Body Grief

Can a body grieve?

Tomorrow was my due date for the baby we lost in May. I have felt a general sense of malaise the last few days, a sadness that lingers on the margins, making me irritable and quiet. But strangely my body has just plain hurt. From my eyeballs to the soles of my feet. My hands hurt, my teeth hurt, what I think might be my spleen hurts. So much so that Becca had to try to convince me this weekend that it probably wasn't liver failure or cancer.

I woke up this morning feeling like I'd been hit by a truck. It doesn't feel like sickness; it feels like brokenness, like protest, like groaning.

Is it possible that even the cells in my body know that things are not as they should be?

Somehow I am still tempted to cave to the accusation that to say that out loud, to say that things are not as they should be, to say that women should not be barren, that babies shouldn't die, that my body shouldn't know what it feels like to create life but not give birth to it, indicates a lack of faith.

There is so much good here. So many gifts here. There is so much God in this pain. In small ways, sometimes, I'm even grateful for all of this. Like Naaman seeking a cure for his skin condition from the prophet Elisha and receiving as well a cure for his heart condition, it seems clear that I am being healed from diseases far bigger, far deeper, far more insidious than infertility. And I am so grateful.

It feels like a betrayal of all the good to acknowledge that things are broken.

But my body is more honest than I.

I grieve not because I lack faith that this pain has meaning or that our story has a good end. My grief does not nullify or deny all the good here. I'm sure (nearly almost most of the time) that it is grace that has brought me right here - to this shaky, post-traumatic-y ache.

I grieve because things are not yet as they should be. Not yet as they will be.

This is my act of faith.

"In its peculiar way lamenting is an act of faith because it speaks to our understanding that things are not as they should be." - Enuma Okoro, Silence and Other Surprising Invitations of Advent

Thanksgiving

There are all these things in this season of my life - lessons, truths, insights, what have you - bits of broken glass, worn shiny and smooth by the relentlessness of grace and pain and breathing. I feel like I have pockets jangling with well-worn color, pieces to hold between my fingers while rubbing the uneven edges: the necessity of hope; the entanglement of joy and pain; the importance of gratitude for my soul's well-being and survival.

We set aside today for gratitude. And I wish there were something here today for someone else but I write because it's cheaper than therapy and my voice on the page annoys me less than the sound of it out loud and so, today, for me, I write my gratitude, this pouring out that fills.

It makes sense to start with whatever's closest and right now I'm warm, and full, and in the company of people who love me - against the odds - so I'll start here.

I'm thankful for Wes and Heather. I'm grateful for the day we first really met, them sitting at our dining room table, hours and hours going by while we caught ourselves in a hundred "oh you too?" moments, slowly and bravely telling our stories, finding in each other safety and community and church. I'm grateful that if I'm not sneaking baby Eli out of his carseat, someone is handing him to me, allowing this woman the gift of teaching someone to blow raspberries, of feeling the sweet limpness of a baby finally giving in to sleep while praying beggy prayers for grace and favor on his little life. I'm grateful for the way they have loved our friends, quick to take them as their own, and quick to offer their own friends for us to love. I'm grateful that we can choose our families and that I'm spending Thanksgiving this year with a part of mine.

I'm thankful that I'm learning these three terrible truths of my existence: that I am so ruined and so loved and in charge of so little (Anne Lamott). This is the kind of pain that heals.

I'm thankful for my family - these people who are still my training ground in forgiveness, and showing up for each other, and learning to share.

I'm thankful for a new understanding of "eshet chayil" from Proverbs 31 - that it's not necessarily about what we do, but how we do it - and the exquisite challenge to do what I do with courage and heart.

I'm thankful for my pit crew: Amanda, Beth, Sharon, Joan, Marcy, Mariah, Josh, Lisa, Micah, Cyndi, Corey, Anna, Janelle, Becky, Sandra, Katie, Amy, Jessika, Brooke, Jimmy, Becca, others even still. "What a great scam, to have gotten people of such extreme quality and loyalty to think you are stuck with them" (St. Anne again, of course). I am thankful for 3:33pm prayers, glasses of wine, life-saving sustenance via Facebook messages and homemade bread and the benefit of the doubt and sushi lunch. I am thankful for people who do not flinch at my words, who help me separate the true from the nonsense. I'm thankful for connections instant and deep and I'm thankful for slow, halting steps toward friendship. I'm thankful that I spent the very worst day of this year in bed with my best friend watching British soaps and eating gummy worms.

I'm thankful for cardigans from Target, for iced tea, for the homemade quilt Alissa made for my wedding.

I am thankful that I am finally learning to pray. I am thankful for this confession: "You and I both know what we are dealing with here" (Anne Lamott); for this honesty: "come as Your true self and contradict the world so full of unbearable deathliness" (Walter Brueggemann); for this awareness: "you can let the whole scenario be bathed in God's gentle, gracious light, and in that light even for a few stolen moments, you can behold" (Brian McLaren); for this consistency: "give us today our daily bread" (The Book of Common Prayer).

I am thankful that my unfaithfulness serves to render me speechless in the face of God's great faithfulness to me.

I am thankful that Todd Waggoner chose me nearly a decade ago and keeps choosing me every day. I know some days that choice is harder than we'd both like it to be - I'm thankful that most days it still seems like a no-brainer. I'm thankful that we are both equally certain that we got the better end of this deal. I am thankful that we still send flirty text messages to each other during church. And I'm thankful that I have never once felt afraid. God alone knows the enormity of that gift.

I am thankful for my grandmother's stuffing recipe and that my husband begs me to make it every year.

I'm thankful for the way this last miscarriage shook me out of my silence, making me so desperate to refuse the shame that I stripped down naked and paraded my bare, broken self around the Internet. I'm thankful for the sweet, freeing release of being denied the possibility of pretending that I have it together. I'm thankful for the light streaming in through the cracks in my heart and my sense of self-worth and my desperation to convince you of my competency. Oh my God, thank you. I'm so grateful that the light does get in.

I am thankful for the bread and the wine and that there is more than enough for this grace-beggar.

There is so much here and it's all a gift. And I am thankful.

Woman of Valor

I put the book down and cried. I had spent a delightful amount of a long weekend, cuddled up in my oversized yellow chair, wrapped in a quilt, devouring Rachel Held Evans' A Year of Biblical Womanhood. I read most of the book laughing or rushing to post quotes to Facebook, so I was a bit surprised by the tears leaking out as I finished it. I think they were tears of gratitude. I tweeted the author my thanks.

She gave me the gift of a new understanding of Proverbs 31. Entire women's ministries have been built around this one chapter of the Bible. It's a poem about a superwoman. She rises early and works through the night. She manages her home, runs several businesses, volunteers with charities, and is praised by her husband and children. She annoys me. Somehow she's become a standard for women, a measure by which we always fall short. And yet in modern Orthodox Judaism, it is men who memorize this chapter not women. They memorize it so they can sing it to their wives. It's not a standard by which women are to judge themselves. It's an anthem by which men are to praise their wives. The "wife of noble character" depicted here is more accurately translated "woman of valor" (eshet chayil in Hebrew). Valor - a military term, meaning boldness, courage, strength, intestinal fortitude, heart, backbone, moxie, guts.

I haven't felt like a woman of valor lately.

Though he didn't say the words exactly, I heard someone say to me, "you can't be intelligent on matters of faith and theology - you're a woman." And the persistent drumbeat in my head began: you are too much. Quiet down. 

In a moment this week that could have been a chance for graciousness and praise, I came face-to-face instead with the real contents of my heart: a lack of mercy and the ugly, rotting stench of unforgiveness. And the beat goes on: you are not enough. Not merciful enough. Not good enough. Not strong enough.

The depth of my desire for kids has been reduced to groaned prayers as eloquent as "babies. please babies."  And yet every month when the news that I'm not pregnant arrives, a piece of my heart exhales with relief. One more month to delay the consuming panic that accompanies every twinge and pang. One more month before another test of my faith and my stamina and my intestinal fortitude. One more month before I have to face the question: do I have what it takes? Am I enough this time? And then the guilt, oh, that ever and always present companion of women everywhere. Too much and not enough.

I am having trouble praying lately. Too antsy to sit still long enough. Too full to know where to begin. Too quick to assume that God is annoyed with me anyway. My sweet patron saint Anne put it like this on Facebook last week:

God isn't stalking around bitterly, muttering about how I've stepped away from the

heart cave where I can be with/feel/share with/hear from God. S/He isn't grousing, "Boy, I'm tired of that stupid narcissistic Annie Lamott. She makes me 

sick." I think He or She is thinking, "Poor Princess Tushy. Coming to be with me ONLY in between games of mental pinball: Amazon sales figures, candy corn, obsessively reading about Karl, Grover, and Peggy Noonan...." I think God gently rolls God's eyes, like I do when my grandson is fixated on a broken mini-transformer and how his life is ruined, and why he can't have gummy bears when he wants, plus why he SERIOUSLY will not take a nap, and is, as he says, "Soooo mod. I just sooo mod at you, Nana. No nap!"

That's me, I guess. Fixated on all the broken mini-transformers and certain my life is ruined when I probably just need a nap.

So what to do about it?

I'm having a sort of love affair with the Eucharist these days. Jonathan Martin tweeted a few weeks ago that while a time of worship and a sermon are good and have their place, it is the bread and the cup that compel us to come. It's the body broken and the blood poured out that transform. Communion has been a sweet time for me lately, usually a time for introspection and gratitude. This past Sunday, I couldn't muster the courage for introspection. I didn't feel a lot of gratitude. All I felt was desperation. So I stumbled fast out of my row, grabbed the elements, and just consumed. It didn't feel particularly holy. It may have been wrong. But it was honest-to-God desperation for what truly sustains and satisfies. If I thought it would have helped, I would have buried my face in the tray of crackers and poured the tiny cups of grape juice over my head.

And I stood in the shower yesterday. Home alone and desperate still. Not nearly serene enough for silent, contemplative prayers. So I just started talking. I'm not enough. I don't have what it takes. I'm too much. I don't have anything to give. Help me, help me, help me.

My phone chirped. I finally forced myself out of the stream of hot water, unsatisfied with the time of prayer, if you can even call it that. And on my phone, a response tweet from Rachel, the author of the book:

"Eshet Chayil!"

Woman of valor.

Neither too much nor not enough. Woman of valor.

What to do about it? Let's start with changing the drumbeats.

I am working to provide money for my family: woman of valor.

I chopped vegetables for a salad for my lunch today when I wanted to just go to bed: woman of valor.

I offered a friend an hour and a glass of wine when I didn't feel I had anything to give and left feeling like I had gained everything: woman of valor.

I spoke the truth a little too vehemently and shaking all the while, but I spoke it anyway: woman of valor.

I keep trying for a baby, daring to hope, risking my heart again: woman of valor.

I will keep praying when the sky feels like lead and I will keep desperately consuming the body and blood of my Savior because where else would I go: woman of valor.

Valor: boldness, courage, strength, intestinal fortitude, heart, backbone, moxie, guts. 

Eshet Chayil!

Major Baby Funk

I am in major baby funk today. Like my heart is ringing a bell and wearing a "Hope is for Sissies" sandwich board and marching up and down the street. Mocking me. Protesting all the hippie-dippie feel-good mumbo-jumbo I've been spewing forth in this space lately. On strike, walking the picket line, demanding more babies and less personal growth. I think it's Halloween - all the cute kids in costumes - and the remnants of the stomach flu and the domestic chaos two sick people can cause during two hurricane days stuck inside. Nothing permanent. Nothing irrevocable. Nothing disqualifying.

But when I feel this way - hopeless, sad, pathetic, and self-pitying - I smear salt into the wounds like some sort of deranged psychopath bent on torture and starting naming myself:

Failure.
Liar.
Hypocrite.
Wuss.
Unaccomplished.
Unworthy.
Not Enough.
Too Much.

I tell myself all my words of hope are thin and transparent, blowing away like all these leaves under my feet, fragile as cotton-ball spider webs decorating office hallways today.

Maybe this is hope: it takes less time before I realize I'm lying to myself again. I stop scrunching up my face to hold back the tears and I breathe in and out again and I find courage somewhere to stop the self-inflicted assault.

I've committed to walking through this pain, but it'll be honest pain, you bet your sweet self. None of that deceitful, name-calling bullshit. I confess truth. I'll stand up real tall and declare it with authority and conviction when I can, but I will speak it, even when my voice shakes. I am sad today, oh yes, but I am not failing. My emotions today are neither too much nor not enough. They are true and they are real, but they are not the most real or the most true. Hope doesn't feel true today. But it isn't any less so.

So I think I'll go home here soon and I'll open the door to little hands asking for candy and I'll make soup and I'll pick a few things up off the floor and I'll light a couple of candles and I'll wrap myself in something warm and cozy and I'll speak my real names, like confession, like prayer, like an incantation:

Brave.
Strong.
Beautiful.
Grateful.
Human.
Hopeful.
Beloved.
Enough.

You Don't Even Smell Like Smoke

It was a Wednesday in late September last year. I was newly pregnant again and it was still possible that the first lost pregnancy had just been a one-off genetic fluke. I had gone to sleep the night before with a worrisome pain and growing anxiety and had woken up to an increasingly clear confirmation that this pregnancy would not result in a baby either. I woke Todd up, made phone calls to the doctor and my office, took a shower. Todd eventually fell back asleep while we were waiting for our doctor's office to open and the panic wouldn't let me sit, made me want to crawl out of my skin, so I drove to Panera to bring us home breakfast, because that's what my people do when the sky is falling. We feed people, we bring casseroles, we eat jalapeno-cheddar bagels.

Back in the car, with the bagels and the decaf coffee, I started to pray. I expected to articulate the groans of my breaking heart with pleas for this baby's life, offering God various bargaining chips if only, but what came out of my mouth, my fists clenched around that steering wheel and hot, angry tears making the drive difficult:

I believe. I believe.

Eight months before, before the first pregnancy, before the floor of my expectations for my life had fallen out from under me, I didn't know if I believed. I was married to a pastor, I would have told you I believed, I would have told myself I believed most days. But the previous ten years had wrung my faith into tatters. I had seen people who professed to believe do horrible things. I was neck-deep in a graduate program about poverty and the faces of women trying to feed their children were wrecking me, surely more real than the God I mostly believed in. I was dragging around heaps of baggage, crammed full of well-intentioned but devastating teachings about God.

And it was in my car, driving home from Panera, on that Wednesday morning in September, losing again a life I was desperate for, that I realized something I never saw coming:  I believed. 

I have been haunted throughout this excrutiating struggle for babies by the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the book of Daniel. They are Jews in exile in Babylon and when the king declares that everyone must worship an image of gold, they refuse, despite the king's threats to burn them alive in a furnace. They respond like this to the king:

"If we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God we serve is able to deliver us from it, and he will deliver us from Your Majesty’s hand. But even if he does not, we want you to know, Your Majesty, that we will not serve your gods or worship the image of gold you have set up." (Daniel 3:17-18).

It's the but even if he does not that haunts me. It's one thing to believe that God can save us; it's quite another kind of faith entirely to believe even if he does not. That's the kind of belief that I knew that morning. It wasn't intellectual assent. It wasn't something I felt. I just knew in that moment, in my gut, in my bones, that I believed. That this was the Really Real.

After my third miscarriage in May, in the ridiculously illogical bargaining phase of grief, I told God often that I would walk through infertility as long as God was glorified. I begged God to make this pain purposeful, to draw us and anyone he'd allow deeper into this mystery that what is truest at the center of the universe is Love.

We, inhabitants of this broken planet, drowning in grief and tragedy and mess and stupid, people who want to rip the face off someone because they disagree about which of two Presidential candidates is better, when we see the glory of God, we have to speak it. We have to whisper it into someone's ear real close or shout it at passersby. Look, glory! 

So here, look, glory:

I was sitting outside the other day, drinking wine and seeking wisdom from a woman I love like crazy, and she said to me:  you don't even smell like smoke.

I had forgotten the rest of the story in my hang up about verse 18. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego are thrown into the furnance, where a fourth person "looking like a son of gods" joined them, and they are all just walking around in there. The king, freaking out, calls them to come out and when they do he saw "that the fire had not harmed their bodies, nor was a hear of their heads singed; their robes were not scorched, and there was no smell of smoke on them." (v. 27)

They didn't even smell like smoke. 

I have no idea what the end of our story is. I do not know if God will save us from any more fires. But I know this, I know this: He can bring us through so we don't even smell like smoke.

Look, glory!

Sunrise

We were offered a gift, a free weekend at a beach house, so we packed up some friends, a couple of coolers, that pile of books waiting to be read, and we headed off toward the sea.

Yesterday we decide we need to be there, on that beach, for the sunrise. I can barely sleep, I keep waking up, afraid I'll miss it, excited for the dawn. And I know this must be vacation, this eagerness for daylight, all my normal alarm clock-induced dread gone.

So Todd and I sit in the dark, wrapped in a blanket, our feet burrowed in the sand trying to keep warm. We watch the waves come in, constant and faithful, predicting which one will make it the farthest up the shore. As the sky lightens we read Walter Brueggemann prayers out loud and Hosea and talk about the hormonal God we serve and how to love God with our bodies, if toes in the sand can be an act of worship.

It's pretty light out now and this man I call mine, cold despite being huddled up next to me, says "alright, where is this sun?" I tell him I think it's already up, hidden behind the clouds on the horizon. It's beautiful, yes, and I've resigned myself, almost unconsciously, to this less-than-dazzlingly display, sure that the clouds and the haze are preventing something grander. I had hoped for glory, bright rays of pink and orange and yellow reflecting off the water, but I told myself this was good enough, I didn't want any more.

And then, a few minutes later, this:

A few more minutes go by and then this:

And I hear, clear as this day waking up right before my eyes: those who hope in me will not be disappointed. (Isaiah 49:23)

I have to get up. I want to dance. I run to the water, we play in the waves, holding tight to each other as the water races back to the sea. I literally want to break into a jig on this empty beach for the joy of it.

The heartsickness from hope deferred is miserable. I am unconvinced that there are sadder words in English than "I had hoped." But hope is not optional for me. I am called to hope. And I will choose to dance like a fool at the edge of the water with the joy that my ultimate hope will not be disappointed. I am so grateful that when I'm tempted to resign myself to a God who is just good enough, the sun leaps up from its hiding place below the horizon and I hear:

Oh honey, you have no idea.

Crying about Jesus in Dunkin Donuts

Todd and I walked to breakfast a few Saturday mornings ago. And I pause here to say again how fiercely I love living across the street from places to go. So we walked to Dunkin Donuts and not a cute little sidewalk cafe, but still. If I squint I can almost convince myself that I'm a hip city girl.

What is it about sticky tabletops, the chaos of screaming, powdered sugar-covered children, and all the suburbanites in Lycra bicycle shorts that inspires so much more intention in our conversation than if we'd eaten our bagels at the quiet of our own kitchen table? Whatever it is, Todd asks me to tell him about the best thing I'd read last week. And as is so often the case, I tell him about what Rachel wrote this week, as if she is someone we know or my BFF (because I'm certain if she knew me we would be, of course). So he gets out his iPhone and he starts to read it out loud. At first I'm distracted by the man on his knees trying to fix a wobbly table and the woman sitting with her husband and children who looks like she could never possibly have eaten a donut before, but then the words wash over me and I lean in close and when he's finished, even though I'd already read it twice, tears are streaming down my face.

He asks me why I'm crying and I say random, inconsequential things for a bit because I'm embarrassed and I don't really know and I'm afraid I won't be able to say it, I'll just sob it out like a crazy person. But I know he'll understand, or try to, so I finally blurt it out, sobbing of course, I just love Jesus. We laugh for a second at the absurdity, sitting in Dunkin Donuts, crying about how much I love Jesus. And then we talk while I cry some more.

I've heard stories of people reading the Gospels and falling in love with Jesus. And I've never really understood. The Jesus of the Gospels can be cagey, vague, infuriatingly unclear, answering questions with more questions, telling parables instead of just coming out and saying it. I suppose I've loved Jesus, because of my understanding of how, somehow, he died for me and saved me and now God and I are okay, but it seems to me now like I loved Jesus for what he did for me. Like you'd love a soldier who fought for you or a teacher who taught you something you needed to know.

But the Jesus Rachel described? I didn't know him before. The one who confided first in a sinful, outcast, foreign woman that, yes, I am the Messiah you've been waiting for, and was so satisfied by this truth-telling that he told his disciples he didn't even want lunch anymore. I picture him now, offering dignity to this woman who knew so much shame, telling her to drink up, he was what she needed and she'd never have to be thirsty again and then sitting back in the sun by that well, sighing deeply, full. 

The Jesus who chose to appear after his resurrection to his female followers, commissioning Mary Magdalene to go tell the others, entrusting the most important news in history to a person whose eyewitness testimony wouldn't hold up in the court of her day. 

This one who saved the woman caught in the act of adultery, exposed to a vengeful public right at the moment of her darkest deeds, her most intimate acts, her deepest, most shameful secrets, and he saved her life and then offered her mercy and not condemnation and saved her again.

This Jesus who inspired a woman to break open a bottle of expensive perfume, pour it on his feet, and wipe them with her hair. And then the men start to grumble and accuse her of wastefulness. I wonder if she paused, stricken by the idea that she may have done something wrong, feeling shamed for her impulsiveness and emotionality, wondering if Jesus was dissatisfied with her offering. But Jesus speaks in her defense, telling them that wherever the Gospel is preached, we will tell the story of her love for him.

Jesus who tells us he came for the poor, the captive, the blind, and the oppressed. Who identifies himself with "the least of these." Who reached out his hand and touched lepers, these disfigured men and women who had gone who in the world knows how long without the touch of another human being, placing compassion far above any concerns about religious cleanliness.

Maybe all this is another gift infertility and miscarriage have given me. My story is small, but I relate to the shame and the brokenness just a very little bit. I think I understand a fraction of the desperation that caused the woman who had been bleeding for 12 excruciatingly long and lonely years to fall on the ground and reach her fingers out to brush the hem of Jesus' robe, on a hope that he'd be willing to heal her, too. And I think I can imagine what it must have been like, not just to feel healing flood her body at that moment, but for Jesus to turn around, seek her out, and see her.

I keep saying I feel seen. It's more accurate to say that I'm convinced I'm seen, even when I don't feel like it. Because it's easy to doubt, when yet another friend posts their happy news on Facebook (no offense! I'm excited for y'all, really!). When I'm happily cuddling my friends' babies, it's easy to believe that no one sees the longing that feels like it'll split my heart wide open. But if Jesus came to show us what God is like, I believe in a way I never would have dreamed that not only am I seen in these moments, I'm saved in them, too.