2023 in Retrospect

 I went all of the year 2023 without writing here. With my life feeling so very finite, my trusty ole blog didn't seem a worthy enough place to expend energy.

Since the last time I wrote here...

• I have had a whole pregnancy and a whole baby. Now I have a three-year-old and a nine-month-old. They're sisters, and this morning we woke up to them talking and singing together in their room. 
• We took a trip to Guatemala, Jake, Tessa, and me.
• I have had and ended a full-time job with the county's Housing Authority.

• We have gotten roommates, a family from Nicaragua. 
• I have spent three months babysitting two toddlers and two infants.
• I have helped my toddler potty train. There is incredible emotional weight to this milestone, and I felt entirely unprepared for that. She'll never be a baby again, and she deals with that by playing "Baby," in which she tells me what to do, and is therefore no different from any of our other games, except that she uses a whiny voice.
• No one in our immediate families has died.
• No new cars were purchased. 
• Our house looks a little different. My brother-in-law installed a few new outlets. Jake installed a pot rack. Edwin repainted the bathroom. Uncle Tom put a door in the side of the garage. 
• We look a little different. Our hair is greyer. Our bellies are a bit saggy. We can't seem to catch up on sleep. 
• I have started a part-time job answering helpdesk emails for a non-profit. 

I used to have a Xanga. Remember how it was the same thing as this, but with the option to choose music along with your post? I remember people doing this, giving "it's been so long since I wrote"-type update posts every six months, and then nothing. And then Xanga died, and I lost years of writing. 

I see I just did that; an update, I mean. I wonder if it means that a blog is no longer the place I hang my thoughts. I don't have a more pressing place to put them: I'm not suddenly running for office, or writing a book. I imagine I'll be back little by little.

Theology of Suffering

I was in an Urgent Care this evening, crying my eyes out due to the pressure in my ears. I remember when I was maybe three years old, sitting on my mom's lap and crying my eyes out for the same reason. I remember saying something about God to her, like, "Why does God let this happen?" or "Why does God hate me?"

Tonight, I practiced all the breathing techniques I know (maybe three... mostly different counts of inhale-hold-exhale) to deal with the pain. I paced, I sat, I prayed. I prayed not just for myself but for a few other people I know to be in pain right now, including people who are literally in war zones or being tortured. I pray for them most. I told God that he is still good, even though I was in pain. I thanked him for being with me while I was in pain. And that's my entire theology of suffering. That's it. 

I drove to the pharmacy and acquired at little cost: Sudafed, amoxicillin, and prednisone, all of which I dosed up in the parking lot, and prayed to drive safely home in spite of my compromised reaction time. All was well. I lay down on the couch and writhed and wailed until the medicines took effect. 

"Only Physical"

Something else is going on with these thoughts. While I was waiting for the doctor, I thought, "at least it's not losing my child. She's safe at home, going to bed. At least this is only physical." But I don't believe in "only physical." If I had lost my child, the pain would be so acute as to actually be physical, not just psychological. And is any pain psychological only? Aren't we experiencing it with our physical mind? Praise God for the physical. "Only" nothing. It's a seamless everything. 

Moving to East Lancaster

Right now, we have a bedroom dedicated to storing the puzzle we're working on. Another bedroom is just laundry drying. An office upstairs contains a blow-up mattress and an old rug. We move the rest of our stuff in on Saturday, when, I assume, I will find our plates in an unlabeled box. We've been eating all our meals out of the same three bowls around a card table in camp chairs for almost three weeks. I'm not complaining. I can't believe we get to live in a city where we've already made and begun to make friendships. I can't believe we get to live in a big house with guest rooms! I can't believe how many people we're going to be able to host for dinners, or for a weekend, or much longer! I can't believe how yellow our kitchen is. 

All our books are in boxes, still, and the bookshelves waiting to be wedged into vans from various quadrants. We live in meanwhile, and there's something serene and sad about how empty the house still is. We don't know who will share it with us, or when. We don't know how full it will get, or how empty. We're hoping. And hope can fill a house. 

A Story of Our Cat

"I can't find the cat I told you about on the phone, but let me get a different one for you," Colleen motioned upstairs. A minute later, she was back downstairs with a dejected cat in her arms. "This is Tiger Lily! She was hiding under our bed." Tiger Lily was a dark tabby cat with little splashes of orange coloring on her back. 

I was so ready for a cat, any cat, that I gently pushed Tiger Lily into the cat carrier, and thanked my friend for giving us one of her several house-and-barn-cats. I already loved her. 

On our way home, Jake and I renamed her "Hen Wen," after the future-telling pig from The Black Cauldron. It took Hen Wen three weeks to venture out from under the couch regularly. When she had an eye infection that needed care, Jake and Quinn had to lift the whole couch up for me to retrieve her. 

I recall the day we moved, five months after bringing her to live with us, I had to seek her out in the farthest recess in the farthest room. She came out when I called, sheepish, because she and I both knew she was just so scared. 

At my in-laws' house, where we were moving, Hen stayed in the basement for a week or more. Hugely pregnant, I sat with her in the basement for long periods. I found an old wooden chair and tried to reach down to  pet her over my belly. She didn't even see where we slept for a month, since it was past many rooms where many people roamed. She was just so scared. But how far she had come! One day I even found her lying on our bed, out in the open, sunning herself. She loved lying on our bed. 

You hear it, right? The past tense that is not just a one-time event, but the habitual turned perfect tense? Because two weeks ago, Hen Wen just wasn't eating much, then nothing at all. It took me forever to realize that she was having trouble breathing. After putting Tessa to bed and leaving the monitor with my in-laws, I took Hen to the emergency vet. It just so happened that Jake was away for the first night since Tessa was born, and I felt like I was on my own on this one. It seems like it all happened very fast after I decided to take her in. The fluid around her lungs was a hopeless matter. I walked in with her in the cat carrier, and I walked out two hours later with a heavy heart and an empty cat carrier. I cried in the car for a while before going home. 

On the exam table, I held her still while the vet tech took her vitals. Hen Wen rested the weight of her head on my forearm, too desperate to be scared now: trusting and tired and laboring to breathe, and maybe also glad to have such full attention from me. It was a rare thing that I turned my whole attention to the cat after I had Tessa. Hen just had to find those moments to snuggle when things were quiet, overcoming her fear and finding me. Here she was snuggling with me a few weeks after Tessa was born.

Summer Berries

 On my clothes this summer have been blueberries, blackberries,

peanut butter, 

and other marks from the mouth of my baby daughter, 

who likes to blow raspberries.

She thinks putting her tiny baby mouth on my skin or my shirt and making fart noises is a good way to pass an afternoon.

And it is. 

We sit on our blanket in the grass and laugh and laugh. 

Bridal Showers and Baby Showers

 I think a cool addition to bridal showers and baby showers is storytelling. I know it happens without planning it... but does it? Or do we spend the entire four hours catching up and never get to the event? I'd love to attend a bridal shower where we the gift-giving is optional but the telling of a story is expected. That's the thing you bring. You wrap it up in a little forethought, and you limit it to three minutes or so. A bridal story shower, or a bridal telling (and a baby telling!). I want stories of real life more than I want the stuff. (Thank you for the stuff, I needed the stuff, too, though.)

Stories are the gift that grows the courage to step forward into the next part of life. 

There isn't room in our houses for all the photos and letters and journals of our forebears. But we can tell the stories. 

For a bridal telling, I would want my one friend to relate the story of their first night together, in all its honesty and heartbreak of disappointment. I would want my other friend to tell us about how she burnt dinner very often during her first two years of marriage, and served those meals wearing only an apron. It was a fun thing, not sad. You have to hear her tell it. 

I would tell about our honeymoon in all its hilarity and spice, things that don't belong on a blog future employers may find.

For a baby telling, I would want my mother-in-law to talk about breastfeeding, how every time her first child latched, a white hot pain shot through her; every time, and she didn't give up. And Shelby to tell of her two c-sections, one traumatic, one peaceful. 

I would tell about my fears, and almost suffocating Tessa by accident when we co-slept and she was swaddled. I shudder to think about it as I write. I would tell about how after nursing and nursing AND nursing on and off for hours, right around 9:30 PM one night, she fell asleep so deeply that I could lay her in her bassinet, and there she slept for hours. It happened all at once, just as I was about to despair, she surprised me by being a growing human being. I tell you, in the first month, I was exultant and miserable all at once, and didn't know if I was loving her. I was just trying to keep up and to take care of us both without hurting anyone's feelings in the meantime. 

There is something pretty important about being surrounded by other women when you cross these thresholds. So we buy stuff. We go to Target and get gifts and wrap them, then bring them to the party to be unwrapped and suddenly all that paper is a burden and we throw it away, and pile up the goods in bags, after all... These are important items for life, yes. But our stories are our treasures. 

Social Security Numbers

"I see on this intake form that you're asking for my social. Why do you need that, though?" I asked the secretary politely.

She conferred with the secretary next to her, who had heard the exchange. "Tell her we need it as a secondary identification."

She turned back to me, "We need it as a secondary identification. You would be surprised how many people have the same names." 

1. You have no idea what would surprise me. 

2. The only people who need my social security number are people who are paying or lending me money. When the eye doctor starts paying me money instead of marking up eyeglass frames by 400%, I'll give 'em my SSN. 

3. Fact: As of this writing, no one else has my name. 

So I didn't give it. But the secretary I was not talking to said, quite audibly to me, "Tell her we at least have to have the last four digits." So I wrote my birth year there. 

This whole scene was irritating to me, a person with a social security number. But what was merely loitering in the back of my mind came dashing to the front: people who are here without documentation would start to sweat in this moment. This tiny fit of solidarity does not move the needle on justice for folks who have come here for legit reasons, and I know this. 

So what will move the needle toward justice? I'm not currently seeking out ways to help dismantle and re-create the immigration system. I suppose I'm waiting for a chance to fall into my lap. But if I wait, it will likely look like standing up for the little guy. Standing up for the little guy, as a little guy myself, is sure to land me in trouble. I'm just gearing up. I'm getting myself used to a little bit of trouble, making a little bit of noise, trying to see how the little guys would be treated if they were there, so I can stand with them.