Parenting

Do you know what kids don’t have? Any sense of the trauma their parents went through trying to get them here.

Here, as in born. As in alive and whole. 

 As children of parents, we are all so fucking selfish. We don’t think about how we almost killed our mothers trying to get into this world. We don’t think about how she hemorrhaged in an overheated van while her husband went looking for help.  Hemorrhaged while her other two children slept in the back, hot but oblivious.

We live our bitchy little lives, sighing and gritting our teeth over every imposition, every voice mail, every piled up email, every “When are you coming to visit again?”, completely blind to the fact that our birth was terrifying and exciting and looked forward to and feared, and we sit there smug about how big we are now, and how not like children we are, when in fact the act of saying we’re not like children is what makes us so fucking childlike.

We think of our obligations and our inconvenience and their ridiculous habits and points of view and never once question the way her body changed, the swelling, the hunger, the bills they feared, picking beans out of chili and making brown gravy even for pancakes, the sleepless nights driving round and round the block, the endless fight with doctors who don’t believe in you the way she does. The people who teach you to speak and walk and to function.  

They shrug and call it parenting. I shrug and call them trouble.

The realization that I suck is as baffling as it is true. The realization that my parents will always be excited when I come to visit, that they will always look forward to getting hugs and kisses from me—me a grown-ass woman of 31. Too proud to hug and kiss. Too smart and impatient. Rushing them off the phone because I’m busy (and I am so fucking busy…but too fucking busy for the people who made me possible?).

We take our very existence for granted when our parents know how delicate and fragile a process it was getting us here. Here, as in born. As in alive and relatively whole. While we tear down the highway. While we skydive and join the military and insist on breaking our own hearts over and over again. They watch. They worry. And we scoff.

And that’s being a parent.

A Very Good Thing

Griffin was in the bedroom putting clean sheets on the bed, a chore I detest in some crazy exponential inverse of how much I adore clean sheets. I'd taken my wedding and engagement rings off to do the dishes, but as I walked from my bureau back to the kitchen, I saw him standing beside the bed, his arms full of comforter.

I thought, I married him. I actually stood before God and our loved ones and he is mine until the end, and I'm his. And I know this because I have the pictures.

And it was this crazy moment that I'm going to go ahead and say I bet a lot of women feel. Maybe it's more the women who've been sad before, who've lost hope that they'd find their Griffin, or thought they had found him but instead had a Lacoste or a Cool Water. Women whose wedding days blur with the passage of time so that the wedding itself doesn't feel real even though every moment in their everyday lives sings of that joy. Or maybe it was just me, bemused and grateful that Griffin was home and clean with a belly full of what I had cooked and who was in that moment, in all likelihood, thinking of nothing more complicated than which end of the comforter is up--these are the moments in my marriage that fill me up so fully I don't know how I ever lived without it. I recognize that I thought I had it before, but the reality of missus is so unknowable until it happens. I think about all the married women I know, all of whom kept this secret, keep this secret: you feel the preciousness of your marriage in clean sheets, that check in the bank, the fence he built. 

I think about all the married people I know who are happy, and I can't believe they never told me about how safe they feel, how loved, how responsible, how even in the humdrum-don't-know-what-to-make-for-dinner of the everyday, your heart keeps getting refilled with the thought: I married him.

It is a very good thing.

Dust

I was looking for a mailing address today when I came across an old email that said this:

I wonder if you reach this stage of brokeness, when you know you cannot be any more broken because what you are is already glass-dust, if this is when the God-lightning hits and melts everything back into something new and beautiful and (please God) whole? I wonder how much of me will blow away before the zapping?
---
I realized as I sat here that I don't think there ever was just one zapping that put me back together. And I recognize from the sadness of that email, from the despair that had broken me all the way down, that without the friendships I had and the love those people showed me, and how they held me to the light even when I just wanted, thought I needed, to be let go, that we have to stand by one another no matter what. I wouldn't have made it through 2009 without that love. And I'm grateful for it.

The War on Women

Well, I guess I was wrong. It appears there really is a war on women, on our daughters, sisters, mothers, aunts...

I do not believe in abortion as birth control. I do not believe a woman has the right to choose not to carry a baby she and a man made through their mutual desire for one another. This is a more complicated story than that, though. A much scarier one. This story is really about slavery, about denying human rights on the basis of...actually, I'm not sure where some of these people get their authority.

This is an election year and I usually consider myself to be nominally Republican. I believe in smaller government, a strong military, tax cuts, and any other of a number of things that mark the Republican platform. But as I keep reading different sources online, the take many Republican men have on reproductive rights is astounding to me.

Sitting in an airport the other day, one article linked to another which linked to another, and so forth, and I ended up at the Huffington Post. Now, I know that the Huff Post isn’t necessarily considered the most unbiased news source in the world, but this post by Soraya Chemaly has set my head on fire. I think you should read it too. In it, she outlines and links to some of the most horrifying lawmaking I’ve read about, ever. Georgia Representative Terry England, for instance,  thinks women should carry dead or dying babies until natural term birth occurs because cows and pigs do it all the time. As Elizabeth Czukas points out, a procedure that takes the dead baby out of the mother should not be considered abortion. While carrying a stillborn child until labor starts might not hurt the mother physically, there's the chance that it can. And what about her emotional health? What person in their right mind thinks a woman should have to walk around carrying her dead baby just waiting for it to finally miscarry? Why does this man, and others like him, want to risk women's health over a baby that has already passed on? Why should that choice be taken away from women and qualified healthcare givers? But sadly, that choice has been taken away. The law passed. Democrats managed to make some modifications, but read the article. How much do those changes really mean?

Todd Akins thinks women have a magical anti-pregnancy mechanism in their uteruses which prohibits reproduction after a rape (and this is after we give him the benefit of the doubt for misspeaking “legitimate” instead of “forcible” rape).

Virginia, Texas, and Iowa want to enact a law requiring abortion-seeking women to have an internal ultrasound so they can see the baby before going through with the procedure. To be clear, women wouldn't have a choice in this. And again, let’s be clear about what this means: a wand between 6-8 inches long would be inserted into their vaginas in order to show them the baby.

I don't believe in abortion as birth control. But I do believe my body and the bodies of all women and girls are sacred and no one should ever have to submit to rape. Rape? you say. This is just an ultrasound. Yeah, put on your paper dress, spread your legs, and rethink that.

 If someone wants to take something 6-8 inches long, cover it in a condom and put it in a vagina without the owner of the vagina's uncoerced consent, that IS rape. [The states] are calling it a woman's right to know, but it sounds a lot more like a state's right to rape. These states want to force women to have this ultrasound. Having had an internal ultrasound before, let me assure you, it sucks. Someone has a joystick in your hoo-ha, and they move it around, up and down, repositioning, in and out. It’s the unsexiest sex I’ve ever had and certainly the most humiliating—and I was there willingly trying to figure out what was causing me almost incapacitating pain. My technician wasn’t mean. He didn’t jeer at me. But it was awful. Really awful.

I don’t believe in abortion as birth control. But as a life-saving procedure? As a uterus saving procedure? 

I believe life starts at conception, I do. But I don’t believe in always letting nature take its course. Forcing women to carry dead babies until labor starts naturally? Charging a suicidal pregnant woman with murder after she survives but the baby doesn't? Denying women medical treatment that would save their lives or their organs? Kansas wants to deny pregnant women chemotherapy. Will the next step be denying women who may possibly become pregnant chemotherapy because of damage her uterus might incur? Religiously affiliated hospitals not only deny treatment regularly they don’t even have to tell women treatments are available OR refer them to another hospital or physician. What about women with severe mental disabilities? What happens if they're raped and conceive?

It makes me sick.

In an election year where there’s been so much talk about the economy and jobs and insurance, where all the politicians sound the same and point fingers at each other and excise truth and fabricate fact, I’ve decided not to participate. I’ve decided that I can’t tell the difference in monetary and financial political-ese. The jargon and doubletalk has pushed me down and pushed me away. I’m not an economist.

But I am a woman. A woman with a brain and a uterus.

So, this year, I’m going to vote on something I do understand. My vote will be about me. About women. About girls. About victims of rape and incest. About my right to choose myself over my uterus. I don’t think it’s selfish. I think it’s liberating. I don’t believe in abortion as birth control. And you know what? I don’t think a lot of people do. This subject—a woman’s right to choose—it’s about me, and my conscience, and my body, and my mental health, and my rights as a person. It’s also about yours.  

Plateau

I’ve always been waiting for the next best thing. For example, I hadn’t hit high school a minute before I wished I was already driving. I didn’t start driving before wishing just as much to graduate. Didn’t graduate before I wanted my degree. Didn’t get the degree before I wanted to get married. You see the pattern.

I’ve always had a plan, see. High school, college, marriage, babies, 30. Now everything but the babies has happened, though we’d have to transpose marriage and turning 30. Enjoying the moment was difficult-to-impossible because I was always dreaming about the future.

Elizabeth Gilbert talks about how driven we are to achieve in her book Committed. I think she touches on it in Eat, Pray, Love too. But basically she says there’s this order of things we do, especially women, and if we don’t do them, or if we take too long to do them, there’s a sense of inadequacy. There’s a fierce societal pressure to follow certain paths in a certain order, and to choose your own path (or in my case, have it feel like someone else was doing the choosing on a completely willy-nilly basis) serves as a rebuke to those who followed the path and now people judge you because they think you’re judging them. Or something like that. It’s stressful. Having to leapfrog from accomplishment to accomplishment, from joy to joy, or even tragedy to tragedy sucks.

Griffin and I have been married for awhile now, and it’s lovely. The biggest thing on our horizon right is surviving this semester since I’m not working this year. That’s stressful, yes, but it seems like the pace has slowed down tremendously. I feel like I’ve hit a life plateau, and I’ll be idling for at least the next several months.

The relief I feel is huge.

While some might equate hitting a plateau with being in a rut, I don’t. For us to de-plateau would require us getting pregnant, being deployed, or moving (I refuse to entertain the idea of anything negative doing so) and none of those things are happening in this year (when I say year, by the way, I always mean school year, not calendar year—occupational hazard). We have nothing to look forward to, and I hope you can hear this with the relief I feel instead of a quiet kind of desperation you might recognize if someone else made the pronouncement. We have a whole year of just being together to enjoy—something we’ve never had.

Never had? you ask. What about the year you dated before you got engaged?

Well, long-term readers would not have been shocked by the first paragraph of this post. It's so incredibly Mena.So consider that I spent the whole year before our engagement wondering first, Is he the one?  Then, Oh, he is the one! Does he think I’m the one? Then, It seems like maybe he does think I’m the one—so, when’s he going to propose?

It’s an exciting time, filled with thrills that roll your stomach and clench your toes but it’s not exactly restful. And I don’t know if I’m the only weirdo out there, but my love life’s in control of a lot of things. A fight could make me pissy all day. The high of new love makes me giddy and restless. I’ve never been good at compartmentalizing enough for my love life not to affect my everything-else life. So now that we’re married, even though he still puts butterflies in my stomach, even though I wake up every day with a smile on my face because he’s beside me, I am enjoying not having relationship stuff being in charge of my brain’s concentration. He will be home when I get there. He will be there when I wake up. He will sit at the table and eat the dinner I make.  He will be there. Pretty much guaranteed. Never had that before. Loving it.

I have heard from friends about the post-married doldrums. The excitement of planning the wedding is gone. The anticipation of the honeymoon has been met, and I’ll admit I was sad to come home from our whirlwind big city and beach tour. However, when Griffin comes home, I no longer feel it’s necessary to pounce with some new quasi-emergency wedding issue, and I don’t feel put out that he’s watching YouTube instead of helping me write shower thank-yous. There’s a year of relative peace ahead of us, where we can both concentrate on school and each other, maybe renovate our house a little bit. There’s no pressure bigger than our little bubble.

So, we’ve hit a plateau. Thank God.

The Problem with Forgiveness

The problem with forgiveness is simple. It feels like you're letting yourself off the hook.

A Co-inky-dink?

So. Cool Water left me for a crazy lady. After a year or so, he started dating a cute blonde named Cutie.

In the class I just started, there is a cute blonde named Cutie Cool Water who gives me major stink eye EVERY time I see her, which has been 2 class periods of 3 hours each, with multiple seat shifts since even COLLEGE PROFESSORS have fallen prey to “how great and helpful and wondrous group work is.”

Yesterday after class (and multiple stink eyes), Cutie let the very heavy door slam on me as we were leaving. Of course, this meant I ran to my car in order to have some privacy while I Facebook stalked her. Did Cool Water beat me to the altar? Was I such a hard act to follow that his wife not only knew who I was but actively hated me?

Nope. She is definitely not married to Cool Water. And I still have no idea why she hates me. 

Interesting, huh?

Douche-baggy Asshole

Doesn't matter to me that it's 11 years later. I'm not ready to have the name Osama Bin Laden be merely an appositive as in "Terrorist leader Osama Bin Laden."

The only way he gets to be an appositive is if his name comes after "Douche-baggy Asshole" as in "Douche-baggy Asshole Osama Bin Laden."

And even then--I think that's an incredible, probably unforgivable, insult to douche-baggy assholes everywhere.

The Curve of The World

I’ve been thinking about something for the last few weeks. I’ve been listening to half sentences form in my head, watching myself shy away from complete thoughts, completely avoiding writing because I was afraid of what I would finally figure out. I’ve watched as the ghost of a vision has tempted me to describe it. To acknowledge the solemnity and accuracy of its being and to put to words, finally, something I never, ever knew.

I have always been of the mind that making love connects you in every important way to the other person. Whether there’s orgasm involved or not, at least for me, that feeling of closeness is the point. Of holding that person to you in a way you don’t hold other people. Heart to heart.

I still believe that. I don’t have children, so I can say that just making love (if you can ever really say “just” in terms of this) is the most intimate, joyful thing I’ve done. Being with Griffin has only exploded this thought.

But now, Griffin and I are engaged. We’ll be married in a few months, and I couldn’t be happier. I’m ecstatic. I will belong to the kindest person on earth, and he will belong to me. Legally, physically, spiritually, we’ll be one. I’ve always loved the gospel that talks about a man leaving his family to cleave to his wife.

I realize, though, that I have been so, so wrong about the physical. Now, I lie beside Griffin, and in my mind, I see us as silhouettes on the curve of the earth. I see us as one, and it’s beautiful. But then, the earth starts to turn beneath us, as if we were treading the sphere, and at our feet, I see the spark that is the physical, and it is bright enough to illuminate the little spaces between us. As the world turns, another light appears, and this light is as a star compared to the spark. This sun obliterates everything, and Griffin and I can see nothing, no cracks, not even each other because there’s so much light surrounding us.

I have, save for a fairly brief time when I was in my mid-twenties, always looked forward to marriage. I have always wanted to be someone’s wife. And at 20 much the same as at 29, I thought I knew what I was missing by not having that, and I thought I knew what I’d be gaining when I did.

I’ve been flip about the idea of marriage, when I thought this whole time I was being completely serious. Yes, I know what it means to put him first even when I’m pissed. Yes, I want to do his laundry. Yes, I want him to put new brakes on my car. Yes, I want him to vacuum for me. These are the things people who love each other do. This is how you make a marriage. You work and you plan and you love and you make love, and that is what a marriage is.

But this brightness is looming on our horizon. Yes, looming. “What God has brought together, let no man put asunder.”

I want to marry Griffin. I look at the ring on my finger, the circle of gold, the brightness of the diamond, the tradition and the promise that go back and back and back, and I am so excited. This love we have is amazing. He is amazing.

I felt that I knew what it meant to be joined to him spiritually because it felt so very spiritual. I’ve listened for years to the Church telling me that the physical connection wasn’t enough and that was why you should wait; it was the ultimate act of love to put the two together, and I really thought I had bypassed that because of how much I love Griffin. I mean, I do love him so incredibly much. How could there be more? I thought what I was feeling must be what they meant because it was so much.

I stand here now and watch our silhouettes at the curve of the horizon, and I see that sun rising, and then I am on my knees with awe and fear because I see now where the two will meet. There is no Mena and Griffin. There is only us. I think about how Mena will continue to exist as a writer, Griffin as a farmer. He will do something to irritate me; I will do something to hurt his feelings; we’ll keep happy secrets to surprise the other. We will be separate—but so incredibly not.  A marriage is not about being in love or compatibility of style, of magnetic attraction or willingness to work for the other; at least, not entirely or not even mostly.

In a few months, Griffin and I are going to stand on the curve of the world and make our vows. That sun is going to rise and illuminate and then demolish the gaps that keep us as two, and God is going to run his finger down the seam of Griffin and me, and all that I am, all that Griffin is, will be more than we were, together.

Caterpillar

Sometime in October, I think, I started seeing a counselor. I saw her maybe twice a month. Before our first visit I typed up an outline, a guide to Mena, if you will, and I sent it to Lizzie to see if I had missed anything. It was three pages long. She wrote back to me: Mena, you are not on here at all.

I was a little confused so I went back and reread everything: I had a section for Dad, for Mom, for Cool Water, for Lacoste, for Griffin, one section for job, one section for class. Aren’t all those things Mena?

Then I got it.

There were 3 pages of problems, but I had nothing about what I needed or wanted or dreamed. Nothing. Everything on there was what people needed from me. The pouring out from me, not a pouring in. I went back and added a section about how I was afraid of being abandoned, since in many different ways, every man I’ve ever loved has left, most of them because whatever I meant to him just wasn’t enough to keep him with me. Even when I looked at Griffin, who made (and continues to make) it obvious every day through his actions and his words that he loved me, I was worried about when he would leave me. It was sad. I was sad.

Then, in January, I cancelled my appointment with the counselor because of a conflation of scheduling problems: a death in the family took me out of state when I could least afford, time-wise to go—I was looking at a  major $10,000 school deadline on the day I was supposed to return from the funeral,  and I’d be missing the first days of a new semester where I have a demanding English or writing class every day until 6. Oh and there’s, you know, my full time job. Teaching  English and writing and literature every day, all day.

Who wouldn’t feel like they were drowning?

That isn’t to say I was totally unhappy because that just isn’t true. I was thrilled with Griffin and the life we were building. I was very happy, in a million different ways.  His generosity took away my financial strain; his shoulders bore some of the weight of my family obligations. He loved me despite my brand of crazy. But I was so afraid of losing him. Of him changing his mind.

And so I called and cancelled that January appointment because taking an hour to talk about how busy and beat down and secretly afraid I was was only going to make it worse; I needed that hour to catch up on all my obligations. Yeah, I know how that sounds. But let me tell you, in those kinds of crisis moments, it seems exactly like that. I was so afraid of stopping for one hour, for taking one hour off, that I just didn’t. Every now and again I popped a Xanax and kept on going.

But then, good things happened. I had a good time at the funeral, and spent many hours drinking and laughing and eating with family I love. I met the deadline. I was excited about those classes, and I loved the required reading for my lit class and I enjoyed the time I spent reading instead of feeling guilty about reading for “pleasure.” I was asked to join a private writing group, and while that added to my work burden, it felt like a benediction of the writing I’ve been doing for months (writing that you all don’t know about it because I never seem to post even briefly anymore). And I stopped thinking that if I didn't wash Griffin's clothes and empty/load the dishwasher myself on a routine basis that he would not want me anymore. I realized it was dumb because Griffin is so good, and actually, I am too.

And then good got better. In late February, right around our 1 year mark, Griffin and I started looking at rings. And then we talked to my parents. And his. And suddenly, all sorts of doors opened. When Griffin deploys, he’ll be making as much money alone as we do together now, possibly a little more. How we live currently is making it likely that I’ll have little to no credit card debt by the time he leaves. My father will have a knee replacement this summer, and instead of tearing my hair out trying to work out a caregiving game plan that includes being at school at 7.45 every morning and at least one masters class after school, Griffin has said I don’t have to work next year.

I don’t have to work.

I can take the time off from my teaching career without guilt or worry. I don’t have to feel resentment (and then guilt for feeling resentment, even though the resentment is natural) toward my parents for making me burn my candle at both ends and in the middle.

I’ll be able to write¸ really write, seriously, for a year.

At my last appointment with the counselor, she said, “Well, you don’t even need me anymore! You’re cured! All your dreams are coming true!”

And it occurred to me how right she was. Having Griffin in my life has made all my dreams come true already. I am so, so grateful.