Thoughts From Places: Newport, Rhode Island

I know that I've talked about running a half marathon since forever. It's legit, I think. I'd never done anything like this before. I didn't think that this was something I could do. I needed to process what I was convincing my body to do. I needed to provide an example of the excellence my body could aspire to, especially in this year when there has been example after example of negativity towards or disregard of female bodies. I needed to re-write the story that has been handed to me about what I'm capable of and what I desired to do. It has been no small factor in the creation of my character.

I don't imagine that I'll set this story down anytime soon, or stop displaying the medal with absolute pride, but I did make a video about it and maybe this will be a momentary button on the end of the story. It was a good weekend. I'm glad of it.

Kind of Tired

I forgot what it was like to feel tired like this. It's the good kind of tired, the kind that happens when you've spent most of your day on your feet teaching and engaging, giving bits of your knowledge and yourself away without any expectation of reciprocity. It's the kind of tired you feel after your body has carried you places you never thought it'd go, muscles feeling that exhausted tight-looseness as you stretch and settle into a chair for the first time in hours. It's the mental quietcalm that comes as you push open the door to your home after a long drive, leaving the rumble of the road for the stillness of being here. It's the slow blink, eyes open then shut for seconds, as you lean into the last sentences of a conversation you don't want to end but can't continue. It's the kind of tired that makes settling in to your bed at the end of the day feel like your wages for the day, letting your mind slip off to sleep unconcerned for tomorrow because you know that you did as much as you could today.

I long for this kind of tired when I don't have it. I'm frustrated by the kind of tired I've been: tired of the election, tired of thinking, tired of being lonely, tired of trying, tired by the mountains we've set before ourselves, tired of the mountains we've brought down upon ourselves, tired of worrying, tired by the things I do to avoid worrying, tired of carrying around the weight of this tiredness. That's the tired that chains you to the bed or to the couch, the kind of tired that makes you ask whether anything would really be any different in the world if you just didn't get up today. This kind of tired claims victory over your crumpled body, crows over your admission of defeat, promises you that you will never stand again because you're incapable. This kind of tired assures you that you are alone, have always been alone, will always be alone, and fantasizes about tomorrow when its mass can press down on you again, cracking your ribs and crushing your windpipe.

I love this time of year, when the air's crisp, wakes you up when you step out the door. I love watching the leaves change. I miss the daylight when it's not there, but I can't say that I mind the extra quality time with the stars. It's been quite the week, between last week's post and a birthday and writing eleven pages and driving to New York City and then Rhode Island, then running a half marathon in the pouring rain, then driving back, returning the rental car, and starting a new job the next day. I've earned my exhaustion. It's good, it's all been good, but it makes me wonder about who I am, who I've been, when the weather isn't kind and my friends aren't around and the days aren't packed. Am I allowed to be displeased with who I am in the desert, even as I live my life in the harvest?

I got ninety million questions about how we move forward as individuals and communities and as a nation. I want to give my life to answering them, to help us all heal from the pain the world's thrown at us. I want each day to end with that good kind of tired.

Let's see what we can do.

Eggs

I have polycystic ovary syndrome. The lady doctor diagnosed it in 2013 or so. It’s where a bunch of little cysts form around your ovaries to prevent them from working right. Basically, a normal ovary is like this:

All pink and normal and stuff. (Images taken from attainfertility.com)

And here's what mine look like:

LOOK AT THE CYSTS. ALL OVER THE DAMN PLACE.

For me, polycystic ovary syndrome meant that the first time I got my period, I called my mom to come pick me up from school because I thought I had appendicitis. It meant that I didn’t tell anyone when my periods didn’t come every month because I was so glad to be spared the nightmare that they were. I thought everyone needed a jumbo combo pack of ibuprofen and maxi pads to get through their periods and I marveled at the girls who could just handle it. It meant that I lived with the shamefully loud plastic peel of the wrapper on an overnight pad echoing around the school bathroom every three hours and still managed to bleed all over every pair of jeans I ever owned in high school. It meant that I embraced fun phrases like "shark week" and "moon time" so that I could explain why I bailed on social activities and commitments without grossing out the boys around me. It meant that I spent a chunk of the last football game of my college band career curled up in the fetal position in my hotel room, praying that I could pull it together in time for the game. I rattled as I marched with a bottle of pain pills hidden in my uniform.

When I went to the gynecologist on my state employee insurance after college, they tried to confirm the diagnosis by giving me an interior ultrasound, but the picture wasn’t really clear. A medical test which left me sobbing on the examination table in pain couldn’t actually confirm that PCOS was the reason that my period, when I did have it, lasted for a week and a half and came with migraines and cramps that leave me bedridden. The ultrasound wasn’t covered under my insurance. I paid hundreds of dollars so that I could cry in front of a stranger and be told nothing new. 

When I went back to the gynecologist to get the results (mostly, you know, to be sure that I didn’t have cancer of the ladyparts), I was so relieved I wasn’t dying that I must not have been really listening when the doctor told me how hard it would be for me to have kids. I was single. I’ve always been single. Motherhood is a bridge to be crossed when you come to it and at 24 or 25, I didn’t see any need to speed toward it. I was so flustered when she asked if there was someone special in my life that I missed the part where she said, “Well, when the time comes, it’ll be a little more difficult” and “you’ll need to consider hormone treatment” and “you might need to try for a couple of years.” I just signed up for birth control to try to regulate my periods a little and went on with my life.

Later, after seeing a friend’s Facebook post on PCOS, which is the most common cause of infertility in women and affects up to 10% of women, I went into an internet spiral. “Infertility” caught my eye everywhere. Other than the pages that described the symptoms, which were spot on for how my body behaves, the pages I read most were about how you deal with this if you want to get pregnant. There are hormones you can take. There’s a surgery, which is a bit of a last resort. If you’re loaded, there’s IVF. Every body is different but as far as I understand what my doctors have said, it will be a long and difficult process for me in particular to get pregnant and even if that does happen, the pregnancy will likely be difficult. 

When I read this, all I could visualize was night after night of my imaginary future husband holding me while I sob through period cramps. Night after night of fuming at my body because the pregnancy test was negative again. Long night after long night at the hospital as I recover from yet another miscarriage. He’d get worry lines that should be saved for when our sixteen-year-old son is learning how to drive a stick shift. His heart would endure stress that should only be caused by the batter standing between our nineteen-year-old daughter and pitching a no-hitter. There would be a herculean effort that would put a strain on our jobs and our marriage, all because I was born with a downstairs that wasn’t able to bring life into the world on its own. 

I want four kids. I want a house full of life with two dogs to clean up the mess that my infant daughter makes with her cheerios and a cat for my three-year-old son to chase and adore. I want to sit through oboe lessons and violin lessons and the endless screeching hours of practice. I want to sing my son to sleep with an alto version of Summertime from Porgy and Bess. I want to bundle up my kids and make my husband carry a thermos of hot chocolate so I can teach them how to find planets in the sky and show them every constellation I know. I want to read The Hobbit to my whole family. I want to watch Star Wars with my daughters and help them make lightsabers and do their hair like Princess Leia. I want to fall asleep beside my baby's cradle. I want to fall asleep in a blanket fort with my five-year-old. I want my seventeen-year-old to fall asleep in the hammock with a book across her chest on a pleasant summer day and I want to leave a glass of water beside her for when she wakes up thirsty. I want my husband to carry our kids on his shoulders and I want us to go on road trips to see the Grand Canyon and the Statue of Liberty and Disneyland. 

But as I read these articles, my body screams that those dreams I have about parenthood are ridiculous. The cry is not entirely irrational. PCOS comes along with a whole host of symptoms, stemming from the way it messes with my hormones, that affect attraction and relationships in ways we don't even think to think about. And even if I do find someone, again, how can I put him through all that pain and disappointed expectation? Anybody I’m going to pick is going to be smart and kind and the world needs more people like that. He should have his own kids and there’s someone out there who would make him just as happy as I would with much less stress. A little piece of that wonderful human out in the world, continuing the work of making it a better place. I can always take one for the team to make that happen, bow out before he commits to walking down this complicated road with me. 

Plus, like, overpopulation, right? And adoption’s always an option. A long, bureaucratically-mired, painful-in-its-own-way option, but an option nonetheless. Or being a foster parent! I’d make a great foster mom. There are so many children that need love in the world. I don’t need to bring new ones into it. Never mind that my arms ache to hold a son I’ll never have, a child I’ll never name or teach how to change a tire or explain sex to or demonstrate unselfish love for. All the lessons I’ve learned in my life, the generosity of spirit I want to cultivate in the next generation, all that can be imparted to a baby I didn’t make. I can write a book. I can travel the world and talk to people. I can travel and talk and write a book. With my husband. I can open my house to all people at any time. I can grow a garden and feed anyone who needs it. I can care for the women and children whose men didn’t deserve them and I can care for the men and children whose women deserted them. I can invest in a community and be a mother to hundreds of kids, going to football games and swim meets until the wheels on my chair will no longer carry me the places I want to go. Pregnancy’s not the only way to wear out a body. 

So, as I turn twenty-eight, please don’t joke with me that the clock’s ticking. My biological clock turned off almost as soon as it turned on. Don’t base your expectations for my life, body, or purpose on Genesis alone. I have done that, and sometimes continue to do that, all on my own. I have carried the weight of my imaginary children and my imaginary husband around with me for years. I understand that God is on the side of life and makes miracles happen but I don’t know how to ask for, or even if I should ask for, the miracle that would fix this. I don’t know how to ask God to change the body he knitted within my mother’s womb. 

What you can do instead, and what has been done for me, is to wrap me up in community. Be Christ for the bleeding women of today who long for healing and reunion with the community. Encourage us women who live and work and exist with PCOS, so that we can educate and help others manage their symptoms. Embrace the fact that some women will need the hormonal regulation that the pill provides or the almost-elimination of period symptoms that an IUD allows and see that that fact does not cause moral corruption. Acknowledge that family and parenthood take many shapes and forms and God doesn’t bless children differently because of how they were born and to whom they were born. It is our responsibility as much as we are able to care for every child and every adult who used to be a child with the unselfish love of God. 

This is an especially profound responsibility here and now, in this world where my body is made vulnerable and vilified and deified all in one tweet, where it is elevated and weighted down with sacred expectations over the course of the same sermon. We are capable of such kindness, though we don't always act like it. As you meet people where they are, as you encounter their hurts and their strengths, find a new way to be kind in the world.

Ask Me Again

Ask me again.

Because I walk through this life with eyes wide open and I feel like I see so many things and so many people and so many events and they all set me running towards understanding but sometimes that understanding is hard to come by and so I just don't know how to answer. But

ask me again.

Over the course of a week in my life, a friend had a baby and my brother got engaged and another friend got married and a different friend lost her grandfather and I want to speak about the beauty of life, how it allows us to see beginnings and endings in the span of a few days, how it doesn't slow down, even when you feel like it should, how it pulls together the disparate parts of your being as it throws you into new communities and reminds you where you came from and where you're loved. But I don't know how to say all those words exactly, to tell the stories of the leaves that only have the potential to change, clinging to summer green when the world around them aches for autumn, to talk you through involuntary smiles and sing-alongs, to teach you how to drink deeply from the wine of good conversation or let kindness flow from the store of goodness recently renewed in your soul. I'm still trying to give shape to these thoughts and so what I need you to do is to

ask me again.

I'm here, I promise. I'm focused and I'm engaged and I want to let this experience form me, make me into the person I know I've been aching to be. I'm excited for all the information that's coming my way but it's a lot to work through, you know? It's a lot to handle. We're reactivating circuits in my brain and forcing them into perpetual use and we're asking that from my brain after it's been disoriented by life and location. And then, on top of that, life kept on happening. I can't be disassociated from everything that's come before. So we're rattling the foundation I've just finished rebuilding while I'm finding my place again and wondering how it is that I've never asked these questions before or had these questions answered and where I can take these thoughts now that I've developed the muscle of chasing them down. I'm doing my best to be present but sometimes it's hard to hear over the mental gears ticking so it would help me out if you could

ask me again.

Because there's a lot going on and I don't know what my answer should be.

Because I'm good at protecting myself, but I know that I do that to my own detriment and I'm not sure how to fix it.

Because I do want this. I just express that poorly.

So ask me again.

Names

"What's their name?"

It's a common enough phrase at the ends of bible studies or small groups or any church community meetings where prayer requests are shared and taken. It was one of the first ways I learned to be unselfish, the taking down of names. So-and-so's second cousin who has a broken ankle is just the object of another sentence that I have to wait through before I can speak to my pain and grief and annoyance and ask for blessings. But Amelia's cousin Jeremy who works in landscaping and really can't afford to have to take the time off because of his broken ankle is a person, a living, breathing individual who I can pray for and who, if I have the means, I can assist and care for. Taking down a name is one of my earliest spiritual disciplines.

There is power in names. You're given one shortly after you enter this world and your name still exists after you've left it, buried somewhere in paperwork or engraved on a tombstone or held in the hearts of those who loved you. Naming someone in your prayers brings that power to the fore and calls God to accountability for this person. You connect to this person, even if it's the thinnest of threads, the most easily broken. It's not some girl who just had a baby-- it's Anna. You know Anna. Or you can imagine Anna. By naming her, you connect to her.

This is why we say their names. To humanize, to connect, to make just another black male killed by police an actual person in our minds. Keith Lamont Scott. Terence Crutcher. Two names on the litany that we should saying to ourselves every night, calling God to accountability for. Two more people who are never coming home again. Two more human lives lost among a system that has taught us to fear humans because the color of their skin, to speed up as we walk down the street or be too quick on the trigger rather than seeing the person who owns that skin. How long does the litany need to be? How many names? How many people?

Pray with me, my brothers and sisters. Pray in earnest. Say their names and call their memories up before the Almighty. Because when you do, when you come to God with prayers for these people, for this nation, for these times, when you say their name to make God accountable for the tragedy that we live in, participate in, benefit from, defend daily, I truly believe that God will move your heart. God will transform you.

God will let you know that you are accountable. You are meant to have kept your brothers and sisters as brothers and sisters. We have not done that. We have not done that.

When God changes you, when your heart is broken for these people, for their families, for their communities, come talk to me. Let's talk about police training. Let's talk about caring for our officers who mean to keep us safe. Let's talk about supporting police departments. Let's talk about building communities. Let's talk about the ways we can work on changing the human heart. To steal a phrase from a friend, let's together learn repentance and patience and grace so that we can reframe how we understand force and power and authority. Let's figure out which leaders are going to build bonds between people. Let's talk about the people who have been taken from us and let's treat every life like it belongs to a name rather than a number on a statistician's sheet.

Ask for their names. Preserve their lives. Live in this world with these people and love them deeply because they are people. Because they have names. Because they matter.

Start at the Beginning

I know, I know, I said that I'd have a post about what I'm learning for you every Friday. But I also want to make my creative projects work for me and that means every other Friday, I'll be posting my Vlogyries video on here in place of a text post because videos take time and my videos are rarely if ever uninfluenced by what I'm studying. So here, at the beginning of a new semester, is a reflection on beginnings, influenced by some of what I've learned in my Spiritual Formation for Ministry class and some conversations I've had with friends as the year begins.

Life and Lessons

A couple of housekeeping things before I get to the meat of the matter:

1. In the midst of job hunting and classes starting and Labor Day, my car broke down and I had life to deal with, so I missed a couple of posts. Sorry, team. 
2. For those of you who don't know, I'm in my third week of classes at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, DC. I'm in the Master of Divinity (Mdiv) program, which is a three-year program that covers the basics of biblical studies, church history, theology, and ecclesiology. You know, all the stuff you want your pastor to know. Wesley is a United Methodist seminary and for ordination in the UMC, you need an Mdiv (typically). So stay tuned on all of that. 
3. As soon as all the paperwork clears, I'll be doing a more or less full-time internship alongside my five classes this fall semester. I imagine things will be busy but I do want to maintain the discipline of writing something each week. My goal is to write a post about what I'm learning for each Monday and a post about my life/what I'm feeling each Wednesday. Those may drop off as the workload amps up but that's the goal. 
4. Has anyone told you today that you're beautiful and you matter? Because you are and you do. Be affirmed, friend! 

And now, on with the post! 

***

I take almost everything in life as a lesson. Any big life event is not only an opportunity to learn something new about myself but also a chance to listen with intention for the message I'm receiving about my role in the world. I don't want this to come across as overly fideistic or moralistic or spiritual. I'm not preaching here, or trying to set an example. This is just how I live my life amidst all the chaos and bullshit and things I can't control. I can control this. I can control how I react. I can learn from the curveballs and fast balls and the occasional sweet pitch that sings right to where your bat wants to be. I can learn from the ones that earn you a walk.

Like when the car broke down. There were ten kinds of divine providence smiling down on me that fay, from the people who gave my car a jump in NC to the fair weather on the roads on the way up to the small miracle that was pulling into a gas station that happened to have a service center with remarkably kind people only a mile or so from my apartment. The car could have died in Charlotte and needed a tow back to Hickory, leaving me stranded seven hours away from where I needed to be. The engine could have whirred its last on some backroads highway in Virginia with no cell service. I could have decided to go somewhere else for gas and ended up paying for a tow and an impound fee. I could have decided to drive it to my apartment and ended up with a lifetime's supply of parking tickets. 

Through the whole thing, I learned stuff, like exactly where the alternator is and what happens when the engine mount breaks and how a tow truck hooks up to a vehicle. I learned (again) that I don't like depending on others, that I take every kindness thrown my way as unimaginable grace, that I'm uncomfortable with the impact of the whims of fate, and that I don't know how to treat those emotions and thoughts. Do I really think so little of my person and so much of the space that it occupies that I can't ask for a little help now and then? What's my deal with being unwilling to accept kindness? Do I really need so impenetrable a shield as that? And what use is that shield when forces outside my control dictate the terms of my response anyway?

When we went to orientation at Wesley, the first thing we really did was have a worship service. Now, I love me some singing and some responsive reading and a good word or two preached. But they asked us to hold hands during one song and I stepped on away. I do not hold hands with strangers. And they asked us to come up and dip our hands in the font and remember our baptism and I did not want to do that. I can remember my baptism from back here, thanks. I do not want to walk up in front of this group of people that I do not know and participate in a symbolic gesture of a faith that I hold to be deeply personal. It's been rocky sometimes and no amount of remembering a dedication to Christ that I didn't ask for is going to help with that, or at least, it's not going to help within the fifteen minute space of the end of this service. If I go up to that font, I am going to sob like a child in front of all of these people who will not understand my tears.

I went up anyway.

It was a barrier that had to come down sooner or later and it may as well have been sooner. I participated. I was next to last in line and I splashed my hands around in the fountain because if God's not a God of joy in creation, I may as well go home now. I let this part of the service work for me. I let a community start to love me and I started to believe that they would shoulder my burdens with me. Then after that, we all hugged our way through passing the peace. I swear, hugging is a spiritual discipline on its own. I marvel at people who can just casually go up and share space with another person like that. Is your love for all humanity really of that easy depth? Why isn't mine? Do I want it to be? 

I know that I do community differently at the beginning of my stay somewhere than I do by the end. We all do. I have friendships already and I want to put time into maintaining them; I want what already happened in my life to continue to matter. So even watching television becomes a social experience, with long conversations and all caps reactions. I know my friends on the other side of the screen and they know me. They get me. They support me. We're already invested in each other. It makes me tired to think about putting that work in again in a new place where I have to spend the majority of my effort pretending that I've found my footing months before I actually will have. Anyone who's met me in real life in the past couple of weeks has not gotten my level best. There's just too much else to be worried with. 

But you get what you put in, I suppose. You only learn the lessons if you're looking for them and you generally only form relationships if you ante up. Besides, my car's dead. If there was ever a sign from the heavens that I should stay put for a while, it's that. Cars are complex systems. It's easy to read divine intervention into the perceived spontaneous mechanical failure. Now all I need is for the internet to go out and maybe that'll jump start this whole friend process.

(Dear God, please don't let the internet go out. A car I can live without. The internet is a completely different story.)