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In which our gentleness is evident to one first

January 9, 2013

Source: forums.thefashionspot.com via Sarah on Pinterest

We had a full house of friends the other night. It was a “serve yourself from the stove” kind of evening, and Joseph hollered and crashed dinosaurs together in the living room while the football game blared, tinies danced to music, and crumbs covered the floor. After most everyone had left and the dishwasher was roaring, I collapsed on the couch, overstimulation complete. I’d lost my temper earlier in the day with one of the tinies, and I was still stinging with it.

One young couple remained behind, intending to put their little baby down to sleep at our house so they could stay a bit longer and visit. My three were sound asleep, and the house was dark, just a few lamps lit, and I waited with my knitting in hand, enjoying the quiet while this beautiful young mama tried to put her baby to sleep. But, as any parent knows, many are the plans in a parent’s heart but often it is the baby who prevails. (“Sleep alone in an uncomfortable playpen in a strange house? No, thank you, Mumma.”)

I listened to her sing soft and slow, she has a lovely voice. I couldn’t discern a word she sang, but the sound and melody of a mama-lullaby overheard melts armour, unfurls muscle knots, exhales the lungs, and releases tension. Eventually, my friend gave up to the inevitable with good grace, carrying a bright-eyed small baby back out, and she rocked her girl slow in my old red rocking chair until the baby blinked longer between yawns and lolled back. She said something so wise while she rocked, I wanted to write it down: “Paul told us to let our gentleness be evident to all*, and I want my gentleness to be evident to our baby girl, too, even when no one is around to overhear or notice but her.”

*Philippians 4:5

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In which we get this part of the Incarnation

December 2, 2012

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If more women were pastors or preachers, we’d have a lot more sermons and books about the metaphors of birth and pregnancy connecting us to the story of God. (I am rather tired of sports and war metaphors.)

The divinity of God is on display at Christmas in beautiful creche scenes. We sing songs of babies who don’t cry. We mistake quiet for peace. A properly antiseptic and church-y view of birth, arranged as high art to convey the seriousness and sacredness of the incarnation. It is as though the truth of birth is too secular for Emmanuel, it doesn’t look too holy in its real state.

So the first days of the God-with-us requires the dignity afforded by our careful editing.

Because this? This creating out of passion and love, the carrying, the seemingly-never-ending-waiting, the knitting-together-of-wonder-in-secret-places, the pain, the labour, the blurred line between joy and “someone please make it stop,” the “I can’t do it” even while you’re in the doing of it, the delivery of new life in blood and hope and humanity?

This is the stuff of God.

There is something Godly in the waiting, in the mystery, in the fact that we are a part of it, a partner with it but we are not the author of it. How you know that there is life coming and the anticipation is sometimes exciting and other times exhausting, never-ending. How there is a price that you pay for the love love love.

I was fortunate to give birth to three of my tinies without complications. I find myself thinking of those experiences often during Advent; they are still very fresh for me. My eldest daughter was born in the hospital in a fairly usual way. My littlest girl was born at home, in water, with midwives, a beautiful and redemptive experience for me.

But it’s the birth of my son, my Joe, that stays with me in these winter months.

Joe was an unintended free birth in our building’s parking garage while we were on our way to the hospital. We were alone – no midwife, no doctor, not even in our own home with a clean floor but instead a garage filled with gasoline and tire smells.

My husband was scared; a lot of things could go wrong in this scenario (he had the good sense to act like he was in control though). And we were surrounded by strangers – helpful, concerned strangers but strangers nonetheless – and they were witnessing me give birth.

And yet my body had taken over and all we could do, all I could do, was surrender to that moment fully. Every muscle in my body was focused, my entire world had narrowed to that very moment. And then there he was, born while I was leaning against our old truck, standing up, into my own hands, nearly 9 pounds of shrieking boy-child humanity, welcomed by my uncontrollable laughter and his father’s uncontrollable relief-tears. A few people applauded.

There wasn’t anything very dignified about giving birth.

And yet it was the moment when I felt the line between the sacred and the secular of my life shatter once and for all.

The sacred and holy moments of life are somehow the most raw, the most human moments, aren’t they?

But we keep it quiet, the mess of the Incarnation, because it’s just not church-y enough and men don’t quite understand and it’s personal, private, there aren’t words for this and it’s a bit too much.

It’s too much pain, too much waiting, too much humanity, too much God, too much work, too much joy, too much love and far too messy. With far too little control. And sometimes it does not go the way we thought it was supposed to go and then we are also left with questions, with deep sadness, with longing.

My entire concept of God shifted in that moment, leaving my brain and my life and my theology to catch up with what my soul now knew deep. I could never see God as anything other than through the lens of the Incarnation, of his Father-Mother heart and his birth now.

No theologian or counter-circumstance-experience can take away from what I know, what many mothers the world over know in their heart of hearts about loss and birth and raising babies and real transformation: it’s Love and it is sacred and it is human and it all redeems. The very truth that God put on flesh and blood and moved into the neighbourhood through birth, even – especially – that experience of birth, now showing us what it means to be truly human.

Women can tell this part of the story this Christmas, the glimpse behind the veil, the life lived in the in-between of the stuff of God.

There is a story on your lips, isn’t there, mama? of how you saw the face of God in the midst of fear or pain or joy and understood, really understood, Mary, not kneeling chastely beside a clean manger refraining from touching her babe, just moments after birth but instead, sore and exhilarated, weary and pressing a sleepy, wrinkled newborn to her breasts, treasuring every moment in her heart, marvelling not only at his very presence but at her own strength, how surrender and letting go is true work, tucking every sight and smell and smack of his lips into her own marrow.

God, Incarnate, Word made flesh, born of a woman and the Holy Spirit.

We can tell the true, messy stories of the Incarnation.

Emmanuel, God with us.

May we recognise the miracle of the Incarnation, not in spite of the mess, but because of the very humanness of it.

This is an edited post that originally appeared on 14 December 2011 at A Deeper Story.

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In which I am here, breastfeeding, but not for much longer

September 12, 2012

For six years of my life, I’ve fed my babies from my own body, and now my last baby is a busy toddler, and she isn’t interested, I’m nearly finished with this part of my life. I can feel it, like the shift in weather I sense in the collar-bone I broke when I was six years old, yes.

So I want to remember, for the real rest-work, and for the metaphors of struggle and let-down and release and feeding, and for the weight of responsibility, the lightness of giving, and for the ordinary, every day, pausing holy-wonder. I want to remember that I was here, over and over again, and I was profoundly changed.

Here I am: 27 years old, blackened and bruised eyes from the exertion of a posterior delivery of a nearly 9lb baby girl, and she is curled up on me, fresh-baby-vernix-skin-to-stretched-out-mama-skin, and she’s nursing and I’m born again with the release of birth and the knowledge that this is one thing I can give and do for her, and a longing for the lost babies I won’t hold until heaven.

Here I am: 29 years old, sprawled in the backseat of our old Trailblazer, holding another nearly-9lbs baby, in front of a crowd of strangers, and without thought, I’m trying to wrestle my shirt off through my laughter, I just want to get that baby to latch onto me, I miss him inside, I’m empty, already, but I have something to give him, it’s nothing but raw instinct. The ambulance workers make me wait until we’re in triage at the hospital. That night, I sit awake, all night, and I nurse him, longing to take him home, to be quiet together. I hold the perfect dome of his soft unstitched head in the palm of my hand, and cry with relief.

Here I am: thirty-two, nestled into my own bed, freshly washed with damp hair, and a nearly 10-lb brand new baby girl beside me, her hungry mouth on me, and I look up to see my husband, wonder in his eyes, beside and around us like a parenthesis, and he says softly that this is the favourite sight of his life, always, ever, these moments.

Here I am: crying with pain and longing, bleeding, googling correct latch videos at 3:12 in the morning.

Here I am: arranging blankets in the church pew for discrete purposes only to have chubby arms yank blankets off and suck with noisy bluster and longing, until everyone in the radius is grinning.

Here we are: on the pier by the ocean, in the coffee shop, in the mall. Here we are: at the market, at the church, in our family bed. Here I am: nursing one baby, while a toddler boy sits beside me patting her hair gently, and a kindergarten girl sits on the other side, cradling baby feet, and the baby keeps popping off to grin her gummy smile at them both.

Here we are: in the middle of the night, first thing in the morning, noontime, all times, sleeping, awake.

Here I am: snapping open nursing bras, tucking in bamboo cloths, applying Lansinoh, praying for grace, avoiding dairy.

Here I am: being changed, transformed, worshipping God in the sacred everyday gift of this radical act of giving.

Here I am: in the early days, falling asleep and snapping awake, crying when the milk lets down, drinking water, balancing on the nursing pillows, staining shirts, burning with a fever from mastitis a time or two.

Here we are: together, always together. Here we are: connected, carrying the same blood and milk and bones.

Here I am: with a real breathing metaphor of contentment and peace, with a milk-drunk, blissed-out, flour-sack of a baby, thick with goodness, and something breaks through the veil between earth and heaven, I understand down in my marrow and now I can’t think of God as anything other than Abba.

Here I am: stronger, bolder, fearless, empowered, soul-quieted, a giver, nourished by nourishing, a mama.

And here I am now: nursing a squirming and disinterested toddler, every once in a while, and knowing that one of these times, it will be her last time, and it will be my last time to lay skin to skin, tummy to tummy, with my own babies, breastfeeding, and that time is coming soon.

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In which I am a bell

June 23, 2012

Friday night and I’m frustrated and grumpy. (I’m always grumpy when it’s hot.) Sometimes I wonder if the sun is anchored to the morning, if Joshua is somewhere in time commanding the sun to stand still, because how is it only 1:48 in the afternoon, for the love? Today was filled with too much bickering, accidental injuries, frustration, disobedience, it was just a day, a day, a never-ending day. By the time Evelynn’s bedtime rolled around at last, she had been yelling – not crying, yelling – loudly for nearly an hour. My nerves were frayed and I piteously questioned the universe how two non-yellers like us managed to produce three such impressively loud tinies. I changed the baby into her pajamas, changed yet another diaper, brushed her 10 small white teeth, I was bitten twice for my trouble. Brian loaded the older two up in the car, the Fraser River is flooding and, of course, he wants to go see it. I rocked Evelynn as the garage door went up and back down below the floor, I was stewing, steaming, boiling, eager to put her to bed. I wanted to sit down with a cuppa tea, in the quiet, to open the windows and let in the cold night air, to read, to clock out. But she nursed and squabbled and nursed, my milk wouldn’t come, I was too tense, too frustrated, too wrapped up in my own frustrations to truly give even this small gift.

Deep breath.

Exhale.

I’m here, darling. I’m here. You’re all I see, you’re all I see, there now. I see your furrowed brow, your little paws holding tight to my bra strap, you have a dimple at the base of every finger. I see your soft orange elephant jammies, covered with little pills of fabric, they’ve been washed so many times. And I see you, I’m here, I’m here. There you go, here, let me hum a little for you, it always slow my blood right down.

And with that relase, with that deep breath, with those old hymns in the hum of my throat, I filled her, and she sleeps even now, as I write.

I have these moments a hundred times a day. I’m not sure who is raising who in this house sometimes. Because when Anne is storming, and I pray and I teach and I guide her back to centre, I am guiding my own storming self, there, on the inside still. Because when Joe is not listening, and I am tugging on his ears, telling him to pay attention, to be gentle with others, I am tugging my own ears, pay attention, woman, pay attention. Every time you complain, darling, I will make you tell me two things that make you happy and thankful, and yes, maybe I should try that, too. Because when I am harsh and busybusybusy, too caught up in saving the world or cleaning the washroom and who can tell which is which, their souls are bruised and these tinies, they are my barometer for this: is there peace, is there joy, is there love, patience, kindness? goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, self-control? Over and over and over, throughout my days, these moments happen, the moments of clarity, of realising that I am a mother, yes, and I am a woman, and I am so desperately in need of His grace, and sometimes I don’t know what to say except that God is meeting me here, and it is bright and unforgiving and healing as a prairie sun.

Because when Evelynn needs me, needs something as simple and basic as nourishment, and I am too busy, too frustrated, too wound up, to release even my milk to her, and then, when she teaches me, again, to slow, to breathe, to pray again for grace for this act of giving, when I release and my arms hold her pure trust, pure contentment, capped with damp baby curls.

Because when they are stuffing witch daises into mason jars beside my bed, when they are singing the songs I teach them, I feel like an axis, like gravity, like the force of their universe, and I want to be a compass, a clarity.

I am reading Annie Dillard’s “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” and last night, I read that legendary sentence, ““I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.” I had to shut the book, sit in the darkness, in the silence of the knowledge of this very thing of the thing. You can go your whole life without realising who you truly are, and yet, a hundred times a day, I am struck, and everyone feels the lifting.