Category Archives: parenting

Shout their voicelessness

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Children are notoriously voiceless, which is why Lindy West’s crusade to “shout your abortion” is so very tone deaf.

In this country and in many countries all over the world, women of childbearing age may have the right to kill their own small daughters and sons, but once that procedure has resulted in the death of a child, it no longer belongs to the mother to shout.

Mother–see how ironic that sounds.

We have to shout for…

…the voiceless girls

Who have lost their lives, their right to shout

For daughters

For sons

Forever missing

Their voices.

Uncomfortable Sermons

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I wonder, perhaps more often than I should, what would happen if we actually expected church sermons to be practical, actionable, real?

I wonder this because in the last 10 years I have worn my proverbial mendicant’s shirt to communities of faith, as has my whole family, only to find that the churchy probably don’t want us there.

They don’t want us because we talk about horrible things–rape, sexual assault, the abuse of children, sexual exploitation, the way the justice system fails victims, the way branded communities fail.

Not all at once, mind you.

But the truth remains so. If you tell a story about faith-minded adopting family neck-deep in ministry and family and community and then those people, especially their young children, are hurt, terribly hurt, by the people they were supposed to consider family.

Well, that is not a good sermon.

It is, however, very similar to many stories in the Bible, which is where I have gone for my uncomfortable sermons.

Where do you find yours? Where do you go to find the way through

The darkest, hardest places?

Miscellaneous Offenses

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A new ordinance has been signed into law in New Braunfels, TX. Please be aware that it is soon to be an illegal “offense” to feed the wildlife on public and private land within the city limits.

That means that a sentence that has been both true (and legal) for my children and for me will not be true for my grandchildren–

When I was little I fed the deer at Landa Park.

I have a very distinct memory of my son holding out a graham cracker to one of the deer at the park.

There was a period of time when we went to the park–a park, every day to feed someone–duck, chicken, deer, squirrel, turtle, fish, goose…each animal encounter was a priceless chance to sustain my children’s empathy. They practiced compassion, mercy, self-sacrifice, even science, and the scientific method as they spent time observing and feeding animals.

When we went to feed the animals we also tended to feed the children. We bought food from dozens of local restaurants and groceries. We ate our picnic, hiked, fed the animals. This ordinance prohibiting the feeding of animals in New Braunfels will mean we will buy less food from all these places. We will spend less time and money in New Braunfels.

We will not feed the children at the parks of New Braunfels, if we cannot feed the animals as well. It will be too painful remembering what used to be, for one, but then there is the pesky inviolate injunction of the law. What if we were to drop a cracker or a pizza crust? According to the city ordnance we would be breaking the law.

So, somehow, our city government and elected officials have decided. We should not feed the animals they say. And that leaves me deeply grieved, because I know, my children know, that

What they are really telling us is:

Don’t feed the children!

Because as Jesus has said more eloquently than I could–food is more than food, it is everything that feeds our souls.

And this kind of rich food for the soul of kindness and community and blessing is now thoroughly illegal

In New Braunfels, Texas.

Luke 12:23 NIV

[23] For life is more than food, and the body more than clothes.

Broken Alabaster

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The Calhoun County Courthouse is a mausoleal mid-century modernist confection, the juvenile detention courtroom then a windowless (Chinese) box on its second floor.

Perhaps I am biased. I remember envying the parents whose kid had gone on a wild joyride and the various parents of pot sellers and users.

I remember thinking the local Baptist pastor who was there for jury duty was a harbinger of God as I spilled out

The terrible story of why I was there.

Which had to be after the judge used the shade of our old oak tree for his big white truck. After his lawyer son stood across the street, bemused as Mary, on the roof, hurled her salty invectives at me.

After the juvenile probation chief told us they would not hold Charles forever and I thought to myself as I looked at him, (what do you have to do in the state of Texas to get yourself thrown in prison?!)

They say there is a library somewhere, an Ivy League kind of library, which has thin panels of white stone from floor to ceiling.

The light diffused through the thin white stone, perhaps to show-off or to shield the books.

I have searched for it for years, can’t find it

So much like a pearl, mother-of-pearl, an alabaster jar

Full of the most unmistakably broken

Perfume.

Darkest Secret

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The smallish courtroom in the smallish building in the smallish town near the coast. I used to say the armpit of Texas and that is when I liked the place where the d.a. joked in juvenile court about the time his underlings ribbed him for his inadvertently possessed marijuana plant

I

I carry around the iterations of the Baptist pastor, the university president, the camp cook, the college preacher, the old friend, missionary doctor, adoptive cohort, biological aunts, uncles, cousins

Immediate family

With fear in their eyes because I

I

Told the story

About everything except the day they adjudicated Charles

My subjunctive regret

Had I been present in the smallish courtroom in the smallish building with the smallish judge

Would they still have been able to

Lie for him?

Let him off so Scott-free

Smallish voice says over and over

I should have been there.

That day.

Return of the bad mom

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I tell myself to find her, in the old kitchen where she did so many dishes by hand. It had yellowish linoleum, dark wood, and doors which lead out to the front room and dining room. We sit at the ugly white table with the thin plasticky band of gold around its edge.

I run my finger along its long-gone edges as we drink something warm together.

I tell her she is beautiful, she has always been beautiful, even in those years she could not see it. I tell her I admire her courage and willingness to to be the bad mom. I tell her I have learned from her mistakes.

She would tell me something, surely, what is it?

In a house so full of sturm and drang, I want to hear her voice over the din of the little ones

So long gone.