July, 2010-- My father-in-law: Living the vows

It’s probably good that the wedding vows are very general. Catholic wedding vows are just two sentences long:  “I promise to be true to you in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health. I will love you and honor you all the days of my life.”

            Perhaps there are a few young couples who grasp exactly what they’re promising with those sentences, but most—myself included—stand on that altar and think the words about bad times and sickness are more of a formality.

            As a twenty-five-year-old bride, sickness to me still meant a case of strep throat, and a bad time was rain at Summerfest.  The naiveté of youth blended with the fairytale tulle of the wedding dress and the two-foot tall cake for dessert seemed to whisper “liar” to the hints of trouble in the vows. 

            Now, sixteen years into marriage, I would stand on that altar with Bill again and promise my life to him, once again, but I would also understand that just as the word “good” cannot do justice to the exquisite joy of the moment of a baby’s birth or child’s adoption, so the word “bad” cannot contain the profound sorrow of loss and pain.

            Bill’s mom died of Alzheimer’s disease three weeks ago. It was by no means the first death we have experienced as a couple, but it was the closest. Watching my father-in-law care for his wife during the eight-year progression of her illness taught me the depth of the sanctity of marriage. Alzheimer’s is a cruel and sneaky disease. It started off looking like normal forgetfulness— Nancy misplacing her keys or reaching for the wrong word in a sentence.  It progressed to the somewhat worrisome—Nancy adding flour rather than powdered sugar to the cake frosting. At each stage, we lost her a little more. A usually bright and engaged conversationalist, she became increasingly unable to keep up with chatter at the dinner table. As the disease progressed, she lost her ability to cook, to keep the calendar and checkbook, to drive, and in the final year, even to dress and care for herself.

            My father-in-law, Harry, responded to his wife’s illness by living his marriage vows so completely and so beautifully, it took my breath away. Harry would never say he was living the vows. Harry was a computer analyst and programmer before he retired; a straightforward and practical man, not given to poetic expressions or liturgical language, so he would just say, “I made chicken and potatoes for dinner,” if he said anything at all. But for a groom of the 1960s whose responsibilities as a husband had not included making meals, keeping the house or calendar, or doing much of what would be considered “women’s work,” Harry’s decision to take on the full care of his wife, along with doing all the things she used to do, was to me, exactly what is meant by honoring your spouse all the days of your life.

            A few years into Nancy’s illness, I suggested to Harry that he didn’t need to worry about gifts for myself and the kids for birthdays and holidays. Gift-buying had been Nancy’s department and I didn’t want to burden him with one more responsibility. I think I may have offended him, because he sputtered something about how it was not going to be a problem. And it wasn’t. Apparently, he had been absorbing Nancy’s sense of style through the years; while I wasn’t too surprised with the remote control vehicles he gave to the boys, I was amazed by the fabulous clothes he managed to pick out for both the girls and myself.

            “Great sweater,” a co-worker said to me at work one day shortly after Christmas.             “Thanks. My father-in-law gave it to me,” I said.

            “Who has a father-in-law who can buy them clothes?” she said incredulously.

            A father-in-law who is living the vows, I thought.

            As Nancy’s condition worsened, Harry—in Bill’s words at the eulogy—became a Superhero. He took on more and more of Nancy’s care; managing her medicine; feeding her; dressing her. Sometimes he was hard on himself, saying he wasn’t patient enough. In her final year, he was smart enough to know what was best for her; sending her to adult day care a few days a week so she would be in a safe setting while he got things done in the house. Two months before her death, he found a nursing home a mile from their home. She moved there, and Harry visited every day to feed her lunch.

            On the day of Nancy’s death, Bill, Harry and I were together in her nursing home room, along with the hospice nurse. Nancy was struggling to breathe. Harry knew it was time. I said goodbye to Nancy. Harry left the room and I thanked her for being such a good mother-in-law, for welcoming me into the family and sharing her son with me; for being a wonderful grandmother to our children.

            And now, a few weeks later, I have someone else to thank, and that’s Harry. For giving me a model of what it means to live those marriage vows.

            “I will love you and honor you all the days of my life.”

            So, that’s what it looks like. Got it.

            Thank you, Harry.

April, 2010-- Denial is a dangerous place for parents

There’s a framed school portrait on our guest bathroom wall of kindergartener Liam smiling happily with a big, blue Bob-the-Builder Band-aid pasted between his upper lip and nose. Liam’s eyes are twinkling and he is apparently unbothered by having a large swath of plastic taped on his face on picture day.

             Other school portraits of our kids have come and gone; usually we keep just the most recent picture of each child displayed. But something about that picture has always spoken to me, and even though Liam is now in sixth grade and the stitches in his upper lip have long since healed, the picture remains, and I notice that guests occasionally leave our bathroom chuckling.

            Liam’s smiling Band-aid photo captures for me the essence of the journey of parenting. It’s not the smooth, untroubled times that form us and our children—it is the difficult times that we work through, cry through, and finally emerge from, somehow stronger and more joyful. Liam’s stitches don’t stand out as a particularly difficult moment for our family (yes, there was the screaming, the blood, the emergency room, and the Velcro papoose they needed to tie him down--  but all of that was less than 20 minutes). But the picture does symbolize for me the far more seriously challenging times we’ve made it through as a family.

            And every family has them.

            A friend of mine got divorced and shortly afterward, one of their three young sons was diagnosed with leukemia. At the time, I remember wondering how she could possibly make it through this. The weight of what she was dealing with looked crushing to me. Yet, the community rallied; brought her meals; prayed for her and with her. She, in turn, approached the illness rather matter-of-factly, spending long days at the hospital and at home nursing him through the chemo, believing he would get better. He responded well to the treatment and now, about seven years later, he has been in remission for about five years and is a great athlete. I see her in Mass, with her three big boys. She is not crushed. She is strong and whole.

            Difficult sections of parenting are terrifying because we fear they may either never end or may end badly. Because of this, some parents choose denial during the difficult periods. I have seen parents of children who are clearly bullying others at school make excuses for their child, blame the victim for overreacting, or otherwise shrug off their child’s behavior. These parents may be afraid that they have made mistakes that led to the bullying; or perhaps they fear the measures they might take to stop it won’t be successful; or perhaps dealing with their child’s poor behavior will require energy and time that they don’t believe they have. Their fear causes them to freeze. They ignore the problem, hoping that a happy ending will build itself. But in doing so, they miss out on the joy and satisfaction that comes when a family acknowledges a problem; works through it; and after maybe weeks or months—or even years; solves it. They miss their smiling Band-aid moment because they refused to acknowledge that stitches were needed in the first place.

             We only need to look at the Gospels to see that Jesus is all about acknowledging sickness, failure or sin in order to bring about new life and healing. He steps into problems rather than away from them. He heals the hemorrhaging woman; brings Lazarus back to life; gives the blind man sight. When he sees people making bad choices, his relationship with them brings about change —the woman at the well with many lovers starts living a moral life after meeting Jesus; Zacchaeus, who cheated people out of taxes, gives half his money to the poor when Jesus comes for dinner at his home; Saul stops persecuting Christians and transforms into St. Paul after meeting the risen Christ.

            Imagine if, instead of stepping into problems, Jesus would have simply smoothed them over, saying about the hemorrhaging woman “I’m sure her bleeding is just a stage.” Yet, some parents do this. Unwilling to believe they have the ability or responsibility to stop the hemorrhage, they allow their child to continue unhealthy or destructive behavior. Friends who are teachers tell me about parents who come to them not in a spirit of collaboration to help a child who is struggling, but instead, with a spirit of defensiveness to their child and aggressiveness toward the teacher, refusing to acknowledge their child’s faults; blaming the teacher for picking on the child. 

            If our faith calls us to become Christ to others, the first “others” we must heal and transform are our children. We must recognize that the most difficult aspects of parenting aren’t evidence that we’ve failed, but rather are opportunities to become more than we thought we were capable of. But this requires us to first acknowledge the hemorrhage; the immorality; the sickness. Being Christ to our children requires us to step into problems rather than away from them.

            And it requires us to stick with the problem until there is resolution—to pray our way through issues, while working every brain cell God gave us. We are called, as parents, to give everything we are to pulling the best from our children, understanding that sometimes pulling this best from kids is a joyful task, and sometimes it is sheer pain.

And when we do this; when we acknowledge the pain, step into the hurt; enter into the difficulty; that is when the miracle will begin to occur. For pulling the best from our children—no matter how hard— is love in action. And love transforms.

March 2010-- Bananas

During the Offertory, I started thinking about bananas.

            It was a Friday in Lent and I was at 8 a.m. Mass in part because Bill and I were going to have a staffing that afternoon with our foster daughter’s biological parents, her social workers, her guardian ad litem, the foster parents of her biological brothers and their social workers. Quarterly staffing meetings are often uncomfortable, sometimes volatile, and usually unproductive. Waking up the day of a staffing produces in me the same emotions as waking up the day of a scheduled tooth filling, but without the assurance of Novocain.

            And that’s why I had bananas on my mind.

            At the afternoon’s staff meeting I was planning to ask Teenasia’s biological father for permission to have her baptized and receive her First Communion. The social worker had asked him for permission a couple months earlier, and the answer had been an unequivocal no. Despite Teenasia’s father’s two-year no-contact order with his children, he still had parental rights, and as such, retained authority over decisions in his children’s lives in areas of religion, health and travel. He said “no” simply because he had the right to do so— refusing T the opportunity to cross state lines for our family vacation last summer; refusing to allow the medication that his son needed; and now, refusing permission to baptize.

            Complicating the matter was that Teenasia was focused on receiving First Communion in a way that went far beyond what I saw of my sons’ interest when they were second graders. “Of all the children in my class,” Mrs. Wong told me at conferences, “no one wants First Communion more than Teenasia.”  So I needed that permission — because Teenasia needed the permission. She had been hurt by her father enough.

            Bananas. I sat there in church, not feeling spiritual in the least. The readings did not produce that sense of resonance they sometimes do, as if the writers were speaking about my life in particular. The homily didn’t stir me. I was not moved by the congregation around me, the songs, responses or the petitions.

            The offertory song began and I realized I was there for the Eucharist, for the grace it offered, with a dry, matter-of-fact belief in the Eucharist that was suddenly reminding me of bananas.

            When I was a competitive runner in high school and college, I would get so nervous before races that I didn’t want to eat at all. I wasn’t hungry and had no desire to do anything but get the race over with. The morning of each race, though, I knew that whether I felt like it or not, my body needed energy. And so, dry-mouthed and sometimes slightly nauseous, I would force myself to eat a banana, knowing they were quick energy, easily digestible and provided 100 precious calories. I didn’t eat the banana because I felt strongly about the banana, or had a desire for the banana. Instead, I ate the banana because, strangely, I had faith in that banana. Not the kind of faith that makes you cry or tell your story of conversion. Rather, my faith in the banana was simply that I knew the banana had 100 calories, and those calories were going to work for me.

            Before the offertory song began, I had been alarmed by my own sense of spiritual apathy. I knew it was an important day; knew that I had chosen to attend Mass for a reason. I wanted to be buoyed by faith; I wanted emotion and connection to the liturgy around me.  Yet, as I sat, barely singing, watching the words in the hymnal go in and out of focus, I understood that I would take the Eucharist that day much as I used to eat bananas—without desire or emotion but with the knowledge that I was doing the most nourishing thing I could at that moment.      

            The gift bearers handed the bread and wine to the priest and I noted, without joy or excitement, that I would receive grace from the Eucharist that day— not because of anything that I was, but because of what the Eucharist was. The banana’s power was in the banana, not in my belief in the banana, and the same was true for the Eucharist. I would receive Christ, and Christ’s grace would fill me whether I desired it or not; whether I had emotion about it or not, whether I understood how it would happen or not. Bananas give energy and the Eucharist gives grace. My emotional state at the time of consumption of either was irrelevant.

            And so I received Communion. I went back to my pew, knelt down and did not pray. Could not pray. I just knelt there and looked around, feeling nervous and thinking of bananas.

            Later that afternoon, the grace came. It came so brightly and so well that I didn’t even have time to think of bananas. I brought to the staffing a letter Teenasia had written to our seminarian, explaining why she wanted to receive her First Communion. I told Teenasia’s father about how well she was doing in school; in sports; in her life at home. Her father nodded, listened and then asked if we had a picture of Teenasia playing soccer. I did not, but Bill opened his wallet, took out his picture of T in her M&I pink jersey, holding a soccer ball, and gave it to her father. Then I showed Teenasia’s father her letter; told him how much it would mean to Teenasia to be baptized; to be a Christian; to receive First Communion.

            Her father nodded, then said, “Well, if it’s what she wants. Okay.” He signed the necessary forms. He looked at the photo again. I blinked back my tears.

            T’s baptism will be April 18. Her First Communion will be May 2.

            We’ll have banana cream pie for dessert.

March, 2010: Lent and foster care

Six years ago, when our foster daughter Teenasia was two, we had to give her up for Lent. She had lived with us just over a year at the time, and over the course of that year, her biological father took the parenting classes and met the conditions the court required for her to be placed in his custody. We knew that the timing of the return was such that she would be moved from our house right before Easter. That Lent stands out as the most difficult of my life. Week by week, Teenasia began spending more and more time with her biological father. A full day. An overnight. A weekend. Two weeks before Easter, my husband and I and our two sons, then five and nine, said goodbye by blessing her with the Irish prayer of “May the road rise to meet you,” and buckled her into the car seat in the back of the social worker’s car. I remember waving as the car turned the corner, hoping that the Children’s Court judge knew what he was doing in putting T in her biological father’s custody, but not really believing that he did.

            It was my belief in the Resurrection that got me through. We went on vacation with the boys that spring break and happened upon an amazing Mass on Easter Sunday. The congregation was beautifully multicultural; the readings and homily were radiant with life; the music inspiring. Yes, the Mass said to me, yes, Jesus died on the cross. But now he lives. I thought of T and hung onto the Resurrection.

            Two more Lents and Easters passed by. We received another foster child, Jamie, and adopted her. She wore a pink frilly dress for her first Easter with our family and a blue one for her second. I wondered if Jamie was our Resurrection.

            Then suddenly, in the summer of 2006, Teenasia was detained from the custody of her father once again. She was once again placed with us. Maybe this is it, I thought. Maybe this is her Resurrection. But after six months with us, her father once again met conditions for her return. And we once again said goodbye, did our Irish blessing, and sent a tearful T back to her father.  And at that point, I really thought I had my Resurrection theory all wrong.

            After T had been back with her father about six months, the Court told us there was no chance we’d ever see her again. “The placement is absolutely stable,” Teenasia’s court-appointed guardian said. “I have no reservations about the return of this child to her biological father.” Bill and I knew he was dead wrong, but had no legal recourse.

             As distraught as we were with Teenasia’s return to her biological father, we knew there was still profound need in the foster care system for adoptive parents, and decided it was time to adopt another child. We went through the licensing, the home study, the interviews. We requested that our placement be a girl, younger than Jamie, so as not to disrupt the birth order. And on the very day that we were supposed to be placed with a new child— just over a year since Teenasia had been taken away from us that second time— our little girl was once again detained from the custody of her biological father.  “She needs placement right now,” the emergency-placement social worker said over the phone. “Can you take her?”

            Teenasia was sitting at our kitchen table a half hour later. And once again, I believed in the Resurrection. 

            This Lent, T has been with us a little over two years since she arrived for that third time. Her biological mother and father have court-ordered no-contact with T. Milwaukee’s Children’s Court system has scheduled a trial to terminate their parental rights in early summer. T is eight now, and lives with wounds I will never fully understand. But she also exhibits joy, resiliency and faith that I wouldn’t have believed possible, if I had not experienced them firsthand. Our family’s journey with T has been our own passion—a cycle of suffering and new life. We are still awaiting the Resurrection. Still waiting to adopt Teenasia. This Lent, we may get several steps closer. And next Lent, we may be all the way there.

            Teenasia has forever changed Lent for me. She has changed how I view waiting; and how I view suffering. Because of my daughter, I better understand the weight of a cross and why Jesus fell three times. And because of my daughter, I pray I will one day better understand the Resurrection.

            Many people talk about giving up something for Lent or trying to start something new and good. And I see the value in that—I’ve done it myself and I’ll do it again. But another approach to Lent is to take a look at an existing desert in our life; and to enter into that desert rather than try to sidestep it. Lent can be a time to acknowledge the weight of the cross we’ve been asked to bear and to give ourselves completely to the job of carrying that cross. Accept the suffering. Take on the suffering. But most importantly, believe that the suffering will lead to new life. Will lead to Resurrection.