August: The Year’s Midlife Crisis
I think August is the midlife crisis month of every year. At least here in Minnesota, this is the time when things I haven’t done begin to loom around the edges, saying, “If not now, when!?” It’s hot and sticky here, but the days are getting shorter, and we all know where we’re heading. Mortality calls us by name.
I was driving down the street yesterday and saw a treehouse. Not a fancy treehouse, not an amazing treehouse, just a pretty basic backyard maple tree treehouse. To my shock, upon seeing it, I burst into tears. Happily, I was alone, and not in heavy traffic, so I could pull over and get my bearings.
As I cried, what was running through my head was that it was suddenly, inarguably, completely and utterly clear that I would never be building my own kid that treehouse she once wanted. She is 16 now, breezing by occasionally in between the events in her complex social calendar. If I built her the fanciest, most spectacular treehouse on the planet, she would glance out the window, say, “Thanks!” and continue on her own way.
It’s not that she begged for a treehouse when she was younger, or even particularly wanted one. It’s not that I didn’t give her other cool things, or experiences. It’s that the window has closed on that possibility, and on the whole Mom-as-center-of-desire-fulfillment stage of her life. Don’t get me wrong: It’s not that she doesn’t cozy up like a toddler when she wants something, usually money or permission to do something. But in her life’s soundtrack, I am mostly the background music now, not very often the plot or the dialogue.
I know that’s just as it should be, and still I sat by the side of the road and had a moment. A moment of grief and loss, a moment of clarity that it is time for me to redefine my own life, refocus my own days. Then, as I pulled myself together, a sense that there is some joy and excitement in that refocus. The regrets are real, but the pull of life’s new possibility is much stronger.
Regrets come to me in surprising way. One morning, stacking dishes into the dishwasher, I ached with regret that I had never spent time on Ebay searching for particular dinner plates that my father said once, in passing, he liked. I still regret that I didn’t give him a college sweatshirt—I know that he wanted one the Christmas that I was 19 and he admired the one I had one myself, but I told myself I couldn’t afford the twelve bucks to get him one of his own. For God’s sake, I think now, with all that money he shelled out!?!? I finally went back for a college reunion years later and sprang twenty bucks for a college t-shirt, which he received politely, but with no visible enthusiasm. I found it, clean and unworn, when I cleaned out his dresser after he died last year.
I don’t know if this is true for other people, but the regrets that I have are much more about things I didn’t do than things I did. I’ve done some really stupid things. Careless things, wreckless things, inappropriate things, occasionally something downright mean. I’ve made huge mistakes. But forgiving myself for those is somehow easier than forgiving myself for the things I never did. The trips I haven’t taken, the risks I looked away from, the conversations and relationships I avoided.
So, in this final stretch of summer, I am thinking, what will I regret if I don’t do it now? That lake down the street that I mostly just nodded to in June and July? I’m in it every day now. The garden, so easy to visit superficially? I’m diving into it now with my whole body, not caring a bit how filthy I get. My days have a mantra: grab summer now! This is your moment! Stop lamenting how hot it is and have some fun!
From Your Minister
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As I began my monthly rituals of circling around writing my Quest column—rituals which generally include brooding, conversations, naps, internet searches, leafing through poetry books, walking the dogs, cleaning the kitchen, reading friends’ updates on Facebook, casting about in my mind for something wise I read or heard long ago that I can share—rituals of circling similar to my dogs’ as they prepare to lie down, following some cellular memory for creating a nesting spot—as I did all of this, something shocking emerged in my awareness: I have never preached or written, explicitly, about joy!
Fear and Love at Tent City
There is a protest at Tent City tonight, the place where Sherriff Joe Arpaio holds thousands of immigrants in his self described ‘concentration camp.’ Where there is never any relief from the Arizona heat, where humiliation is a daily occurrence.
I’m with my people, in our bright yellow Standing on The Side of Love shirts that match the school buses that take us there, Unitarian Universalists in Phoenix for our annual convention. There are hundreds of us going, a couple of thousand maybe, mostly white, middle class, documented. And yet I am afraid.
I’m afraid because I’ve heard there will be counter-protestors, militia folks maybe, perhaps with the weapons which are legal to carry in Arizona. I’m afraid because it’s so hot, because I’m not exactly Olympics material in my physical fitness, because I am taking a teenaged child whose safety means everything to me.
And then, as we sit in worship and prayer, preparing to go, speakers from the local Latino community speak. A young woman describes her decision to commit civil disobedience, to be arrested by Sherriff Joe Arpaio, because she is tired of living in fear, of her whole community living in daily fear of being rounded up for real or imagined infractions and thrown into the Tent City, as they have been for the past 20 years. A young man describes arriving in the United States at age one, and now facing deportation –leaving the only country he’s ever known to be sent to one which is foreign to him.
And I begin to feel embarrassed by my fear. Not ashamed, not guilty, just embarrassed. As if I am a kid who grabbed too many cookies off the plate. And I think, this fear that binds us all, this fear of being arrested and humiliated and tortured in our own country: How does that hold us back? How does that diminish us? The young woman who chose to be arrested says, Yes, she was afraid, but she’s been afraid all her life. This arrest, in a way, freed her. I think of the words of the poet Audre Lorde, in her essay which is desert-island-essential to me, The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action:
What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?
As we get into our bright yellow school bus, a minister offers a prayer for our journey. I say to the driver, Are we holding our departure up because we are standing up praying? And she looks up with some annoyance and says, “No! I am praying!” As I begin to lead the crowd off the bus, she says, “Thank you so much for doing this. My husband is in there.”
At Tent City, I don’t see any counter protestors, with or without weapons. I see a small gaggle of brave locals, who have come to thank us for being there. One woman I speak with tells me that her inability to pay for a traffic infraction landed her there for ten days. She describes the endless heat, the lack of adequate drinking water, the horrible food. She says then, tears in her eyes, “My girlfriend is in for a year.”
Another man holds a sign charging Joe Arpaio with homicide. I ask him how many people have died at Tent City. He says at least five. I ask him if his church stands up to speak out about this. He replies sadly, “I am still Catholic but I do not go to church anymore. Most of us don’t. There was one priest who spoke out for us but they got rid of him.”
As I get back on the bus to go back to air conditioned comfort, a shower and clean pajamas, his words stay with me most. I wish that I could have responded, in Arizona or in my own home state of Minnesota, “You would be welcome in my church!” I know that the Phoenix UU church is doing fantastic work to be welcoming, to stand tall as an advocate for justice for immigrants. And yet I know that, while we stand on the side of love, sometimes we stand too far off to the side, in our fear, in our privilege, buffered, unwilling to disrupt our comfort. I offer a silent prayer and wake up this morning with his words still piercing my heart.
(Photos by Jie Wronski-Riley)
“I didn’t say it was fair, I said it was the law.”
I asked my ex, my partner of almost twenty years from whom I separated three years ago, the co-parent of a teenaged kid, to attend a $14 community education session with me and update our wills.
We had spent thousands of dollars asserting, in two different states, that we were in fact related to one another: that sharing a home, a car, a life, a bed in fact meant that we would be responsible to one another even after death did us part. It turns out that, as difficult and expensive as that assertion of relatedness was, telling the state we had broken up was a breeze, and cheap to boot.
Our state of Minnesota, and our nation, enthusiastically agrees that we are no longer an item. In fact, they never believed that we were. Since we were all in agreement about this matter, I entered the community ed class in a calm place. I’m cheap, and my cheap self felt pretty happy that $28, for the two of us, would get our affairs in order.
I’m not saying I didn’t feel a tinge of sadness. I wondered, as I felt our after death wishes fit so easily into the pre-typed will templates which the lawyer leading our session had brought, just how much it had cost our relationship to be swimming upstream all those years, asserting that in fact love does make a family. I wondered if, had we been able to relax and float instead, supported without exerting an ounce of energy, our relationship might have survived.
But mostly I concentrated on filling in the forms accurately and quickly, initialing what needed to be initialed and checking boxes that needed to be checked. Everything goes to the kid. Check. Until the kid is 25, not too long now, a trust is established, with the following executor. Check. My ex and I whispered in consultation, no tension or disagreements between us, only wanting to get things set and done.
Most of the people in the room appeared, from their questions and comments, to be leaving their estates to their husbands and wives. They checked the box that said, to my spouse until their death, and then after spouse’s death to our children (insert names here).
But then. At the next table, a man, probably in his late 60’s, raised his hand. “If I want to leave everything to my friend, and then after he dies, to the kids, what box do I check?”
The lawyer clarified. “You want to leave everything to your friend?” “Well, yes, for the rest of his life,” said the man. “And then to our kids.”
The lawyer said off-handedly, “Well, you need to write on the blank line that you disinherit your children.”
The man’s mouth fell open in horror. “I don’t want to disinherit my children! I just want my friend to have what he needs for the rest of his life, and then the children would get it!”
The lawyer asked, as if he were cross-examining a witness, “Did you not say that you wanted to leave 100% of your estate to your friend?” The man nodded. “So that leaves zero percent for your children. Hence you must disinherit them.”
My mellow cheap self was suddenly gone from the room, and my mother tiger self was sitting in my seat instead, with adrenalin-clear vision. I was picturing what it would be like for my own kid to learn, after my death, that she had been disinherited. Like every other adopted child she will be processing, for her entire life, some amount of grief and loss about her birthmother. At that point, she’d also be processing the death of one of her parents. And then to be disinherited on top of it? I wondered, quite seriously, if she would survive.
Glancing at the man who had raised the question, I realized that I didn’t even know if he was gay or trying to care for some other friend after his death. But I did know I wasn’t going to sit quietly. I raised my hand. “So you are saying, “ I asked the lawyer, “That a gay couple could adopt or bear a child, raise that child together, and then they would both have to disinherit that child in order to provide for each other legally?”
The lawyer looked bored. The forty or so people in the room looked longingly at their will templates, studiously not looking up. I went on, “So you are saying, that even without the proposed Consititutional amendment on our ballot in November, which explicitly states that marriage is only between a man and a woman, loving and committed couples are forced to renounce either their children or each other in order to have legal wills?” The lawyer looked annoyed, but I couldn’t resist pushing it. “Are you saying that?”
“Look,” the lawyer said, “I didn’t say it was fair. I said it was the law.”
My ex and I finished filling out our forms, had them notarized, and left. As we walked out, this $14 class didn’t feel like such a bargain.
A Prayer for the Caregivers
You know who you are.
You put your own life on hold, move across the country to sit by the bedside.
You process the hospital bills, pay them, know they matter more than the car you had thought you needed.
You explain patiently, one more time, to the one who won’t remember.
You make 100 phone calls searching for a kidney donor.
You hold the shaking body through the nightmares, even in your sleep.
You take time to find the one food she will still eat.
You rub ice chips on his lips, and then chapstick.
You find hours you don’t have, rush to the hospice. You’ll sleep later.
You know who you are.
You couldn’t do anything else.
It is your privilege and your duty to be right where you are.
Haunting Conversations
I moved away from Minneapolis to live in Boston and DC from 1989-2004, and then moved back. One thing I love about being back where I spent my young adult years is when I run into people I knew from the 1980’s.
Recently, I ran into a woman who looked dimly familiar. When I heard someone else call her Jean, I realized why and I asked, “Are you … Jean X…?’ Yes, she answered.
I said, “I think you took over the end of my lease in my apartment in a fourplex on 16th Street, back in 1982. It was a sweet little tiny apartment.” Yep, she indicated, that was correct.
“How long did you stay?” I asked. She answered, as I expected, “Oh, a couple of years.” Then , to my shock, she went on, “After that I moved upstairs and I’ve been there ever since.” I must have looked surprised, because she said, “I know it’s a small apartment, but I never got into the job, house, car thing. I bike where I need to go, work enough odd jobs to pay the rent, and mostly spend my time outside.” She nodded to the beautifully cared for community garden, where we stood, and I could see that she spent a great deal of time there, indeed!
This conversation has gone through my head a dozen times since we had it. This woman was still living exactly the way that I, and everyone I knew, lived in 1982! Before we got into the kid thing, before we got into the graduate school thing, before we got into the job, house, car thing.
It made me think of that Sufi story about the old fool, Mullah Nasrudin. As is often the case, Nasrudin is talking to someone much more prominent, successful, well-dressed, and self-important.
The rich man looks at Nasrudin’s house, shakes his head, and says, “You know, Nasrudin, if you could just get a job like mine then you wouldn’t have to live in this small shack and live on rice and beans!”
And Nasrudin looks back at him and says, “If you could just enjoy rice and beans and a simple shack, you wouldn’t have to work at a job like yours!”
Running into Jean made me think about these past 30 years. Am I happy about the changes I’ve made? Has the house, job, car thing worked for me?
Jean’s health and joy was apparent. Unlike most people I know, I’ll bet she does not wake up stressed about how to accomplish the day’s list. Is she living more the way humans are supposed to live?
I don’t know, and I won’t have time to think about it very long, for today anyway. I’ve got a house to clean, errands to run, a job to do! But our conversation keeps reinserting itself as I rush about, and I find myself planning rice and beans for supper.
From Your Minister
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I am talking to a man whose wife has just told him she loves someone else. I need to go to the ocean, says this Midwesterner, to see something bigger than my pain.
I am on the phone with a woman whose sister is dying. Her sister’s young child is inconsolable. Even here, says the woman on the phone, there is beauty. There is joy. Even here, there is something beyond the pain.
A Prayer for the Overwhelmed
For you who are stretched too thin,
Flat out,
Buried up to your eyeballs,
Pulled in too many directions,
Keeping too many balls in the air,
Tracking too many loose ends.
May you drop it all, just for a moment, and know strength and wholeness.
Give It All Away! Wisdom of the plants
These days, as spring turns to summer, the garden is insistent with one message: Give it away, or lose it all.
Early in the development of a garden, it’s about procurement. Picking out plants, choosing a place for them, seeing how they do. With the kinds of perennials I tend to favor, that is both fun and highly interactive. Many of the flowers in my yard have stories that go along with them about who gave them to me, stories that make them that much more beautiful.
And now, as I go into the fifth or sixth summer of having turned my yard into flowers, herbs and vegetables, it is imperative that I give stuff away. If I don’t, if I try to hold onto all of the abundance for myself, the whole thing will die.
And so I join my local facebook group for perennial exchange and post regularly what I have to offer, “Bee balm. Rudbeckia. Strawberries. Grape thistle. Dig your own!” People come with shovels, apologetic about taking too much, and I want to tell them, there is no such thing as taking too much!
I go to farmers’ markets, see people paying $5 for rhubarb, $25 for a hanging basket full of morning glories, and though I want farmers to make a good living, still I want to whisper, “I’ll pay you to come to my house and take that same thing!” I refuse to allow a friend I am there with to buy morning glory plants, my voice so sternly admonishing, you would think she wanted to eat kittens. I convince a friend into native foods to try to eat Jerusalem artichokes; I happen to have hundreds. I offer plants to neighbors who walk by and stop to admire, to friends planting gardens at their kids’ schools. I plant lupines and ferns and hostas in pots from garage sales and sell them myself at a garage sale, to start others on their gardening journeys.
There is so much wisdom, so much life, in what the garden is teaching me about giving it away.
First, in order to give away what I can’t use myself, I need to be in constant relationship with many people. Weeding and throwing on the compost pile is the simplest way to say goodbye to too many lupines and kiss-me-over-the-garden-gate plants; it is tremendously more fun to give them to people who will love them! When someone I can’t remember ever talking to stops by and says, “We have been eating raspberries all week from the shoots you gave us,” it makes my day. It’s unlikely that a few people will want all I have to offer. I must diversify channels for the abundance to flow!
Second, it’s OK to change my garden, to simplify. The “tall garden” I loved turned out to block my neighbor’s view of the lake, so now I have a short garden I love, with the tall plants elsewhere in my yard, and the yards of others. The vine that promised beautiful flowers turned out to be so vigorous it scared me–dig that out and pass it on to someone who wants to cover an old barn!
And finally, the most beautiful flower becomes a weed if it’s growing someplace you don’t want it. Along with aphids, beetles, early frosts, flooding rains, and sudden frosts, I get to arbitrate life and death in the garden! I am the creator of this plant haven so I also am given the power to be the destroyer—to decide that vinca is, after all, not what I want, even though it is thriving in my yard, or that the fancy lilies simply get on my nerves with their showy blossoms; I prefer more humble snapdragons. For those of us who tend towards codependency and putting others before us, gardening is a great exercise in getting to put our own needs first!
There are hundreds more messages I receive from the plants on a regular basis; I will be sharing these as they arise. One of them is “To everything there is a season,” and today’s season is about sharing and relinquishing the abundance of life in order to treasure what is particularly yours to treasure.
Prayers for Those Who Love Soldiers
… who are in harm’s way
For the parents, who remember with longing when you could hold that child in diapers, sending out mothers’ or fathers’ intimate care,
