Everything is different, and yet everything is the same. The most important people are still the most important people. The most important things are still the most important things. And yet, everything seems different somehow.
I guess it’s not actually that things are different so much as that things have been even more revealed. What was there and true all along is simply no longer as hidden. How drug companies profit. How the poor have less access to health care and technology and education. How the selfish hoard, and are incapable of considering and unwilling to consider the community and the greater good. How little some people respect and value and care for our nation’s aging citizens and family members.
I guess it’s true that adversity brings out the best and worst of humanity, and I am just done with the coverage of and from the worst of humanity. I am done with the fear mongering and the finger-pointing and the projections.
Translate: I am now rationing my news intake. I want to know what’s closed and what steps the CDC says I need to take, but I am *done* with pictures of empty grocery shelves and listening to pundits say the president mishandled this virus situation (is that actually news?) or that kids should or should not be in school. I need to be informed, but I need to balance information with stories and news about the best of humanity. For my own sanity.
You know what hasn’t changed, ever? What was true 6 months ago and 6 years ago and 6 decades ago, and is still true today? People are mostly good. Most people are good. We tend to focus on the small percentage that is bad, and it’s gotten so out of hand that it can seem like the bad outweighs the good – and that’s just not truth.
I believe in science and I believe in God. It doesn’t have to be one or the other; it can be both. I can pray and I can take vitamins and vaccines. And I may even knock on wood. Because I can be a faith person who’s also a little superstitious and who believes that it’s my job to do what I can while letting God worry about the rest. And that’s not awful. I think it’s probably actually pretty normal. And people just won’t admit it because faith people want you to be all faith all the time and science people want you to be all science all the time, and the two are not supposed to mix. But I am faith and science both, and I’d like to say all the time but the truth is sometimes my faith in science and my faith in God can be shaken a little.
Such as when I watch too much news.
I am a person who prepares and also a person of faith. I have a stocked pantry and a stocked bible. I have my doctor and my pastor in my contacts. And this morning I balanced yesterday’s worry about a potential lack of things – the result of too much news intake – with communion, taken with a few dozen strangers, before the sun lit the sky.
And it felt awesome. Awesome to have quiet moments. Awesome to be part of a community of people focusing on the same thing. Awesome to focus on good things at the start of the day. Awesome to throw out old and unhealthy thoughts and fill those parts of my brain with goodness and quiet. Awesome to, for just a few moments, be the child instead of the parent. Awesome to worry about nothing. Awesome to be imperfect and loved anyway. Awesome to be a contradiction and loved anyway.
1 Corinthians 11:28 says, “Everyone should look into his own heart before he eats the bread and drinks the cup.” International Children’s Bible
It’s Presidents’ Day, and this year we’re going to elect a President. As I’ve gotten older, our choice of leadership has seemed more and more important – not just because I think we chose so poorly last time, but also because 20 years ago I would have told you that I wasn’t sure all our votes were counted. I guess five key things have changed since those days:
I became a mother, and now I feel the responsibility to do something about the world my girls live in.
I have encountered children, including one of my own, who will be categorized as pre-existing condition when they reach adulthood and will desperately need health care after their parents can no longer cover them.
I have seen first-hand how the privileged have access to better everything. Better legal services. Better education. Better health care. Better chances of getting a second chance. Better chances at being given the benefit of the doubt. Money and education make a huge difference in the kind of treatment and care people have access to, and ultimately their odds of survival and their quality of life.
The world has changed. People with guns enter places that used to be safe and they take the lives of others, including our nation’s children.
Al Gore lost the presidency, and I truly started to believe that votes are counted and they matter.
The more I think about this coming election and all the craziness in our country right now, and the more I encounter people of all backgrounds and who vote in a variety of ways, the more I’m convinced that the majority of America is not represented by what we see in Washington and what we see on the news. The majority of us are not just right or left, or Republican or Democrat, or liberal or conservative. The majority of us are somewhere in the middle, in an area defined by shades instead of absolutes. Our life experiences move our political needle, and hopefully also our empathy needle, as we make mistakes or get to know people not like us or get a diagnosis or someone we love is hurt.
But the candidates we’re presented with right now seem to either fall at the far sides, where the absolutes reside, or act like they do simply to secure votes.
It’s absolutely crazy to me that someone would say that any political party has no room for someone who believes differently. You can’t be a Democrat if you believe abortion is wrong? Or you can’t be a Republican if you think access to guns should have limits?
That. Is. Stupid.
And incredibly short-sighted.
You know what else is crazy and short-sighted? Our thoughts on instances or events have suddenly started getting us lumped into an absolute value type of category.
I can see a video of police brutality and think the officer in it is an asshole while also believing in the goodness of other law enforcement officers. I can kneel during the national anthem and still love America and care about our military and be thankful for their sacrifice. I can think that abortion is wrong and still respect the right of others to make different choices or even just believe that government should not have control over those sorts of things.
You can vote Republican and believe in restrictions for assault rifles or funding for climate solutions. You can vote Democrat and believe in prayer in schools or not want federal funding for Planned Parenthood.
What most of us can agree on, I think, is what makes a good person. Someone who is kind, who tries their best, looks for the truth, helps others, has empathy, and does the right thing when no one is looking. We are not all ever going to agree on the issues of the day, but it seems like we could at least agree on the need for our country’s leaders to be good humans – and to vote accordingly. In all the years I’ve voted I have never seen so many good people get caught up on opposite sides instead of focusing on the simplicity of who’s qualified and who’s a good human?
This is not the time to not vote. It’s not the time to stick our heads in the sand and worry about our hair while we let the rest of America figure this out. As the old saying goes if we don’t stand for something, we’ll fall for absolutely anything – and that’s true in our personal lives, in our professional lives, and in our politics.
It shocks me how many people can listen to our current President and think there’s a good human. Set the political issues aside – really look at a person who laughed about grabbing and mistreating women, who belittled the family members of a fallen soldier, who made fun of a former POW, and who made fun of someone with a disability. I challenge you to then look at yourself in the mirror and say I want my children to be like him or I aspire to be like him.
A number of people, including our current president, are interviewing for the job of leader of our country. It’s our job to decide who gets that job and that decision is not just about key metrics, but also, and most importantly, about each candidate’s goodness or lack of it.
The supreme quality for leadership is integrity. Dwight D. Eisenhower
I sat with my Mom at lunch today and thought OH GOOD LORD over and over and over again. It’s Mother’s Day and I wanted us to have a nice lunch with good conversation and then all these things – MomLife – kept happening. The wait time was going to be 45 minutes, someone didn’t want pasta, someone wasn’t sure of the kind of cheese used to make that restaurant’s version of mac and cheese, someone wasn’t finished with their story before someone else started their story and we had to fully assess the unfair interruption, and we even had fake nails came off which required a thorough inspection of the floor under our table. OH GOOD LORD can we please just all eat and let Grammy have 5 minutes of peace?!
I spent some time today wondering at what point in MomLife things calm down. And then I started to wonder if it doesn’t really ever calm down, and maybe it just changes. Maybe MomLife really boils down to moment after moment and day after day and year after year of thinking and saying OH GOOD LORD, just in a variety of different ways.
The first OH GOOD LORD moments happen during pregnancy. My favorite is when women hover around you to relive their awful birth experiences for you. Ones where they knew better than the doctors and nurses, the epidural didn’t work, they needed 119 stitches, and they ended up not eating or drinking anything for the 3 days they were in labor. What we should do is tell those women to shut it, but instead we just internally think OH GOOD LORD.
Women also say things like get ready for sleepless nights!, breastfeeding is best, let me share my recipe for puréed organic purple carrot and guava baby food, and I wasn’t sure the dishwasher was hot enough to really get things clean.
Fact: You will suffer from lack of sleep.
Fact: Millions of babies throughout history were not breastfed and somehow magically made it to adulthood as high-functioning wonderful people.
Fact: Purple carrots are the worst. (Or, millions of babies throughout the last century have somehow made it to adulthood on food prepared by Gerber.)
Fact: I have praised God for my dishwasher.
You know what’s useful info for a pregnant woman? Prepare yourself for leaving the hospital wearing the largest underwear of your life in the most comfy sweatpants you own. Your large underpants will hold a variety of attachments including, if you’re lucky, a to-go cool pack from your favorite nurse. Additionally, your largest-ever underwear will be held in place by an outer mesh underwear because your regular underwear will need reinforcement to hold everything in place where it should be. You will not allow yourself to sneeze or cough for days for fear that the inner and outer underwear and all the attachments will fail, and at the hint of any potential cough or tickling in your nose, you will inwardly cry OH GOOD LORD. The good news here is that at no point while discussing big underwear with other Moms have I ever encountered a woman who had a breach – so sneeze carefully new Moms.
Once you’re out of the infant phase, people love to see and share pictures of little ones smashing birthday cake. Moms are prepared for those birthday cake messes, so they’re adorable. However, every other day of the year messes are unexpected and not adorable. And even with the occasional ones you find funny, you will also find yourself groaning OH GOOD LORD as you stop to consider how to get gum out of carpet, if it’s OK to put tissues back in the box if they were all pulled out but not actually used, or if the amount of lotion that got in their mouth while they were playing with your lotion is the amount that requires you call poison control.
When your kids are off to elementary school and another child hurts your child’s feelings, there are two separate OH GOOD LORD moments. The first is a prayer for help in the moment of your awareness of the incident, when you are inwardly desperately thinking about the right thing to say to make them feel better. The second is minutes or hours later, possibly even when your child is asleep or has moved on, when you have a moment to think about it and you become enraged that the offending child could possibly say/do that to your child. In that moment, you think OH GOOD LORD because you suddenly realize that you are mad enough and irrational enough to lose your cool and yell at someone else’s child (and that child’s parents and their neighbors and all their relatives) and you don’t even care if you end up with your mug shot on the nightly news.
Then your elementary child asks crazy hard questions that no book can prepare you for. If you’re a well-seasoned parent, you might be able to conceal your reaction to learning that your child put a baby doll dress on your girl cat and secretly married her to your boy cat and has been praying they will have kittens. Or you could be like me and calmly explain that the cats are fixed and can’t have babies and so this is not one of those things to pray about…and that will result in your child questioning why you did this really mean thing and prevented them from having a family and OH GOOD LORD did I mess that up.
When your kids are off to middle school you learn that teachers send parents emails when children get good grades and that teachers call parents when children pull pranks that get out of hand. In the moment you realize a teacher is not calling to say your child is the recipient of a Nobel prize, in the pause where that teacher is searching for tactful words, you will think OHHHHHH GOOOOOOD LORRRRRD this cannot be good. And then later when your child gets home from school and you say Hey, your teacher called me today and that child says something like Mommy, I really thought it would be funny and tells you their thought process, you think OH GOOD LORD this child got this love for shenanigans from meand Is it possible this is my fault? This is maybe actually kind-of my fault.
Ella’s photobomb fail!
As my girls get older I find that the vast majority of the time they are out of my sight, when they’re at school or in a friend’s yard or at a sleepover, I think about them but I don’t worry about them. But the moments when worry or panic do hit me, my emotions are overwhelming and OH GOOD LORD how often they are irrational. The possibilities in my head can go from the slightly possible to the absolutely insane in about 5 seconds once I see a news alert of a school shooting, or learn of a child who’s been abused or abducted or addicted to drugs. I struggle sometimes to rein in my thoughts about those possibilities, something I suspect will never completely go away and a part of MomLife that is really, really hard.
Without a doubt, OH GOOD LORD exasperation is the most common of all the OH GOOD LORDs. These occur when you find your child’s dirty clothes resting literally right in front of the hamper, when dirty dishes are sitting on the counter literally right above the dish washer, and when you are asked to provide your child with a reason why they must bathe. Sometimes when questioned about an empty toilet paper roll, which coincidentally is just two feet from a bin of full rolls of TP, all children in my house will claim they have not used the bathroom that day. And OH GOOD LORD, really?
But the best OH GOOD LORD exasperation occurs when your children are embarrassed by you or shocked by you. They might, for instance, indicate that your camo pants are not appropriate even for hanging out in the yard. They might call you “extra” when you open their water bottles even though they have literally never opened a water bottle for themselves. They might ask you to jump on the trampoline with them and then say things like Mommy, that’s good for 45! Or they might offer to do your make-up so you can “really look good.”
And just when you think you can’t possibly handle another OH GOOD LORD exasperation or panic or fear moment, your child will say or do something that makes your heart melt. They might bring you breakfast for dinner or make you a card that says their favorite thing about you is your kindness. And you will tear up and think OH GOOD LORD I love these kiddos so much and I am so thankful and lucky to be their Mom.
This Mother’s Day was filled with OH GOOD LORD moments, and it was a really great day. I may have caught the girls fighting about slime containers but I also caught them praying for folks who need healing and planning with friends how to raise the most money for the local children’s hospital. Such is MomLife – a mixture of fun and peace and chaos and loud and quiet and annoyance and love all in one day.
Happy Mother’s Day to my Mom, who continually shows me how to be a Mom and who I am absolutely certain still has regular OH GOOD LORD moments because of me. Sorry I’m perpetually late to church and sneak in to the back row wearing my jeans and flip flops.
Brave, Anyway 