The Opposite of Faith

I just wanted to say a little something about the quote that's been hanging out at the side of my blog for a while. "The opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty." Anne Lamott said this in an interview on NPR a while ago. She probably had no idea it would end up in print on somebody's blog. But, in any case, it resonated with me in a way I could never have expected, and the concept has come back to Mango & I numerous times in the several weeks since I wrote it down. It's just a little gem of wisdom that fits some thoughts together neatly in a new way. Lots of people scratch their heads at this idea. But here, let me break it down. If you are CERTAIN, you are not employing faith. Faith means you are believing in that which you cannot see, that which you cannot know. I am so comforted by this. Faith is not a religious platitude to make us feel better. Faith is messy. Faith is when you are living on the edge. Faith is when you are so confused and unsure and blind and scared. And you believe God anyway. Just God. You don't know anything else, except that God is. And you know the tiny glimmers of God that have flashed through the dirty lenses of life. You know some little bit of who God is. And that has to be enough. Because nothing else is certain. You simply have faith. And that isn't cute or religious or easy.

Stay With Me

We were talking about college the other day when she said, sort of off-handedly, in that off-handed-I’m-dying-to-know-the-answer kind of way, “Where will I live when I go to college?” I responded quickly, “Well, right here, of course.” She smiled and laughed and got that relieved, excited look. “Really? I can stay here?” Of course. Of course. Honey. Child. Sweet Love. You are always welcome here. You can live here for the rest of your life if it pleases you. And I am so happy that you want to, that you want to know if you can be here because you’re comfortable here, because it feels like home.

I am so grateful. I have so many thoughts about this past year. Last summer was so new, so full of raw emotion, uncertainty. It was a blood, sweat & tears kind of summer. We held tightly to each other, as though if we let go we’d fly into opposite directions. Vectors. She’s learning about vectors right now, and that’s what I think of. What happens when two things are bound together tightly, but they’re pushing at the cords? When you set them loose they fly apart so hard they’ll never find each other again. So, we held tightly, with persistence. We held tightly even though we were scared and worried and tired. We cried.

And then the cords loosened a little and we could walk away from each other still attached. It was hard and scary, and we weren’t always sure that the connection was still there. She held loosely, with her face turned, buried in school work, not always interested in connection, not full of the gratefulness that first filled us all in this journey, not always conscious any more of the gift we were giving, nor of the gift we received in her.

And then, slowly, painfully, and somewhat surprisingly we discovered that closeness exists through time and space, that connection can happen after separation, that somehow we can flow in and out of each other’s space in a comfortable sort of way. I guess we became family. It wasn’t so much a decision any more. The focus is not the adoption. We simply belong to each other. We didn’t think about the strangeness of it all the time any more. We just live together. We just live together. Now. In the moment. And maybe now it’s in her heart, in her emotional memory, ingrained in who she is that she will always be family. Maybe it’s moved out of her head and into her existence.

And she wants to stay. I could not ask for more.

Camping

Excerpted from an e-mail to a friend:
We just got home from our own camping adventure on Friday. Wednesday night was 50 degrees & we shivered our way through dinner and then went to stand with our faces in the wind down by the water. The lake was rough & wild. Vespera sketched pictures, and I took some paper & a pen down to the lake. My fingers froze, but it was so powerful and wild out that we couldn't help but be drawn to face it. Then we snuggled down in our tent and slept peacefully to the sound of crashing waves & roaring wind. Thursday was chilly in the morning, but by afternoon everybody was wading in the water, collecting agates and skipping rocks. By evening it was downright warm & we sat on the shore taking pictures while the sun set. Friday we packed up to leave, as both Vespera & Mango had broken out in hives - I think from the moths, but that's another story. We took ourselves to the Munsinger Clemens flower gardens in St. Cloud and took more pictures, dangled fingers in the fountains, danced in the gazebo, and sat on the swings facing the river.

My journaling out in the wind & the cold:
This place has been a place of healing, the balm of water, the relentless wind. I found beauty here when the world lacked beauty. And power, power so strong I couldn't help but open my arms and fall into it. Trips to this lake, to this shore, are a way of marking the passage of time for me. Here I found the freedom of traveling alone with my lover, my friend, the one who knows my soul, to whom I have been married these 9 years. It is a heady sort of freedom to find that now you are married and you're "allowed" to go on trips alone with your love. We took one of those first trips here. And here I snuggled my baby to my chest to keep her warm with my heat and my milk through a long, cold night. I was filled with the fierce mama-love to protect my own from the elements. Here I opened my closed fist to hope when I learned the tragedy of my family's history, when I had closed my hand and my heart to most of the world. Here I found myself much healed the next year, walking the shores with a toddler, holding her hands, holding the hands of my love, snuggling under the rain, through the thunder, laughing, smiling, feeling the pulse of our lives and a readiness to live again.

Then, this year, I've returned, with another daughter, two years since I last was here. Life so full, so rich that I find myself not just standing, facing the wind, hands, arms, face open, but longing to run to the shore and splash my face in the warm summer water, letting the waves wash over my feet. "I have known the wind. It's been a friend all of my days..." even when I didn't want it, couldn't feel it, ran from it. And this year my smallest daughter sat next to me on the rocks and said, "I'm thinking about the waves, Mama," and she threw her hands up to the wind. My older daughter, the one who lives intensely in a baptism of wind and waves, the one who calls me out to immerse myself, who makes me remember that this is what I always wanted anyway, she is drawing on a bench facing the lake. She is recording the moment, after spending a roll of film for her photography class. The ones I love the most are all around me. Sweet windy darkness is falling. The air is chill and still we sit out in it, wrap ourselves in it. This is our life, embracing the wind and all it offers. And I know that I will always love the wind.

Of waterbirth, trauma, swimming & allergies...

Mane learned to swim two days ago. I was just beginning to wonder if it was ever going to happen. We have a membership at the YWCA. She loves to be in the water, loves to play and slide and jump. She loves her life jacket, too, though we only use it in lakes and hotel pools. We've kept it out of the Y pool intentionally to see if it would prompt her to try to swim. But the honest truth is, though she loves water, she's afraid of it. She has always hated to get her face wet, but the fear seems to go beyond that. She got very excited about swimming class and then panicked that they might just throw her in the deep water when she can't swim yet. She has never, ever heard anyone talk about doing that to teach someone to swim. The fear seemed to come from nowhere in particular, but it sent her into enough of a panic that our conversation about swimming lessons went from happy & excited to near tears in a matter of seconds, leaving my scratching my head and totally confused. I dropped it and hoped that someday she'd learn to swim...in her own time.

I'm getting better at learning to trust, to believe that when the right time arrives, she'll do whatever it is that she needs to do. After all, she learned to roll over, crawl, walk, talk, and read with very little assistance from me. It seems that my job has always been, and probably will always be, creating an environment conducive to learning and then stepping back to allow it to happen. She's always been sensitive to too much prompting and to performing upon request. This child has fierce boundaries, a strong sense of her own identity, and a deep need to be the initiator of her own actions. When I see it that way, I am grateful. She has strong internal motivation.

I was pondering Mane's birth recently, as her 5th birthday recently passed, and I'm also wrapping up a childbirth class for moms who are both due in early July. Mane was born at home in a big birthing tub in our dining room. My pregnancy and labor were relatively uneventful. I wasn't horribly sick. I was in pretty good shape. I ate well, swam a little, went to work, and finished my Master's degree. The labor lasted 10 hours from the time I got out of bed because I couldn't sleep any more to the time of her birth. I walked, showered, threw up a few times, and held on to the sides of the tub. My midwife arrived 2 hours before the birth. Mane's heart tones were great. But, after two hours of pushing, she was born limp and blue. We rubbed her and talk to her. Our midwife suctioned her mouth. The bag of waters never broke. So, we didn't know she had passed meconium until after she was born. She didn't open her eyes or even really seem to be with us until our midwife gave her a few breaths, at which point her eyes flew open, and we all laughed and cried. And, after 5 breaths, she breathed on her own. And then the cord finished pulsing. The time was intense, but not overwhelming. And it only really became scary to me in retrospect. It helped that our midwife was so calm.

When Mane was about 2 years old, she told me about her birth. She told me it was "dark in there" and she "had to sleep a lot." About the actual birth, I can never remember her exact words, but she told me about a bright light - consistent with the flashlight our midwife was using under the water. And she said something about being in trouble and needing help, which is consistent with the above story.

In a moment of insight, or perhaps just crazy mom-brain, I wondered aloud to Mango a few weeks ago, if Mane's love/fear relationship with water might have something to do with her birth. I mean, she told me very clearly that she remembers being in trouble and needing help. She'd never heard her own birth story at that point. She loves baths and always has. She was never the kind of baby to scream in the tub. She often bathed in the tub with me and still does sometimes. But, she has also had this somewhat irrational fear of water in her face, of water that's too deep, of getting in over her head.

Two days ago, she brought her swim goggles to the Y. She put them on & started dunking her face in the water (because Mango did it with her & they could look at each other under the water). She was nervous and would come up really quick. Then she started going under longer as she realized she could see my hands and feet and swimming suit under the water. She got interested in reading the YWCA letters at the bottom of the pool. Then she started picking up her feet and kicking & the next thing any of us knew, she was swimming across the pool under the water. Yesterday we went again & she switched from goggles that covered her eyes & nose to goggles that covered only her eyes. She also started swimming briefly above the water. I was in total shock, but it was like something finally broke through. She stood up in the water and shouted at the top of her little 5yr old lungs, "I CAN SWIM!!!!!!!!!!!!!" And then she threw herself back in the water & started paddling again. Her excitement was beyond any I've seen at any other developmental stage.

As some of you know, Mane was also diagnosed with a wheat allergy about a month ago now. She's been wheat/gluten-free for 4 weeks today. minus two very small accidental exposures to gluten. The gluten-free eating has enormously improved her ability to handle frustration and cope with transitions, enough that Vespera has also noticed and begged us not to put her back on gluten to test & see. I'm wondering now if clearing wheat/gluten out of her system gave her the mental clarity to break through whatever fear was keeping her back about the water.

It's all theory, of course, and there's no real way to find out what has been and is going on. I just wonder, though. It makes me think. It makes me consider the ways that birth and nutrition affect us in small but real ways, or perhaps even big and unusual ways. We'll never know. None of us can do our births over again, nor can we know what subtracting an allergen from our menus would have done at different points in time. I was reading a book called Passionate Marriage last night. It's by a Marriage & Family Therapist. One of the therapist's clients said to him that he only wished that he & his wife had gone through therapy sooner. He was lamenting the years that had been "lost." The therapist responded by asking what made the man think that he & his wife were capable of making their new changes at any earlier point in their history together. His point was that all the things that came together to make them who they were at that point contributed to the positive changes they were able to make in their relationship. I find this comforting. Who knows if the breakthrough Mane made at the pool could have happened any earlier in different circumstances. Everything in her life history up to this point came together to make swimming possible two days ago. We can't know any more or less than that.

More on Wheat & Gluten

It's some sort of crazy confirmation that taking Mane off wheat was the right thing to do when Vespera insists that we cannot put her back on wheat or gluten for more testing. Vespera has noticed the behavioral difference more than anything and really, really doesn't want us to put her back on gluten. ;)

So, I've got gluten-free bread baking in the oven right this second. I made quiche last night. We had biscuits over the weekend. Everything is a little experimental, but that's the story of my kitchen anyway. I need a two or three week cooking plan. Wouldn't that be hilarious. I don't think I've ever been quite that organized.

We are also waiting for a call from Mane's pediatrician to see if he'll refer us to Enterolab for testing: enterolab.com We're going to do the testing anyway...just wanted to see if we could get insurance to pay for part of it.

Since Mane's test was positive for wheat allergy we've met many, many other people who have trouble with wheat and/or gluten. It's all over the place. Another mom at motheringdotcommune said that so many people can clear up their digestive trouble by eliminating gluten, not because they're allergic, but because gluten is so hard to digest anyway. I thought that was interesting. She also pointed out that we don't need medical professionals to tell us what our bodies are already telling us. If your body feels better when you don't eat gluten, then you already have your answer. That's so true.

Many, many of the people I talk with wonder aloud how many other kid probably have allergy or nutritional issues, but the symptoms are so seldom associated with allergies that nobody figures it out. Mane had an accidental exposure to gluten after being off it for 5 days. Within 45 minutes she was practically crawling out of her skin. She could not sit still. Her attention span was reduced to zero. She had trouble listening and controlling her impulses. She had trouble falling asleep. It was outrageous. Perhaps the reaction was more dramatic because she hadn't had any gluten in five days. I really don't know. All I know is that she has always periodically behaved like that and now we may know why.

Wheat Allergy

Oh, and Aurora's allergy testing came back. She's allergic to wheat. I'll be posting recipes. I learned to make wheat/gluten-free Mexican mole sauce this week.

Reflections on the Bible and Immigration

Excerpt from an e-mail to a friend:

My thoughts about immigration have been long in forming and they still aren’t totally developed yet. I did a searched of Old Testament law the other day just to check out whether there were any policies about letting people in or out of Israel. I mean, Israel was a theocracy, the laws given by God. I think it’s a pretty good standard, though I don’t claim to understand all of it. In any case, there aren’t any laws or regulations about securing borders. But there are mandates to care for aliens and temporary residents and to treat them as citizens or native-borns. And that only seems right and humane to me. We destroy families, leave children parentless, leave mothers and children in poverty when we randomly deport people. This is not right. Not to mention the psychological, emotional and relational damage that comes from tearing apart families. This doesn’t even cover the arguments about what people of illegal status are contributing to out country. It’s sick and wrong to treat them as second class citizens. Immigration policy fails to really look at these people, to look them in the eyes, see their faces and hear their stories. It treats them like numbers and statistics. I serve a God who loves people individually. And I intend to do the same. And to fight for them as real human beings. It isn’t about foreign policy or the economy. I believe that if we treat people right, God will be in our midst and we will be blessed. And I’m sorry that I cannot separate my church and state for the sake of this argument. I believe that my faith has everything to do with my politics. Though I don’t think politics should get to say anything about my faith.