The Pedagogy of Conflict by Padraig O'Toama

This poem has remained in my mind ever since I first heard it. That repetition of one life, one life, one life. Five times, like five fingers on a hand. Each time is the first time.

I imagine this when we hear about a school shooting. The Sandy Hook School shooting. Twenty-eight killed. One life, one life, one life, one life...28 times. Like the tolling of a bell.

https://onbeing.org/poetry/the-pedagogy-of-conflict/

III
When I was a child,
I learnt to count to five
one, two, three, four, five.
But these days, I’ve been counting lives, so I count

one life
one life
one life
one life
one life

because each time
is the first time
that that life
has been taken.

Legitimate Target
has sixteen letters
and one
long
abominable
space
between
two
dehumanising
words.

The entire poem is here.

https://poets.org/poem/pedagogy-conflict

I

When I was a child,

I learnt to lie.

When I was a child

my parents said that sometimes,

lives are protected

by an undetected

light lie of

deception

When I was a child,

I learnt to lie.

Now, I am more than twenty five

and I’m alive

because I’ve lied

and I am lying still.

Sometimes,

it’s the only way of living.

II

When I was a child

I learnt that I could stay alive

by obeying certain

rules:

let your anger cool before you

blossom bruises on your brother’s shoulder;

always show your manners at the table;

always keep the rules and never question;

never mention certain things to certain people;

never doubt the reasons behind

legitimate aggression;

if you compromise or humanise

you must still even out the score;

and never open up the door.

Never open up the door.

Never, never, never open up the blasted door.

When I was a child,

I learnt that I could stay alive

by obeying certain rules.

Never open up the door.

III

When I was a child,

I learnt to count to five

one, two, three, four, five.

but these days, I’ve been counting lives, so I count

one life

one life

one life

one life

one life

because each time

is the first time

that that life

has been taken.

Legitimate Target

has sixteen letters

and one

long

abominable

space

between

two

dehumanising

words.

“The Pedagogy of Conflict” Originally published in Sorry for your Troubles (Canterbury Press, 2013). Copyright © 2013 by Pádraig Ó Tuama. Reprinted with the permission of the poet.

Jesus is real - you can see him.

"The fact that the church is the body of Christ means that he becomes visible and real in the world today." -- Eberhard Arnold*

Interesting that we often hear people say they can't believe in Christ because they can't see him. They can (should?) see him in us. Jesus is visible and real because we are him.




* From the Daily Dig newsletter by Plough

Eberhard Arnold

The living Word once took on flesh in Mary’s son. The eternal, living Word – Christ – now takes on a new body in the church. Therefore the apostle Paul said that a mystery was entrusted to him, which he calls the body of Christ (Col. 1:24-26). The fact that the church is the body of Christ means that he becomes visible and real in the world today.

Just as Christ was in Mary, so Christ wants to live in us who believe and love. If Christ is real in us then we will live in accordance with and reflect the character of God’s future. The future kingdom receives form in the church.

For this reason the church must represent now God’s peace and justice in our world. This is why it cannot shed blood or tolerate private property. This is why the church cannot lie or take an oath. This is why it cannot tolerate the destruction of bridal purity and of faithfulness in the marriage of husband and wife. This is why the church expends all its life and energy to make room for God to bring everything under his rule.

"Little Women" and the Marmee Problem

What an interesting perspective on Marmee from Little Women.

"Little Women" and the Marmee Problem

by Sarah Blackwood

The house is busy, happy, trimmed for the holidays. Laura Dern trips through the warm domestic chaos and trills over her shoulder, “Just call me Mother, or Marmee. Everyone does!” She’s introducing herself to Laurie (Timothée Chalamet), but also to us, the audience for Greta Gerwig’s new adaptation of “Little Women.” The setting is cozy, the women dressed in to-die-for knits and linens (the socks alone!), and the introduction is not inaccurate. In the novel,the elder Margaret March does generally go by Marmee, just as Abigail May Alcott, Louisa’s mother, did. These are well-loved, and excellently loving, women. Yet, Marmee? The word occasions a shudder. It’s sentimental, sexless, without drive. It’s sticky and cloying. The tagline for the new film is “Own your story.” Can a Marmee do that?

Marmee rarely figures in the most pleasurable contemporary discussions or interpretations of “Little Women.” She’s not usually featured in the personality quizzes. There’s no essay devoted to her in “March Sisters,” the wonderful recent essay collection about the novel. It has only been relatively recently that the real-life Marmee’s sharp wit and insight have received sustained critical attention at all (namely in Eve LaPlante’s groundbreaking work on Abigail Alcott’s journals and letters). Yet Marmee is central to the story that Louisa May Alcott wanted to tell. “Little Women” is about four sisters trying to make the leap from girlhood to womanhood. The plot is theirs. But the ending, Alcott was clear, is Marmee’s, because her girls, each in her own way, both love and despise what’s waiting for them at the end. The prospect of becoming a Marmee, “Little Women” tells us, is simultaneously an aspiration and a threat. Marmee is at once far more interesting than many readers may recognize and also a major narrative problem.

Gerwig has said that she found inspiration in Marmee’s shocking confession of anger to Jo. “I am angry nearly every day of my life,” she declares, after Jo has almost let her sister Amy drown in an icy pond. Gerwig’s is only the second adaptation ever to commit the incredible line to film (the first was Vanessa Caswill’s BBC version, from 2017). And the new film’s main innovation—its deconstructed chronology—is well-suited to reveal what Marmee and the girls might be angry about. When Gerwig cuts directly from Beth’s funeral to Meg’s wedding day (in the novel, these events do not occur in this order), the film makes a very broad point: marriage is a kind of death. The point is humorously underscored in smaller moments, too, in multiple scenes of sharp-witted middle-aged women barely suffering their foolish husbands. Laura Dern’s Marmee responds archly to various idiocies offered by her husband (the brilliantly cast Bob Odenkirk). But the satisfactions of archness are short-lived, and I left the movie feeling like Marmee got short shrift once again.

What’s missing is what the novel takes pains to reveal: a subtle account of the damages that Marmee has accrued across a lifetime of becoming and being a Marmee. In the novel, but not in Gerwig’s film, Marmee clarifies why her anger might come as a surprise to her daughters: “I’ve learned to check the hasty words that rise to my lips, and when I feel that they mean to break out against my will, I just go away for a minute, and give myself a little shake for being so weak and wicked.” The scene is not just about the expression, or existence, of righteous anger; it’s about the depressing processes through which mothers suppress that anger.

Once you tune into this wavelength, you can’t unhear it. Take, for example, the famous scene in which Jo returns home after selling her hair for money. The sisters are, as usual, center stage, clucking and exclaiming over Jo’s violation of her “one beauty.” But when the narration turns to Marmee, it marks for readers the extent to which we—like the girls—are not invited in to whatever is really going on inside of her: “Mrs. March folded the wavy chestnut lock, and laid it away with a short grey one in her desk. She only said, ‘Thank you, deary,’ but something in her face made the girls change the subject.”

What did it feel like for Marmee to hold that hair in her hands? Did Jo’s youth and bravery remind Marmee of her own, now distant? How proud she must have felt, but also how failed: unable to change a world in which her daughters were forced to sell themselves in exchange for a modicum of power. Marmee, it is clear here, probably most hours of most days, wanted to ball up her fists and scream.

Marmee’s drama takes shape in a sort of narrative negative space: unspoken, skimmed over. But it is there, even if it’s hard to learn how to notice. Compared to the soft, knowing wryness of the contemporary Marmees (Susan Sarandon, Emily Watson, Laura Dern), or the prim, angelic ones of the mid-twentieth-century adaptations, Alcott’s representation of maternal anger feels like a miracle of insight. It comes out of nowhere and seeps in everywhere. Marmee is central but unknowable, cherished yet easy to ignore. She can’t be figured out because her experience of subjectivity does not dovetail with what the social world expects or wants from her, and she knows it.

Our culture’s sentimental attachment to stories of young women about to bloom is strong. Jo’s anger—at her own powerlessness, at her culture’s obsession with marriage, at others’ assumptions about what shape her life should take—is legible; Marmee’s is not. A subtext of “Little Women” is that the explosive potential of these four girls is not, and will not be, realized; this is why Marmee belongs at the heart of the story. Gerwig’s adaptation is too committed to the idea of Jo as a transformative feminist hero to plumb these depths. The story that Gerwig’s film wants us to own—the story that so many redemptive, individualist readings of the novel push us toward—is the one where there are survivors, singular women who somehow escape. I don’t think this was the story Alcott was telling.

“I am almost suffocated in this atmosphere of restriction and form,” Abigail May Alcott wrote in her journal in 1842. Her husband, Bronson Alcott, was home in Concord after a more than six-month trip to England. He had left Abigail alone with four girls under the age of twelve, in deep debt, and with no income. She struggled. Yet things did not get better when he returned with two friends, Charles Lane and Henry Wright, in tow. The three men were in the early days of planning what would come to be the nominally egalitarian, vegetarian commune Fruitlands, but their condescension toward women was keenly felt by Abigail. She describes how they silenced her inside her own home: “I seem frowned down into stiff quiet and peace-less order.”

It’s possible that Louisa’s most feminist act was not only the invention of the indelible Jo but rather the insistence that Marmee’s anger—both expressed and suppressed—should be a central part of this story about creativity, love, home, and world-making. When she was seventeen, Louisa wrote in her journal about finding a note from Abigail: “[Her letters] always encourage me; and I wish someone would write as helpfully to her, for she needs cheering up with all the care she has. I often think what a hard life she has had since she married—so full of wandering and all sorts of worry!”

Louisa never did become a Marmee. She was not wrong that writing and Marmee-dom were at difficult odds in the eighteen-sixties and seventies, and she’d spent a lifetime painfully observing her own mother’s struggle with anger, misrecognition, and powerlessness, in her marriage and in motherhood. Louisa made her choice, and I’ve always cheered her radical vision of womanly independence. Still, her novel remains as good a reminder as any that one of the central problems of human life—motherhood—is, has been, and always will be a creative wellspring, not only a story to overcome or leave behind. It makes me angry that this fact is still so hard to see.

Sarah Blackwood is an associate professor of English at Pace University. Her book “The Portrait’s Subject: Inventing Inner Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States” is forthcoming.

A Primer - a poem about Michigan

A Primer

By Bob Hicok

I remember Michigan fondly as the place I go
to be in Michigan. The right hand of America
waving from maps or the left
pressing into clay a mold to take home
from kindergarten to Mother. I lived in Michigan
forty-three years. The state bird
is a chained factory gate. The state flower
is Lake Superior, which sounds egotistical
though it is merely cold and deep as truth.
A Midwesterner can use the word “truth,”
can sincerely use the word “sincere.”
In truth the Midwest is not mid or west.
When I go back to Michigan I drive through Ohio.
There is off I-75 in Ohio a mosque, so life
goes corn corn corn mosque, I wave at Islam,
which we’re not getting along with
on account of the Towers as I pass.
Then Ohio goes corn corn corn
billboard, goodbye, Islam. You never forget
how to be from Michigan when you’re from Michigan.
It’s like riding a bike of ice and fly fishing.
The Upper Peninsula is a spare state
in case Michigan goes flat. I live now
in Virginia, which has no backup plan
but is named the same as my mother,
I live in my mother again, which is creepy
but so is what the skin under my chin is doing,
suddenly there’s a pouch like marsupials
are needed. The state joy is spring.
“Osiris, we beseech thee, rise and give us baseball”
is how we might sound were we Egyptian in April,
when February hasn’t ended. February
is thirteen months long in Michigan.
We are a people who by February
want to kill the sky for being so gray
and angry at us. “What did we do?”
is the state motto. There’s a day in May
when we’re all tumblers, gymnastics
is everywhere, and daffodils are asked
by young men to be their wives. When a man elopes
with a daffodil, you know where he’s from.
In this way I have given you a primer.
Let us all be from somewhere.
Let us tell each other everything we can.

Published in the print edition of the May 19, 2008, issue.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/05/19/a-primer?reload=true

A scientist who loves and welcomes faith!

This is so good. No science VS. faith. Science AND faith. Look especially at the last paragraph -- the last question. "Often paradoxes are our best approach to understanding the universe. Consider your two eyes — they let you see three dimensions. You don’t say: “My two eyes contradict each other, so I can’t believe either.”

I believe in a deeper reality than the laws of physics that we know now."

Breakthrough Prize winner Aron Wall on faith and science

by Lisa M. Krieger

Prize winner conducts research at the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics – and prays at Cupertino’s New Life Church

Mountain View’s Aron Wall lives and breathes science, pondering fundamental insights about quantum field theory and gravity that have earned him this year’s prestigious Breakthrough New Horizons in Physics Prize, to be awarded in a red-carpet ceremony at NASA Ames on Sunday.

But the 34-year-old believes just as fervently in divine intervention, which saved him from traditional education — where he had been forced to repeat algebra and was uninspired by geometry, while his heart sang with Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity.

“I was in trouble. It felt like a very gloomy tunnel, with no way out. I needed someone to step in and rescue me,” said Wall, a devout Christian who worships at New Life Church in Cupertino, part of the the Church of the Nazarene. “It was providence. God acted through Middle College,” a Foothill College program in Los Altos Hills where he flourished emotionally and intellectually.

The son of Gloria and Larry Wall, who created the Perl programming language, Wall went on to write an award-winning PhD dissertation about black holes and the 2nd law of thermodynamics and study at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J.  He is now conducting research at the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics and will head to England’s University of Cambridge in the spring.

He explains physics and theology in his personal blog: Undivided Looking.

OK, what do theoretical physicists actually do?

It means I think for a living, talk to people about it and then write it down. The cartoons show the physicists wearing lab coats – but as I theorist, I don’t do experiments.  We think about some area of physics and do calculations or computer simulations. I often take a theory we already believe, then prove something that is true about it.

As a child, what attracted you to physics?

I liked the orderliness of it. There was a sense of a pattern — a pattern that people are working to understand, and it is not fully understood yet. All these particles have different masses and nobody really knows why.

My family would go to the Mountain View Public Library about once a month, and I would check out books from the children’s section upstairs. One day, I checked out a book about physics to take home. The chapters of the book were about things like “force,” “pressure” and “energy,” which seemed boring to me then. But near the very end, it said that scientists had recently discovered that subatomic particles, such as protons and neutrons, are made out of even smaller particles called quarks. That surprised me because I’d never heard it before.

From then on, I would always check out some physics books, like Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. I would make charts of all the known elementary particles and try to figure out what other ones there might be to fill out the pattern.

School proved challenging. What happened?

I learned algebra in the fourth grade from a cute book called “Algebra the Easy Way,” and by the time Crittenden Middle School put me in an Algebra I class in the 7th grade, I was already on the verge of teaching myself calculus.

The algebra teacher made me repeat the class again in the eighth grade — even though she knew I knew everything — because I never turned in any homework. 

By the ninth grade, I was stuck in Honors Geometry, but thinking about Einstein’s theory of General Relativity instead. If I had stayed at Los Altos High School, they actually would have dropped me down from Honors Geometry to the non-Honors Trig/Math Analysis course due to getting a “C+”  — partly due to not turning in homework, and partly due to not remembering all their silly rules for how to write proofs.

How did you get out?

A high school counselor recommended to me the Middle College program, which takes students who have difficulties with the normal high school program and has them take community college classes at Foothill College instead. They only take juniors and seniors, so I had to skip my sophomore year to get in.

When I was doing the orientation for Foothill, they gave a math test and I got the highest score. So they placed me into calculus, immediately. My most inspirational Foothill College teachers were Christopher DiLeonardo, in geology, and Robert Hartwell, in music appreciation.

Psalm 107 was particularly meaningful to me during this time. It is all about people suffering from various kinds of hardships. The Lord saves them from their distress.

College must have been even better.

I went to St. John’s College in Santa Fe, which is a weird Great Books college that teaches all subjects using primary sources and discussion classes.

I knew I wanted to be a physicist, but I was attracted to the idea of a school where I would learn about everything else too.

Any favorite books?

Plato’s Dialogues with Socrates. A lot of people don’t realize how accessible Plato is. It’s really just a bunch of guys having a conversation

I also enjoyed discussing the Bible with other students who weren’t necessarily religious, since they were seeing it with fresh eyes.

Why did you choose the University of Maryland for your PhD, rather than some big-name school?

I chose it because I wanted to work on quantum gravity — but was skeptical about the truth of string theory because it has no direct experimental evidence. Most of the famous universities are very string theory oriented

(Physicist Jacob) Bekenstein and Hawking had conjectured that black holes obey the 2nd law of thermodynamics, which is about irreversible one-way processes in nature. My PhD dissertation research proved that their conjecture is correct — and was later awarded the Bergmann-Wheeler Thesis Prize.

Faith is a big part of your life. How can a physicist believe in something that is so deeply mysterious, and not testable through direct evidence?

Everybody has a way of looking at the world. A computer programmer looks at everyday life situations and thinks: Algorithms!

As a physicist, I’m trained to look at ideas and say: Approximations!

All of our theories about what is true…They are valid in certain patches, but we don’t know the whole. There are so many examples where a theory works well and then breaks down in one way or another. In science, we have to have something that works well to understand the world we’re in. But for something outside the physical universe, like God, the theories fall flat on their face.

I think the evidence for Christ comes in the form of historical data, like the miracles Jesus did and his resurrection. And also our personal spiritual experiences. These are different types of evidence than what we measure in science.

Often paradoxes are our best approach to understanding the universe. Consider your two eyes — they let you see three dimensions. You don’t say: “My two eyes contradict each other, so I can’t believe either.”

I believe in a deeper reality than the laws of physics that we know now.

Gleeful and serious violence

Is this awesome or what? Look at their sweet, angelic faces -- and then read how they played! As a mom, I was always pretty terrified of rough play, but you can hear the love of the memory in this telling.

Life and Death in the Forest

by Josh deLacy | Dec 14, 2018 

I suppose I shouldn’t have expected to find the old trails. We had our work cut out for us even then, when we were diligent about it. Proving up that territory took time, grit, and a hulking, battle-scarred maul with a wicked hook at the end, perfect for tearing the guts out of stickerbushes and orcs alike. I never Christened that instrument of destruction, at least not well enough to remember now, but I can still feel its nubs and cracks and splinters beneath my palms. That beast of a stick refused to yield a comfortable grip, and I refused to want one.

Somehow I re-discovered the maul every spring when it got warm and dry enough to venture to the othersideofthefence. Ben and I would tear through half a dozen rotten sticks in the first few days—soggy explosions of bark and moss and bugs that did nothing to beat back the hordes of plants that had invaded our forts. We’d lose skirmishes again and again until I found the maul half-buried under last year’s leaves, abandoned in a mess of once-conquered, now-thriving stickerbushes. I’d unearth its sun-bleached hilt, raise the muddy hook high, and like Aragorn and Andúril, or Luke and his lightsaber, or Link and the Master Sword, we’d change the tide.

Ben took the opposite approach and used whippers. He’d pinch a cedar bough just below the thick place where it met a larger branch, and he’d bend the bough until the bark split and the red-white core looked as tight as a rubber band. Cedar boughs are almost a sort of pre-wood, springy and flexible, more plant-y than tree-y, but a good one would split down the middle, and Ben would twist it around and around as the fibers spread and snapped one by one until the whole thing dangled like a broken arm. Then thirty-pound Ben would tug on the bough until the last fibers snapped, strip away the offshoots, and go to war.

Whippers cut through ferns like butter, while the maul, for all its heft and intimidation, could only bludgeon ferns to the ground and watch them rise right back up like a flock of demonic phoenix. Nettles crumpled under any stick, same as the swampy alien plants by the pond. But the real enemies were stickerbushes. The green ones broke easily enough if you had a decent weapon, and their thorns were too soft to plunge deep if one snagged you. Not so the old ones. The old stickerbushes had hardened into skeleton armies with thorns as tough and piercing as blasterfire. The old stickerbushes ruled the deepest parts of the othersideofthefence, so naturally, we carved our base out of the heart of their lair. I can still hear that the maul crashing into them. Sometimes they were stormtroopers. Sometimes Moria goblins. They moonlighted as battle droids after Episode I came out, and every now and then they were just stickerbushes. Deadly, evil stickerbushes.

I wore shorts exclusively for most of elementary school, dang the torpedoes, and my shins showed the cost of my conquest. Red lines ran knee to ankle, peppered here and there with tiny globes of blood. I sported bruises, too, these ones inflicted by Ben and Calvin and other friends.  We kept an arsenal of swords, shields, staves, and axes in my closet, weapons I had forged from PVC pipe, foam insulation, and duct tape. One hit to the torso killed you dead. Three hits to the same limb chopped it off. Head shots were off-limits by parental decree, but if they happened on accident you better recover quick before Calvin jabbed you in the belly with a two-handed sword.

No weapon inspired more fear than the ball and chain: a bag of rocks wrapped in an old bathrobe, stuffed into a beanie, and tied to an old jumprope. You could swing that rock bag with enough force that your opponent cared more about not getting hit than about winning or losing the match. That, and the time I miscalculated and overshot Ben’s chest in such a way that the ball and chain wrapped once around his neck, cinched itself tight, and smashed into his face. I panicked and pulled back, which jerked Ben straight to the ground like a horizontal hanging.

Mom and Dad never found out and Ben survived, and our fingers survived, too. After the first few swollen knuckles, I duct taped bits of padding onto ten pairs of cotton gloves I bought from the dollar store. Every Friday our friends would glove up, pick weapons and teams, and one side would get thirty seconds to run through the trails and take up defensive positions around the base. We’d fight among the ferns and stickerbushes until the battle spilled out to the yard and driveway and creek gully. The best areas were atop the rounds of wood waiting to be split, where we’d hop between platforms like Jedi; or on the curved cedar trees with exposed roots you could run along like Legolas; or in the passage between the fence and the compost pile, where a team’s single surviving warrior could force enemies to approach one at a time, at least until someone ran around to the other end of the passage, which left the stalwart defender no choice but to jump the fence and scramble into the creek gully, where footing was precarious and fighting wasn’t much fun.

The older we got the harder we hit, and the PVC cores cracked and broke and were fixed with duct tape and cracked and broke again. We lost the axe first, and then the longsword. The daggers and Darth Maul lightsaber survived longest, mostly because no one wanted to use them. But by that time we had discovered airsoft guns, and we started our evolution from flimsy plastic pistols to sporting-good store semi-automatics to metal sniper rifles to fully automatic $200 weapons from eBay that left welts and chipped windows.

I wandered through the other side of the fence a few weeks ago, pushing aside plants and ducking under branches. The trails had vanished. The stickerbushes won. As for the maul, I fear it’s joined the likes of Excalibur and Narsil. I could only find a small clearing that marked the heart of our old base, surrounded now by brush and memory. A last, lingering trace of our gleeful and serious violence.

Josh deLacy

Once called “a modern-day Jack Kerouac” by NPR after he hitchhiked 7,000 miles through the United States, Josh deLacy has since found homes in the Pacific Northwest, the Episcopal Church, and the post calvin. He is the managing director of Branded Look LLC and communications director at St. Luke’s Church. Josh’s writing has appeared in places such as The Emerson Review, Front Porch Review, and Perspectives.

Mary definitely knew

by Ben Maddison

What a beautiful article.

https://mbird.com/2018/12/mary-definitely-knew/

They brought the baby to our doorstep. Five days old. Directly from the hospital. One outfit. Four pre-made bottles. A handful of diapers. A package of wipes. And a packet of papers that offered no definitive judgment on the proper pronunciation of her name. “I think it’s…” the social worker said. “I’m pretty sure.” A statement full of confidence, backed by the full weight and authority of the State of New Jersey.

Like any new parents, we waited with fear and excitement for this call. Two months since our state licensure. One year since the doctor told us we wouldn’t have children of our own. Four years since we started this “infertility journey.” We did tests and surgeries and diets and counseling and 29 hours of state-mandated training and a home inspection, about which one parent-friend of mine said, “If they made everyone do this, no one would be allowed to have children.” Our friends threw us a foster shower. We filled our house with baby things and toddler things and the most frustrating baby-proofing items that guarantee your fingers will get jammed in drawers for weeks.

But above all, we waited. And we prayed.

We wanted a baby more than anything else in the world. But the reality of foster care is that it exists because the world is broken. Child abuse. Drug addiction. Neglect. Poverty. Systematic injustice. Sin and Death. Our hope for a family inextricably linked to suffering and darkness of this world. Our hope and expectation married to someone else’s shame and guilt and pain.

They brought a baby to our doorstep. An answer to, but also the result of, so much pain.

It was all very Advent.

For the last three weeks, we have done what new parents do. We have felt (almost immediately to our surprise) the full weight and judgment of the Parenthood Law come crashing down on us. (“You changed her ten times,” the doctor said—eyes wide and full of judgment.) We have fretted over whether she was breathing the way she was supposed to (or at all) in her sleep. We have fed her every two hours. We have fought and bickered over many little, insignificant things—the little frustrations magnified by the addition of a third party. We have done so much laundry. We have washed our hands raw. And we have not slept. (“Sleep while the baby sleeps.” THANKS, KAREN. We’ll get right on that!)

It’s amazing how those menial tasks—the slave labor to the dictator-queen that is a newborn—make you love this tiny, demanding, unsatisfiable human being. She screams and cries and can’t do a single thing for herself—can’t even hold up her own head, the snowflake! But she looks at you with those brand-new eyes. And she seems to smile at you. And she nestles her head against your neck. And she needs you.

So, I cry. Because she’s perfect. And I love her. And I can’t believe she’s here. And my heart breaks that she can’t be where she should be. That she’s with us instead.

People love asking “are you prepared to give her back?” As if that is a normal question one might ask any new parent. “Are you ready to give this thing you love more than you knew you could back to the uncertainty and brokenness of this world?” Are you ready for her to not be yours anymore? Are you prepared for this all to end?

It seems to me this question could be asked of any parent. “Are you ready to lose a child?” Life is fragile, the world is broken. Things don’t go according to plan. “Are you ready to lose something you love?” Seems like a reasonable question—one based in the cold reality and statistics of everyday life.

But we don’t ask it. Cause it seems wrong.

This is why I think there is so much anxiety and handwringing about “Mary Did You Know?” People like to complain about its theological depth, its understanding of scripture, or the “mansplainy-ness” of the song. But all of that is just a front for our real anxiety.

Mary, did you know that your son would die?

Mary, did you know that this child you love, more than you knew you could, would be gone?

Mary are you prepared to give him back?

We don’t want to think about this. We don’t want to even say it, lest we speak it into existence.

This Advent, it’s the only thing I can think about because they dropped a 5-day-old baby at my door. And for better or worse I have fallen in love with this beautiful little girl. And I am in no way, shape, or form prepared to give her back.

And it could happen any day.

“Mary, did you know?” Of course, she knew. We all know.

“In the midst of life, we are in death: of whom should we seek for succor, but of thee, O Lord.”

“Advent always begins in the dark.” So, says one of the patron saints of Mockingbird, Fleming Rutledge. There no denying the brokenness and darkness that exist in and holds this world captive. And yet, we look for, grasp for, long for with sigh too deep for words, the light shining in the darkness. The irony of our hope being found in a baby is not lost on me this season. The irony of the light scattering the darkness through the offering off—the handing over of—a son is not lost on me.

“For God so loved the world that He gave His only son…” (John 3:16)

“On the night [Jesus] was handed over…” (1 Corinthians 11:23

It’s not only Mary who knew that her son would have to be given up, but the Father as well. God sent his only son into the world—handing him over to the brokenness of that world—so that the brokenness could be dealt with, once for all.

When people ask “are you prepared to give this child back” I am reminded of Mary and of God—and of all parents and all people—who know that one day, hopefully a day far-off, that they too will have to give their children over to the brokenness and death of this world.

But in that handing over, we are as ones with hope. The handing over of Jesus into the hands of sin and death opened the way for the correcting of that brokenness—the reconciliation of all things. As Paul writes to the Galatians:

“But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children. And because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’ So, you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir, through God.” (Galatians 4:4-7)

“Are you prepared to give that baby back?” No. Not at all.

But when (and if) the time comes, I know I will be in good company. In the company of people who have turned over children in the name of reconciliation—the name of repairing broken things or making whole things that are fragmented.

It is in this handing over that makes possible the opportunity for adoption as children of God.

For now: we wait, and we pray, and we stay up all night, and we love this tiny child more than we can love anything else in the entire world. Because we all know that the things we love will pass away—we know it, Mary definitely knew it, and God knew it when he sent his only son.

So, I hold this beautiful, perfect child. And I will love her as unconditionally and totally as is possible until I give her back. Because we live as people of light in a world of darkness—and we know that imputing light, imputing love, imputing and praying for reconciliation are the only ways we can respond to a Father and mother who first gave up their son.

Mary definitely knew.

Inheritance by Siri Live Myhrom ("Life is hard.")

Inheritance:A Poem

by Siri Live Myhrom

My mother had a mantra

that connected dots through every year,
every difficult event:
            Life is hard.

It was always said gently and meant tenderly, often preceded by Uff-da
or whispered as a quiet descant
with the bruised and urgent love of a mother
as she held me:
            Oh, honey. Life is hard. Oh, honey.
For 37 years, it was the sympathetic balm applied
            to scraped knees and mean words
            failed attempts and broken hearts
            bad colds and depressive breakdowns.
Any pain was wrapped up in her arms
and the immutable fact
of the enduring un-easy-ness
of our days.
And she knew something of how hard it could be,
my Midwestern mother, born on a prairie farm,
broken by polio at eight,
paralyzed for a year, taught herself to walk again
by holding on to the bed mattress or her mother’s coaxing hands.
But her body was never whole again,
always faltering and bent, always tired, always aflame
with relentless twisting pain.
Yes, she knew it: Life is hard.
            hard like a kick from a milking cow,
            hard like hauled wood and cast iron stoves
            and cold pine floors and stillborn baby siblings you never knew,
            hard like the unwanted hands of your oldest brother on you,
            hard like January ground that the dark wind pounds down.
Life is hard.

I felt the inheritance of that fierce story
passed down to me like a burning coal —
the kind that can soothe the ache of winter nights
if placed in the right container
but that will take the flesh right off you if you hold it.
I saw this:
that while we cannot rip away the verses
that burn in the palms of others,
once they are handed to us and become our inheritance,
we are given some holy choices:
        embrace and recite
        revise and restore
        toss into the flame
        take up a blank page and create new.
When I hold my daughters and sing this new song,
            Does life feel hard right now? Sweet girl,
            I’m so sorry it feels hard right now —

and we talk later of what beauty can rise
from that rough and nourished ground —
I sense a harmony with my mother’s refrain that hangs
like sweet strung music in the background:
            the hard places make a good foundation
            for rest
            for rebuilding
            for steadying yourself again,
            for dancing
            for practicing over and over
            the patient strides and daring loops of staying upright
            while in uncertain motion.
            All winter long, no matter how ferocious the cold,
            the roots are cradled: frozen darkness, too,
            can be a still, quiet kind of love.
And I know this intensely —
when I hold my girls and the moment of their earnest pain,
their small hot hands clinging to me,
remembering and blessing my mother,
I can do what she did so well:
I can make myself a soft place for them
in this hard, beautiful world.

Can't we be friends?

I felt like this article said a lot of things I've thought. I never was a "guys' girl," but I do remember being shocked to learn that -- seemingly -- nearly all guys are not capable of separating "the purely intellectual friendship of a woman who’s just happy to hang out, from an opening to someone who might become a romantic partner — or at the very least go to bed with them." I know you can't generalize that all guys are the same, but I do remember my surprise at how prevalent this was.

https://psiloveyou.xyz/do-them-all-want-to-f-k-me-and-other-questions-of-a-guys-girl-4f4687d0fef5

Do They All Want To Sleep With Me? — And Other Questions Of A Guys’ Girl

Being a guys’ girl is all fun and games — until you realize you’ve been the one in play all along.

I recently read Girl Logic: the Genius and the Absurdity, by Iliza Shlesinger. Perhaps you’ve heard of her. If not, go find one of her specials on Netflix.

The point I want to highlight from her book is (spoiler alert) not really part of any of her stand-up specials. Even though Iliza and I are very different people in many ways, by reading her book I found a strong commonality: we’re a couple of guys’ girls.

Iliza’s whole chapter on being a guys’ girl is very spot-on. My experience fits exactly what she describes: “It’s not like I specifically set out to become one; it happened naturally.”

There are a few factors that bring a girl to cultivate more friendships with guys than with other girls. For some of us, connecting with other women just doesn’t come naturally. Men seem simpler to deal with (when there’s no romantic interest on the girl’s part, but more on that later). Around them you can say anything, be anything.

As a rule, I don’t feel as comfortable around other girls as I do around men. I was never the most feminine of women. Makeup was a mystery to me until I turned 25, which was the same age when I finally learned how to properly blow-dry my hair. Before that, I used to think of hair driers as something for emergencies only. I nearly put mine inside a glass box in the bathroom with a sign: break glass in case it’s below 50ºF outside and you forgot to wash your hair 3 hours in advance. To this day, I’m completely lost when it comes to flat irons and curling wands.

Hanging out with boys so much has that effect. It’s a never ending vicious cycle. You start hanging out with boys because they’re easier to deal with. Around them, you don’t wonder why you can’t hide your dark circles with makeup as well as Lucy does, or if you’ll ever manage to starve yourself enough to have abs like Debra’s. You don’t feel inferior for your clothing choices because you’re not standing next to Allison and her perfectly assembled, on-season, trendy outfit.

There are so many questions involved in hanging out with girls. Like, how much boy talk is too much boy talk? How much weight should I say I’m trying to lose this week? How can I pretend to care about Stacy’s flat iron dilemma? Ceramic or titanium? Is forming a star with our fingers for a picture still a thing? If I just nod and smile, will they catch on that I’m not enough of a girl to keep up?

I never had any questions when hanging out with boys. Boy’s harden you up with crude jokes at the same time as they allow you to relax with their incredibly low standards for what constitutes good company. So things like makeup and hair and clothes become less important, and when you notice, it becomes even harder to connect with the girls than it was before.

Like I said, vicious cycle.

I don’t want to be unfair to girls by implying all they care about is looks and clothes, just as I don’t want to be unfair to boys by implying it’s all pizza and fart jokes all day.

I have connected at a deep level with many wonderful girls throughout my life, it just has always been simpler and far easier for me to find that connection with guys.

Of course, boys are only easier to deal with when you’re not into them.

It’s 100% true what they say: once we put a guy in the “friend” category, he becomes an assexual being. When we say that he’s like a brother to us, we don’t mean it Game of Thrones style. Not ever. We mean he holds as much sex appeal to us as a seashell. And maybe not even that.

And that’s impossible to change.

My behavior next to a guy I’m interested in is completely different from my behavior next to a guy I consider a friend. For starters, coming up and saying “hi” to someone I’m interested in is a struggle, while around my friends I’m spontaneous and loose. I’ve recently got better at it, but I still get very nervous around guys I find attractive.

A relaxed time is one thing a girl can expect from guy friends, but Iliza accurately points out another aspect of the dynamics:

“Being a woman participating in a male-dominated activity meant one thing: you were “good enough” to run with the guys. Being as skilled and ballsy as the guys lent a girl a subtle air of superiority.” — Iliza Shlesinger, Girl Logic: the Genius and the Absurdity.

My earliest memories of being five at the preschool’s playground all involve me running around playing with the boys. I’d spend summer vacations surrounded by them, biking, climbing trees, bodyboarding, playing soccer and hide and seek. My knees couldn’t catch a break, they were always scraped raw.

I liked the idea that I could keep up with the boys. Short of belching the alphabet, I’d do pretty much anything.

But then I grew up. And even though I still occasionally played basketball with the guys, those friendships became less about physical accomplishments and more about intelectual discussions and shared interests.

And that’s when we’re back to Girl Logic. Iliza separates the guys’ girls into six different categories, from the truly sports fanatics to the funny girl through “The Hot Chick Dudes Claim Is “Like a Sister” but You Know They Secretly Jerk Off to Her Instagram Pictures”.

I never really second-guessed any of my guy friendships. Not even when I discovered, a couple of years after high school, that one of my great friends from that time had lied to everyone that we’d kissed. Not even when another great friend sent me texts at 4 am telling me he couldn’t stop thinking about me.

Not even until recently, when a third friend (or so I thought) decided to drive 7 hours to see me and got extremely disappointed when I treated him as no more than just a friend. To be clear, before he hopped in his car, I told him I was involved with someone else (which was true), but he came anyway.

So, it just recently dawned on me that many of what I had always considered to be great friendships had had their starting points on a guy being interested in me.

And yes, I saw When Harry Met Sally.

I just always thought that the arguments against male/female friendships in the movie weren’t exactly accurate.

I guess you can call me naive.

If you remember the movie (or haven’t seen it), Harry meets Sally and tells her women and men can’t be friends because “the sex thing always gets in the way”. He explains to her that a man can’t be friends with a woman he finds attractive because he’ll want to have sex with her, and he can’t be friends with women he finds unattractive because, in Harry’s words: “you pretty much want to to nail them too”.

All my life I’ve heard people tell me that I’m pretty, despite sometimes looking in the mirror and not being so sure of it myself. I know I also divide opinions a bit. I know some men think I’m stunning, while others look at me and go “meh. No big deal”. But no one ever thinks I’m ugly.

This isn’t me being conceited, this is just what I’ve learned after almost 30 years of being alive in a western society.

It stands to reason that many guys first approached me because they thought I was pretty and perhaps they could get some. It just never occurred to me that their friendship had hidden intentions, since it never occurred to me to first become friends with someone I’m interested in — if you remember, I find coming up and saying “hi” nearly impossible to do.

I used to not really question my friendships with guys. Now I have one major doubt:

How many of them want to sleep with me? Do they all?

I supposed I used to think that Harry’s argument in the movie was flawed because it paints men as sex-obsessed animals, incapable of separating the purely intellectual friendship of a woman who’s just happy to hang out from an opening to someone who might become a romantic partner — or at the very least go to bed with them.

And I spent my life giving men more credit than that.

OR I spent my life too distracted to notice the hungry wolf eyes of those I had already put in the seashell category. Because if I’m not interested in a man as more than a friend, how could he?

But of course, just because you’ve a-sexualized someone in your mind it doesn’t mean they’ve actually became asexual beings. I’m ashamed to say I’ve only recently came to this realization.

And that brings me to the second major question involved with being a guy’s girl:

Are they all only being nice to me because they think I’m pretty?

Are any of them interested in me for who I am more than for what I seem to be?

I’d like to give my friends more credit and believe that they are. I’d like to believe no one would bother to be my friend for ten years if they didn’t get deeper value from my friendship than maybe eventually attain the opportunity of perhaps someday obtaining sexual gratification.

Still, I know my overall perspective on being friends with guys has shifted a bit. I won’t suddenly start avoiding forming these bonds, but I feel more equipped to do a better job separating the men who can put their sexual desires in the back burner and value the friendship from those who’ll take any opportunity to come on to me.

Meanwhile, I want to celebrate my friendships with other girls. After all, they’re not nice to me because they want to f*k me (most of them, I think), and that makes any difficulty in connecting a thousand times worth overcoming.

by Tesia Blake

Names have been changed to protect both the innocent and the guilty.