Shame and the USPS

If you're reading this, chances are high that you'll be getting a piece of mail from me through the USPS in the next couple weeks.  You'll see the envelope, a spark of recognition and anticipation might light a fire under you. Perhaps the Webers finally got around to sending me that Christmas card-turned-New-Year's greeting they are late with? Nope. Maybe Heather was affectionately thinking of me, and her fondness was so rooted and ageless and meaningful that she felt the need to do something as quaint and concrete as sending me a handwritten note through an old-fashioned, honest to goodness postperson?  Close. I was thinking of you. And regarding most of you, I admit affection of varying depths. But I did not send you a handwritten note to express it.  I'm very sorry to disappoint all of you who will look at that envelope expecting personal sentiments or trinkets or, in the case of one friend who replied to my request for her address: "Please send money and gluten free cookies."

God help me, and God help all of you.  I have written a fundraising letter. Horror of my deepest horrors. I have described a humanitarian adventure my daughter and I will take in July and I have requested that you take up the adventure with us, in spirit of course, by way of two things: 1) prayer, if you're the praying type and 2) financial contributions to our trip, if you're the giving type. Of course, one may also pray and give. 

In my heart of hearts, I believe this is a great venture to invest prayers and/or dollars.  I believe the work done by Iris Ministries is changing lives in ways both athiests and believers would deem worthy. But it's terrible to ask for money.  Which is why I don't "ask" for it per se.  In my letter, I let you know that if you'd like to partner with us, there is an opportunity.  But I'm not fooling anyone. It's a fundraising letter, with a self addressed envelope included so that you can all send money back to me so that Una and I can buy our passports and plane tickets to Mozambique.   Were it not for the possibility of financial help, I could have sent you all an email and asked for prayers, best wishes, and blessed thoughts.

My friend and pastor, Rich, who was a missionary in Bangladesh for nine years says people are more likely to give if you present them with some numbers, if you suggest $15 or $100 or $1000 donations.  So I printed up these slips to go with the envelope. They say somethign to the effect of (imagine a perky voice): If you would like to financially support us on our trip, we welcome any contribution you would like to make!!  Small numbers add up to big numbers when many people are involved!!  And then I list how many people would need to give if everyone gave $15  or $100, and so on. 

I put these slips in five envelopes and then I had to stop.

Do me a favor, if you get this letter in the mail, forget that you even have a wallet.  Just read the story in the letter. Read it and see how your insides feel when you're done.  If some piece of yourself is crying out in agreement with this story, with our adventure, with the work we have ahead of us, then, maybe, possibly, remember that you have a wallet and see if that place inside of you is leaping at the chance to open it.

But if you read the letter, and you think, eh, then you might want to just cut out the picture of me and Una to remember us by.  And then add the rest of it to your recyling bin.

Adventures with Food (& eating & the Amish & being a stricter mommy)

Hi there.  I’ve been busy not-blogging here because I’ve gotten a kick to the pants to start eating healthier again.  And all that carrot peeling, fruit chopping, and bread baking takes a lot of time.

Here's my story: December of 2011 was Chocolate Month. November was Thanksgiving. And October ushered in Halloween candy, which I never used to buy until this year. Oh, and September was Moving Month. The girls were loving how much junk food mom was letting them eat all fall.  And, alas, January came with the understanding that  I was we were fully dependent on sugar and chocolate. Along with recurring blecky feelings after eating, I had some strange new symptoms:  My hormones were all out of whack.  And I was having hot flashes many times a day. What? At 33?

That’s what I said.

Truth be told, my diet was already probably better than 75% of you readers. (I’m not trying to brag, I just know how many of my friends already thought I was a health-food nut). And so it seemed kinda crazy to me that my body got as messed up as it did. Since January 3, I’m eating different than I was, than I ever have.  Proof: I got a recipe book from the library with an entry for “Brain Omelet” (that’s calves’ brain, people).  And while I will never (in a million years) be preparing brain omelet, I am now eating with body chemistry and body physiology in mind like I never have before.  Ever heard of re-colonizing a digestive track? You can do it with kefir.  (My Iowa friends give me an are-you-on-crack face when I mention kefir. But come on, West Coast, you’ve got to be friends with kefir. I just know it.)

Did you know you might get fewer stomach aches if your grains are soaked in water and an acid for 24 hours before cooking? Yeah, I’m back to that again—soaking grains and legumes. I’m fermenting and growing things on my counter before ingesting them. I made my own wild yeast starter for sourdough, and I’m baking bread. It’s happening. Oh, and apparently, experiments with enemas help, but I'm skipping out on those.

The hard part of all this is my offspring, who nightly tell me I’m Hitler the worst mother in the world, that I’m ruining their lives with the stricter rules about sugar.  God help them, they can only have two cookies after dinner.  “In the old days, you would have let me have three!”  “In the old days” = a temporary lapse in judgment since moving four months ago.  I was busy painting their rooms--and so of course they could have ten cookies for dessert?

The upside is that I think I feel better, though it’s slow going, and the hot flash situation is not resolved. The most educational part about it all is that I bought two shares in a herd of dairy cows on an Amish farm.  It’s illegal to sell raw milk in Iowa, and so I don’t buy raw milk. I already own some (now that I bought some shares in a herd of cows).  And when I went to pick up my raw milk for the first time last week, my Camry bouncing over a muddy rutted lane, I called out my window to a little Amish boy, circa age 7, who replied to me in a the most adorable German accent that I could pick up my milk right down the lane.  As my friend Rene and I drove through the farmstead, we passed a barn with the door open. From the ceiling hung two sides of an unfortunate animal (cow, I’m assuming), just curing in the foggy January air. Clara, the Amish woman who sold me a share of dairy cows, gave me my gallon jugs of raw milk and pointed out for me the cream line a third of the way down the gallon.  These are organic-fed, pastured cows—lots of omega-3s in their milk.  Still, I had no ideas cows were this prolific when it came to cream.

There is something really beautiful and pleasing about making my own butter or cheese from milk that has never been at a grocery store.  Something really comforting about all the jars-covered-with-cheesecloth that perch on my counter in various stages of soaking/culturing/fermenting. Something unseen, mysterious, is happening in all those bottles and jars, and my body will find out what in 24-48 hours. My body will be happier for it.

Will I always eat this way? I don't know and I don't care. It’s just how I’m living now, to get up out of this hole.

Dear "Anonymous Facebooker"

Dear Anonymous Facebooker,

I saw your post today. The one about believing in Jesus Christ and challenging other believers to put the same post on their wall.  You said Jesus said he would deny us in front of God, if we deny him in front of our “peers.”  It’s a simple test, you said. If you are not afraid, then re-post.

You probably don’t know this—probably you had no desire to have this effect on me--but your post makes me want to do the opposite.  Because it inspires guilt and fear in me, a lover of Jesus who gets by in the world because of and out of the conversations I have with him daily: the questions and answers and simple moments of divine presence felt.  Yet, Jesus never told me—he didn’t, I promise—to copy and paste your status up on my Facebook page. And I wonder at the audacity of a mere human trying to boil down a relationship with divinity (and everyone’s afterlife statuses-to-be) to whether one hits cntrol-c followed by cntrl-v on a keyboard. It seems so black and white. So cut and dried. So harsh, really. Do this, or else. Or else—what? Damnation? Eternal Punishment? Separation from God for eternity?

Because that’s the kind of God you believe in. The kind that is upstairs devising tests by which he can damn us all quickly. Hey—using Facebook for the job is so efficient. All he has to do is count.

Do you remember that Peter denied Christ three times and yet. Yet, Peter was also martyred for his love for Christ, crucified upside down. Because of love. For Christ.

Anonymous Facebooker, I want to introduce you to wiggle room. If you peer into the economy of Christ’s kingdom, I believe you’ll find an X factor,  so that a man like Peter, who denied him three times, and then testified for Christ, died for the sake of that testimony, is welcomed by Christ—not denied by him. The X factor: can we call it grace? Grace that doesn’t damn us to hell the second, the moment, we speak or don’t speak, act or don’t act, put your stupid status on our FB page or not.  Because there are a hundred times a week I speak or don’t, act or don’t, and yet I know this grace that looks at the whole picture of my heart, grace that gives me an opportunity to be in process, to make mistakes and recover, to arrive at my own understanding and final revelation of divinity or not divinity in my life.

Maybe I don't sound very gracious toward you. I'm sorry. I need to take deep breaths and back away slowly when I see status updates like yours. I have to write an entry like this over the span of a week because I'm trying to make it come out not-too angry. I'm working on telling the truth as I see it, with love.

And here's my bottom line: God’s not riding Zuckerberg’s coattails..  

Tiny: a Cookie Conversation

Ah cookie? Ah cookie?

No. the cookies are all gone. We’re not having cookies.

Ah cookie?

Nope. Do you want some crackers?

No.

Do you want some Chex?

No.

Do you want some raisins?

No.

[Curiously eyes old carrot stick on floor, picks it up, nibbles it momentarily].

Reset. 15 minutes later:

Ah cookie?

I'm Sorry I Didn't Bring You Cookies

I’m sorry I didn’t bring you Christmas cookies.  You live far away.  And/or, we ran out of eggs.  When you have a limited supply of gas and eggs, you have to let whim and the spirit lead. 

Among other destinations, the spirit led my family and a plate of cookies to our friend Ethel’s house last Christmas Eve. I swung open our minivan’s passenger-door, plate of cookies in hand, and two things happened at once, so fast I almost missed them both. One, the stick-on bow that I had affixed to the tin foil-covered plate of cookies slid off its perch.  Two, the cell phone in my coat pocket slipped out, hit the street’s pavement, and ricocheted right into a storm drain.

I just bought that cell phone. Three weeks ago. I even purchased insurance should it be damaged. I even purchased a very expensive, very hard case/enclosure system that would protect this cell phone in the event of nuclear war, fire bombs, and toddlers.  The “otter box,” as it’s called, reminds me of a sat phone MacGyver might have used, back when they were the size of small boom boxes. 

The insurance I purchased doesn’t cover cell phone loss due to low elevations in the bottoms of storm drains.

Our only hope was a manhole cover at the top of the storm drain.  Correction: our other hope was my husband, who thought to pry up the manhole with a tire iron stored under our carjack.   And so he did. 

Did I also mention that this was a family outing with all the children? We were bonding over taking cookies to people who whim and the spirit led us to.  So the four of us (Tiny stayed in the car) took turns peering down into the seven-foot storm drain at a mess of dry leaves and plastic bags. We could not see the cell phone.

But we knocked on Ethel’s door, handed her the cookies with a Merry Christmas Eve!, and then asked if we could borrow her ladder. Mark lowered it into the manhole while I stood next to him and fretted that he would hurt his arm or shoulder or that the ladder would fall over once inside. And then he inserted himself into the hole and climbed down the ladder while I fretted some more and Ethel and the girls stood around watching. The girls said, ohhh, ohhh, oh.   And I said, be careful!  And Mark batted the leaves around with the tire iron once he got to the bottom, but he could not find the cell phone. Until he got to a small tunnel/pipe thingy (presumably the route the water takes out of the storm drain as it fills up) and moved a plastic bag and some leaves around and there the phone was.  

And he climbed up the ladder, and he handed the phone to me. And he pulled the ladder out of the manhole and replaced the cover.  And my otter-box encased phone looked as good as it could be. It could have survived nuclear war, fire bombs, or toddlers. But it chose a storm drain. Good for it. Branching out.

Earlier this week I got a second-degree burn on my hand. Two months ago I got a concussion after a glass light fixture fell on my head.

My friends want to build a phone- and heat- and glass-proof membrane that I can surround myself with at all times, which is okay with me as long as it is chocolate-permeable.  Because there are only two food groups in the world: chocolate and everything else.  And I wouldn’t want my diet to get off because I didn’t get an adequate amount of cacao bean through the phone-/heat-/glass-proof membrane/bubble thingy my friends want to build. I wish them good luck with that.

And as a postscript, if you’re wondering if I’m accepting See’s candy right now: I am.  My supply is off to a really good start.  It seems people read my blog post last week and I received more than two pounds of See’s chocolates over Christmas as gifts.  I can always make room in our cupboard for more, should the urge strike you.  Unfortunately for you locals, the See’s candy kiosk is closed at the local mall. You’ll have to mail order, people. You’ll have to mail order.

2011: Year in Pictures and Few Words

2011. Here's what happened. We had a toddler (who used to be a baby). She liked to eat dirt.

We had an Evvy (who turned 7 in the fall).  She's sweet. And loud. And is trying to master the art of running on her hands and feet. Once in a while, she plops down for a rest.

We had a Una (who turned 9 in June).  She's sweet and smart and thoughtful. She says I'm not allowed to post "hilarious pictures" of her. Or embarrassing ones.  But this meets her criteria:

(Psst, if you want to see another one that I just love, then see it.)

We don't have a good picture for everything that happened this year, but I'll let the ones we do have tell the rest of the story.

Nay Nay's birthday. We love her.

Fourth of July in our friend Robyn's front yard. I laid on the grass in the shade with Nay. Everybody else watched the parade and caught candy. Candy. Bleh.

Una and Evvy were flower girls (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!).  They've been asking their whole lives to be flower girls. 

And here's a silly flower-girl pose with their/our silly friend Chris.

Hey, did you know we moved this year? But I don't have any pictures of our house handy. And honestly, I don't know if I want you to see it yet.  The shrubs out front are too bushy, and I haven't hung all the pictures yet.  Instead, I should offer you an annual family portrait, like people do, in front of a Christmas tree or a wreath, yada yada.  But, does the pose below count? We look sorta reflective/end-o-the-year-thoughtful/familyish.

No?  How bout this one?

This is not at our new house. Or even our old house. And somehow we lost our kids and gained a dog. But at least you can tell who we are (see red shirt) and that we look happy in a SNL kind of way.

Merry Christmas and/or Happy Holidays to all y'all out there.   We are happy to know you and hope you can come visit us soon.

Heather, Mark, and girlies.

Christmas Chocolates, Christmas Lights

Today, for about five seconds, I thought about opening my own See’s candy kiosk franchise at the Coral Ridge Mall—next winter, October 1 through December 26. Be there.

See, the elderly couple who ventured into the franchise this year are from Ottumwa. They drive a good two hours to the mall every day and stand in their white See’s candy lab coats, holding  out baskets of lollipops for passersby.  This poor couple, the cashier confided to me, will most likely not be back next year.  The See’s candy franchise has taken its toll—all that winter driving, varicose veins and such.  Poor dears, I thought.  And then, poor me, because how will I get See’s candy locally ever ever again? How will I get it without having to pay a 20$ shipping fee from Chicago or California? My purchase today at the See’s candy kiosk wasn’t even for myself—it was a gift. A box of milk chocolate Bordeaux for not-me because I shopped whilst hanging on to the illusion that See’s might be at my disposal at least 3 months out of the upcoming year.  And so I was truly forlorn at the news whispered to me by the young cashier. Childhood nostalgia for See’s kicked into high gear.    

That's when I had this brief and fleeting idea: *I* could run my own kiosk. And then I could have as much See’s as I wanted.

But, I would probably gain thirty pounds.  And I hate the mall at Christmas time.

So I went home and put my packages away, feeling so terribly sorry for myself and the See’s candy deficit in my life that I began to hear voices.  The milk chocolate Bordeaux was actually calling my name!  At first I couldn’t believe it—these things don’t happen in real life, I told myself. Christmas presents can't really come alive. Tsk.

But, the ethereal reach of a box of candy across the house, from my office where they were stowed away to the kitchen where I put away dinner leftovers became a thing of substance.  This box, this gift for a dear relative, was asking me to do something unthinkable, something terrible awful. Oh dear God.  I argued with it, chastised the perversion of its thinking.  And then I asked the husband:

Would you hate me for eating this [$17 box of] See’s Candy?

(A quick aside: It’s better to ask these sorts of questions with melodrama.  If I’d asked, for instance:

Do you think I should eat Aunt Ione’s box of Christmas chocolates?

--well, a five-year-old could give you the right answer in no time flat.)

Would you hate me?  Well, that’s just the right cocktail of self-pity mixed with desire and fear of rejection to make a husband tell his wife, practically, No, honey, you go right ahead. Btw, I love you sooo much.

I couldn’t live with the shame of eating someone else's Christmas present in front of him. So I waited 'til he left. And then I did it.  Sunk my teeth into that soft center and gave myself the biggest bite on the inside of my cheek to date.  Chocolate mingled with the taste of blood. But despite accounting for the blood-chocolate combo, something else just didn’t seem right. And wouldn't you know it, I'd bought the wrong candy, and by “wrong” I mean not the kind I thought I was buying. It lacked chocolate in its gooey center.  And it tasted like it’d  been in its Christmas wrapper since August, when the factory got ‘em all prepped and ready for the holiday kiosk.

Stupid $17 box of talking chocolates. I'm gonna cut your throat out.

In other breaking news, I’m charmed by our neighborhood’s display of outdoor holiday lights. You know how our minds free associate and leap to all sorts of random hypotheses throughout the day? Well, today, I thought: people who put up Christmas lights must be nice. Nice nice. Bring-meals-to-sick people nice. Rescue-a-mutt-from-a-well nice.  And if I was stranded on the road, my car engine on fire, my children in tow on a bitterly cold winter’s night, you know which house I’d stop in for help at?  Not the one with the people who couldn’t be bothered, the people who didn’t have the time, energy, or emotional resources to string up a Wal-mart rendition of baby Jesus lit up like a Broadway stage. Nope. I’d stop by the house with the well-lit Santa sleigh/reindeer combo in the front yard and hope the residents there (or Santa) would give me a lift home.

(See's candy update: I’m on my sixth seventh piece.)