Confessions of a Martha

Now as they went on their way, [Jesus] entered a certain village, where a woman named Martha welcomed him into her home. She had a sister named Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to what he was saying. But Martha was distracted by her many tasks; so she came to him and asked, ‘Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me.’ But the Lord answered her, ‘Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.’ --Luke 10: 38-42 NRSV

My mental illness is most pronounced first thing in the morning. When I roll out of bed, my brain takes flight like a startled covey of pheasants. While turning on the shower a single thought; a song lyric, movie line or newly created piece of narrative, for example, loops crazily until I realize it’s stuck on repeat and then deliberately shove it aside. My morning routine is a practiced ritual from the order in which I cleanse my body to the sequence in which I assemble my breakfast. If I get distracted in the slightest, it’s almost guaranteed that I will forget something and, upon sitting down to eat, will realize I am without a fork or a napkin or—the horror!—my coffee.

Once the food and caffeine begin coursing through my veins, my thought processes become more linear. I wish I could say that the mental mania subsides completely, but I can’t. Sometime after the coffee, I create a list of all the things I’d like to accomplish in those generous hours my kids are in school. I am aware as I write this list that it’s going to be impossible, but I tell myself that as long as the highest priorities are covered, I can let the rest go. I seldom do. Because inevitably, the things I most want to do wind up at the bottom of the list. And as the weeks pass, the list of “want to do’s” grows rapidly without the “have to do’s” proportionally scaling back. So I am left each day feeling like Martha—standing in the kitchen at 9:00pm wondering where my day has gone, irritated with everyone around me, and feeling the pain and sadness of once again having missed out on “the good stuff.”

I want to be Mary. I honestly do. I believe that writing creatively is what God wants for me. After years of fear that I loved writing too much, that I would never be allowed to do it seriously because it was selfish and wrong, I have finally reached a place of trust that God would not have given me this passion if I wasn’t intended to use it.

So why am I standing in the kitchen still trying to complete my “to do” list before I’m allowed to go and experience the joy of sitting at Jesus’ feet? Why am I unable to reconcile my need to create with the full basket of laundry on the couch, the grant deadlines and the sound of the school bus dropping off my kids at the end of their day? I mean, even if Martha had joined her sister, eventually someone would have had to clean up the dinner dishes. I don’t suppose Jesus would have offered to do them for her.

But maybe that’s where I’m wrong. Maybe if I’m just willing to set aside my own agenda for a while and stop to listen to God’s call, I’ll find that there is time for everything. Everything in God’s plan, anyway. I believe my creativity is a part of that plan. So I will stop and listen and have faith that all those little tasks will still get done. Nothing is impossible for God.

Otherworldly Origins

For many years now scientists, historians, science fiction writers and the general public have marveled at the advanced scientific achievements of some very early human civilizations, raising the possibility that such impossible wonders indicated an otherworldly origin for human life. But the debate has raged on with compelling arguments on both sides of the issue and no real evidence. Until now.

I have suddenly realized that there exists proof positive that life on our planet came from elsewhere in the universe. It’s so simple and it’s been staring us in the face for at least… well… a few years certainly.

I offer you as evidence the written Hebrew language. A beautifully crafted, poetic and vibrant communication tool used for thousands of years by one of the earliest cultural groups in recorded history. How is this proof of alien origins, you ask? Hebrew has no vowels. Clearly, this is an irrefutable example of ancient text messaging.

No, think about it! Now that we’ve evolved to the point of having developed both space travel and text messaging we can certainly expect expeditions in the not-too-distant future to populate far flung planets ourselves. Planets so primitive and remote that basic survival will supercede all attempts to preserve records of these pioneers’ former home. Here and there, as civilizations develop, someone will find a record of his advanced origins and convince everyone to build something completely out of whack with the rest of their capabilities. But any other connections to the original settlers will be lost.

Can it be long before someone discovers the Dead Sea Phone in some desolate cave along the shore—unrecognizable in its specific form, perhaps, but deciphered as an advanced alien technology from long ago? I’ve no doubt that when the years of grime are stripped away, there on the bottom of the device will be an inscription in Hebrew translated as: iPhn.

The Talk

A few weeks ago, Eiledon and I had “the talk.” Not THAT talk! We’ve had an open dialog on THAT subject for over a year now. No, I’m talking about the Santa Claus talk. I had long been dreading it, that time in her life when she realized her parents, along with most of the adult world, had perpetrated the ultimate hoax on her for years.

I had no idea how she would take it, because my own experience had been so different. I can’t remember ever believing in Santa Claus, most likely because I had an older brother, precocious in the extreme, who caught my parents red-handed one December and passed the revelation along to the rest of us. But my parents never really played into the Santa mystique. We never had pictures on Santa’s lap, and when we did sit on Santa’s lap after the Sunday School Christmas Program, we all knew it was really Mr. Vanstrom in a fake beard. Under the tree each year there might be a gift or two “from Santa” but we all just sort of laughed and knew it was from Mom and Dad.

My husband’s family, on the other hand, cultivated a rich and detailed Santa mythology. They always saw Santa before Christmas each year to make their wishes. They opened their gifts to one another on Christmas Eve, and then Santa came that night and brought a few more gifts to be opened in the morning. Santa filled the stockings, Santa put the candy canes on the tree, and Santa left the Whitman’s Sampler for the family to enjoy. Santa’s presents were always wrapped in plain, brown paper and he always left an empty milk glass and the last little bite of the cookies left out for him. And, of course, Santa always left a note, written in big, black, shaky handwriting, congratulating Dan and Nate on having been such good boys that year, and politely thanking them for the cookies.

When Dan and I had our own children he made it plain that he wanted to continue his family’s Santa traditions. At first I argued because I’m lazy and it just sounded like too much work. Then I argued because I deeply believed—and still do, somewhat—that Santa Claus represents nothing but the crass commercialization of what ought to be a rather humble religious observance. A little later, I got all Doris Walker on his ass, refusing to perpetrate such nonsense on my impressionable children and deliberately LIE to them until they got smart enough to do the math and physics themselves.

I lost.

We have truly wonderful pictures of the kids on Santa’s lap which, looked at together, are a hilarious record of our kids’ development over the years. Our annual dinner at Ruby Tuesday’s on a slow-paced weeknight, which precedes the visit to the Big Man himself, has become a cherished family tradition. There’s something simple and charming about gifts wrapped in brown paper, plain candy canes that magically appear on the tree, and a piece of fruit in the toe of each stocking, even if it is buried under enough sugary crap to choke a horse. We have heartwarming notes the kids have left on the table with cookies each year. And I have many sweet memories of the kids’ reactions on Christmas morning when the one thing they most wanted for Christmas was there under the tree, when it clearly hadn’t been the night before.

But now Eiledon is eleven, and while I pray that she hangs on to her wide-eyed, wild, creative spirit, I know she lives in the real world with a lot of other almost-teens struggling to figure out what’s truth and what’s bull. She started asking last Christmas, but only half-heartedly, not really wanting an answer. Then this year the angst became unbearable. Every time Dan answered her question, “Well, what do you think, Eiledon?” I could see the painful struggle in her eyes, between wanting an answer and not wanting an answer, all the while suspecting the answer but hoping upon hope that so long as no one confirmed it, anything was possible.

I sat silently and uncomfortably by. I hated her confusion and I hated my complicity in creating it. And while it’s one thing for Dan (43) and his mom (70) to speak earnestly to one another about Santa, almost making him real by sheer force of will, it was more than I could bear to see a conflicted pre-adolescent trying to keep one foot on each side of the great divide.

Finally one night, as I sat with her at bedtime, she said again—asking, but not asking directly—“I just wish I knew for sure one way or the other.” I couldn’t stand it any longer.

“Do you really want to know?”

“Yes!” she cried.

I sighed and smiled sadly and she knew before I said a word. “There is no fat man in a red suit who flies around the world in a sleigh drawn by flying reindeer delivering toys to millions of children in one night.”

The relief was palpable. I’m not sure which of us was more relieved. Possibly it was a draw. She said: “I didn’t think so,” and smiled a real, easy smile. “It’s sort of ridiculous to think it’s even possible.”

I smiled back, glad to be on equal footing with my wonderful daughter, grateful to have been so easily forgiven for my years of elaborate dishonesty. She seemed instinctively to understand that it was never malicious. That she ought not to feel stupid for not having figured it out sooner, nor betrayed by her most trusted source of information.

We talked a little about the “spirit” of Santa—the idea of selfless, even anonymous giving that expects nothing in return, except maybe good behavior and a couple cookies. I told her that, to this day, her father and grandmother will not say that Santa isn’t real. For them, the mythology is deeply entwined with family history and that, in and of itself, makes it true, gives it substance, imbues it with life.

Believe it or not, my eleven-year-old got it. Maybe it’s the Watson genes. In any case, we ended our conversation feeling closer, both relieved of our burdens and grateful to be moving forward. But just before I got ready to leave the room, I turned back to her and said, “Don’t tell Gavin. He may not be ready yet.” She assured me she wouldn’t breathe a word.

The “bad mom” in me secretly hopes she does.

New Year’s Ultimatum

I wanted to post to my blog on New Year’s Day. I woke up excited, faintly buzzing with a sense of purpose and meaning. As I puttered in the kitchen early that morning in a dim and silent house—well, except for the cats pouncing on each other and hissing and growling to wake the dead—I thought, “How wonderfully symbolic! I can start the year with a blog entry and renew my commitment to writing regularly.”

Then it was nine thirty p.m. and I was struggling to get my kids to bed, feeling crabby and exhausted and I hadn’t written a darn thing.

At several points throughout my day, most notably as I combed through three months of bank statements trying to find a mysteriously missing seven dollars, my mind lit on the idea that I ought to be writing. And each time, following the initial excitement about the idea of writing, there came a crushing resignation that there just wouldn’t be time. This was followed by a nagging voice at the back of my mind telling me that if I didn’t write something on New Year’s Day, then there was no point in bothering to continue.

What?!?

Whose voice was that?!?

Whose idea was it that January First should have a deeper significance to the human condition than just the arbitrary point at which some cultures start counting the next 365.2564-day trip around the sun? What exercise-club magnates got together and hatched a scheme to explode their January revenue each year by promising success if only you start trying to lose weight right now? When did I decide that “resolution” was synonymous with “ultimatum?”

I stopped making “resolutions” about six years ago when I actually took action to get recovery from my food addiction (in November, by the way). But this year some things are shifting emotionally and spiritually again. I think I was excited on New Year’s Day not because “this time I’m gonna make it stick!” but because I’ve recently been gifted with a broader sense of vision. I don’t “have a plan” for employing my creativity. Instead I’m trying to be quiet, to listen, so that I don’t miss those sometimes elusive invitations to the sacred act of creating.

Not surprisingly, as soon as I called it out, that voice disappeared. Like most bogeymen, it was entirely insubstantial and only had power so long as I supplied it. Call it what you want, but I think of it as one voice in the broad repertoire of Evil, the ingenious way it twists something so benign as a New Year’s resolution into a monster with the power to kill creativity and any vestige of joy that creativity might generate.

A dear friend said to me yesterday, “I need to surrender the life I’ve planned to be open to the life that’s waiting.” This January third, I resolve to be open.