano and the toddler plunked extra notes.

that was the last time I saw your mother
before she died.

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In this season that I do not have time to write, this is the idea God gave me:  For me to ponder and notice again the words I've already written once, to keep praying the beads of memory to discover this sacramental life.

Won't you join me?  

I'd welcome your company along the way.