Choose Your Own Adventure

Living a Better Story Seminar from All Things Converge Podcast on Vimeo.

Note:
This entry is in response to Donald Miller’s contest to win a trip for two to Portland for the Living a Better Story Seminar. Also, be sure to check out Don’s latest, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years

MY MOTHER
When I was very small, I went with my parents to an even smaller Baptist church. I liked the hymns. I spent most of the time drawing on the back of the weekly bulletin, which kept me quiet enough for my parents’ liking. Dad often fell asleep, his head leaning toward the floor as if in prayer. Only he wasn’t. But the wooden pews were uncomfortable at best and before long he would have to readjust his position. Sometimes I would sit on the floor and lean over the pew, which doubled as a table for my latest work of art. The offering was my second favorite next to the singing. If we were lucky, Mom would reach into her purse and hand my brother and me a dollar bill each to tuck in the offering plate as it passed us by.

Apart from service on Sundays, I read the Bible with Mom. I still have her Bible somewhere, its cream leather cover and red-edged pages worn from the passing of time. We read it together starting in John. I liked reading it sometimes, but even more I liked the time I spent with her. We would sit on the bed next to each other as she held the book and read to me, or sometimes I would read aloud.

And then, when I was ten, my mother died.

It was no surprise that with my mother no longer around, my dad, brother, and I went to church less and less. From that point on, my relationship with God became complicated. I was a child struggling to make sense of the kind of loss that leaves a hole in your chest.

MOTHERLESS
I don’t remember having any kind of hope for a long time after that. My story could have belonged to anyone, but it didn’t. It was happening to me. That’s how I saw it through my teenage years. And so, instead of changing the plot, I settled in for the ride.

By the time I was in high school I worked a typical retail job at the mall. While I didn’t think the life I was living was a direct ticket to hell, it wasn’t satisfying either. There are only so many times you can get drunk and pass out before you realize your problems are still there in the morning. Besides, graduation was around the corner and the pressure was on to make something of myself.

When it was slow at work, I would hang around the clothing racks, pretend to straighten the hangers, chat with co-workers. So the first time Erica invited me to church I blew it off.

Eventually I did go, kinda as a favor to my friend and co-worker. I’m not sure why, but I decided to go back a second time, and a third. That was the night I chose to begin the healing process. I prayed to God and asked him to be whatever I needed since I didn’t know anymore what I needed and obviously wasn’t doing a very good job at being in charge of my own life. As I drove home that night, I knew something inside of me had shifted.

For a while, everything felt new. Every experience, every conversation. It was like I had gotten corrective lenses and everything that was blurry was now in focus. It was the reprieve I needed.

But eventually, the feelings wore off and the time for growth came. The wounds that occurred many years before needed to be reopened to heal right.

MY MOTHER’S MOTHER
The showdown between me and God had been brewing for the past nine years and was now an underground volcano finally ready to erupt. Although I pretended all was okey-dokey, I was still seething. By the time I was nineteen, I had lost the two most important women in my life: my mom and my maternal grandma.

When Mom died, Grandma became a second mom to me. After all, she lost her only daughter and I lost my only mother, which seemed to give us a special connection. Living next door to her strengthened our bond because I could drop in at any hour to see what kind of sweets she had in her kitchen, or play a few rounds of Yahtzee. I spent countless hours at her house, many times sleeping over to keep her company since Grandpa had passed back in ‘89. We would stay up late and watch Murder She Wrote, or my favorite, The Golden Girls.

My grandma died from lung cancer, which finally became immune to treatments and took over her body. It was heartbreaking to watch the woman I had depended on consistently through the years begin to need help from me for even simple tasks.

I brought this up to say that I think the showdown with God culminated after my grandma passed. It was the last straw. I felt abandoned all over again by people and God.

OTHER PEOPLE’S MOTHERS
But God must’ve known I’d need another mother. It wasn’t long before I met Alaine and adopted her as my own. I followed her around to glean any kind of wisdom I could. She welcomed me like a stray puppy. And when I felt hopeless, she shared her life story with me. The good, the bad, and the ugly. It gave me courage and I began to believe that I could have a different story.

I won’t bore you with details about the tears I cried, the endless pages of journals scrawled with processed feelings, the titles of books I read about grief, the prayers I prayed that led to my heart becoming mostly whole again. But I will tell you that I could not have written this part of my story alone. The work my mother started was passed to my grandmother, and then to someone else’s mother.

CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE
My relationship with Alaine changed me. I began to feel like the reader of those Choose Your Own Adventure books from elementary school. Except the book was my life, so I played it safe.

I went to college, earned a degree in social work, got a full-time job, married my best friend, moved into a small rental, and adopted a cat. The only things left to cross off the list: buy a house, have kids, open up a 401(K), and erect a white picket fence along the edge of our property line.

Now, if I was in a Choose Your Own Adventure book I might do something crazy like quit my job, backpack across Europe with my partner-in-crime, become a painter, write a book, or all of the above. Because in the book, if you get caught by the bad guys and get offed, or quit your job and it doesn’t work out, you can always go back to the safer choice.

I want to come to Portland for the Living a Better Story Seminar because I think I can hear the Voice whispering to me, prodding me along to live a better story, but I don’t feel brave enough to write it - yet.

I want to meet other characters, hear their stories, be encouraged, and get an old-fashioned kick in the butt to choose something risky for a change and see where it takes me.

Because I think I know what my story is about.

THE MOTHER IN ME
I’m not a mom, biologically speaking. Even after four years of marriage my “let’s have a baby” clock has yet to start ticking. On top of that, I’m not good at mom things like sewing on loose buttons and cooking recipes from scratch. But there is something in me that feels like I think a mother might feel when I meet a young woman who is motherless too.

When I was eighteen, I landed a gig at a shelter for runaway and homeless youth. On the Friday to Saturday midnight shift I cleaned bathrooms as part of my weekly routine. Scrubbing the dirt off toilets changed me. I thought a lot during those eight hour shifts, mostly about the girls I’d met who didn’t have mothers either. I wondered who would show them the way into adulthood, only I knew most of them didn’t have someone else’s mother to guide them.

For many years I was silent about my loss. I thought I had to be. I hid everything touched by loss in the deepest caverns of my heart, afraid that my stories would be too much for another to bear. Then in January 2009, I sensed that still, small Voice telling me to write about the experience of losing my mother.

I wanted to write, I did. I wanted to put into words what so many others have been afraid to say, including myself. But I was still afraid. And fear is a lot less tangible than money or time. It’s impossible to fund-raise and buy fear a one-way ticket to a tropical island, and sometimes more time leads to more procrastination. I struggled with the fear of rejection and the fear of being known. Some days the words came like a flood and some days fear had browbeaten me into silence or retreat, thinking someone else could tell the story better.

I’ve got the bare bones of my story down, but what I need is an inciting incident to thrust me in a forward motion into the next chapter.

I want to connect with a generation of women who have grown up without mothers and invite them into honest conversations full of purposeful tears, and healing laughter. I want to share my story with hundreds, maybe thousands of women, so that they too can have the hope of choosing their own adventure. And if I can wrestle with fear and win, I just might have the chance to do all of those things and more.

Doctrine

in the landslide of our fathers’ ways
we’ve stayed in this place far too long,
our hands callous and rough,
our insides just as tough,
we’re dying to be free.

the words from our mothers’ tongues
have shown us how to expect what
cannot be done, 
in famine we are trying to feast,  
but  there are only empty plates
and much more than our bodies
to feed.

we’ve lost ourselves underneath
apparitions of who we used to be,
but we just keep going
year after year.
after year.
after year.

we’ve become what we’ve not wanted,
our days wasted on vacant movements
as we go through the motions until the
spaces in our hearts grow so large that
our dreams are swallowed.

you and me, we’re meant to be
unencumbered by the weight of
the expectations of
our fathers and
the presumptions of
our mothers,

or else we’ll never really be free.

I Remember/Don’t Remember

[I’ve recently been challenged by Journaling as a Spiritual Practice by Helen Cepero. One of the journaling exercises from the book is to simply write whatever comes to mind by finishing the phrases “I remember…” and “I don’t remember…”. I did this exercise in my journal and it resulted in a very cathartic experience.

Remembering our stories can be difficult. Sharing our stories can be even harder, but the growth that happens in us and others as a result can be compelling enough to take the risk.]

I remember the day she left, the day I stood on our porch
in a pink nightshirt, tears rolling down, down, down into
a small circle on the fabric below my chin.

I remember waking up that morning with a feeling of dread,
I remember the way Dad’s face looked and the fear
and uncertainty that formed into a pit in my stomach.

I remember waiting for the ambulance on the front steps
of our olive and white striped mobile home, I remember the
long, drawn out breaths that filled my lungs, then left.

I remember Mom and Dad driving away in the ambulance
without me, without my brother.

I remember waiting
with a hope that makes
the heart sick.

And I don’t want to,
but I remember when
he came back without

her.

I don’t remember:
how I was told.
the days following.
feeling anything.
the faces, both familiar and strange, offering condolences.

I couldn’t remember her favorite color to pick an
outfit for the showing so my aunt chose blue.

I don’t remember how I was able to cry so much in the
quiet hours of the night without waking my dad; maybe
he couldn’t hear because he was crying too.

I don’t remember how time
kept going, how people kept

living.

I don’t remember burying the
anger so deep that I couldn’t
feel it or find it, and through
the years I forgot where I put it.

After a while, I didn’t remember
how to be a good daughter,
I didn’t remember how to care.

I don’t remember laughing with Mom about cute boys,
crying on her shoulder after my first break-up, or asking
her for advice after a fight with a friend, so I drank until I
couldn’t stand up, until I didn’t remember that I didn’t
remember.

I don’t remember Mom being there to soothe my growing
pains, to comfort me, to guide me gently through the hard
and awkward life of a teenager because I guided myself.

I don’t remember the feelings of inadequacy, the jealousy
of friend’s moms who were so endearing because I chose
to forget those glaring reminders of my motherless years.

I don’t remember Mom being there when I graduated from
her alma mater, I don’t recall her proud smile, the sound of
her hands clapping when my name was called.

I don’t remember her affirming words and the confidence
they instilled in me when I got my first real job, when I
started college, when I began to make the difficult choices
that would shape the rest of my life.

I don’t remember her helping me as I prepared to move
out on my own, as I sorted though my belongings alone, and
packed my life into boxes not knowing what I’d need.

I don’t remember the words of wisdom she shared with me
on my wedding day when I married my best friend just like
she had done 33 years earlier.

Now I’m a wife, and I don’t remember being taught my
way around a kitchen, how to patch up an old shirt, or
how to keep plants alive.

I don’t remember what it feels like to be her daughter,
I don’t remember the convenience of calling her when
I’m having a bad day or need a recipe for dinner.

I don’t remember the years we had together to make memories,
I don’t remember how our relationship turned to friendship over
the years as I grew older and left my adolescence behind.

I don’t remember how the last 18 years passed so quickly
or how I grew up so fast, because some days I still feel like
that 10 year old girl who just lost her mother.