10 years & 1 baby

Having a baby is like suddenly getting the world's worst roommate.

Anne LaMott ... Bird by Bird

Jonathan and I have had a pretty consistent tradition of doing something to celebrate our anniversary every year, be it dinner out or breakfast in, toasting with fizzy water on a picnic or bubbly on the patio, staying in town or exploring on the road.  I almost always write a card for him.  Two years ago I wrote a little piece on the occasion of our 8th wedding anniversary and shared it here.  This year we did something completely different.

Yesterday, Saturday, was our 10th anniversary.  It's the first time we've had an anniversary on a Saturday and we started celebrating Friday night with a bottle of bubbly, both of us hoping for an easy end to a rough day....baby boy received 5 vaccinations on Friday morning and was so out of sorts we skipped going to a dinner group of friends I'd been really looking forward to seeing.  So bubbles hit the glass and we smiled and kissed and toasted.  And before I got two sips in baby boy woke up.  A few hours later I woke up around 3 am to feed him and had a sore throat and stuffy nose, a full-on cold in the brew.  In the morning Jonathan made pancakes and I made oatmeal (I'm doing gluten & dairy free for the little guy...) and it was almost 1 pm by the time we got out of the house.  We stopped at Whole Foods for picnic food & took off for a park we'd never been to for a walk we'd never been on.  The clouds turned dark as we drove north and it started sprinkling just after we turned off the main road.  Ten minutes we later discovered that the bird sanctuary stroll we'd been looking forward to started a couple thousand feet down a gravel road past a water treatment facility, complete with treatment pools and the sheriff making an arrest.  We ended up eating our picnic on a table not far from the parking lot, camouflage fishing boats on the launch nearby, then strolled down the river for a little bit before coming home, where I crashed at 4 pm for an hour with a major headache and Jonathan kept the entering-evening-fussiness baby relatively happy.  I was back in bed by 9 pm with the finally-asleep baby boy while Jonathan babysat a book on data warehousing.  I even forgot to have someone take a picture of the 3 of us.  We plan to reschedule our 10th anniversary.

But in the meantime, I have this to say:

When we brought the little guy home, Jonathan carried him into the house and my sister got our bags out of the car and we set up shop.  And a couple days later all hell broke loose as exhaustion and hormones kicked in and breastfeeding appeared to be an utter failure and my body began to process having been through an unmedicated 12 hours of labor plus 4 hours of pushing out an 8 lb 11 oz baby with a 15 inch noggin.  I honestly never felt like it was more than I could handle, but giving birth to him was hard work.  Really hard.  And my body needed to say so.  On top of that I was super tired and completely overwhelmed.  So the tears started and they lasted for about five weeks.  I'm almost not kidding.

I'll share more of that story eventually, but I give those details simply to tell you that my husband is amazing.  Every morning I would eat the five-star breakfast my sister whipped up, feed the baby, hand him off to her, and then crawl, sobbing, back into bed, where Jonathan would simply hold me until I cried myself into sleep.  Jonathan was so tuned into me and himself, processing through his own experience of everything around our little boy's birth and listening as I processed through mine.  Our little roommate is entirely disruptive.  And entirely good.

I've heard women say they fell madly in love with their baby upon the moment of birth, but honestly I felt that more toward Jonathan than my baby.  I adore my baby, but my sense of need for and connection to Jonathan was primal.  We're both pretty independent and the downside of this is that it's too easy to live more parallel to each other than we'd like.  That took a monumental shift in the first few weeks after our son arrived.

As much as I love celebrating in a festive way, I feel like the real celebration of what Jonathan and I are (which I wrote about here) spoke its most powerful voice in those days when we were both simply trying to keep our heads above water and generally not being able to do so, but were instead able to simply be moved along the drift and tumbled through the waves to a better place.  I don't think there's any great honor in seeking out hard stuff for its own sake, but I do think that the most pivotal experiences in life are usually the most difficult.  At least, that's been the case for me.  And like our own personal development, relationships develop new bonds through those times too.

There is no one on earth I would rather be married with, creating life with, moving through reality with.  Happy 10th anniversary, my love!

Because it is the nature of love to create, a marriage itself is something which has to be created,

so that together we become a new creature.

To marry is the biggest risk in human relations that a person can take…

If we commit ourselves to one person for life this is not,

as many people think, a rejection of freedom;

rather it demands the courage to move into all the risks of freedom,

and the risk of love which is permanent;

into that love which is not possession, but participation…

It takes a lifetime to learn another person…

 

When love is not possession, but participation,

then it is part of that co-creation which is our human calling,

and which implies such risk that it is often rejected.

 

Madeline L'Engle ... The Irrational Season

Singing with Jamie

I remember the very first time I met my sister-in-law, Jamie.  She was sitting on the brick wall outside the north entrance to Seattle's University Presbyterian Church.  It was a chilly Saturday morning in early 2001 and she was helping out with a work day offered by college students preparing to go abroad for the summer.  I don't remember this, but I'm willing to bet she was holding a Starbucks Americano.  A few months later she, my brother Ned, and two others left for Turkey for the summer.  They came home with carpets and stories and Jamie's filled journals and Ned's newly pierced ears, dyed red hair, and Bono-style sunglasses, and both of them with stars in their eyes.  Shortly thereafter they started dating and I moved to Europe.  Ned called me a few months later when they were engaged in February.  Jamie and I talked on the phone a time or two and she sent me Crayola markers and cards she illustrated and a verse from Zephaniah:

 

On that day it shall be said to Jerusalem:

 

"Fear not, O Zion;
let not your hands grow weak.
The Lord your God is in your midst,
a mighty one who will save;
he will rejoice over you with gladness;
he will quiet you by his love;
he will exult over you with loud singing.

I will gather those of you who mourn for the festival,
so that you will no longer suffer reproach."

I get chills from the words and the song in my own heart is wet with tears.

Jamie and Ned were married the following August on a gorgeous Sunday afternoon.  They made promises and danced and shed tears and laughed and Ned spontaneously kissed the bride at the beginning of the ceremony, prompting a mock rebuke from their pastor that it wasn't time for that yet and charmed, delighted laughter from the gathered crowd.  Their lives continue to play like that.  Four children and eleven years later they are still singing, this time a song that mixes in sorrow but that rings clearly with their thick, abiding love for each other and echoes of profound living.  Here is her song this morning.  I love you, Jamie.

http://nedabenroth.blogspot.com/2013/08/an-update-from-jamie.html?spref=fb

On In/Fertility. And Children. And Being People. And All That.

A friend recently sent me an article about Anna Karenina. The timing was perfect, partly because I was in the midst of re-reading the book (before seeing the new movie, which I want to see for its fabulous costumes) but also because the writer's point about the idolatry of giving one's entire self over to a person dovetailed with things I've long thought – and have been recently thinking about again – about marriage and children.

Jonathan and I have been married for a little over 9 years.  I always felt that if we had kids it would be good and if we didn't it would be good.  There has always been a little underlying question there for us, but I wasn’t worried about it.  But since we didn’t have children over the years, I especially appreciated the women who got me – who understood my blend of openness to having kids, occasional uncertainty and fears about having kids, and contentment if we never had kids, all of it woven with awareness of both grief and celebration in either case.

Plenty of women feel it differently.  They’ve always wanted kids.  Or they got married and wanted to have kids.  Or some have never wanted kids.  For me, it’s not that straight, and while I didn’t want my fears to rule, neither could I “fake it till I make it”.  As I searched for voices that would resonate with mine, I found them hard to find.  I've heard polarized versions certainly but not mine.  So I’ve felt a bit of a compelling draw to see if I can articulate a few thoughts here in a way that describes my experience, creatively and maybe with a little humor confounds a few assumptions, helps illuminate something of the width of being God's in this world, and offers accompaniment for others. That oughta be easy enough, eh?

Jonathan remembers me talking early in our marriage about liking the idea of having 3 kids and he also remembers periods when I wasn’t sure I wanted to have kids.  I’ve always felt that mix.  Motherhood never felt like an imperative for me.  I've never been one of those women who felt like I had to have kids, that it's what I "was made for".  It wasn't something I was adamantly opposed to; but it also wasn't a centering point for me.  I knew that even if I was a parent one day I couldn’t see finding my sense of self in my children.  I felt the same way about marriage and still do.  I wouldn't trade Jonathan for anything, I utterly adore him.  But even as we are each transformed in our relationship, neither of us finds ourselves in the other.  Being married with him is not who I am in terms of grounded identity.  The same is how I see having kids.  If it happens, it happens.  If it doesn’t, it doesn’t.  It changes a lot, but the essence of who I am is not defined by that.  I turn to God for that.

But when I got married it seemed like kids were almost assumed.  Why else would you get married?  You might feel uncertainty around parenting but of course you’d have kids.  And voicing something beyond that was almost heretical when it was really only disruptive.  Truthfully, it really bothered me because those questions about motherhood don't usually start by asking about who you are; they start with wondering why you're not one, or when you'll become one, or don't you want to be one?  At a party earlier this year Jonathan & I got into a conversation with a couple.  The wife talked a lot about their sons, the husband his work.  After a bit she asked us if we had kids.  When we said no, the conversation literally stopped, I kid you not.  It was pretty uncomfortable.  I tried to fill the space for a moment or two with what we were involved in, but they were clearly done.  Neither of them had anything left to say.  It’s like parenthood becomes the central pin you’re identified around.  Absent that, you’re almost nothing.

Both Jonathan and I have been blessed by people who do not have kids and who are committed to caring for others in ways they couldn’t if they were parents.  I deeply admire and respect them.  What about them?  And what about people who can’t have kids?  If having children is so key as to be assume-able, what’s being said about people if they are childless (I hate that word) in either case, by choice or by chance?

While we weren’t "neutral" on the topic of wanting kids, neither Jonathan nor I assumed we would be able to have kids. We certainly didn't marry with a plan around having children. In fact, our pre-marriage conversation about kids fell sometime in the final few weeks before we got married – it was fine to not know numbers and timing and have a plan, but I thought we at least needed to know if either of us definitely didn’t want kids.  It went something like this:

Me:      So we haven't really talked about kids, do we need to?

Him:    I'm not sure.

Me:      Do you know for sure that you don't want kids?

Him:    No

Me:      Ok

End of discussion.

Those of you who know me well might find the brevity of that surprising, but that's really all there was to it. It was similar to our pre-marriage discussions about finances, community involvement, retirement, cohabiting, career aspirations, vacations, vegetarianism (ok, not really) and other kinds of Big Things you’re supposed to talk about before the vows.  And so we were married.  And honestly, over the years "kids" really came up relatively little.  We'd meet the topic here and there, and there remained unexplored questions, but neither of us expressed much urgency around it.

Because it’s who I am, I would check in every now and then to see what Jonathan was thinking. When he turned 40 he told me, "it's not that I'm dying to have kids right now but I don't want to turn 50 and regret never having tried." So we decided to try. For non-fertility related reasons, I'd been off birth control for several years and in that time had only one or two unexpected "I wonder if I'm pregnant" moments (I wasn't). For brief stretches during those years we tried getting pregnant but frankly being so focused on it really wasn't very fun, and I am not a good fertility tracker. Absent a compelling expression (like his directness when he turned 40), I was content sailing along in other streams. But he turned 40 and we got serious.  And several months went by. I eventually signed us up for information sessions at two adoption agencies and a fertility clinic.  We weren’t committed to adopting but it was an option and we wanted to explore it.  I’d never felt like I had to be pregnant to have kids (although I have thought a pregnancy wardrobe would be fun – the clothes are cute!) but it was an option too so we explored it as well.  The doctor at the clinic said, "here's what I think, here's what we'll do, and you won't be doing the same thing in a year."  I loved her.  For several reasons, we went that route instead of adoption.  So I knew that in a year we'd know:  we're either having kids or we aren't.  That was over a year ago.

I have friends who've given birth, who've adopted, who've never done either, who don't want to, who would love to but are single and don't want to be single moms, who have given birth or adopted as single women, who’ve been through termination of a pregnancy, who’ve given children up for adoption, who've gone through multiple miscarriages and multiple failed adoptions. Women whose stories around having kids are full of fullfilment and others whose stories are full of pain. Many whose stories blend a lot of both.

As we started this process last fall I felt a genuine curiosity about how it would be for us.  I didn't see it mostly as me becoming a mom, I saw it as us having a baby, and on a route that was familiar to us through many couples we know but experientially new for us.  Some of it was as easy and blasé as brushing my teeth.  And some of it was really, really hard.  Emotionally draining.  Physically uncomfortable.  I got tired of tests and procedures.  Very tired of it.  Anxious about a few.  Angry occasionally because it mattered to Jonathan too yet it fell to me to research procedures and schedule us for information sessions and appointment times and ultimately to put my body on the table.  He had his moments too...babies require two people.  There were times when I was ready to be done, when it felt like the damage to the soul was almost too much.  Toward the middle of summer as we talked about it one day Jonathan said he'd rather be with me than have kids with someone else, which was sweet and good timing and something I knew, but which I grasped the truth of with both hands because there were times when I didn't know how much longer I could keep up.  We didn't go as far as you could, but you can't undergo much around fertility treatment without some sense of being invaded.

The cycle of hope and disappointment can be devastating (for both men and women).  That wasn't the hardest part for me.  The hard part for me was the waiting, the staying in it.  And in that staying and waiting, I carried my uncertainties and fears and my full-on openness.  I tried not to leave anything behind.  Staying in a process whose end was somewhat clear but ultimately would be defined by us.  I didn't feel free to make commitments that might last more than 8-12 months, and that meant not doing a couple things I really wanted to do.  Trying to figure out the balance between putting some things on hold and yet not putting ourselves on hold – the heart of that personhood/identity crux.  Jonathan and I had decided where our limits were and that helped.  We knew we'd try some things but not others.  Some options simply felt more drastic than would meet their value to us.  But in the meantime we were going through this process that I knew we'd set aside a year for but could actually last longer than that.  Because you do enough cycles of everything and then at some point you decide you're done.  Or you take a break and re-tool for the next step, if you want to take the next step.  But even if you've paid your final bill from the clinic and deleted the medical assistant's phone number from your speed-dial, you know that unless a surgical procedure occurs there's always that off-chance of pregnancy and you wonder if you want to remain open to that possibility or if you'd rather just say "no" to it so you are free to say an unequivocal "yes" to other things.  It's a bizarre place to be, and it was the part that brought me to tears and exhaustion.

I'm married to a fairly placid man, and I mean that in the kindest sense.  He is sentimental and intuitive and cares deeply.  He also doesn’t express things with much volume, and even less under pressure.  It takes a lot of work to get him riled up enough that the more juicy bits come out.  And I know...I've tried many times over the years to push him to that tipping point.  At any rate, when he is ready to speak it’s always worth listening.  While I knew we both cared and felt invested in the process, I came to know that Jonathan & I also felt that in different ways.  It’s a little terrifying…the questions…“when will we know we’re done? and will we both know it at the same time? and what if we don’t?”  I knew that the year-end would bring a very different kind of grief for him than for me if it meant we weren't having kids.  We'd both feel it, but for different reasons.  There's no way to prepare for that, it was just a reality I began tracking with.  How to be together in our own ways.

A few of our family and close friends knew what we were in, and talking with them was usually good.  I knew that I could carry everything to them and they wouldn't look at me like there was something wrong with me.  Or I could not talk about it and they were ok with that.

One of the most gracious gifts came from my sister.  Six and a half years ago she had their second baby.  That summer when they were over for a weekend Mel and I sat in my sunny living room talking.  I’ve always admired how after she had kids Mel was still so actively interested and inquiring about people and the world.  I appreciate that about her deeply.  That summer, we were both at transition points, her with another baby and me with a shift in commitments.  From the outside it seemed like the perfect time to have a baby.  But I acutely felt a desire to not have kids during that period.  I struggled with how to describe my heart to her, my not knowing, my uncertainty.  In the midst of it all, she said the most loving thing anyone had ever said to me about it:  "Mindy," she said, "I think you'd be an amazing mom.  But if you never have kids that's fine."  Even though her words were what I knew to be true, I seriously felt like I’d been set free hearing her say them.  My sister has three kids.  She adores her children.  I knew she’d adore mine.  She loves being a mom and holds motherhood in very high regard.  I knew that it was something she would enjoy doing together with me.  And in that moment I also knew (again) that she loved me too.

Here's my bottom line:  I think that life is basically about creating life, in all the many varied ways that happens.  In the midst of everything, I always came back to that:  what is it for me to create life right now?  I felt like my constant prayer was “God, remind me who I am, who you are, and how that creates.”  Because even if somewhere in this process something "worked" and we had a child, it would be fundamentally altering, and I would be bringing myself along.  My heart, my soul, my energy, my living.  However life goes, with or without children, creating is vast, a realm wherein we get to hear and experience the voice of God in our very selves and others.  It’s a truly phenomenal thing to know that we matter that much!  A few years back I revisited the question “what is the voice of God in my life?”  I came to know that the voice of God is in my own voice, my own life, my own being.  As it is in everyone’s.  The person I am is completely and fully unique across all of place and history – no one, ever, has been exactly like me and never will be.  The individual person that I am, that I was created to be, matters.  Cosmically.  As I play out in the world, whether with kids or primarily in other ways, an en-livening is possible.  And THAT is stunning to me.

And that's what I wished was the dominant thread, the affirmation I wanted to hear. I know there are millions of women out there who say that they were made to be moms. And I can believe them, that they really do feel that way; but I also suspect that being a mom is like other meaning-ed undertakings in their life:  it’s on the path to becoming who they’re made to be. That's not to say their motherhood is not fulfilling or enriching or transforming or grounding.  It can be all that and more.  And yet it's not enough.  It'll never be enough.  It'll be powerful and influential and pivotal.  But if they had never been moms they wouldn't cease to be or make significance.  They wouldn’t be less of a woman.  Their story wouldn’t be over.  I know because of my own life, and because of the millions of women out there who would desperately love having children but who aren't/can't, and are still vitally alive and creating in the world.

It's now December, with Christmas just a couple weeks away. We put up a Christmas tree last Saturday afternoon and hosted the neighborhood shindig on Sunday night. The year allocated to tests and procedures has ended. And since I know you’re wondering, I’ll tell you:  we're expecting a baby in June!  And all that comes with it.  I am slow to excitement around most things in life, it’s not my immediate go-to response; but Jonathan was immediately on cloud nine and the whole thing is starting to become more real for both of us.  And we are both deeply happy.

And I keep thinking about all the things I usually think about and am dreaming about some endeavors I want to undertake.  I fully anticipate profound changes.  A friend was over at the house recently & commented that "it's finally going to look like someone lives here!"  You laugh at that being a profound change...  Messier though it may become, I'm pretty sure I still won't like stuff strewn all over the place.  (Except shoes....I'm good with shoes being everywhere.  As long as they're cute shoes.)  With all that and more, though, I'm also pretty sure my heart will remain drawn to the things God opens me to see in the world, and those will expand, simply because that's how life – and love – works.  It’s grounding and it’s moving.  There is always more to the story.

This baby that started growing a few months ago will forever be attached in some way to us but we are not the extent of its being.  In fact, we are barely the beginning.


©2012 Mindy Danylak

Introducing Melanie: Blue Marble God

The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn't have been complete without you. Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid. I am with you. Nothing can ever separate us. It's for you I created the universe. I love you. There's only one catch. Like any other gift, the gift of grace can be yours only if you'll reach out and take it. Maybe being able to reach out and take it is a gift too. 

... Frederick Buechner ...

When Shannon and I launched The Front Porch Series, we knew we were onto something.  We'd sat with many many women over the course of years, hearing stories and longings and celebrations.  And we knew that people (and most of the people we meet with are women) need places to take their stories, and themselves, to.  Places to speak and be heard.  To practice and express self.  Where presence is healing, supportive; even if it doesn't change circumstances.  And, importantly, places that are a bit removed from but still very close to the everyday.  We are huge believers in counseling (done with good therapists), but one thing we have both also known is the parallel need for a typically-people-ed existence...a process-oriented, grace-experienced, love-offered space with the people who we normally live life with but in settings and experiences that are not the usual normal.  That are a bit more sacred and protected.  One cannot replace the other:  we encourage people toward counseling when needed, we offer the parallel.  Among many other things, time and again the groups we've led highlight how life bumps up against spirituality.  Questions about meaning, about God, about the abuses and joys of gathering around faith.  And as we send people out after a day retreat, we want them to continue a connectedness because we can't carry all the day forward for them....they have to do some of that work in their own life, in their own way.  But we know amazing people who love well.  So we keep a list.  Some are counselors, many are not.  They are mentors, spiritual directors, good hearts, women who listen well, who have experience in certain domains of the every day of life.  For that is where we live:  in the every day.  And being accompanied in the every day is phenomenally powerful.  Here is your life.  Be in it.

And Melanie is one of the people you might want to be in it with.

One of my absolutely favorite women EVER is my friend Melanie Poole Gillgrist. I think I cried with Melanie the first time I met her (always a good sign in my book!) somewhere in the ballpark of 2004, sitting in her office at Northwest Family Life.  I volunteered for a little while at NWFL...their executive director, the amazing & incomparable Nancy Murphy, was on a world-wide speaking/conference tour & I checked her mail, voice mail, and email while she was away then did some work on a research project I no longer remember the details of.  But Melanie was there and helped hold the place together, and I spent at least as much time in her office every week talking as I did at Nancy's desk working.  My mom had died a few years before, I'd lived abroad, I was in a relatively new marriage, I was figuring out who I was at that time, and I was in need of a friend who was a bit older than me and wiser but who would love me in a way that didn't make me feel the difference between us.  The kind of woman who would give me a vision for the future without her trying to do it.  I found her in Melanie.

Melanie is one of those women who gets under your skin and settles into your heart simply by bringing who she is.  She speaks soul and humor and comfort.  She is brilliant, witty, analytical, comfortable, contemplative, kind, focused, poetic, strong, and completely memorable.  I fell head-over-heels in love with Melanie and her husband Rob and will never be the same for it.  Melanie's compassion and steadiness and thoughtful conversation, Rob's intensity and intellect and hearty laughter...the authenticity and emotional warmth and relational style they each bring...availability and health....as two individuals and as a couple they are a gift of passionate life (and I think 'passion' is a tired word so for me to use it is saying something!). 

They became friends for both Jonathan and me.  (Photo on the ferry to Bainbridge, 2005.)  The four of us shared meals and ferry rides and coffee and work.  We drank wine and ate pasta and talked as the candles burned down.  We watered our plates with sprinkles of tears and waves of laughter, moving through life's turns both good and, frankly, terrible, and then in moments of redemptive amazement.

Rob & Melanie moved to Minnesota a few years back and then to Butler, Pennsylvania (which, ironically, is where my mother-in-law grew up).  I would move heaven and earth to get them back here but, alas, God hasn't left moving heaven and earth up to me.  But she's now on the Internet, which is sort of like the human version of being everywhere at once!  Melanie's new venture, Blue Marble God, launched this week & I'll be reading every post.  When I read, it's like being with her.  Her words speak the integrity of honest spirit and everyday life.  They come simply but from deep personal exploration, marinating the soul toward places her gentleness might belie.  Because I know her, I know:  she knows.  Melanie has lived a textured life...she is acquainted with deep grief and loss and sheer fun and delight.  Her heart for contemplation and integrated spirituality beats strongly.  If you've ever wanted a spiritual director Melanie's your woman!  Cheers to you Melanie!  The word needs your voice.  Its sound is so lovely and I am grateful for the vibrancy of it that I still experience today...a heralding of God....in my everyday.


©2012 Mindy Danylak

How did you meet? And then what happened?

Eight of us gathered 'round the candles, voices swinging across the planks, stories spilling laughter and tears, resonance and incredulity, criss-crossing here and there as life is wont to do when four couples start passing pasta.

"So tell us the story of how you met," went the refrain, and each couple filled in blanks.  Our marriages are 8 and 9 and over 30 years long.  They include a boatload of talents, regional and global long-distance, letters and emails, high regard, college love affairs, arranged marriage, some altered states of consciousness, many kinds of intelligence, deep hurt and healing, transitions, children and no children and grandchildren, foreign languages, crises and near-misses, passion, trust, varying plays of other people, and the mysteries of time.  Searching for and abandonment to love and its remarkable ways.

The next morning I woke up early and unloaded the dishwasher, wondering about the point at which people stop telling those stories of meeting and marrying....because people do stop....other stories stand out more and take their place.  Or after time, recollecting can lose some sparkle...for some times, for some folks, remembering becomes bittersweet, painful even, depending on where the relationship has gone.  I suspect there's not a couple on earth that can't look back at their early relating and find inklings of their relationship's eventually more developed pathologies.  I suppose that sometimes in very early marriage those meet & marry stories are the ones that couples tell partly because not much else has happened in their lives together.  Later we tell them because they are charming and fun and as the song goes the beginning is a very good place to start.  But even where the eventual strengths are sturdy, and even as the sweetness prevails, we didn't all get married to have that one early chapter be the whole book.

When you read good novels you should be able to find intimations of the whole story in the very first paragraph, like harmonics that ring at the slightest touch.  Those lines should suck you in, whirl you around, and stir your bones in such a way that the story lives with your very breath, every sentence a respiration.  I'm reading a book like that right now -- it's almost 542 pages and I can't put it down -- I read the first half in two sittings.  The opening paragraph starts like this:  "It's so hard to explain what the dead really want."  You're with me, right?

Openings are gates.  And open gates are irresistible.

It's well worth it to write good openings in novels.  And no less so in life.  We all want good starts, right?  So the novelist rewrites those first lines endlessly.  The editor reads the manuscript and you make pre-printing revisions; but in real life you don't get that luxury.  Or is it a luxury?  Isn't the essence of craft life?  We get redemption, we get transformation, we get process, but not re-writes.  Our lives flow -- sometimes roughly, sometimes smoothly.  Each story its own paragraph and flowing from the previous.  At some point the story has to be let loose to tell itself.  The only way that first paragraph gets sweeter is with the liberal permeation of time's release.  The constant becoming.  Not the re-writing....the writing.  And I can't wait to keep reading.


©2011 Mindy Danylak

Making a Marriage

Eight years ago today Jonathan and I married each other on a hot sunny day in Seattle.  He wore a tux, I wore a big dress.  Our families and many dozens of friends celebrated with us.  The flowers were lovely, the food was divine, the wines were fantastic (all from Walla Walla, of course).  We vowed and sang and kissed and were photographed and took a ride in a fancy car.  We mixed our losses with our gains and shed tears of missing with those of joy.  There are things I would do differently today but that's because we're 8 years older now and we've changed a lot.  But that being said, we loved the day and love remembering it.

I had imagined I might never get married.  I wasn't opposed to it but I didn't feel like I had to get married.  I am not a a squishy romantic.  I grow weary of fluff & flourish quickly--I am sentimental and desire richness but not the flowery or the gushy.  I also didn't love dating, and dating is sort of a prerequisite for marriage.  I did date several guys through college & my early 20s and all but one were good men.  But I figured that if the confetti fell from above & prince charming emerged from the sparkle I would be right there and recognize what was in front of me.  In fact, I sort of hoped that it would happen that way--fast & clear & smashingly passionate--and that's pretty much exactly what ended up happening!

I love being married with Jonathan.  He is kind and loyal and gets to know the neighbors.  He remembers people and continues to call someone "my friend" years after they last saw each other.  He has absolutely THE greatest laugh in the world hands down--it should be a ring tone!  He loves to dance and doesn't hide his tears.  He is philosophical and he thinks.  He's artistic and abstract and he sometimes sets things down and loses them; he also makes mobiles and does origami and leaves data models all over the house.  He likes keeping papers out where he can see them and when I swish things into piles and hide them in the dryer before company comes he gets worried we'll forget about the credit card bill.  He tracks our finances on these spreadsheets that blow my mind.  He may not know how much money we have but he takes great delight in designing the spreadsheets.  He never misses the Stanley Cup or the World Cup and yells robustly at the television during games.  When I go out with my girflriends for the evening he stays home and sautes onion into perogies and drinks vodka and the house smells like a Russian kitchen when I get back.  He is occasionally irreverant and generally not overly serious.  He's funny in the mornings, which is a big plus, and he sings in the shower and pays my library fines and he kills all the spiders.

However, anyone who has ever been married can tell you that it takes more than that.  So I thought about it--what describes the spirit of us?--and came up with three things:

     1.  We're each responsible for cleaning our own bathrooms.
     2.  We value the life in each other.
     3.  We encourage each other to be in rich friendships.

I'm sure there are other ways to describe it, but so far the best of our relationship can be described by those three realities.  Everything pretty much lines up behind their essence.

Jonathan doesn't always sing in the shower and take out the trash.  We don't always feel in sync with each other and the occasional season has felt a little more like mid-winter's wait for the burst of hyacinth.  My nightmare version of marriage is when it looks more like a merger, when there's so much "us-ness" that you can't find the two people inside it.  But with Jonathan I don't have to worry about that.  I am not obliterated in our relationship.  If anything, our work with each other is more about attending to being found than to not being lost.  And I do go flippy when our relationship's best is experienced in 3D.

I've always said that love messes with our sense of timing, and I think I'll add the spatial realm to that as well.  Just when you think things are linear and known, there's this firework...sometimes pretty and celebratory but also fire-y and bound to disrupt the status quo.  And when life is chaotic and messy there can still be this internal calm.  Sometimes the best of times all go together and there are periods of playful rest.  And sometimes the worst of times all go together and the darkness is also bleak.  But when they do, they are not the final word.

In her reflections upon marriage and ontology, Madeline L'Engle writes:

A Russian priest, Father Anthony, told me,

"To say to anyone 'I love you' is tantamount to saying 'You shall live forever.'"

I am slowly beginning to learn something about immortality.

I don't entirely know what that all means but I am drawn to it.  What I love most about marriage is that it is life.  Being married is different from but not outside the hallmarks of any kind of life.  Dynamic, creative, and real at its best.  And in any event, not static.  Not even tied by time.  Eight is a number.  It represents a passage of time but it does not boundary or define what has been nor what will be.  And for both what it has been and what will be, I am grateful to be in it with Jonathan.  It's right.

Happy anniversary, love!
May you live forever!

___________________________________
©2011 Mindy Danylak

Mouldywarp

The other night it was pretty late and I was trying to fall asleep. I don't usually have to try -- my siblings and I have all been blessed with a remarkable ablity to conk out at the mere suggestion.  But I was laying there, not falling asleep, and Jonathan says, "ok, what are you thinking about?"  He knows I've been thinking a lot lately but it floors me how he can feel me thinking.  "Moles," I say, "I'm thinking about moles."  He busts up laughing.  They're not in my usual repertoire.  Yes, the little guys who pop out of the ground in my back yard in the middle of the night.  They left evidence of their tunnels last week.

I aspire to write something every month to post here, but July came and went and now it's into August and there's no July post.  Maybe it's because it's finally summer in Seattle and I'm starting to feel human again.  I was starting to feel like summer was ignoring me; and then when it rained a few days after the sun came out I was worried it was just gonna skip me like a joke I didn't get.  But now it's actually been over 60 for several days in a row and it feels miraculous.  I think I've almost forgotten how much I felt like a shadow all "spring."  Almost.

At any rate, this summer I've read a lot and celebrated a lot and and worked a lot and walked a lot and spread a lot of bark and am launching a new venture with a dear friend.  (More to come soon on that.)  I've spent countless hours thinking about memory and time and stories and family and landscaping and the economy and cooking for crowds and dream interpretation and communicating vision and web hosting -- and, yes, moles (did you know there are none in Ireland?) -- and frankly I sometimes just get tired of thinking.

So I'm considering all of that evidence of my own tunneling, sniffing my way along a process and a path, knowing that something new and noteworthy is about to pop up, that there's a whole lot of life under the surface in smaller yet vibrant spaces and that when the time is right there will be a different kind of evidence of me.  And that will have to do in lieu of a "regular" blog post.

In the meantime, I give you an excerpt (in italics below) to enjoy from Mary Karr's fantastic memoir, "Lit".  Her writing in this story shares the kind of energy I feel like I'm in these days...pithy, rich, reflective, basic, to the point, meandering, leaving some things unsaid but carrying much and being fully tuned in.  I also love the way they talk about God.  And that Mary Karr's healing involves a near-blind nun who has a weakness for cookies and a very wise heart.  If I were a nun I'd want to be like Sister Margaret.  The below is Mary's writing, not my own....it's not even necessarily relevant to what I've been thinking about, certainly not to moles, let alone to web hosting.  But sometimes in the tunneling we find other people's work & know that certain proteins in the roots are found in our own roots.

How do moles decide when to pop up?

***

The night after the train debacle, I drive under a sky black as graphite to meet my new spiritual director for the Exercises — a bulky Franciscan nun named Sister Margaret, patiently going blind behind fish-tank glasses that magnify her eyes like goggles.

Asked my concept of God, I mouth all the fashionable stuff — all-loving, all-powerful, etc. But as we talk, it bobs up that in periods of uncertainty or pain — forlorn childhood, this failed relationship — I often feel intentionally punished or abandoned.

How’s that possible, I say, if I have no childhood experience of a punishing God?

Margaret says, We often strap on to God the mask of whoever hurt us as children. If you’ve been neglected, God seems cold; if you’ve been bullied He’s a tyrant. If you’re filled with self-hatred, then God is a monster-making inventor. How do you feel sitting here with me now?

I don’t know, like some slutty Catholic schoolgirl.

She laughs at this and says, I see you — she peers through those lenses — what I can see of you, as my sister, God’s beloved child. The hairs on your head are numbered, and we’ve been brought together, you and me, to shine on each other a while.

So you don’t judge me? I want to know.

For what? she said. I don’t even know you.

Well, I say, I’m not married, and I aspire to be sexually active again some day.

She says, I’m not naive. But Jesus might ask: Should you be vulnerable to a man without some spiritual commitment? Is that God’s dream for you?

God has a dream for me? I say. I love that idea. It sounds like a Disney movie.

I know, Margaret says. Her pale round face opens up. Everybody uses the phrase God’s will or plan. That has a neo-Nazi ring to it.

I like the Disney version.

I feel you, she says, and I sit for a minute silently disbelieving she’s a nun. She adjusts her heavy glasses, and her eyes once again magnify.

Let’s eat a cookie and pray for each other’s disordered attachments, she says. Mine involves pride and cookies.

Mine, I say, involves pride and good-looking men.

Together we bow our heads.

Relationship Disaster: "Twilight" or "Sadomasochistic Teenage Erotica" ?

There is a lot going on in this recent blog entry from Kimberly George and some of you may be drawn to other parts of it, but I wanted to share the following section about the violence at work in the "Twilight" stories. While I admit to not having read the series, I very much share Kimberly's concern about models for relationships -- and this is not the first time I've heard the word "heroin" in a description of Bella & Edward's relationship. For those of you who have read these, what do you think?

What Twilight Has to Teach: Today’s Normative Gender Restrictions and the Marriage of Sex and Violence

As we talk about normative gender restrictions, I think it’s important to highlight one extremely popular script currently in vogue, particularly for teenagers: the bestselling Twilight books and movies. The second book in the series, New Moon, just came out this fall as a movie. The gender stereotypes in these stories are as damaging as any of the religious beliefs around gender we have so often analyzed on our blog. Here, I will restrict my comments to the original book in the series, Twilight, which is the only one I have read, but reading summaries of the others in the series has assured me the problematic gender scripts only get worse.

The drama of this original, bestseller revolves around the awkward Bella and the “god-like” Edward falling tragically in love. She is the new girl in town who wins the attention of the aloof, mysterious sex symbol. He is a 108-year-old vampire in teenage form who is disturbingly volatile and controlling, but only because he “loves her” and is trying to “protect” her. Our vampire-hero is so intensely moody—the reader late finds out— because he is edgy from fighting his vintage patriarchal battle: Bella’s so darn attractive to him, that he is in immediate danger of losing all control, dominating her, and leaving her dead. And so we read on—never quite sure if Bella will end up being a bloody mess should the teenagers decide to consummate their relationship. The intimacy in this book is like heroin—thrilling, dangerous, and flirting with death—and the drama of it makes Twilight a page-turner.

I am horrified, to say the least, by the 498-pages of dysfunction that passes as romantic entertainment in Twilight. Just when did “sadomasochistic teenage erotica” (as my colleague Kj Swanson terms it over at her brilliant blog) become so overwhelmingly popular? Twilight is unabashed in its reflection of some of the worst elements of our culture’s patriarchal dysfunctions: domestic violence patterns, eroticized violence deemed “romance,” and harmful power differentials between men and women that are either not noticed or are mindlessly condoned. In fact, the power differentials in this book are the very foundation of its plot. Bella is constantly being saved and infantilized by Edward; his moods continually switch from angry to intimate like a typical perpetrator; and the reader awaits whether the sexual tension between the characters will lead to Edward enacting violence toward Bella. It is her sexual attractiveness that arouses his desire to suck her blood and kill her. Because of how attractive she is to him, she is forbidden to initiate any physical relationship. It all must be led by him, and she must risk her life during any moment of intimacy.

And this is what teenagers (and many adults) are imbibing?