Author Archives: Jendi Reiter

Giving Children the Gift of “No”

It’s been awhile since I shared a picture of His Supreme Cuteness, so I’ll introduce this parenting post with Shane modeling his summer haircut:

Today I want to talk about a strange trend among parents in our crunchy-progressive middle-class demographic (what we used to call Bobos in the 1990s): the belief that “No” is a dirty word.

“I never said no to my kids,” one acquaintance advised me, as her prescription for avoiding the “terrible twos”. Another friend noticed me gently steering the Young Master away from baby-unsafe objects (“Uh-oh, the table lamp is not a toy”), and favorably contrasted that method to her other friends who don’t feel comfortable declaring any property off-limits to a toddler.

This meme is widespread enough that it was satirized last year on my favorite sitcom, “Modern Family“. Cameron and Mitchell are a gay couple raising their adopted daughter, Lily, who has become a spoiled little princess. Claire, Mitchell’s sister, is a well-meaning control freak, i.e. just like me. From ABC’s website: “Claire wants to discipline Lily for repeatedly flicking the light switches on and off in her house. Cameron says they are trying an approach where they don’t say ‘no’ to their child. This leads to an argument about parenting methods. Claire believes her point will be made once Lily flips the garbage disposal switch while Cam has his hand caught down the drain. She has a big laugh once Lily makes her move, as it’s only a light switch that’s flipped.”

I could cite various child-development studies about how kids need structure and limits to learn good behavior, but I think Claire has the disciplinary angle covered. Instead, let’s consider another danger of No-phobia: stunting your child’s ability to protect his own boundaries.

When adults are afraid to say “No”, they are modeling unsafe behavior for their child. They are implicitly teaching him that “No” is a weapon that inflicts permanent damage on the hearer, and that a good person will avoid causing that kind of pain, whatever precious things of their own they have to sacrifice in the process. That’s a recipe for codependence.

Whether they say the word or not, parents have physical veto power over the child and he knows it. Thus, going to great lengths to avoid the appearance of authority only turns an honest conflict into a dishonest one. The child learns it’s not okay to express negative feelings about something that affects him, because the parents aren’t okay with their own feelings. They’re modeling a passive-aggressive way of working around an interpersonal problem.

Children need to be able to signal “No” from an early age in order to feel safe in their bodies, whether it’s by squirming away from an uncomfortable touch or pushing aside food that doesn’t agree with them. Our job as parents is to use our “No” power judiciously, saving it for the most important house rules, and allowing as much flexibility as possible for the child’s safe exploration and mastery of his environment.

What are the “terrible twos” but the child’s experimentation with his own “No”? He’s looking to us to teach him how to set limits skillfully. (“If you don’t want the beef bourguignon, darling, please push it to the side of your tray instead of throwing it on the floor.”)

So bring it on, Bunky. Just let me encase all the furniture in bubble wrap first…

Imitation of Christ, or Substitute Savior?


“Jesus died for your sins” was the best news imaginable when I was taking my first steps out of an abusive family.

As is common for a traumatic enmeshment like ours, my bio mother and I were both under the delusion of being each other’s savior. She thought I was the meaning of her life, her greatest accomplishment, her sole fulfillment. This adulation carried a high price, however. When she was overwhelmed by her own unprocessed sadness and anger, she believed that I, the center of her psychic world, must have caused those feelings. I must not have been loving, respectful, or obedient enough.

It’s natural enough that I would grow up believing her myth about me, as parents are their children’s first gods. But the same dynamic develops between two adults in an abusive-codependent marriage, too. The abusive partner knows how to leaven her dominance with enough displays of helpless neediness that her spouse feels duty-bound to stay.

Abusers attract white knights the way Sleeping Beauty’s briar hedge attracted princes–99% of whom got skewered, don’t forget. What a power trip to be the rescuer, the only one who’s able to heal the broken beloved. I say this not to victim-blame but to illuminate an escape route that many enablers either can’t imagine or don’t feel they deserve: just consider, for a moment, basing your self-worth on something other than this relationship.

So what does this have to do with the Atonement? Well, to me, “Jesus died for your sins” meant that my fundamental okay-ness as a human being, my right to exist, no longer depended on being perfect in another person’s eyes. Jesus, who outranked even my mother, had already decided that I was lovable as an imperfect person. I was actually more free to repent of particular errors because I no longer had to be ashamed of the general truth that I was fallible.

Moreover, “Jesus died for your sins”, as addressed to my mother and the world at large, meant that I didn’t have to die for their sins anymore. The burden of their okay-ness was something I could now hand off to God.

It’s this second point that I want to explore further in this post, as there’s great confusion about it in Christian literature. I’m concerned that we aren’t taught to distinguish between imitating Christ and substituting for him.

Imitation of Christ seems pretty straightforward when it comes to the Matthew 25 checklist of social justice. Heal the sick, feed the hungry, visit the prisoners, stand with the marginalized. We can reasonably disagree about how best to do this, but not whether to do it. Most of the time, this should be enough to keep us disciples busy.

The tricky part comes when we consider imitating other concepts we associate with Christ. Forgiveness. Redemption. Sacrifice. This is where we need to be much more careful that we are not usurping the Savior’s unique functions and thereby minimizing or enabling abuses of power.

This dilemma is especially acute for Christian fiction writers. Indeed, it’s one of the chief difficulties I need to sort out before I can resume writing the Great American Gay Christian Abuse Survivor Novel, a/k/a Two Natures.

What makes a novel “Christian”? Doesn’t it have to include, at a minimum, some characters modeling Christ-like behavior and enacting Christian values? But then don’t we run a terrible risk of mistaking the sign for the thing signified, and telling a story where one person functions as another’s savior in a co-dependent, idolatrous, and misleading way? On the other hand, when we tell the story through a Calvinist lens of total depravity, all the characters become too helpless and self-loathing to propel the plot to a resolution. (Trust me, I’ve tried this.)

The genre of mainstream realist fiction adds its own constraints. It takes place in a naturalistic universe, a narrative space where supernatural interventions are excluded, like the scientist’s laboratory. Generally, these constraints strengthen the work. It’s lazy writing to have an angel drop in and solve all your characters’ problems. Miraculous revelations are also less useful to the reader seeking guidance, since those are rare gifts in real life. Most of the time we have to look for the divine sparks in regular human behavior, something that the best fiction can teach us to do. However, realist fiction doesn’t have an obvious way to depict that God exists in any dimension except in other people. This heightens the danger that the story will encourage us to mistake Christians for Christ.

Two of my latest fiction reads exemplify the worst and the best approaches to illustrating redemption in the realist genre.

The first and worst is Jason F. Wright’s NY Times bestseller The Wednesday Letters, an inspirational soap-opera novel about family secrets. (Basically the same genre as Jodi Picoult, only written by a conservative Christian guy.) Spoiler alert: the drama revolves around a woman who bore her rapist’s baby, kept this a secret from her children (including the aforesaid baby) and the community, and forgave the perpetrator, who turned his life around in prison and became a family friend and trusted pastor. When the secret comes out after her death, the only thing her adult children can talk about is what a saint she was to forgive the rapist, and how we are all obligated to forgive him because Jesus did. And look how much good he did as a pastor afterward! Oh, the power of forgiveness. Tra la la.

I’m picking on this book because it’s far from exceptional. I hear this same invalidating narrative about abuse and sexual assault from many religious people. It’s basically a perpetrator-centered story, using the victim as a foil for his personal growth. The amount of trauma awareness here is negative zero. We’re supposed to be so moved by his transformation that no one asks questions like: Did keeping the rape secret, in order to give the perpetrator a fresh start, make the mother feel ashamed and impede her healing? How could it not harm her relationship with her children? Was it really a responsible choice to not tell her small-town community that their new pastor is a convicted rapist? How can she be 100% sure that he’s not going to re-offend?

I’m not saying abusers never repent, or that they should never be forgiven when they do. I’m saying that saving their souls is not the victim’s job. The perpetrator’s redemption is a matter between himself and Christ. Whatever happens there, he will never be entitled to his victim’s trust, continued contact, or complicity in his secrets.

The Wednesday Letters is bad theology because it puts a Christian stamp of approval on the co-dependent idolatry that characterizes an abusive relationship. It drafts an unwilling and powerless person into the role of suffering servant that Christ took on voluntarily from a position of supreme power.

The title story of Catholic fiction writer Arthur Powers’s splendid new collection, A Hero for the People: Stories of the Brazilian Backlands, offers a far more compelling picture of human cooperation with Christ’s redemptive work. These tales spring from Powers’s work with the Peace Corps, helping subsistence farmers and rural workers resist being forced off their land by wealthy speculators in league with a corrupt government. (A scenario similar to the classic Western movie “Shane“.)

In this story, a humble, slightly nebbish-y, but dedicated monk is reassigned to a remote mission outpost which the diocese plans to close as soon as its ancient priest dies. Brother Michel starts listening to the locals’ tales of oppression and takes up their cause despite threats against his life. But all the while, he daydreams and prays for a hero who would ride into town and rout the overwhelming forces arrayed against them, like Shane the gunslinger. Their nonviolent resistance staves off the land seizure for another day, but there’s no Hollywood ending. Brother Michel knows he can only give it his utmost while turning the outcome over to God. Still, he prays for a hero, while the reader sees the sweet irony that the monk is the answer to his own prayer, a title that he would never dare claim for himself.

What makes Brother Michel’s imitation of Christ genuine and beneficial to the reader? Two things. Number one, it leaves room for God’s further action. The monk can’t fix the problem all by himself. He may not be able to fix it at all, but with God’s help, he’s brave enough to do his part. Number two, he isn’t consciously playing the role of savior, an ego trip that tempts a person to make himself the center of someone else’s story. “A Hero for the People” is not a set-up to show what a great person Brother Michel becomes. It’s about how he makes himself available in a Christ-like way to the oppressed, not about how he transforms the oppressors’ hearts, although that possibility is left open as well.

Unlike the rape in The Wednesday Letters, the exploitation of the poor is the central Christian concern of “A Hero for the People”. We are invited, perhaps commanded, to help the Brother Michels of the world combat this evil, rather than congratulate ourselves for forgiving it.

For more on the Christian fiction writer’s dilemmas, see my 2008 post, “Who Cares for the Reader’s Soul?“

Abuse and the Limits of the Welcoming Church


They dress the wound of my people
  as though it were not serious.
“Peace, peace,” they say,
  when there is no peace.
(Jeremiah 6:14)

Projection and denial are two ways we avoid a clear view of evil. In the progressive church, we perceive, perhaps too vividly, how our fundamentalist counterparts project their shadow selves onto out-groups such as women, gays, and nonbelievers. We understand that this purity obsession can shield abusers in the community by offering an easy mechanism to discredit the victim. In a congregation taught to see women as sexual temptresses, for example, a molested young girl can be pressured to repent for “leading” the man to sin.

However, progressives’ overcompensation in the direction of peace and unity can be just as toxic for survivors. Overreacting against fundamentalist divisiveness, our churches minimize genuine distinctions of culpability and power within the community we are creating. If inclusion is our only defining value, where is the conversation about accountability and transformation?

Shortly after a terrorist bombing dominated our national news, I heard a liberal sermon that
encouraged us to turn our fears over to God’s protection, rather than
pushing them outward to demonize all Muslims. Good message, surely. But
then the preacher went on to say something like “All enemies can become friends.”

I’m sorry but NO. As the military saying goes, “The enemy gets a vote.” My good intentions cannot magically dissuade someone from trying to kill me. This sounds exactly like the myth that enmeshes domestic violence victims: “If I love him enough, if I’m good enough, if I’m spiritual and enlightened enough, he’ll change.”

Perhaps the concept of a friend has become degraded in the Facebook age, but perpetuating the same confusion from the pulpit can have dangerous consequences. There are a lot of abuse survivors in the pews who aren’t clear about their right to refuse intimacy with someone they don’t trust.

Similarly, in our zeal to create a big-tent church for people with diverse beliefs, are we making it socially impossible for members to distance themselves from, or skillfully confront, fellow members whose beliefs they find oppressive? I can make civilized small talk with Christians who believe homosexuality is a sin, as long as they stay off the topic. But don’t pressure me to be friends with them, because friendship in my book requires mutual trust and respect, and I don’t trust someone who votes to strip my family of our civil rights. And please stop trying to convince me how “nice” they are. It’s easy to be nice when you hold all the cards.

Progressive churches can fall prey to the same (deliberate?) naivete one encounters among free-speech absolutists. Any time someone dares to suggest that unmoderated rape threats in online political forums, or Facebook fan pages for wife-beating, might be driving women out of the conversation, a horde of liberals will cry “censorship!” But silencing can be covert as well as overt. The sad fact is that not all people can safely coexist, no matter how inclusive you’d like your community to be.

Too often, the victim who refuses to sit down at the peace table with the unrepentant oppressor is blamed for putting up obstacles to unity. In fact, the blame lies with the other person who demands to belong to the community while subverting its norms and preying on its members. In a powerful recent post about why she no longer attends church, feminist Christian writer and rape survivor Sarah Moon says:

How radical and Jesus-like does that sound? Abusers and survivors, sitting at the same table. Sharing the same bread and wine. The lion lying down next to the lamb.

Sure. That sounds great. Excuse me while I go have a panic attack or two.

I don’t know how to respond to this trend anymore. When I express discomfort about calling a rapist my “brother in Christ,” people accuse me of being a bitter, grace-hating person. When I say that I can’t get over the hurt my abuser caused me, people tell me to get over my “perpetual victimhood.” When I ask for a safe space, people tell me I’m acting just like the exclusionary fundamentalists, and that I need to learn that Christianity isn’t about being uncomfortable.

There’s no grace for me, as I try to work through all the festering hate toward my rapist that I don’t know what the hell to do with. There’s no grace as I try to figure out whether I ever want to forgive a man who hurts me more each day even though we haven’t spoken in six years. Maybe they’re right and I am the bitter, hateful person they think I am, but what about all this talk of grace?

Is progressive Christianity spending so much grace on abusers, in order to show the world how “radical” and “subversive” they are, that they have only scraps left for survivors?

I share Sarah’s reservations about the fetishization of “discomfort” and “being radical”. Underneath the veneer of martyrdom, it’s a self-aggrandizing focus that makes religion about how much pain you can take, not how much justice you can create.

Toranse, an ex-evangelical incest survivor who blogs at Speaking While the World Sleeps, has some choice words about this brand of radicalism. She points out that there’s nothing more mainstream than a no-strings-attached welcome for predators:

How fucking easy. There is nothing particularly “radical” about “extending grace.” “The world” does it all the time. If there ever were a time when Christians (from fundie to progressive to emergent) were dressing in “the world’s” street clothes, it’d definitely be when they’re falling over themselves to welcome an abuser or rapist back to church. How fucking easy to pretend it away. As a survivor, I know how much nicer it seems to just say you forgive. No conflict. Less hardship, it feels. Fewer “radical love” Christians poking their fingers in your wounds. If there ever was a fucking wide, wide, wide road, if ever there was something so fucking opposite of a “narrow way,” it’s this.

Let me say, I love my local church. I don’t know of anything unsafe going on in our community. I just feel very alone sometimes in liberal Christianity, because niceness trumps clear thinking and speaking about sin.

My Poem “Robot Deer Shot 1,000 Times” at New Millennium Writings


I was privileged this spring to receive publication in New Millennium Writings, one of my favorite literary journals. My poem “Robot Deer Shot 1,000 Times” won an honorable mention in their Winter 2011-12 contest. The winners of the shared first prize included my dear friend Ellen LaFleche. Read more poetry from the current issue here. (“Robot Deer” is on page 146 of the issue, page 28 of the PDF.) The current contest, with prizes of $1,000 for poetry, fiction, flash fiction, and essays, is open through June 17; this deadline is typically extended to July 31.

This poem was inspired by one of those “News of the Weird” wire stories about a mechanical deer that cops deployed to trap poachers. The hunter’s backstory, however, simply emerged on its own as soon as I put pencil to page. You never know what your imaginary friends will tell you over a few drinks.

Robot Deer Shot 1,000 Times

Some buckshot-toting boys can’t resist
that hat-rack head lofting into view
in the sweep of the pickup’s dusty headlights,
a come-on like the barmaid’s at the Blue Note
when she slaps your hand but you know she means maybe
by how her tail switches away.
It’s poaching to shoot from the road
at night, one of those rules
on the same page as don’t drink with a married woman
or drive a locked van to Mexico,
even if your brother asks.
Maybe the barmaid can tell a pro tattoo
from the tic-tac-cross your cellie carved with a pen filler.
But you believe the buck is real
and that its brown eyes, glassy
with trust, are the worn-down night’s gift to you,
even when you shoot and shoot but it won’t fall,
clicking its proud head slowly round
like the barmaid’s heels when she glides
her tray of foaming mugs over to the college boys.
Then the Staties roll up with their toy-car lights
joking Bambi sure can take a beating,
and cuffed on the hood you’re forced into a close-up
of the felted frame, pocked with pellets,
and it looks like your brother’s skin after the last radiation.
Tomorrow you’ll be more of a fool
at the Blue Note than you were today,
not because of the deer but the white envelopes
the cops found stuffed in your glove compartment
with poems inked on them, that some joker will shout out
during a lull in the jukebox,
and you’ll think the barmaid, brown eyes soft, is listening.

The Underside of the Tapestry: Reading Christian Books for What’s Missing


Nowadays, more often than not, when I listen to a sermon or read a Christian spiritual guide with friends, a moment will arise when my inner reaction to the text seems contrary to what everyone else is getting out of it. They’re seeing an inspiring picture on the right side of the tapestry, while I’m underneath looking at the loose threads and snarled knots. Like the optical illusion that’s either a vase or two kissing faces, one can at best switch back and forth between these two views, not hold them side by side. Or so I tell myself, those times when I keep my critique under wraps, not wanting to be the death’s-head at the feast who spoils the faith that others need for comfort.

I don’t know that I have less faith that my neighbors in the pews, just faith in different things, and perhaps too little patience with beliefs and attitudes that (in my opinion) distract from our most urgent afflictions and their best cures. Astute readers of this blog will remember that I’ve always been this way, but also notice that my priorities list has been more changeable than my fervor. This awkward mutability gives me another reason to think twice before challenging the group’s consensus.

As far as is consistent with kindness and timeliness, of course, I nonetheless believe every serious engagement with a spiritual text should eventually include the deconstructionist questions, “What is the power position of the author and his/her assumed audience?” and “What perspectives are being left out?”

Advocates of traditional, conservative education (and such a one was I!) have confused deconstructionism with moral relativism. Quite the contrary. The questions above are attempts to bring a consciousness of justice into how we read a text, to take responsibility for our standpoint and our blind spots.

True, in the prideful and competitive culture of academia, these questions have been deployed in bad faith, to dismiss intellectual rivals by labeling them “oppressors”, exactly as their conservative Christian counterparts would exploit the label “heretics”. But the inquiry into power dynamics and incompleteness need not be a bug hunt. It should simply be a nonjudgmental acknowledgment that no text is completely satisfying because the ideal community is always more diverse than one perspective can encompass. This acknowledgment would clarify that members who enter the discussion from an unrepresented standpoint are welcome contributors, not spoilers.

For instance, I belong to a weekly discussion group that’s currently studying the Examen, a daily prayer practice developed by St. Ignatius of Loyola. One of our members, a retired priest, observed that this practice was developed by monastics who had the privilege of contemplation because their daily subsistence needs were met by the community. We have a similar luxury of prayer time as middle-class Americans, if we choose to use it that way, of course. He wondered whether the Examen would be possible or relevant for a desperately poor person such as those he had served in his past congregation–someone whose entire attention was taken up with keeping her kids fed and her house from collapsing.

I found this question uncomfortable in a good way. It added another layer to the repentance and gratitude themes of the Examen by reminding me that my experience was not the center of the universe. It opened the door to other fruitful questions: Is contemplative prayer at the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, worth considering only after basic physical security is established? Or is it necessary at every level of survival, so that (as the Buddha would say) we don’t add to our suffering by becoming entangled in fear, anger, and greed? If the latter, how would the Examen best be adapted to be useful and validating to someone living on the margins? To take that question seriously, we would have to work harder to include such people in our discussion group, instead of making guesses about their spiritual needs from our standpoint.

For further reading on these themes, I recommend:
James K.A. Smith, Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church (Baker Academic, 2006)
John D. Caputo, What Would Jesus Deconstruct? (Baker Academic, 2007)
Crystal L. Downing, How Postmodernism Serves (My) Faith: Questioning Truth in Language, Philosophy, and Art (IVP Academic, 2006)

Poetry from Inside: “Of Father, From Prison”

My prison pen pal “Jon“, who is serving a life sentence in California for a burglary-related homicide, continues his efforts to grow in self-awareness and spiritual maturity through writing. I thought this recent poem was one of his finest, expressing compassion for his child-self alongside remorse for the flawed path he took as an adult. It’s a simple but deep story that I imagine many troubled young men will recognize as their own.

Of Father, From Prison

I used to smile in wonder
at the barb of the fish hook
and however you managed to get worms
so delicately placed and pierced.
Then even when you showed me how
I still couldn’t do it on my own
and sometimes couldn’t bear to look.

I used to sit and wander
as the landscapes became cities
with people beneath the lights of day.
Drifting by in gusts of winds
of mountaintops and Mayberrys
and cow filled fields and stars.
Watching from the passenger seat
while you drove your precious truck
and I waited for my turn
that had finally never come.

I used to be amazed
at all the grand and well told stories
of the life you really never led.
I realized I never even knew you
when I noticed they were lies.
You were gentle, very quiet
always private and reclusive.
You could fix anything inanimate
yet never repair the troubled minds
of yourself or those around you.
And I can think of all the places
you would take me as I grew.
Leaving us with memories
of decaying and joyless days,
of worms, fish hooks and barbs.
And I would be amazed
if you ever came to know
how very much alike
we’ve finally become.

I do not wander in wonders anymore
but sometimes think of who you are.
You living in your solitude
and me stuck within my own.
Where computers are your company,
while books become my best of friends.
Your prison is in a house
and mine within a cell.
Inside the worlds of our own making,
trapped within our mortal shells.

Poetry by William J. Reiter: “Jimi & a hundred & one blue airborne rangers”


I recently got an email from Bill Reiter of Iowa, a poet, Vietnam veteran, and National Endowment for the Arts grant recipient for playwriting. We haven’t been able to confirm whether we’re related, but all Reiters are welcome at the Block. He kindly shares this poem with our readers.

jimi & a hundred & one blue airborne rangers
(the summer of love 1967)

it was a hall
an old movie house really
in the city of saint francis
near the ocean called peace

a grace slick-like chick
was jumpin’ in blue white strobe lights
amorphous light shows pulsating walls
all just a prologue to hendrix

he came out at last
a ‘fro imitation of a black ragdoll
escaped from some absurd beckett cast
surely a tragedy or farce was about to unfold
in the silver screen-less seat-less theater
above a stoned blue clowning crowd

he struck left-handed
upside down strings
a bell-bottomed blue heron
with piercing dark eyes
heavy with one guitar wing

he looked down at us
as if into san francisco’s blue bay
from coit’s tower
as if to jump from another hughes burly bird

i pushed to the front to hear
his voice soft wings
on the wind cries mary
gliding around us
around the statue of saint francis
in the city of saint francis
near the ocean called peace
like a cable car hushing up telegraph hill

i wanted to know about over there
and he played alarums purple haze
murderous intent in hey joe
pain of rejection star spangled banner
with its true blue taps near the end

jimi left the stage that night
prophesying his own end
which came eventually street easy
a barbiturate permanent sleep

he was right-on however about over there
and as he knew coming back was worse

Mother’s Day: Honoring Our Complicated Families

Who is like the Lord our God, the one who sits enthroned on high?…He settles the childless woman in her home as a happy mother of children. (Psalm 113:5, 9)

Mother’s Day has always been a difficult holiday for me. Unlike Christmas or Thanksgiving, there’s no larger goal to take the focus off one’s personal life and the ways it conforms or fails to conform to a Hallmark card.

Because of her trauma issues, my biological mother never felt sufficiently loved or special. On Mother’s Day, she was especially disappointed and confused by the contrast between how she was supposed to feel and how she actually felt. No matter what we did, it wasn’t enough. Now that she and my other mom are apart, her ex-partner has had space to grow into the mother I need, no longer forced into the shadows. But it’s been a long time coming.

Many infertile and waiting adoptive moms can relate to the loneliness of those years when Mother’s Day came around again and we still didn’t have our child. We belonged to an unseen minority who couldn’t help but recognize the complexity of this thing we call “motherhood”, so oversimplified by the sentimental mainstream. Birthmothers, too, may wonder what this day should mean to them. There are no words for loss in the language of this holiday, just pink flowers and brunch and cards that say “you’re the bestest”.

Last year, on my first Mother’s Day as a mom, I was depressed, and ashamed of it. I loved my one-month-old son. I was so proud to sit in the “parents with small children” pew in church for the first time ever. But the pain of our adoption journey hadn’t healed. I felt pressured by the rhetoric of motherhood to pretend that everything was hearts-and-flowers, that this moment made all the past betrayals worthwhile.

It didn’t help that it coincided with the date when our birthmother’s consent became irrevocable. Now it’s REAL. Help me, mommy! I called her up to give her good wishes and support. Her confidence in me, her comfort with her decision, made me believe I really deserved to celebrate, at last.

Just as I push back against aggressive projections of masculinity onto my 13-month-old (I swear, he comes by that cowboy swagger naturally), I continue to deconstruct the false choices inherent in popular ideas of motherhood. Adulthood and sacrifice versus immaturity and freedom. Being ridiculed for hypervigilance yet blamed for anything that goes wrong with one’s child. Mothering, as opposed to generic “parenting”, is by definition a female activity. And we all know what fun it is to be female in our society. Maybe that’s one reason I was so afraid of it.

Therefore, mothering, for me, is also an invitation to lean into the political responsibility that goes along with adulthood. This passage from the “Motherhood and Daughterhood” chapter of Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born spoke to me during those early days of transformation into Shane’s Mom:

The “unchilded” woman, if such a term makes any sense, is still affected by centuries-long attitudes–on the part of both women and men–towards the birthing, child-rearing function of women. Any woman who believes that the institution of motherhood has nothing to do with her is closing her eyes to crucial aspects of her situation.

Many of the great mothers have not been biological. The novel Jane Eyre…can be read as a woman-pilgrim’s progres along a path of classic female temptation, in which the motherless Jane time after time finds women who protect, solace, teach, challenge, and nurture her in self-respect. For centuries, daughters have beem strengthened and energized by nonbiological mothers, who have combined a care for the practical values of survival with an incitement toward further horizons, a compassion for vulnerability with an insistence on our buried strengths. It is precisely this that has allowed us to survive…

We are, none of us, “either” mothers or daughters; to our amazement, confusion, and greater complexity, we are both. Women, mothers or not, who feel committed to other women, are increasingly giving each other a quality of caring filled with the diffuse kinds of identification that exist between actual mothers and daughters. Into the mere notion of “mothering” we may carry, as daughters, negative echoes of our own mothers’ martyrdom, the burden of their valiant, necessarily limited efforts on our behalf, the confusion of their double messages. But it is a timidity of the imagination which urges that we can be “daughters”–therefore free spirits–rather than “mothers”–defined as eternal givers. Mothering and nonmothering have been such charged concepts for us, precisely because whichever we did has been turned against us.

To accept and integrate and strengthen both the mother and the daughter in ourselves is no easy matter, because patriarchal attitudes have encouraged us to split, to polarize, these images, and to project all unwanted guilt, anger, shame, power, freedom, onto the “other” woman. But any radical vision of sisterhood demands that we reintegrate them. (pgs. 252-53)

 

My little pea pod and me in April 2012.

My Poem “The Name-Stone” at Utmost Christian Writers

My poem “The Name-Stone” just received an Honorable Mention in this year’s contest for Christian poets at Utmost Christian Writers. This Canadian website has been very supportive of my work over the years. Read all the winners here. (Some are still in the process of being posted as of today, April 18. Check again in a few days if you don’t see a link to the one you want.)

The poem was inspired by a discussion in my church’s adult education group about a verse from the Book of Revelation: “To the one who is victorious, I will give some of the hidden manna. I will also give that person a white stone with a new name written on it, known only to the one who receives it.” One of our members, a retired Anglican priest, said this could refer to the ancient Near Eastern practice of friends making a keepsake at parting. They would write their names on a stone or lump of clay and break it in half, each one retaining a piece that uniquely fit the other.

The Name-Stone

(Revelation 2:17)

I will give you a stone
with a secret under it.

As children in the Galilee
wrote friendship’s names on both ends
of such a shard, and broke it
and went away, each to his own desert.

Dirt-born,
nothing to give one another
but a ragged edge
that, fit
to its companion, meant love.

Where do the gouged letters lie,
in temple midden or the royal road’s thorns?
What hands crushed the clay?

I will give you a piece
of unmarked earth.

Not the name
your mother pressed onto your lips
to seal the scroll of her sorrows.

Not the name
your father spilled
like an ox-dragged harrow,
a plow with no sower.

They only know the name
that decoy, death,
reared above the spot
where you left this ground.

Granite praises granite,
butchers weep
over the marble lamb,
speak both parts
of the absolving script.

But I will give you a riven rock
to drink from its flood heart,
the rock I broke myself
to fit you.

A Faith That Makes Space for Mourning

Just this morning in church I was thinking about the Middle Ages, how their artwork was full of death, real death with grinning skulls and rotting flesh, and how this is considered the era in Western history when Christian belief was most alive and all-pervasive. How many of us who walked through the door this morning literally believe the words on the banner over our heads: “Christ is Risen”? Do I believe it? And by “literally” I mean “in a way that robs death of its power”. For me that also means “historically true”. For you it may not. But either way, that’s the job that “Christ is Risen” has to do.

I’m reading this absorbing, brilliant, painful novel called Swimming, by Nicola Keegan, which I found through this excerpt in Narrative Magazine. It’s about an Olympic gold medalist swimmer whose competitive drive is fundamentally an escape from her oppressive consciousness of death, triggered by family losses in her childhood and her mother’s subsequent spiral into housebound depression. Replace swimming with academic achievement and you have my life story. As I near the book’s end, I keep wondering why the heroine is proceeding down the very modern track of turning to therapy rather than religion when talent fails her and she has to face her long-buried feelings. Unlike my largely secular childhood, this fictional girl was immersed in Midwestern Catholic-school culture and has great respect and affection for the nuns who mentored her. Yet that framework proves powerless to help her or her family surmount their despair when confronted with mortality. Why?

Maybe it’s because modern Christianity doesn’t depict death enough. The church doesn’t spend enough time on the shadow side, allowing sorrow and pain to have their say, not prematurely silenced by happy endings. (If I ran the world, I’d have a second Lent halfway through Pentecost. Do we really need 29 weeks of ordinary time, people?) Those who are still angry and grieving may feel that the only way to validate their feelings is to reject the faith.

Later today I found some of these sentiments echoed in Robert Gross’s paranormal gay romance story “Dark Lapis“, published in the online journal Wilde Oats. Reiter’s Block readers may recall his poem “Poor Souls” reprinted here last month. The plague that passes through his fictional Renaissance city is reminiscent of the AIDS crisis of the 1980s-1990s, and the younger generation’s tendency to dismiss it as old history even though new infection rates remain high. It also reminded me of post-9/11 New York City and the shallow slogans (“Fight back! Go shopping!”) that were supposed to return a stricken populace to business as usual.

From “Dark Lapis”:

…The city was returning to its weddings and babies, lawsuits and public executions, and the anomalies were generally spoken of with a sigh, a shake of the head, a pious reference to the long-term costs of the pestilence, and an abrupt change of topic. But Magnus was drawn to anomalies. Though he would not admit it to anyone, he distrusted the return of the city to normalcy just as much as he was horrified by the return of spring. He preferred the fog, the darkness, the lapis lazuli ring on his finger. The incised griffin turned inward toward his palm, caressed with a thumb.

The cruel fact was Magnus missed the pestilence. He could scarcely contemplate the immensity of this truth to himself, nor could he communicate it to others. To think of it was like holding a hot poker to your flesh, but there it was-the truth-and it rarely left him. Not that he was anything like the mad monks who raved on the street corners at the height of the pestilence, relishing how the Scourge of God had smitten the sinners. Not that he wished another human soul a moment’s suffering. But he was not yet willing to put it out of his mind as the others seemed to have done, and he walked at night searching for proof that it had not yet lapsed completely into forgetfulness.

The city had marshaled its efforts behind recovery; religion had become reasonable, gentle, and omnipresent. Services were watercolor washes of music and flowers, and the ministers wore white as if they were officiating at weddings. The goal, their flock had been admonished, had been to persevere and in time forget the bad memories and continue with only the good. As if, Magnus thought, the horror were the flesh, the final memory the skeleton, and time were decomposition. He found this offensive. How could he ever forget the worst that had happened? The boils. The vomiting. Fever and ravings. The remedies as violent as the pestilence, which never worked for long if at all. Later he found it loathsome. What good was memory that was so skittish and indulgent, so afraid of pain that it locked the door and boarded it over?

Those days had been a light so unspeakably brilliant you could neither open your eyes to it nor close your eyes tightly enough to keep it out. Even with your eyes shut you were blinded by it. It was so intense that only in retrospect could you take in its excruciating vibrancy. The change, the loss, the revelation; the multiple obliterations of them, of everything. The vividness of one minute corner of existence until it threatened to set you and the whole universe ablaze or tear you open like a knife ripping through canvas. And now nothing had that. Not even the spring blossoms could match it.
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