Hi Everyone,
I know it’s been ages since I’ve posted, but I just had a piece published at Plough, a magazine (both print and online) that I highly respect. Plough provides lots of thoughtful/reflective and change-prompting reading that I’ve appreciated over the past year. The piece I have there is “Belonging.” Just follow the link to read, and while you’re there, check out the magazine and website.
Blessings,
Jen
Yesterday was Mother’s Day, and when I arrived at church, I received a tulip.
So did both my daughters.
So did every woman who arrived at our church yesterday–whether single or married, biological mother or not.
I am glad of this–because every one of us is called to a mothering of one kind or another. My children have several spiritual mothers, and I’m grateful for every woman who pours into their lives. My children need them. I need them. They receive mothering from all kinds of women–from me, from their grandmother, from their female teachers, from the young women who work in their after-school program, from the coaches who lead their soccer teams…
They are challenged and encouraged and pushed and comforted and guided and stretched and corrected–by all these women in ways that are specific to each one.
They need more than one “mother,” and, most of all, they need the motherly love of God, who, though generally referred to as “Father,” also speaks of himself as “motherly.”
I was very blessed this morning to read Mike Frost’s post “The Ferocious Motherly Love of God,” on this topic, and I am so glad to share it with you. May it encourage you as it encouraged me.
Grace and peace this day.
~Jen
I’ve been thinking, writing, and praying about some hard things lately, so it felt like a break was needed on the blog. Found the writing in my journal from not long ago (a venting piece written a bit tongue in cheek) and then this fun pic of our kids at Shedd Aquarium last fall-minus Kelly 😦
When my children were little and I would find sticky spots of who-knew-what under high chairs and on doors and …everywhere, I remember thinking that once they got to a certain age, I would need to simply hose down the entire house.
The logic behind this was that, at that “certain age,” my children would be cleaner, neater, tidier.
Um, when is that stage?
They’re all in double-digits now, and I still feel like dirt and sticky substances literally drip from their fingertips and feet. I can clean a kitchen countertop so squeaky I would be fine eating right off it, and two hours later I come back and it looks as if a family of small animals has been living on it for several weeks.
They’ve grown more autonomous, which means they can do things like fix meals for themselves, but it also means that ketchup, flour, hot dog “juice,” bits of banana, etc.! can be slopped across the floor, in the fridge, under the microwave, behind the sink…
And since they eat all the time and anywhere, let’s add “in the couch and on the rug and on the windowsills…”
HOW?
If they are capable of fixing the food, of feeding themselves, are they not also capable of seeing the mess it creates?
And how, honestly, does a person make that much mess simply pouring a bowl of cereal? How is that even possible?
My inner “martyr mom” tells me they see at least some of the messes they create, but they assume, maybe even unconsciously, I will clean it up.
But I don’t think “seeing it” is the entirety of the problem. I am discovering there is a great chasm—Grand Canyon-sized—between my idea of “clean” and theirs.
“Wipe the countertops, please,” I ask.
When they are finished, it looks to me no different than when they started, but when I bring the offending child in to look, and I point at the offensive countertop, he or she responds, “What? I cleaned it.”
THAT is not clean!
Surely this will get better, right? I have this terrible image of my children, in their 20s, still blissfully unaware of the messes that follow them everywhere they go. This makes me want to create some giant plastic bubble suits into which I can zip them, with a little slot for me to pass food inside. All the slop will be with them in the suits and when they get disgusted enough with it (if they even notice it), I could send them outside to unzip and shake and hose down.
At times the state of our house gets to the point that I see nothing but the dirt, and every crumb-pile and crusty plate and spill in our house seems as if it’s jumping up and down, shouting, “Look at me! Look at me!” That’s when I go on a little rampage, pointing out all the gunk to whichever of my kids happens to be around. But even though I think the evidence of their slovenliness is quite overwhelming, all they do is look at me with that expression on their faces that tells me they think I’m losing it and probably need to see a doctor.
I wonder if they will ever notice or if I will be cleaning up after them when they visit me in their 30s. And usually at this point in my thinking, I indulge in a little fantasizing about a clean house, a tidy house, with everything arranged just so, staying just so.
Staying quiet.
With my introvert self being too quiet in the middle of it.
And I find I am grateful for my house being exactly the way it is.
Dirt and all.
I was in full mom mode, in route from an evening parents’ meeting at the elementary/middle school to pick Em up from art class across the city.
I stopped at a red light in North Lawndale, Douglas Park dark and deep on my right, and noticed a girl standing on the corner. The lights from across the street barely lit her face.
But it was enough to make her tears shine. It was enough I could see her mouth, open with sobs, her hands, clenched in fists, pressed tight against her cheeks.
I rolled down the window. “You ok?”
I startled her; then the words came rushing out.
“I missed my bus, and another one hasn’t come. I need to get home, but I don’t know how.”
I pulled around the corner onto the deserted dark street leading into the park and called her to come to the window.
The red line. She needed to get to the red line, and she needed a bus to get to the red line. She’d missed the right bus, ran after, but didn’t make it. And she’d stood there, alone on this corner, till fear kicked in and she started crying.
Anything beyond the green and brown lines, and I’m a bit clueless about the Chicago L system. In that moment I couldn’t even remember which direction the red line runs.
But I knew this girl couldn’t stand on this corner any longer.
“Will you get in?” I asked her.
She hesitated, then figured the gray-haired woman playing soft music in her car was a better option, and got in.
I turned the car around and headed east, into the city. Em’s art class is on the north side; surely there would be a way I could get this child to the red line on the way.
We talked. I tried to drop as many reassuring bits of information as I could. Mom of four (turns out she’s the oldest of four), the ages of my kids (she’s fourteen, a freshman in high school; siblings are 12, 10, and 5), mother of twins (she’s a twin, too, though her brother died soon after birth, right on her mother’s chest. “His lungs weren’t developed enough.”) My name, her name.
She wasn’t breathing so hard any more, but I had to check. “Did anything bad happen to you? Anything besides missing the bus?”
She said no. My shoulders relaxed.
“You need a Kleenex?” I asked her.
“Yes. Is it okay if I blow my nose? Sorry, I got a little cold, so it might be noisy.”
I laughed and told her that was just fine.
She asked if I was a teacher—I have no idea why: do I still give off that vibe?
“Used to be,” I said. “Now I’m a writer.”
She wanted to know if I was famous.
I laughed again. Far from it, I said.
“You write books, though?”
“Well, I have one written, but it’s not published. I write magazine and news articles for a school.”
We talked about her school then, how her mom and grandma and she picked it because it’s college prep, because it helps its students get scholarship money, because she wants to go to college.
I pulled over to check the red line map, making sure I was under a street light, telling her what I was doing.
I called Dave just to confirm what I thought would be the closest stop to Em’s art school.
We talked more as I drove. Her face lit up when I asked about sports. Basketball is a favorite, track, too.
We talked about her siblings, what they’re like. Younger sister by a year is actually taller, but she doesn’t want to play basketball; she wants to be a cheerleader, even with her long legs. Their aunt said she should play basketball like her sister, that if she became a cheerleader, she’d knock out the whole first row of fans when she kicked. We talked about her grandma, a police officer, about her own long commute to school from the south side to the west side, about where she lived before moving to Chicago.
I saw the L track ahead and pointed it out to her. “I’m going to turn left just before it,” I told her. “The side street’s not so busy and I can let you out. And I’m gonna’ give you my business card so you can call or text me when you get home and let me know you made it safe. Will you do that for me?”
She said she would. I told her again where to cross the street, where to go up the steps to the platform. She got out and was gone.
Later that night I got a text from her grandma.
Her grandgirl had made it home safe.
She’d made it home safe.
And her grandma was very, very thankful.
On Roosevelt Road at 7 p.m.
Driving from one mom “job” to another,
Unaware of the Father’s hand orchestrating/planning/moving,
I’d been exactly where I was supposed to be
To see a neighbor.
*I have a couple of blog/writing-related notes at the end of this post. Thanks for reading!
Earlier this year, trapped in a quiet waiting room while one of my children was doing academic testing, I picked up a book from a shelf and flipped through it. It was a book about Christian missionaries ministering to Muslim women, and it was compiled from the experiences and wisdom of women missionaries who’d served in Muslim countries for many years. I loved reading the accounts, but oddly enough, now there is only one I can recall with any clarity. It was from a woman missionary who felt amazed she’d been asked to contribute to the conversation. She, her husband, and their two daughters had been sent, years before, to a strict society, one in which she had very little freedom even as a Western woman, one in which her daughters had even less freedom. She said something like this: “I have spent most of my time ministering to only two young women, our daughters. I have been their teacher, their spiritual mentor, and their mother. That has been my ministry. I do not know what wisdom I will be able to share.”
And yet, I remember clearly, she had much wisdom, the kind that comes from humility, quietness, watching, waiting, praying.
I wonder if I have been called to just such a season. My husband’s work is most definitely ministry, and it requires deep attention. It is good, good work, and we know he is impacting young men and women who desperately need good education and good male role models. Many of them need father figures. He is being used.
My children are in the middle of good work as well. They go to schools where they are the racial minority (except for my youngest, of course); they go to an after-school program with kids from our neighborhood; they befriend the three young boys who end up at our house many afternoons.
And I? I get them all out the door to do these works. I do the laundry and fix the meals and help with homework and encourage and remind and pray with and, when belonging seems far away, cry with. I homeschool the oldest child part-time, and my paid work is writing, which most of the time is done in quiet. Most days, I do not feel as if I am doing much of anything that is related to what we feel we’ve been called to here, to the work of being integrated, to the work of equality and justice and being/showing Jesus.
I recently wrote an article on the documentary film made about Lilias Trotter, one of the pioneer missionaries to Algeria in the late 1800s (look for a blog post in the next week or so about this). In the research process, I read this quote from her:
Surrender – stillness – a ready welcoming of all stripping, all loss, all that brings us low, low into the Lord’s path of humility – a cherishing of every whisper of the Spirit’s voice, every touch of the prompting that comes to quicken the hidden life within: that is the way God’s human seed-vessels ripen and Christ becomes “magnified” even through the things that seem against us.
– Parables of the Christ Life
This, too, I am reminded, is good.
This, too, is God’s good work—in me, through me.
~~~
NOTE 1: If you’ve never visited my “freelance writing” page (follow the link here or scroll to the top of the page and click on the link there just under the header picture), check it out. If you have any writing or editing needs, please feel free to contact me. I love to help people get their ideas out of their heads and onto paper in clear and lovely ways. No job is too small!
NOTE 2: I added a donate button to my blog (well, actually it reads “Buy Now,” simply because I can’t get the formatting right for it to say “Donate”–oops!). Please do not feel any obligation to donate; I just wanted to give readers the option of contributing to the work of this blog and, through it, to the pro bono work I do for non-profits and churches.
This past spring, when we felt certain the Lord was moving us into Chicago, one of our first steps was to explore school options for our kids. The search for the younger three didn’t last too long. We visited two schools; one of them felt like a good fit to both them and us; and that decision was confirmed when we attended their back-to-school night this past week. Yes, they will face the difficulties of making new friends and learning new systems, but we know already they will be in a nurturing environment, one in which they already feel comfortable.
This, however, has not been the scenario for our oldest child, Emily. Our first choice fell through. Then she found a magnet school she really wanted to attend. She made it past the first round of selections, but not the second. That was heartbreaking and sudden and late. We scrambled and discovered a charter school option. It wasn’t close; it didn’t have some of the classes she wanted, but we thought it would do. So she started classes there, but we found, after a week of trying to make it work, it simply was too far away.
So late Thursday night, Dave and I discussed, again, her schooling choices. We weighed pros and cons and talked through different scenarios, and then, with exhaustion sucking us into sleep, we prayed a plea of confused desperation.
The next morning I woke before the alarm. As I lay there, quiet, I received an insight into my daughter. I got a glimpse into why the less obvious, more complicated schooling choice might be the very best thing for her.
I looked over at Dave and saw he was also awake. I shared with him the insight I’d received. He nodded and told me what he’d woken up thinking about. The two insights meshed; they fit together; they formed something that was enough of an answer for us to move forward with peace.
But even greater than the answer was this: the Spirit’s whispered insights were not just a reminder of God’s great wisdom, they were even more a reminder of God’s Father heart for our girl, for our family.
In that moment of shared insights I got a glimpse of God’s great, beating heart for my girl, who is, even more and always, HIS girl. He knows her, inside and out, through and through, better than I know her, better than her dad knows her, better than she knows herself.
And He loves her.
He loves her oh so well, so tenderly, so knowledgably.
And that understanding is the best answer of all.
Post script: When I opened up the Daily Office on my phone later on Friday morning—just after what I described above—I discovered the day’s hymn was “Day by Day,” one I remembered from my childhood. It was like a loving letter written just for us, but I suspect, in God’s incredible way of loving all his people, together yet so uniquely, it’s for many of us, so I’m sharing the words below.
“Day by Day” by Karolina Sandell-Berg
Day by day, and with each passing moment,
Strength I find to meet my trials here;
Trusting in my Father’s wise bestowment,
I’ve no cause for worry or for fear.
He, whose heart is kind beyond all measure,
Gives unto each day what He deems best,
Lovingly its part of pain and pleasure,
Mingling toil with peace and rest.
Every day the Lord Himself is near me,
With a special mercy for each hour;
All my cares He fain would bear and cheer me,
He whose name is Counselor and Pow’r.
The protection of His child and treasure
Is a charge that on Himself he laid;
“As your days, your strength shall be in measure,”
This the pledge to me He made.
Help me then, in every tribulation,
So to trust Thy promised, O Lord,
That I lose not faith’s sweet consolation,
Offered me within Thy holy Word.
Help me, Lord, when toil and trouble meeting,
E’er to take, as from a father’s hand,
One by one, the days, the moments fleeting,
Till I reach the promised land.
Is lament possible without identification? We white mothers must come to the point of understanding that we cannot say, “This could happen to my son—for no good reason—through no fault of his own—through no action of his own,” and really mean it, BUT nearly every African American mother CAN, and with these words a little surge of real terror spikes in her heart.
That is an example of white privilege.
I know it is, because as a white mother of a black son, I have a hard time really believing those words. Though I know my son’s risk factors are high (he is black, very dark-skinned in fact, and he has pronounced ADHD and high impulsivity), I don’t have the history that makes his danger REAL to me. I don’t have the from-birth distrust of a system, of a majority group that sees me as inferior (though they don’t come right out and say so). My skin doesn’t ripple with a subtle prickle of fear when I see a man in uniform. Even though I am truly “in the shoes” of other African American mothers, my white privilege keeps them loose in the day-to-day. They’re not pinching my every step.
I remember, several years ago, driving through rural Indiana with a Latina friend. As we approached one city-limits sign, I remarked, off-hand, casual, “This is a pretty town, but it was a KKK hotbed until just a few years ago. It’s more hidden now, but it’s still here.”
Her response was immediate, and it wasn’t just emotional. Her breathing quickened; her face went pale, and she was unable to relax until we were miles into the country on the other side. I couldn’t identify, but I “got it.” She’s experienced “difference” her entire life. And I, except for when travelling in Africa (and the “difference” I experienced there brought, for the most part, privilege), have not.
This morning I woke early. We are preparing for a move to one of those very neighborhoods where the other mothers in it live everyday with this fear for their children, where I, too, will experience it more, simply because of location. Because of this upcoming move, our house looks like a picked-over junk shop. It is at the stage when everything formerly “in”—cupboards, closets, drawers—is out, and all knickknacks are off shelves and ledges, revealing hidden dust.
Late last night I moved the verse plaque from the windowsill above my kitchen sink. Behind the plaque I found a picture of my black son taken several years ago when he was in preschool. At some point I’d tucked it behind the plaque and forgotten about it.
This morning, up before anyone else, I read updates on the shootings of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling. I cried. I prayed. Then I went to the sink to fix myself some tea. And there was the smiling face of my beautiful son, like a treasured photo of a lost loved one, placed in a spot where one sees it several times a day.
And for one moment, the shoes tightened, hard, and I remembered the words I’d read just a few minutes earlier in one of the news reports. Philando Castile’s mother, speaking to a group of African Americans mourning the death of her child, told them, “This could be your son.”
If one is truly to grieve, lament, repent, this is what we must understand.
April of 2009
I could blame it on the quality of the light or the setting sun,
But it was more probably that I’d just asked my oldest if she’d like to take a turn at the wheel—
And that made me look at my own hands on it
and notice how worn and age-spotted they’d become.
Strange that I mind my own aging far less than I mind theirs.
The little ones are not so little anymore. The youngest is in double digits—something that bothers me more than I let on,
The middle ones are doing nearly-teenager kinds of things with their friends,
And the oldest, though she remained in the passenger seat, could have sat where I was.
I don’t know which of these caused my heart to gain weight and sink low.
When they were small, banshee loud and wild,
I thought moments like this would never, never come.
“They’re going to live with us forever, you know.”
My husband often said that, generally after a minor catastrophe or an interminable putting-to-bed,
And we would both laugh.
But now…
Stop, I think, stop.
For it is not the “not keeping up with them” that I fear
As much as it is the being left behind, losing my belonging with them.
Silly, I tell myself. You’ll simply belong in a different way.
And yet the exhausting “being needed” of their younger years
Is giving way to an independence on their part that makes me anticipate loneliness.
Strange that the fulfillment of what I have worked so hard for
Should cause my heart such pain.
“You’re going to leave soon,” I say into the quiet car,
and my oldest, somehow reading my mind, responds,
“Not for two more years, Mom.
That’s still a long way off.”
But she doesn’t realize.
Two years is a blink.
I’ll turn around and find her gone,
With the twins graduating high school,
And the youngest out gallivanting with friends.
I shiver,
She sees and turns up the heat,
And I want to cry.
Small Carolina town
Throwback general store
Both my boys looking at the comics
Side by side
Yet the sharp “What’chu doin’, boy?”
Is not directed at the two,
Just the one,
My child with dark skin.
Years before,
Sitting in a crowded Ugandan church
Watching his tiny self
Dance in the aisles,
I wondered,
What are we doing—
Giving him a family
But displacing him from a people?
When he was small, our conversations about race
Were easy.
He called himself chocolate,
The rest of us vanilla,
In high summer, I became
Milky coffee.
Now, though, they are harder.
How to explain to him,
To his sisters and brother,
That the odds facing them
Are not exactly equal?
That what we’ve told them—
Human is human. Period.—
Is not a reality out there
And King’s dream
Is still a dream.
And underneath all this,
Even now,
the question haunts me:
We’ve become a family
But what about his people?
~~~~
I thought this post could use a little lift. This was a fun, impromptu moment in Target when PJ saw this awesome Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle jacket!
Our fourth child was born in Uganda. His mother died of AIDS; his father was estranged and never met him till we began the adoption process. In many miraculous ways God made it very clear that we were to adopt our son. But even as I worked in Africa to get legal guardianship, I wondered about the issues he would face growing up as an African child in a white family, in a predominately white area, in a country where the color of your skin still determines a lot. Racial reconciliation takes on a whole new level of importance when you have a child who is a different race. When I read about the horrifically high numbers of African American men in prison; when I learn that five times the number of African American babies are aborted compared to white babies; when I hear that an African American college professor in the town just two over from mine has been stopped by police more than 20 times in the last couple years just so they could “see what
I couldn’t resist posting this one, too!
he was up to”… I think, “This is what’s facing my son,” and I ask God how I am meant to draw attention to this injustice, how I am meant to fight it—both for my own son and the sons and daughters of other women.
And under all this, I still fear the effects on my son of growing up without a community that looks like him.
I am in a sweet spot of mothering right now–and before any of you fellow moms retch and mentally call me dirty names–please know that I know that next week I may feel entirely different!
But just a few years ago I wrote this about myself (though I wrote it in third person, which tells me something about my state of mind at the time!):
Pieces of her are floating away, more each evening. She tries to reassemble herself during the quiet daytime hours, but she cannot find all the bits before the scavengers gather again.
“Mom, take me here.”
“Mom, I can’t find my shoes.”
“Mom, I need help with my math homework.”
“Mom, what’s for dinner?”
It seems comical—or at least overly dramatic—this feeling she has that the more they need her, the more she shrinks, the smaller she feels. She knows there are others dealing with problems far bigger—far more REAL—than the one she wages in her mind.
Do other mothers feel this way? she wonders. Was I not meant to be one? Where is the joy I am supposed to feel at being needed? Where is the sense of calling and purpose?
Perhaps she was supposed to lose something—some strong sense of individual self-hood—at her children’s births. Maybe it should have come out with the afterbirth, and she should have examined it for its wholeness. “Yep, that’s all my self-focus. No bits and pieces left inside.” Some part of it must have escaped, and that is why she cannot serve without a vague sense of resentment.
“Do it for yourself!” she wants to scream at times, but it almost never comes out.
Instead she sometimes whispers, “I want to run away.”
But what would be left of her if she did? If she were to stop all the doing, what would be left?
Is there being without doing?
Who am I? she wonders, as her hands fold laundry and turn the steering wheel and fill the grocery cart with more food. Is my spirit supposed to be fully engaged in this? Does it have a life of its own? How do I do all this and yet remain me—or even know who I am in the doing of it?
I’m sharing that piece of vulnerable writing because I’ve had quite a few conversations in the last few weeks with moms of young ones, and several of them are not only weary, they’re feeling a little lost, too. The daily feels like forever, and they see no sign of refreshment. One mother of two preschoolers and one kindergartener teared up as we talked. The process of getting everyone out the door in the mornings was wearing on her, and she’d yelled that very morning—and then cried after she dropped her oldest off at school.
“I thought motherhood would be different,” she told me, her eyes wistful, a little wounded. “Why do I get so angry?” she asked me. “Does it get easier? Will I ever feel like the ‘me’ I used to be–or is that gone?”
Does it get easier? Will I lose some integral part of me in motherhood?
Hmm.
A friend of mine is writing a book on motherhood as a spiritual discipline, on the idea that motherhood, in itself, is a formation and practice used by God to refine us; to deepen our knowledge of ourselves; to increase our longing for Him and His presence in our day-to-day, nitty-gritty lives; to expand our awareness of His deep, boundless love for us…
So easier?
Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s the point.
But will we find our being, our ultimate completion, and our very soul in the Christ who draws near to us as we are reduced to crying out to Him?
Yes.
p.s. I would want to share the article titled “The Paradox of Motherhood” simply because the writing is incredible, but I also love what she wrote.
Jen Underwood 