I've met a fair-to-middling number of people over the years who have stated, with varying degrees of intensity, that they wish they could live in the time of Jane Austen. I must courteously dissent.
The first and more obvious objection is simply that your average English longshoreman or tenant farmer was not going about in four-horse carriages and attending opulent debuts every Friday evening. The entire point of Mr. Darcy (for instance) is precisely that he does not represent the norm. Even the other rich people in his circle vied for his condescension. The same would hold true in any epoch you might care to idealize; knights and samurai were always the landed aristocracy, and being a peasant has consistently sucked throughout the story of Man. At least if you're poor in 2021, you can still get Novacaine when they pull your teeth. To live in the time of Jane Austen and be fabulously wealthy, you need a minimum of two magical wishes.
But after all, most people already recognize this, or will acknowledge it if it's pointed out. The real perplexity is a surprising variant on the same essential fallacy, but is far less commonly observed. Apart from the lavish costumes and sumptuously appointed parlours, the true appeal of Austen's cosmos has always been the rich, enduring splendor of her dialogue. Who wouldn't want to spend time in the company of Miss Eliza Bennet, even if it were only as her maidservant? But here's the thing.
Elizabeth, exactly like Darcy, is crucially and overwhelmingly not the norm. Her wit operates on a level so far above most of her interlocutors (and interlocutrices) that many aren't even capable of perceiving it. You could go almost so far as to say that this is the entire point of the bloody story: neither she nor Darcy can find an equal until they find each other. (I know Elizabeth has Jane, the beatific foil to her asperity, but Jane is simply too magnanimous to grasp the methods and motivations of meaner spirits. In Biblical terms, innocent as a dove but not wise as a serpent.) In short, the scintillating conversation that flows from Austen's mightiest heroine was not the parlance of the quotidian.
It might be objected that, at the very least, any random aristocrat could be safely presumed to have a "basic" education that vastly outstrips all but the most advanced schooling of the present day. They wouldn't express themselves in emojis and lol-speak, and could hold up their end of a tete-a-tete. To this I reply that the only real divide between Elizabeth's youngest sisters and a vapidly tweeting 21st Century tween is the accident of their being born in different eras. Can it be doubted that if Mrs. Bennet were alive today, she would clutter every cranny of cyberspace with mortifying Facebook posts?
Nay, friends. The gleaming world of banter and badinage that we envision as Austenian England existed only inside the Austenian mind. If some bored and whimsical power should ever decide to grant your wish, whisking you back to the tag end of the 18th Century, the only advice I can give you is to seek employ as the humble maidservant of Miss Jane Austen herself.
Perhaps, like me, you are tired of hearing about how we live in unprecedented times. Perhaps, like me, you have wryly commented with friends and family about how we wish things could go back to being just plain precedented.
Well, I’ve been coming to an epiphany, and it finally coalesced, so, here you go: These times are not unprecedented in the least. We are simply experiencing the “crisis” du jour. The only thing unusual is our reaction to them. And, that’s something we can change, meaning that we can rejoice, take a breath, and remember that the apocalypse is not upon us.
Understanding Community
For a long time, I thought of myself as self-made, self-sufficient, healthy, enterprising and, ultimately, unstoppable. I took great pride in saying things like, I got my first job when I was 11, I started paying for all my own clothes when I was 14, I left home for college when I was 17 and I put myself through school, working three jobs and taking extra credits so I could finish sooner and save more on loans. And, at the age of 21, I started teaching high school. As you might be thinking, I still do take great pride in those accomplishments. Perhaps too much….
I mentioned to my dear husband last week that, over the past 5 years, I’ve been gradually coming to terms with the fact that actually I’m not very healthy. Though I am hard-working, when my Sister Ass of a body allows it, I’m astounded by how much help I need. I’m being forced to acknowledge that perhaps many of the things I did in my early years of “I can conquer the world by myself” are now catching up with me, at the ripe old age of 32. Lord help me as the decades progress!
In late September, I started shaking. Sometimes just tremors in my head, neck, and arms, sometimes my whole body. With multiple trips to the ER, visits to neurologists in Boston, and some imaging and testing completed, we know now that I don’t have a brain tumor or anything like MS, which is great. But, I do have non-epileptic seizures, or, Functional Neurological Symptom Disorder. It’s not that uncommon (one neurologist referred to it as a “known-unknown”), but “they” don’t know why it happens or how to make it stop. It gets worse when I’m tired, stressed, or when my senses get overstimulated. This has translated into me leaning on my family for a lot of help: my married sister bringing our girls to her house and leaving me dinner; my convent sister coming once a week to cook, clean, and play with her nieces; my parents bringing us casseroles and company on days when I feel disheartened, and helping us bridge the financial gap for all the medical bills. Having one more unusual health thing going on is a total drag, but having structured time and regular visits with family has been wonderful. As I look at my 7 wonderful siblings, both near and far (and think about the one in heaven), my parents’ 16 grandchildren (and counting), I keep thinking, boy are we lucky to have back-up like this—I get to be part of a clan.
“We must decrease, that He may increase.”
When Jamey and I were getting married, “thrifty” as we were, we had initially planned on a small wedding. But, when I literally started having nightmares about not having people there, we realized we needed to find a way to invite everyone. So, as some of you might remember, we fed our guests beans and rice on paper and plastic, accompanied by kegs of Bud Light. And, we were able to invite over 400 people; in December in New England, over 250 of them were able to come. The priest waived the fee for using the church. A friend made the cake. Other friends brought hors d’oeuvres. Another friend sewed an image of Our Lady of Guadalupe onto the priest’s chasuble, since we were married on her feast day (having Chipotle food was liturgically correct, you might say!). Another friend made some alterations to my clearance-rack dress, and I wore my mother’s veil. My oldest sister sewed a button back on my dress minutes before I walked down the aisle. My convent sister made me a crown of flowers and my bouquet. Friends brought holly and ivy and red berries from their yards to help with the rest of the flowers. One of my little brothers emceed, and one of my bridesmaids ran the playlist on her phone for dancing. And, of course, friends sang for the wedding mass. Jamey and I have lived in a lot of places, and with a lot of different people over the years. We had friends and family there from all over New England, naturally, but also from Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, Texas, Minnesota and Colorado, people we had known for decades, and maybe not seen in a decade, and people we had only known for a few months. And, they all came together to help us put on this huge, wonderful party near my hometown. It was especially the mothers of my childhood friends, who really went all out making food for the reception, who amazed me. I hadn’t really seen or talked to a lot of them in years, but they were there, ready to help. That sense of support was hugely instrumental in our decision to move back north from the DC area; we wanted our kids to grow up in a place where it was second nature to the people to take care of each other like that.
One of the things I said to Jamey as we were planning our wedding was that it wasn’t really our wedding, that we needed to remember that day that it was about the community, and that our marriage would be part of our society, and that we needed to build that give and take into the fabric of the day, to have it forefront in our minds. That’s what makes a wedding feast a Wedding Feast, with all of the theological significance that it deserves. It was, no doubt, my mother who had at some point put that idea into my head. And, just as my dad was about to walk me down the aisle, he completed that thought by leaning down and whispering to me, “We must decrease, that He may increase.”
One of the things that I’m working on with this whole seizure thing is to get my mind in a place where everything calms me down, somewhere I can go when it starts ramping up. I started out picturing this spot by the Contoocook River in Peterborough, NH, sitting with Jamey, his arm around my shoulders. We’re on a mossy, low bank, on a bench under the pine trees, with a steep hill behind us that tucks us away from the path and lets us feel focused on this wide, quiet spot in the river, which follows on the waterfall just upstream. Sounds peaceful, right? It didn’t work. I kept getting the sense of imminent danger, like we were in Truman’s bubble world, but that the shield might be permeated at any time by the madding crowd, the sound and the fury, lurking just on the outside.
I reevaluated, and I realized that the “perfect moment” that I needed to picture was actually from our wedding day. Not a place of sheltered isolation, but a place where I was surrounded by my lifetime’s worth of friends and family. When it was time to toss the bouquet, I had a moment of inspiration where I realized I could run up to an old balcony, so I pushed aside some dusty brooms, mop buckets and room dividers and raced up the stairs. Dancing across that little balcony, with The Marvelettes singing Too Many Fish in the Sea, and the literally hundreds of faces of loved ones looking up at me and celebrating with me—that is a memory that makes me feel truly happy, no matter what. Summed up in one word, that memory speaks of communion: Jamey and I had given, as much as we could, to as many people as we could, one hell of a good party, though I do say it myself. And they had given it to us, just as much, if not more so. That, and not a quiet river bank, with the two of us isolated from the rest of the world, is where we could find security, relief, and peace.
A Continuity of Communion
I’ve been listening to some podcasts about music lately, specifically how to approach sacred music in modernity (thank you, Paul Jernberg!). In one of these, Jernberg enumerates three things that need to be present for this music to work: a sense of preservation of the past, a sensibility for how to facilitate participation in the liturgy, and an energized desire to fuel organic growth and continuity. Preservation, participation, and continuity. And then, he goes on to a brief discussion of the contemporary prevalence of secular humanism, which in turn has three elements that create an uphill struggle in this musical endeavor: a disregard of history as outdated, stuffy and irrelevant (Jernberg quotes Henry Ford: “History is more or less bunk”); the idea that we humans can each solve our own problems with enough empirical knowledge and grit; and, finally, the increasing tendency to put ourselves first. So, I’ve been thinking about these three elements of humanism and how they’ve manifested in my own life (egocentric, much?). And, I’ve also been thinking about how they apply in this “unprecedented” era of COVID.
I suspect that anyone who knows me would agree that I don’t disregard old-fashioned, traditional things. Perhaps too much the reverse. But, what about the second idea, that of self-reliance, which sets itself up in opposition to a participation that engenders community? So much pride in the “self-made” accomplishments of my youth! I hope I am not too generous in forgiving my own faults when I suggest that it is a common mistake of youth to think that we have made ourselves by ourselves. (That is the central tragedy of James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, whether Joyce knows it or not.) For one reason or another, I realized lately how much I owe of who I am now to the choices that my parents made when they were in their 20’s and 30’s, so much so that I had them over for dinner for the express purpose of telling them how grateful I am for the multitude of hardships that they took on, and gambles that they made, to get my siblings and me to where we all are today. If I learned to seek out beauty, it was because they showed it to me. If I learned how to work hard, and to sometimes practice discipline, it was because they taught me the paradigms, and eventually the reasons behind them. They handed it all down to me, which, incidentally, for all you Latin etymologists out there, is exactly what tradition means: tradere, to hand over.
As for the egocentrism, naturally this goes hand-in-hand with the idea of self-reliance. If I can figure everything out on my own, then life only needs to be about me, and I only need to look out for me. But, if other people have modeled and taught me what I know and how to share what I have, then I have a duty to be generous in returning that gift to them to the extent that I can—and to pass it down to the next generation, precisely to and beyond the point that the gift requires me to decrease, that they may increase.
When I think back on the continuity of this communion, that is, on traditions of sharing, giving, taking and supporting, physically and spiritually, I think about the generations who came before us, and what trials they might have had to endure and support each other through. Because, the fact of the matter is, history and traditions are not “bunk,” but rather the defining fabric of our own persons and society. With that understood, let’s look back a little ways.
Precedented
2008 was a pretty rotten year for a lot of us, myself included. All my hard work, and there I was, getting ready to graduate college, with a pocket full of debts and zero job prospects, as our economy was nose-diving into the worst slump in almost a century. How about 1962, the year of the Cuban missile crisis? Or the 1950s, which brought the “duck and cover” drills, that were supposed to protect you in case a nuclear bomb fell? Or the 1930s and 1940s, which brought rations and world-wide death and fear? Or the 1910s and 1920s, which brought the first World War, the Spanish Flu devastation, and eventually the Great Depression? What about the Middle Ages, and the multiple rounds of bubonic plague, and an average life expectancy of 33? What about the Dark Ages, that followed on the fall of the Roman Empire? When I think back on all of these things, and then think about the past year, and occasionally using a Kleenex instead of toilet paper on my nice white toilet with my indoor plumbing, occasionally washing my hands with a different kind of soap at my sink with hot running water, because the store was out of toilet paper and my normal kind of soap, and then think on how about as many people die of heart attacks each year in our country as the number of people who have died of COVID in this year since it all started, I start to realize that these times are not so unprecedented after all. It’s simply one more round, in one generation after another, following on millennia of people getting sick and dying, trying to make ends meet (2 weeks ago, Jamey started his fifth temporary job since March 2020), and figuring out how to help each other through it. Namely, one more generation of the human condition.
Except, lucky us, now we have humanism, which means we’re supposed to do it all on our own. That is what is unprecendeted. When the going gets tough, and we’ve decimated our communities by living in a way that makes us believe that they are superfluous, we are, on one level or another, forced to come to an unprecendented realization: though we need each other, we have pockmarked the social fabric that gives us the paradigm in which to practice that give and take, that communion.
Communion comes with a hefty tradition of importance during times of trouble. The Black Death killed about 30 percent of the world’s population (COVID has killed about .01 percent); that Black Death percentage went up to almost 50 percent among priests. They prioritized Communion in their care for the sick. (Illustration by Michale Welply in Die Pest, Geißel der Menschheit, 2006.)
Giving is going to hurt. Any parent can tell you that. But it’s also the sine qua non of humanity. Even in those dusty Middle Ages, with bubonic plague raging, they knew that. We owe it, not by any means just to ourselves, but especially to our friends, parents, siblings, cousins, co-workers, and especially to our children, to remember that the physical gift of self is a non-negotiable element of full humanity. We have bodies; we should use them. He did; He still does.
So it turns out I have Asperger's. We took our girls in for a checkup--months ago now--and our doctor, God bless her, remarked on how unusually squirmy our elder daughter was during the eye exam. These tidings were not, for us, fresh information; Sonya has been such a lovely little eel from day one that whenever I hold another baby, they feel so motionless by contrast that I have to keep checking to make sure I didn't set them down somewhere and forget. But apparently, exaggerated photosensitivity can often be a "tell" for autism presentation. In a zany twist, I have the same symptom; and our doc is familiar enough with my abattoir of a mental state that she quickly connected some dots. The condition is often hereditary (sorry, darling), so if she showed signs, it made sense for me to get tested too.
A whole battery of exhaustive evaluations later--broken up, of course, by everyone getting fired from everything for the bulk of this ugly year--I was diagnosed. Ellen, my brilliantly organized and motivated helpmeet, was the one who found me a mind-brain doctor and then importuned her for weeks on end to make her assessment. When she got off the phone with the brain-mind lady, walked into the living room, and said, "You have autism," it yanked a skyscraper of rugs out from under me. For a second, I actually thought I had heard, "You have cancer."
But ultimately, the truth is so extremely not surprising that I accepted it pretty fast. I was homeless, off and on, for 15 years. I invented a poetic form in which every other syllable rhymes, and wrote a 57-stanza epic in it. I feel more at ease curled up inside of a cupboard than in most social situations--that, or I'm so aggressively friendly that people assume I'm either drunk or insane (both, it turns out!). I have bizarre under- and overreactions to almost everything. Most of all, I just don't work right. Asperger's is a neurological condition, a hardware problem, not only a psychological one. All my life I've felt that I simply couldn't process daily life the way I should--the way "neurotypicals" (as we Aspies like to call the normals) do. I was literally right. In some ways, the diagnosis feels very exonerating. And, of course, the "you have cancer" feeling has largely faded in light of the knowledge that this isn't something creeping up or hanging over me: it's already part of me, it has been all along.
Like probably most people, I still hear "autism" and think "Rain Man." But, luckily (?), I'm high-functioning enough to be morally and socially responsible for my own life choices. I smashed and blundered through a whole lot of road hazards to get this far, but now we know. Now we can start, not fixing me, because there's no "cure," it's just how my brain is wired, but we can start correcting for my tendency to pull to the left. Like driving a car with a splashy tire; we just have to lean harder on the steering wheel. As a group of wise men said long ago, "Now we know--and knowing is half the battle."
I'm guessing the other half is drugs? We'll see how it goes.
Before all this, I worked at a hardware store. When they laid me off, I took three weeks to write and be with my family; then, at the urging of my wise and beautiful wife, I signed on as a security guard at Leominster hospital. The other day at work, as my partner and I were escorting a Corona corpse to the now-full morgue, one of the nurses muttered, "I could make more on unemployment, and I wouldn't have to put up with this shit." How very true. It's what the Shepherds of Christ's Church have done.
Now, I've heard cogent arguments on both sides. I get that by assisting at a public Mass, we put not only ourselves in danger but everyone else that we encounter, and everyone they encounter, and so ad infinitum. My objection to the episcopal decision to shut down every Sacrament they could think of (the average bishop would probably need to consult a Catechism to list all seven) is less that the thing was done at all, and more that it was done so rapidly and with such gusto. The Belgian bishops closed the churches before the government started closing businesses. Bishop Rozanski of Massachusetts has forbidden priests from administering the Sacrament of the Sick, adding magnanimously that, should they run out of Holy Oils, "you may bless the oils to replenish your stock." How could they possibly run out? Tripping over croziers in his haste to slap away the consolations of religion, the man even tried to implement the flagrant heresy of having nurses apply Holy Oil while the priest muttered blessings from behind reinforced glass.
Maybe it's prudent and/or charitable to suspend the Mass for now. I don't even want to enter that debate. I'm just shamed and sickened with contempt for the extreme and systematic cowardice of our bishops, freshly emerging from the abattoir of the sex scandals, snatching so avariciously at a chance to bar the Tabernacle door.
My wife recently went to Confession (a few priests still treasure the notion that staying alive is the not the sole and ultimate purpose of life), and she used an app from the American Bishops' Conference to aid in her examination of conscience. One of the questions it asked was, "Have I had angry thoughts toward my bishops? Have I donated money to my bishops?" What's worse, the obscene crassness of the cash-grab, or the cartoonishly pathetic attempt at slyness? A moot point, as we will be giving not a penny from the gutter to those half-painted sepulchers. Ellie summed it up perfectly when she said that the laity and episcopacy are now in a classic abusive relationship, with the bishops continuously and genuinely baffled when we express interest in not being slapped around the kitchen anymore.
The timing. This virus came so swiftly on the heels of the sex scandals that I'm reminded yet again of how not subtle God can be. They were given a chance to show some kind of resolve, some kind of courage, something other than lascivious flab in their backbones. Instead they scrambled to get away from the Eucharist the instant they glimpsed an opportunity. Remember when Frodo tried to give lembas to Gollum? "Ach! No! You try to choke poor Smeagol. Dust and ashes, he can't eat that." Our Church leaders, ladies and gentlemen.
There are two reasons why I write. One is that I have a
dreadful memory, and, when I have epiphanies, writing down the details of what
and why helps me make sense of them, hold on to them, and remember that I’ve made
progress. The other is that epiphanies are both vital and beautiful, two
characteristics which, I think, ask and somewhat demand to be shared. Some
revelations are private, and others are improved for passing them along.
Baby Rebecca was born in October. There are so many revelations and trials surrounding her existence and birth that I have struggled mightily with trying to make sense of it, and even
sitting down to write about has me a bit flummoxed. But, as with most things we
undertake in life, I think the time has come for me to dive in and hope that
the muddle coalesces as I go. For one thing, the rest of the house is asleep
right now, and I’m strangely awake for 4 in the morning. Seize the moment!
I have heard some women say that each of their children has taught
them a particular virtue or life lesson—patience, humility, courage—whatever it
might be, something that they were lacking. Sonya, my oldest, in the way that
her pregnancy and delivery threw me to the ground, made me realize
spectacularly how very much I am not in control of the things that matter most.
She left me flailing. Rebecca, in a strange way, has been a life preserver.
But, the thing is, you need a life preserver when you’re still at sea, and she
has kept us there still, showing us one step at a time what we are supposed to
be learning, my next building block after Sonya. Sonya says, you can’t rely on
yourself, and Rebecca says, let me show you Whom you can rely on.
After Sonya was born, Jamey and I were talking about the
fact that it was hard for both us to be working full-time, and wishing there
were some realistic way to make ends meet on one income. And so we did that
thing which you should never do, and gave God a deadline. By the end of this
year, we prayed, let something happen to let one of us stop working. By the end
of 2018….
"Something"
A year ago this month, we were in a really bad car accident.
It was a torch that ignited a severe anxiety struggle for Jamey and put me on
medical leave for three months. As we were coming out of that “episode,” we
started looking ahead to the things we’d been discussing before being derailed,
and we drove to Worcester to meet with an adoption lawyer. And then, in the
last week of January, Jamey suddenly lost his job, which meant we lost our
health insurance, and we found out we were pregnant. And I literally sat on the
bathroom floor and cried and shook, because I was scared and overwhelmed, and
this was beyond not “the right time.”
What did pregnancy mean for us? It meant that, because of
HG, I would be physically out of commission for most of the next 9 months. It
meant battling with the insurance company (oh, wait, we didn’t have insurance!)
to get life-saving (not an exaggeration) meds partially covered, and coming up
with the money for the hefty co-pays. It meant finding full-time childcare for
Sonya, because I wouldn’t be able to take care of her. It meant telling my boss
that even though I was coming back from medical leave, I’d be MIA, yet again.
It meant that, not even a year after Sonya’s pregnancy ended, we were going
back into that dark hole.
I read somewhere that half of HG pregnancies end in
abortion. And I’ve spoken with more women than I can remember, other HG moms,
who struggled with this question, some of whom decided to keep their babies,
and some of whom were reeling after choosing not to. And I truly have so much
more sympathy than I ever thought I could for those circumstances. It’s amazing
what an unplanned pregnancy[1]
in the face of considerable illness, financial troubles and unemployment can do
for your understanding and compassion. But, at the end of the day (and the
beginning, and the middle), Rebecca existed, and she had been willed into
existence by Somebody who wanted her, given to us for safekeeping. When
someone’s life is given solely to your care and protection—that is a hefty
burden, and one that cannot rightly be refused.
The week we found out, we happened to go to a church where
we didn’t know the priest, and he got up there to give his homily, and the
first words out of his mouth were, “Every infant that exists is wanted and
planned by God.” Sometimes we get hit over the head with not very subtle
reminders because we need them. And then, a few months later, I read this verse
from Maccabees, and it became the definition I needed to understand Rebecca: I do not know how you came into being in my
womb. It was not I who gave you life and breath, nor I who set in order the
elements within you. Therefore the Creator of the world, who shaped the
beginning of man and devised the origin of all things, will in his mercy give
life and breath back to you (Mac 7:22-23). True to form, the words that
helped me most were spoken in a place of anguish; this mother speaks them as
her seven sons are being martyred before her eyes.
(Rebecca is stirring… get to a stopping point.)
So, what about that prayer that we had prayed, that deadline
we had given God? As it turned out, because we were the injured party in the
accident, it became the way that we could afford for one of us to stay home.
And though Jamey’s mental state was still off-kilter, the accident meant that
he could mostly take care of Sonya, while I did my editing job from home. And,
as it’s done these past few years, despite all our stressing, the financial
side of things fell into place. The occasional and, from our limited
understanding, random checks that would come from the car accident, helped us
keep on top of our bills. And sometimes it was a refund check from a hospital,
or a bonus month on the electrical bill, or friends sending a check in the mail
because they knew things were tight and didn’t wait to be asked (I don’t even
remember how many surprise envelopes we were given from generous friends), but
one way or the other, things kept just
working out. And, when we realized that we still needed help with Sonya because
Jamey still needed help, a friend with 10 children of her own said, hey, what’s
one more a few times a week?! And insisted that we bring Sonya to her house for
three full days each week, until we were coping better on our own. Talk about
generosity.
This all, of course, is more the circumstances surrounding
this pregnancy and birth. And while of course they are part and parcel with the
heart of the matter, they are not, well, they’re not the heart of the matter.
(Rebecca is awake. More later.)
(As in, 2 months later….)
24 January 2020
If you’ve already read what
I wrote after Sonya was born, you’ll know that her birth was traumatic for
me. My oldest sister, who is a veteran mother and laborer, told me later, “When
I came to visit, it was clear that you were very much in love with her, and
totally in shock at what had just happened.” So, that was validating, to say
the least! Naturally, then, I was not looking forward to enduring labor again.
I tried my best to avoid thinking and mentally preparing for it as long as
possible, meaning it wasn’t until the third trimester that I really let that
door open in my head.
I had to get connected with an Ob early on to manage the HG,
and it was just as well, because I was looking forward to having a hospital
birth with all the pain meds at the ready. I knew that in some ways I wouldn’t
be as comfortable as I would be at home, but I really needed to avoid going
back to that same “place” I’d been with Sonya; it had been hellish and
awful and I couldn’t bear the thought of being asked to survive it again.
Rebecca was due in the middle of the two busiest months that our midwife has
ever had (she’s been delivering babies for I think about 35 years) and 5 days
before a huge fundraising dinner that our doula was in charge of planning (Abby
Johnson was speaking, 600+ people were coming), so neither of them was
available for a homebirth anyway.
Okay, so, those care providers weren’t an option for me. Out
of my hands. Out of my control.
At 22 weeks, I woke up in the middle of the night, and out
of nowhere had contractions 3-5 minutes apart for 2 hours. And as I sat there,
there was this strange sense of calm that settled over me, and I thought, wow,
okay, so maybe I’m going to deliver this baby, and that will be the end of it.
It didn’t occur to me to wake Jamey up or call an ambulance or anything. 22
weeks is still awfully little. But then, they stopped, just as suddenly as they
had started. I hadn’t done anything I could think of to make them stop or
start. Out of my hands.
At 31 weeks, the same thing happened. This time I called my
midwife (even though I was working with an Ob, she was still giving me advice
and helping me out, because she’s awesome) and my Ob, and they both said, GO TO
THE HOSPITAL. And again, this strange sense of calm settled over me. I knew
there wasn’t anything I could do or not do about the baby coming early. It was
out of my control.
Luckily, the contractions stopped on their own again, and
after some monitoring and resting and hydrating, we all went back home. And I
had had a chance to see what the laboring rooms felt like, and know that I
liked the nurses pretty well, and have a little “dry run” of getting in the
car, having contractions in the front seat, finding my way to the maternity
ward, etc. I like to practice things, so it turned out I was actually pretty
grateful for it. And, while I didn’t love the monitoring and the lights and the
smells, I was able to say, okay, this isn’t awful, we’ll be okay if it has to
happen here.
By now, we realized that we really needed to get serious
about how I was going to cope with things. Even though our doula wasn’t free,
she suggested we sit down and talk through some of the things that had happened
with Sonya, so we could identify where they went “wrong” and try to adjust
expectations for how things would go this time around. And as we talked with
her, she eventually said that she felt like she wasn’t done working with us,
and that if we were okay with the possibility that she might not be able to
come at the last minute because of this big dinner she was in charge of, that she’d
like to be our doula again. We said, okay, that would be great! And, we
realized we had to be okay with not knowing what was going to happen.
About this time, we started talking with our Ob about
specific pain meds and what would be good options for us and what the hospital
offered. And, one by one, he and we realized that none of the pain meds were a
good idea for me. So. That sucked. And then I started having nightmares about
smallpox outbreaks in the hospital, and crazy ladies a la Mrs. Mike horror stories collapsing over my newborn baby in the
germ-infested delivery rooms. Which I knew were irrational! But they said
something about where my subconscious and my instincts were leading me, and it
wasn’t a hospital. If I couldn’t have pain meds anyway, what was the point of
going to deliver in a place where my gut feeling had me tensed up and I knew I
wouldn’t and couldn’t be as physically comfortable as I would be in my own bed?
Then, my midwife said that despite her busyness, and as long
as I was okay with the possibility of her back-up being there instead of her, that she would
be happy to do another homebirth with us. And, when we told our Ob at the ninth
hour that we were realizing that we were probably going to do another
homebirth, which we knew he thought wasn’t a great idea in general, he said,
well, I hope you will at least keep coming here for managing your meds and let
me serve as your back-up in case of emergency. Which was astounding and
wonderful, because what kind of Ob keeps a patient on when she does something
so wildly out of accord with what he thinks is right? I was and am still
incredibly grateful to him.
And then, holy smokes did I feel like I was Abraham, with
everything leading me back up the mountain of madness and falling into place
for me to go right back to the exact same experience of crucifixion and
sacrifice that had been Sonya’s birth. And I didn’t want to, of course, but every
instinct and sign and prayer seemed to be leading me back, and it felt like it
was out of my hands.
Taped up on the kitchen cupboard during the last few weeks of the pregnancy.
As I tried to get myself into a place of being somewhat okay
with it all, I talked with other moms and did some reading, and I put together
a list of phrases to try to remember when I was in labor. Nothing like, “I am a
flower! I am peace! I am natural! I am beautiful! I am melting butter!” Because
those, believe it or not, felt like a big fat lie. And sappy to boot. I needed
to think on things that acknowledged the difficulties and reminded me that they
would not be forever. And that they had a purpose. And then I read this bit
from Fulton Sheen, which pulled together all the suffering and consecration I
had encountered with Sonya’s birth, acknowledged it, and told me what I had
suspected on my own.
Not only a woman’s days, but her
nights—not only her mind, but her body must share in the Calvary of motherhood.
That is why women have a surer understanding of the doctrine of redemption than
men have: they have to associate the risk of death with life in childbirth, and
to understand the sacrifice of self to another through the many months
preceding it.
The suffering of childbearing, both pregnancy and the labor
of giving birth, like nothing else in this world, allows us to redeem the
world. We become like Mary, in her role as co-redemptrix, and like Jesus, in
his sacrifice on the cross. And we give life to the world, through toil and
grief and heartache. And lots of other aches.
We had early labor at 36 weeks, too, and again it was all up
in the air, and we called my sister to come take care of Sonya, and Jamey left
work early, and then it stopped. Out of control!
When Rebecca’s labor did finally start, 3 days before my
actual due date (Sonya had been 4 days “early”), it started very similarly to
Sonya’s. We had gone to bed for the night, and at about 10, my water broke. But
this time it was just a trickle, not a gush. And we weren’t even sure at first,
because it was so… mild. But as it picked up, and our same midwife and our same
doula arrived, and the contractions got real, we knew pretty quickly it was the
real deal. But even though the circumstances were all the same, the contractions
never got as close as they had with Sonya, and I never got as panicked, at
least not for as long, and even though it was still a compound presentation
(both girls had a little hand right up next to their head), somehow it wasn’t
as awful. He took me back to the edge of madness, and asked me to be okay with
it, and then gave me a reprieve. But, let’s be real! It was still CHILDBIRTH.
The worst three moments, when the contractions were particularly heinous and
close, I thought three dreadful things: “Why isn’t anybody helping me?!” (Which
of course they were, but, you know…). “God, I never wanted this baby in the
first place!” (Which is true, as we have discussed, but hardly the point, since
He did and asked me to take care of her.) And, the kicker, which led to my
lightbulb moment: “Jesus, what did I EVER do to you to deserve this?!”
You see, back in college, I used to listen to this CD of
Gregorian Chant to help me turn my mind off and fall asleep. Mysteria, by Chanticleer (Yeah, that’s
right. I knew how to party!). It’s a collection of chants from Holy Week,
mostly of the Triduum—things we hear at Tenebrae, Good Friday, and yes, Easter
Sunday. Given what I’d been thinking about birth as our share in the act of
Redemption, and because I knew that this music was not only topically
appropriate but also something that calmed me down, I made sure we had it playing
on repeat. Some of it is meditations on the Cross, and, the thing that ended up
being the crystal, so to speak, is the Reproaches of Good Friday.
In the words from this piece, Jesus speaks to his people, telling them of all
the blessings he has given them, all the delights, and then speaks of the
suffering they have stored up for him in return. And it always comes back to
the same refrain: “Oh my people, what have I done to you? Or in what way have I
offended you? Answer me!” And at the moment I thought, God, what did I ever do
to you? I heard this refrain, and it took the wind all out of my angry and
outraged sails. I had no right to be upset and angry with Him, but I could lean
on Him, and suffer with Him, because He’d been there before, and I knew that
He’d be there time and time again for me, and be my Simon of Cyrene. And that
calmed me down and gave me resolution, or at least surrender, like nothing else
could or did. Into your hands, Lord.
When I sat up, all at once, desperate to get in the water,
it became clear, all at once, that Rebecca had no intention of letting me get
in the water. I pushed at the most, they said, three times, kneeling, and she
was born (with Sonya, I pushed for three hours). I remember how long and bony all her limbs felt, and wondering if
other people realized that she was coming already, and thinking (I kept asking
what time it was) that she couldn’t possibly be coming yet, because Sonya’s
labor had been three hours longer, so I must have three more hours to go. So I
announced, during that last push, as much to myself as to everyone else, “She’s
here!” And while Sonya was born to my terror and tears, Rebecca was born to a
room full of laughter. (In fairness to both of them, Sonya’s existence was
greeted with partying and rejoicing, while Rebecca’s was… not.)
I remember, in the hours after Rebecca was born, that
something made me think of a man I had once loved, and whose departure left me
hurt and broken for a long time. Peanuts! I thought. Training wheels. Nothing,
next to this horrific and glorious marriage and motherhood. Which, to be
honest, makes me more than a little trepidatious about what lies in store for
us in purgatory and heaven.
Which is silly. Because of course, what waits for us, is
nothing more or less than Redemption.
One of Rebecca's middle names is Amara. It means bitter, grace, sweetheart, and, the heavens are laughing.
[1]
Planned by God, yes, which means we know existentially that there is a reason,
a purpose, a good and a joy that comes from it. But every pregnancy involves 4
persons (God, the mother, the father and the baby), and only One of us specifically
planned this.
One hears whispers, now and again, that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., harbored imperfection. There are murmurs of improprieties in his doctoral thesis—mutters of infidelity in his marriage. The man was a genius, a visionary, and a great leader; also, he was a man. Not an Archangel, perfect in Heaven. It takes nothing away from his legacy to admit his flaws. Indeed, if he hadn’t been flawed, his achievements would be less admirable.
But contrast our reticence about the putative sins of Rev. King with our almost indecent revelry in the sins of Hippo’s bishop. You already see where I’m going with this: ask ten random people for an Augustinian anecdote, and at least ten of them will say, “Lord, give me chastity, but not yet.” It detracts from neither his sanctity nor his sagacity; if anything, it makes him more relatable, more encouraging, hence in a very real way a better saint, because God can make more use of his example to inspire us.
Now, obviously, there’s one crucial difference here: St. Augustine is not a martyr. His city was beleaguered by heretics—the original Vandals, in fact—during his terminal illness, but he wasn’t murdered by cowards in mid-crusade. Also, there aren’t any Third Century Manichaeans still slinking around, looking for ways to discredit Augustine. The reputation of Dr. King, on the other hand, might still be attacked by bigots and the sons of bigots. All that being the case, it’s only prudent to be more circumspect in mentioning his errors, at least for a few more generations.
Furthermore, the sin of Augustine was not less grave merely because he made a well-known joke about it. In fact, his sin—his mortal sin, that brought so many years of anguish to the soul of his mother, St. Monica—is all the more dangerous to the rest of us because his wit makes it seem roguish and charming. Ultimately, the famous quip is comic, not tragic, for only one reason: that, in the end, he allowed the Lord to grant his prayer.
In short, a person’s failings are never, in and of themselves, to be celebrated. But, since we all fail, since all have sinned and fallen short, it can sometimes be consoling and encouraging to remember that our greatest heroes are no exception. And whatever their faults, it needn’t tarnish the inspiration we can take from their accomplishments.
I say all this because I happened upon an article alleging some things against Dr. King; I have no idea if those specific allegations were true, but I certainly know the man was a sinner, because he was a man. And I’m not afraid of finding out that a hero did ugly things. On the contrary, it tells me that even with all that extra weight and wounding on one’s soul, one can still reach the starlit peaks above.
Someday I’ll probably write a blog post that doesn’t mention G.K. Chesterton. But not today. GK once said of Aquinas that he always wrote with an eye on two qualities: clarity and courtesy. “And he did it because they were entirely practical qualities, affecting the probabilities of conversion.” I try to keep that in mind. I feel like I’m generally pretty courteous. But then I hear people say, “I don’t go to church because my parents made me go as a child,” and I just can't do it anymore. These are the words of an idiot. Did your parents not make you eat vegetables? Read books? Use the potty? If you’re not still doing anything your parents made you do as a child, how are you even alive?
Sonya’s almost two now. (When she was born, absolutely everyone told me they grow up fast; and yep, sometimes everybody’s right.) We’re well past the point where I can let her get away with things like—to pick a random example—throwing her food on the floor. Now and again, we have these titanic battles of will, hinging on the disposition of oatmeal or bath toys. It’s hard for me, because I adore this girl and it breaks my heart to hear her cry, let alone to make her cry. And it’s hard on her because I’m fifteen times her size and hold a black belt in Jiu-jutsu.
Waited a long time to bust out this pic.
As a father, I know perfectly well that it’s my responsibility to discipline my children and teach them to function in society. And I swear I can deal with her crying because I know it’s for her own good and I would be failing and maiming her if I didn’t hold these lines. (Also she’d probably starve if I didn’t coax her into eating once in awhile.) What really bothers me is the power disparity. Of course I can sit there and wait her out. She has no money, no geographical knowledge; she doesn’t have an ID, she doesn’t know anyone that would harbor a fugitive toddler. What’s she gonna do? Ultimately, she’s going to do what she’s told.
And that’s good, because it happens that I do love her and have her best interests at heart. But somehow, it still just seems unfair. I feel like a bully, calmly sitting there holding a spoonful of applesauce while she writhes and shrieks in her high chair. I do it anyway, because I’m her dad and I have to. And you’d better believe we take her to church every week. Why in the Name of God do people think they’re being “deep” (whatever damn fool thing that means) when they reject “organized religion” for “spirituality”? We have organized English. Organized Math. Organized rules for operating a motor vehicle, a bathtub, a toaster. How is it smart to accept no guidance, no fundamentals, in the most important thing of all? Anyway, that’s a whole blog post worth of ranting. If Sonya chooses another spiritual path as an adult, that’s her right; but at least she’ll have a solid foundation from which to make intelligent choices. We’re not going to let her subsist on candy corns because I’m too much of a weakling to make her eat her broccoli.
