When she writes and preaches

We technically live near each other. Why is it so hard to get together?

Both my spouse and I yearn to talk to adults unrelated to our work lives, but the best of intentions don’t seem to pan out often. Our daughters see friends even in the summer at tee-ball, vacation Bible school, swim lessons, and playgrounds. But when do my husband and I get to catch up with friends our own age, other than on social media? We need play dates, maybe more than our kids do!

We used to try to have friends over to dinner about once a month, with varying degrees of success. Everyone needs to eat, right? But between the time my husband gets home from work and the kids go to sleep, we have about an hour, give or take a bit on weeknights. Because of our house’s floor plan, we have to kick them out for the kids to go to sleep. Plus, if the friends have kids too, mealtimes can be fraught with challenges. With our 3-year-old, sometimes even staying at the table is a challenge. Then, there’s the theoretical obligation to clean. Even with making a commitment to “scruffy hospitality” though, it may take some effort to bring the house up to the standards of “it is OK that people live here.”

Since my spouse and I both bring work home with us and there are always dishes, laundry and yard work to be done, “down time” at home is never that. We often have to leave the premises to play.

So I am making a goal, writing it down and sharing it publicly with the hope that I’ll stick to it: We will have a family play date at a park or festival, at least once a month from May to September.

I coach myself, “Don’t argue, this is the easiest possible solution to our adult friendship isolation.” My motivational strategy includes the following:

• Finding a babysitter is irrelevant to making these plans.
• Festivals have specific days and times, so unlike a nebulous commitment to “get together sometime,” we have an actual time to put on the calendar. Some festivals we go to every year are part of how I curate our family memories. They will probably be even better with friends.
• Each family brings their own food to a picnic in the park, obviously. If one or the other family cannot show up for some reason, we are still somewhere fun (and I haven’t expended the effort of making a big dinner, ordering too much food, or even of finding a restaurant that meets all of our dietary requirements).
• It is an excuse to explore different parts of our city. I am highly motivated by ice cream, so if certain friends live near a park not that far from an ice cream shop, I am making it happen. Friends we hardly see because they live in a different part of the metro area will be part of a destination play date.
• There’s no excuse of a home or yard in utter disarray, for any of us to avoid making such a play date. Likewise, there’s no coordinating food preferences, and no dishes to wash afterward.

The payoff for a little planning is significant: conversation with adults reminds us that we are not just our jobs, even if that job is exclusively being a parent. That’s a payoff worth the effort!

“How did you two end up meeting? I can’t remember.”

My husband and I have been married for eleven years; I bet no one has asked me that in at least 5. For very good reason though: we’ve been parents for the past 5 years. While our two daughters are among the most wonderful parts of our marriage, they seem to have overtaken our outward identity as a couple (as a “family”) and even how we relate to one another most of the time. Becoming parents to each child was indeed an adventure that we braved together, but it was so little about “us” because it has to be all about the child for quite awhile in the beginning. So it was a genuinely surprising pleasure to visit the town where we were married, stay with a friend from that time of our lives, and (after the kids were asleep) to have her ask that question, “What’s the story of how you two got together, again?”

I had forgotten just a little bit the pace of our falling in love (not in my long-term memory, but you know, in my short-term memory and daily interactions). How we were such a good fit, and not only did we both know it so quickly, but others recognized it too. Our friend’s follow-up comments named that in ways we haven’t named to each other in awhile. “It sounds like you were really lucky to find the one person who…” she said. She’s right. But we haven’t thought about that luckiness lately.

There seems to be this horizonless middleness – maybe it is middle age? – where we aren’t peering into the exciting unknown with exhilaration, making the person whose hand we are gripping key to jumping off that cliff… because the present stretches on without much change in topography as far as the eye can see. The daily routine of taking care of and providing for kids (whom we love!) is part of the flat surface of the foreseeable future, but so is working without striving for a diploma or residency to complete.

Remembering who we were to each other at the beginning, prodded by someone who has had pretty limited experience of us in person since then, was just what we needed for one of these insignificant, non-milestone anniversary years. With a simple inquiry, she helped me to recover some gratefulness, and actual awe at what we have in each other.

This year, the hand-me-downs are downright thought-provoking.

Last fall they made me sentimental, because it was the first time my younger daughter fit into clothes that used to be her older sister’s, whom we adopted as a (tall) 2-year-old. Now as our pre-schooler tries on warm weather clothes from her older sister, it’s not just about misty-eyed remembrances for me. I’ve been “bridging” (read: filling in during a holding pattern) for a congregation that is awaiting a pastor re-developer. They are at that point in decline. The “hand-me-down” church they wished to pass on to the next generation does not fit, and in fact, even their direct descendents refuse to show up in it except for funerals.

Some of my daughter’s hand-me-downs have stains that have only come to light after years of being packed in boxes in the basement. Did I notice them when I first packed the clothes away? I can’t recall. Or maybe some of them, (like I learned baby spit-up stains can do) show up yellow after awhile of being out of laundry circulation, since they haven’t been in use for awhile. Church wounds can be like that too. Maybe we had no idea someone was still clinging onto something alienating a pastor or church member said to them years ago, but if it has been packed away and never dealt with, the stain may actually have taken hold deeper than it looked originally. And that’s why they are not here, but we will never know.

Also, my two daughters have bodies of different proportions and personalities. Our eldest grows out of the length of clothes long before anything becomes tight around the waist. For our youngest this is not the trajectory. Also, our first rarely has opinions about what she wants to wear or not, but our second throws over items if she struggles the slightest bit the first time she tries it on, or decides a half hour later it is intolerable and WILL NEVER BE WORN AGAIN. So I am glad they were hand-me-downs anyway. The same clothes look differently on them, or may be judged as “not right” for various and sundry reasons. Showing up for church dressed comfortably for yourself, with children behaving how they naturally behave, could lead to stares. Going to church to simply listen, when younger generations are accustomed to the pace and participation of social media, may seem to some like a waste of an hour or a silencing of their voices. They may not have a ready opinion until they try it on, but then feel like it just doesn’t fit them.

Most of our hand-me-downs are not precious. If they were mine as a child, saved by my mother, I don’t give them away. But the vast majority could be interchangeable with other clothing that fits within my parameters, whether it shows up in photos of my older daughter at this age or not. That’s the least sentimental way I feel about buildings or congregations with a long history. If there are congregations in a few mile radius or even closer to your home than this one, I acknowledge they are not the church of your long-standing memories, but they could become the congregation of your new ones. Memories are not a reason to keep setting out clothes no one will wear.

In a way, I am very much pro-hand-me-downs. It means less shopping (which I loathe) and less expense. It seems like good use of our resources, and the world’s resources, to reuse instead of buying new. But I don’t know that I feel the same about congregations. There may still be enough money and a building – resources that should indeed be used for good – but are the established culture, the tight-knit group that perceives belonging, and the history of that congregation ever going to fit a new generation? Is there a point of decline past which it is better to put the hand-me-downs out with the recycling instead of putting them on another child? I do that with clothes when I am too embarrassed to pass them on in the state they are in, to our friend’s daughter one year younger than my youngest. How do we determine that point for a congregation?

Parents have a great power: setting the agenda for their children’s future therapy. This may include, but is of course not limited to:

• What they did that hurt
• What they didn’t do, but we needed them to do
• What we still do because of what they did or didn’t do
• They didn’t understand my generation/situation
• Or did they understand but didn’t care or were powerless to affect the change I needed?

No surprise here, that these are some of the same questions we ask about God, whom we (with Jesus) think of as our Heavenly Parent. What if church is not a habit, or place we go because “that’s how we were raised,” but we are actually there for group therapy, of sorts? We can sort through together our perceptions of what our Parent has done/not done and how that affects us. Our lead therapist can call us out when we are being obtuse, and redirect in healthy directions. We might help each other realize that deeply complicated relationship is affected by many layers of interpretation (ours and others’) about perceived supportive or toxic divine parenting. We can grieve together what we don’t understand, or bewail that the precedent or guidance we have from Our Parent seems not to address the nuances of our generation. We may even delve into difficult theological questions such as: Is Our Divine Parent all-loving or all-powerful?

Even those raised in healthy, well-adjusted households need the ability to reflect on: What of who I am and how I act comes from my family of origin? How can I choose to keep or leave elements behind? So it needs to be said: There’s no shame in going to therapy, or in this case, church.

Some of what we need to talk out might be the damaging interpretations of churches or individual Christians in our past.
Your Divine Parent is angry angry angry!
You better not risk the wrath of your Parent!
God hates this, that, and the other. (But what if one of those categories describes me, yet I cannot be someone else?)

Churches could recognize part of our calling as helping those whose relationships with their Divine Parent or brother Jesus have been damaged by previous churches, bad theology in the media, the culture or from Great-Aunt Gertrude at a time of crisis. So we start a “Theology Pub” or coffeehouse, a way to have initial conversations without the atmosphere of that previously threatening situation. We can talk about spiritual damage and how to address it from the pulpit. We must be vehemently public about no tolerance for physical/sexual/emotional abuse associated with the church, but then more subtly, we need to be self-aware about when group faith talk reveals a need for the services of trained therapists for certain individuals.

But here’s the rub, and perhaps the reason we are hesitant to embrace the role of congregations in running group therapy for our relationship with God our Parent. It’s this word I learned in Psych 101: “transference.” For many of use who recognize our relationship with God as that of parent and child, the Church is in the middle of that relationship. To criticize God is to criticize the Church, and vice versa. Who seeks out their own negative feedback? Not us. What do you want to leave behind from that relationship? Ummm… can we even talk about that or will there be a mass exodus from the church? Most of our baggage with God is in fact baggage from “God’s people” acting or speaking while bearing God’s name. Churches won’t provide the therapy necessary for children of God to pursue healthy, healing relationships with God the Parent – unless we are ready to engage in confession ourselves. We must risk self-reflection when it could very well lead to begging for forgiveness. But if we don’t we’ll never get past the baggage in the doorway.

There are alternative therapies, of course, to unpacking our issues with God in a congregation. Asking deep questions with friends can be much more effective than half-listening to a sermon or responding to questions from a hat with near-strangers. Following a blog or twitter feed or reading books by people who have worked through similar issues could be therapeutic. But then we need to get our own thoughts and feelings down on paper or the keypad, and communicating on the internet is far less likely to be therapeutic than talking to someone trustworthy in person. I remember a professor of Bible saying about the different translations/versions: “Well, a Bible you are reading is better than one you’re not reading.” So I say, “faith talk therapy you’re participating in is better than one you’re not.” However we do it, we have to get past secondhand experiences to get to the core issues in our relationship with God our Parent:

• When do you feel closest to God, and why do you think that is?
• How open are you to other interpretations of how God acts?
• For what do you blame God, or yourself in your relationship?
• What are you going to do about it?

We all want to develop a healthy relationship with our Parent. Faith talk therapy could really help.

When we met our oldest daughter for the first time, we brought her a small stuffed bunny. We called him Krolik, because that’s the Polish word for rabbit. Adoption from a Hague Convention country such as Poland requires at least 2 visits: the first to meet and agree to adopt the child, the second to stay as a family through the bonding period, court proceedings and visa-approval. So we needed a surrogate for what ended up being 4 months between meeting and starting to love her, and actually being able to lovingly parent our daughter in person forever. We needed a part of ourselves to show her we would come back. Krolik did that for us.

As is my modus operandi I thought the book was the point. The adoption agency had suggested we bring a book to give her as a gift on the first trip, and I had bought one of those Hallmark books where you can record yourself reading the book, so that as she turned the pages she’d hear us. I bought the little bunny as an after-thought because it was sitting next to the “Guess How Much I Love You” book in the display. We don’t know how often our beloved daughter looked at the book we had left with her in that interim period, but when we returned she didn’t seem too interested in it. But the bunny – he was her constant companion.

And Krolik was hilarious! He jumped and flipped and kissed by nuzzling nose-to-nose. He was just the right size for her little hand to grab him by the neck, the perfect companion for exploration. It was understood by all of us that Krolik was an essential player in any action we might take – indoors, outdoors, awake or asleep. But he liked to tease us. Sometimes he’d rocket across the floor of a museum, as if to say, “Can you find the real masterpiece in this picture?” Sometimes we’d rush into a cab, only to look around checking for all the necessities, panic-stricken until we spotted him on the bench we’d been waiting on outside.

We only lost him once, and it wasn’t abroad. It was in the drug store closest to our home. When we arrived home without Krolik, my cheerful, compliant daughter refused to get out of the car. She couldn’t tell me why, but it didn’t take long for me to figure that out. Like the mom in “Knuffle Bunny” my first thought was, “Where’s the bunny?” We rushed back to the drug store and re-traced our steps. The employees had just changed shifts and hadn’t seen us earlier. As we turned to leave, there was Krolik sitting atop the checkout that wasn’t being used – too high for my daughter to have put him there – so somebody must have seen him on the floor, known he was much beloved, and raised him up for those who would surely return for him.

Many adoptive families celebrate a specific “family day” and some even call it “gotcha day.” For us, it was such a gradual process, and meeting our daughter was followed so quickly by leaving her again for months. Plus the court date was in the middle of our second, extended time in-country together, so we decided to observe the first day that we took over from our surrogate parent, Krolik, as our milestone. We call it The Feast of St. Krolik, or Krolik’s Day for short, and we go out for carrot cake.

Months after our first Krolik’s Day (1 year anniversary), when I became visibly pregnant, what we had been telling our daughter about having a baby in our family and becoming a big sister became real in a way that surprised my husband and I. And if we’re honest, also hurt a bit. She tossed Krolik aside – physically out of her bed – for a baby doll. On one level, we understood. She was adjusting and living into her new role as protective older sister. But Krolik wasn’t just a bunny; he had stood in for us. He was the physical personality that had communicated in our absence how much she was loved. And he made every day a rollicking adventure.

When Little Sister was about 9 months old there was a resurgence of favor for Krolik, mostly as a baby-tickler. Now he’s making another comeback, but to be very clear, now like every doll or stuffed animal in this house of two daughters, Krolik is most definitely a “She”. We love her so much and are amazed by her every day. And Krolik too.

It has been an adventure-filled 5 years.