April, 2011 If I were Pope

            I was a little girl when Pope John Paul died and was replaced by Pope John Paul II. Upon hearing the news of the new Pope, I commented to my mom on the incredible coincidence that another man of the same name was chosen to be pontiff. My mom explained to me how Popes changed their names once they are elected.

            I decided right then that if my Church’s tradition would evolve to include women priests, and I would ever find myself in a position to be elected pope, I would change my name to Chrissy — a name that sounded substantially more fun to me than Annemarie.

            I hadn’t thought of that exchange with my mom in years — until this past Good Friday, when Bill and I, driving home from Holy Hill’s Stations of the Cross, somehow wandered into a conversation about requirements we’d make for the Church if we were Pope. Interestingly, in our conversation, we didn’t remove any of the current requirements. We added more. I’m not sure why were able to have an uninterrupted twenty-minute conversation in the car with all the kids, but maybe they were tired from all the walking uphill for the Stations. Or maybe they were listening, and thinking that since we make up so many rules for them (no dessert if you don’t finish those vegetables), we could probably make up rules for the Church, too. In any case, here’s what we came up with:

A required yearly overnight retreat for all people 16 and over (Annemarie):  I love retreats. I wish someone would make me go on one. We have Sunday obligation and holy days of obligation, but the obligation is never more than an hour or so. The retreats of my high school and college years were some of the most spiritual weekends of my life, and I know many other people who feel the same. Once we hit full adulthood however (and actually have something to retreat from) the retreats stop for many of us. Retreats are an opportunity to hit the pause button and reflect on where God may be calling us. I’ve learned that I rarely hit pause for myself. Someone needs to hit it for me. I need a retreat mandate. 

A requirement that churches must integrate sustainability into all aspects of their buildings, grounds and parishes (Bill):  Pope Bill would require solar panels on church roofs, geothermal wells on their premises and native plantings in the gardens. He would also require all healthy parishioners to walk or bike to church rather than drive. “Every parish should be a neighborhood leader in terms of sustainability,” he said. “The parish should set an example to the surrounding community about what taking care of God’s creation looks like.”

A requirement to lean harder on Reconciliation (Annemarie): Reconciliation may have gotten a scary and bad rap when it was called Confession and took place in a dark closet with a sliding door. Going to reconciliation should be like taking vitamins, not medicine. Call it Reconciliation Sunday once a month and offer it right before or after Mass, along with coffee and donuts while you wait. Tell parishioners not to worry about listing every single little sin. Choose your main one and call it a day—stay focused on what is giving you grief right now. Make going to Reconciliation convenient by tying it to Sunday Mass, which is each church’s most popular hour of the week. Gas stations have the right idea by selling the optional food and beverages with the required gas. Offer the optional sacrament (Reconciliation) with the required one (Eucharist).

A pilgrimage once every five years (Bill): Your choice — Rome, the Holy Land, a Marian apparition site or a week-long mission trip to serve in an impoverished area. I noted to Bill that since our family drives to church, doesn’t go on yearly retreats and has never gone as a family to any of his pilgrimage sites, we would not be meeting the requirements of being Catholic in very church of which we were the theoretical co-Popes. This didn’t seem to bother Bill, who went on to make up a requirement for each suburban Catholic to switch homes with a central city resident for Lent. When I challenged him on this one, he threatened he threatened to ex-communicate me.

            Our conversation oscillated from the practical to pie-in-the-sky idealism. We both agreed that some of our comfort level with making more rules came partly from living in a neighborhood with many Orthodox Jews. Our Jewish neighbors’ commitment to a 24-hour Sabbath, keeping kosher and walking to temple in all kinds of weather is a witness to us about religious commitment that requires much more than an hour a week. We agreed also, that our rules were less about what we expected from the leadership of our church, and more about what we expected from ourselves, in terms of deepening our own faith response. It was an admission that when a law or rule surrounds something — be it going to Mass, keeping the speed limit or getting to work on time — we are more likely to do it. 

            Bill and I have no illusions that we’ll be moving from Glendale to Vatican City. Our names will remain Bill and Annemarie (which, by the way, I like much more than Chrissy, now that I’m grown.) Any change in careers that we make over our lifetime will not be announced with white smoke. But the beautiful thing about the Catholic Church is that every change that Bill and I came up with on our drive home is compatible with the rules that are already here. Our ideas are not new or revolutionary — each one has its basis in the doctrines and teachings already established. We belong to a church that values retreats, stewardship of the Earth, sacraments, pilgrimages, service and a preferential option for the poor. We belong to a church that trusts its people to define what it looks like to live these teachings and doctrine.

            We belong to a church that says, Pope or not, live your faith as authentically and fully as possible. We belong to a church that invites us to lead— even without that puff of white smoke.

February, 2011-- Trauma, children and attachment

Before I became a foster and adoptive parent, eight years ago, I didn’t really understand how neglect and abuse hurt kids.

Before I paint myself as too dim, let me explain. Certainly, Bill and I decided to become foster parents because we understood that children are hurt by neglect and abuse. It saddened and angered us that so many children in our city were in need of a safe and healthy family, so we looked around our house and within our hearts and found room in both places to welcome a couple of children. But I can admit now, that even as we welcomed each daughter, we didn’t have an understanding of the science that explains exactly how abuse and neglect harms children. We knew abused and neglected children are hurt children, but we did not understand the effect of trauma on the human brain in terms of its ability to form healthy and lasting relationships.

We do now.

When a baby is born, every need met by that baby’s parent or caregiver teaches the baby that it is safe to attach to the parent or caregiver. The baby cries, mom offers a breast: the baby learns she will be taken care of. The baby cries, dad picks him up; the baby learns he will be protected. This pattern is repeated thousands of times in a child’s first year in a healthy family.

A child of neglect or abuse is a child who has learned just the opposite. She cries and Mom does not come to feed her; he feels scared and he remains alone. Like the child from the healthy family, a child from a neglectful home has this pattern repeated thousands of times. Needs unmet, over and over again.

What the child from the neglectful home learns is that he or she must rely only on him or herself to survive. Adult caregivers cannot be trusted.

The longer the neglect or abuse goes on, the more entrenched this belief becomes so that even when a child is removed from an orphanage or a dysfunctional home to a home with healthy, caring parents, the child’s brain cannot readily make the leap that now he or she is safe.

Children from neglected homes may hoard food because they don’t believe they will be adequately fed; they may become defiant to parents or teachers because they can’t trust anyone beside themselves with decisions; they may avoid eye contact; they may tantrum; they may become indiscriminately friendly with those they barely know. The child of abuse or neglect wants nothing more than to maintain control—because he or she has learned that protection comes from only from within herself, not from the caregiver.

The experts put a vocabulary around what happens to children of abuse and neglect the centers on the word “attachment.” Children are said to have a disrupted attachment, or an attachment disorder, or in the most severe cases, a reactive attachment disorder (RAD).

Once a child is removed from an abusive or neglectful home, the new parents need to rebuild the attachment the child missed.  The parents need to assess where the child is on the attachment spectrum and parent (and re-parent) accordingly, using specific intentional and therapeutic methods of parenting that have been shown to be successful. Lullabies and rocking; games that build eye contact; time-ins next to the parent, rather than time-outs; methods of discipline and ways of phrasing questions and commands that lead to compliance and the turning over of control.

Because one of our daughters was twice removed from and returned to the home of her biological parent before the court determined ours should be her permanent home, we have been immersed in the world of disrupted attachment for about three years now.

And while much of what has happened in these three years has been painful and exhausting, the lessons I have learned while working through my daughter’s healing process have all come back to Jesus’ command to love. Love is an action and a decision, not an emotion. When Jesus said, “Love one another as I have loved you,” he invited us to look at how he loved people—and it was through teaching and healing. Jesus was all about building attachment.

Our experience of foster care has been a daily challenge to live the command to love—to believe that the action of loving will lead to transformation of the one who is loved.

Foster care has brought us to levels of love as a family that I would not have known we were capable of. On our better days, you could say we are skilled lovers. The parenting techniques we’ve had to develop to be effective with our foster daughter have benefited our biological sons and adopted daughter as well. In an effort to heal her disrupted attachment, we’ve all become closer

Eight years ago, Bill and I didn’t really understand how abuse and neglect hurt kids. Looking back, sometimes I feel ashamed of our naïveté. More often, though, I am thankful for it. Because if we would have known what we’d be up against, maybe we would not have chosen foster care at all. And had we not chosen foster care, we would never have learned how deeply and how intentionally we could love, when required to.

And we would have missed out on two of the four best gifts in our lives. 

January, 2011-- Dominican High School, salt of the earth

Some of the holiest people around are also some of the most quiet and unassuming. Jesus often pointed out that spiritual bravado wasn’t the equivalent of holiness. He spoke up against the Pharisees praying aloud for all to hear, while highlighting the barely-noticeable widow who put a few coins in the offering jar. We all know of the salt-of-the-earth folks who go about their lives matter-of-factly doing good — they don’t carry a bishop’s miter or have a position of authority in their job or the community, yet their example shines forth and their goodness inspires others to become better. 

            It is a paradox of Christianity that strength and truth often arrive humbly wrapped — in swaddling clothes, for example.

            And if this is true for Christian people, it is also true for Christian institutions. Dominican High School, a small co-ed Catholic high school in Whitefish Bay, is so quiet and unassuming, it doesn’t even show up on the radar of some parents who are considering Catholic high school for their children.

            But for those who slow down enough to take a look at Dominican — for those who recognize the Gospel connection between humility and greatness — they invariably find in Dominican the genuine beauty of Catholic education done right.

            Catholic faith is at the heart of Dominican; there is an intentionality to the parent community. Dominican families don’t choose the school for its status or its legacy — it is too small and too young to have much in the way of either. Rather, Dominican families choose the school because they come to visit and become aware of the holy. Not holy in the sense of the overly pious or a chest-thumping spirituality. Rather, holy in the sense of genuineness, and God present in the ordinary.

            And somehow, in tandem with that quiet faith comes an academic rigor that manages to be neither boastful nor arrogant. When our oldest son Jacob was in eighth grade, I was concerned about whether Dominican, as a high school with fewer than 400 students, could wield the academic chops of larger schools that might draw from a wider base. I needn’t have worried—much in Jacob’s freshman and sophomore curriculum has been material and works of literature Bill and I remember studying early in college. Dominican just published the universities where its 80 or so seniors have been accepted so far, and the list— which includes Fordham, Notre Dame, Northwestern, Boston College, Marquette and Purdue—is a simple, yet eloquent statement about the strength of Dominican’s academics.

            Part of Dominican’s strength comes from its diversity. More than any other Catholic school in metro-Milwaukee, Dominican mirrors the ethnic and racial makeup of the metro area it serves. Dominican reaches past the homogeneity of surrounding Whitefish Bay and welcomes a multicultural student body that will prepare its students well for an increasingly global work experience.

            For me, the spirit of Dominican can be expressed through an example of the JV boys baseball team last spring. At the end of the season, the boys and their families gathered for an end-of-season celebration at a pond near our house. The majority of the boys were excellent swimmers and were comfortable in the water, playing keep-away, leaping off a raft in the middle of the pond, racing each other. Two of the boys didn’t have much experience with natural bodies of water and didn’t know how to swim.

            “I’m more of a land animal,” one confided to me.

            “Well, you two could just stay in the shallow part,” I told him. I didn’t actually think the young man would go in the water at all. I thought he and his friend would just stay on shore; that he might be concerned the good swimmers would give him a hard time. Instead, though, he thanked me, nodded and the two slowly ventured out to waist-deep water.

            As I looked on, the swimming kids splashed their hellos to the guys in the shallow water, and included them in a game of catch. No one commented that they both kept their feet firmly on the bottom of the pond. When the ball landed beyond the comfort zone the non-swimmers, one of the swimmers would stroke over and toss it to one of them without comment. It was a remarkable moment for its ordinariness. And it struck me that at Dominican, quiet kindness is the norm, not the exception.

            This Catholic Schools Week, eighth graders and their families all over the city are preparing to make their final decisions about which high school to attend. Perhaps a thousand of these students will choose Catholic high schools with big names and correspondingly big enrollments—excellent schools indeed— and I would never second-guess the education those students will receive. And as those thousand students sign the enrollment papers for their schools, a separate group — of perhaps just a hundred—will choose Dominican. And I can’t wait to meet those families; to hear the stories of how they found Dominican and the moment they knew it was for them.

            Dominican. Small and quiet. Leaning humble. Filled with spirit and grace.

            Salt of the earth.

            And strong. So strong.

October, 2010-- Hearts outside my body

When I was pregnant with our first child, Jacob, more than 15 years ago, I came upon this quote by author and mother Elizabeth Stone: “Making the decision to have a child - it's momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.”

Overly-dramatic, I thought at the time. Surely, Ms. Stone is exaggerating. While I didn’t doubt that having a child would change my life, a heart walking around outside of my body was a ridiculous idea. My child would have his identity, I would have mine, and while I would certainly care and be concerned about what happened to him, there was no way I would feel like my own heart was walking around.

Then I had Jacob. And within a day of his birth, I understood that Elizabeth Stone was not being overly-dramatic or sentimental. She was simply stating a fact. The investment of motherhood is so intense and intimate that the line between where a child ends and where the mother begins becomes blurred.

Each subsequent child after Jacob added a new heart walking around outside of my body. And as the children are becoming older and more complex emotionally, one of the things I am discovering is that if I am to be an effective mother to four children, I need to be able to find and claim that spot where each of my children end and I begin, as blurry as it may be.

When I had babies and preschoolers, most of their emotional life was within my control and I managed it. It was relatively easy to see what the problem was and get to the bottom of it—he’s screaming because he doesn’t want to clean up his toys; he gets a time-out for screaming, then still has to clean up the toys — problem solved.

In a family of six, it is rare that everyone has a sensational day at the same time. With  four hearts walking around outside of my body, the risk is that I will absorb the pain of the most broken heart each day. Three kids have a good day; one is sad because of  something outside of my control —and that’s the pain I absorb. That’s the child I’m thinking about in bed that night. The risk is that I will never have a sensational day.

The danger of motherhood is the paradox of control. There is so much is within our control in terms of how we can shape our children’s behavior, their morals, the decisions they make in school, the way they learn to relate to others. In many ways, we are the major determining force in our children’s lives. Yet at the same time, our children will have experiences that will have nothing to do with us, and these experiences will shape them and form them as well.

When I look at successful mothers who are a stage or two beyond me—mothers with teens or college-aged kids—what I see is balance between a heart-outside-my body love of their child and a deep respect for that child as an individual apart from them.

These mothers have learned to acknowledge their child’s struggles and problems without being consumed by them. They offer support while at the same time recognizing that it’s not up to them to be the problem solver each time. They have come to a place where they realize that even the heart outside the body needs to find its own path and make its own way. They have learned that it’s possible to have a sensational day even when one of their  children has a mediocre one.

These mothers inspire me and shine a light for me. As I watch them, I’m learning to find that blurry spot where each of my children ends and I begin. As I watch these mothers, I’m  learning how to live with the strange sensation of four hearts walking around outside my body.

September, 2010-- Our struggle with keeping holy the Sabbath

Our family has had trouble with the fourth commandment. Keep holy the Sabbath day.  It’s not that we skip Mass on Sunday, but rather that too often, we only keep holy the Sabbath hour and a half (our time at Mass), rather than the Sabbath day itself.

            We live in a neighborhood with a high population of Orthodox Jews. Their Sabbath runs from sundown Friday evening to sundown Saturday. During this twenty-four hour period, they may not drive, cook, clean, shop, mow their laws, do laundry, repair problem areas of their home or play in soccer tournaments. There are probably additional things they may not do, but these are the ones I notice, since that’s what Bill and I are generally up to while they are walking past our house back and forth to synagogue.

            One Saturday afternoon, David and Liz, our Orthodox friends down the street stopped by so our children could play together. Bill had been weed whacking at the time and I had just taken a week’s worth of socks and underwear out of the dryer. We stopped our work to chat, and talk soon turned to the Sabbath. 

            “On the Sabbath, we spend a lot of time visiting and talking with other people, because we can’t do much else,” David explained as I peppered him with questions. “Most of the people we visit with are also Orthodox Jews because they’re the only ones who have the time off to do the same thing.”

            “In fact, David, we should be going because we interrupted them from their work,” his wife nudged.

            But Bill and I urged them to stay. I knew my 84 socks and 42 pairs of underwear  would wait patiently for me, and I wanted to learn more how this Orthodox family with three kids could manage to set aside a full day for God and relationships, when our own family seemed not to have an hour to spare.

            Talking about it later, Bill and I decided our family needed a Sabbath. Aside from Mass, we acknowledged that our Sunday didn’t really look that different from any other day of the week. Chores; running kids to activities; last-minute projects from work; errands. It’s not that what we were doing was so bad—it just wasn’t especially holy.

            In the book Sabbath, author Dan Allender makes a case for Christians to take the Sabbath as holy. He defines “holy” as “set aside,” and writes, “Sabbath is the day we practice for eternity. It requires that we receive, intend and protect the day. The bind is that if we let the day happen spontaneously, it will usually dissolve into the route of least resistance.” 

            As Bill and I planned what we wanted our Sabbaths to be, we held onto to Allender’s assertion of Sabbath: “Sabbath is about relationship, nature and beauty.”  Bill and I knew we could never keep our Sabbaths at home if we hoped for them to feel holy and set aside. The call of the socks, weeds, e-mail and cluttered basement would be too loud.

            Instead, we decided that after attending Mass, our Sabbaths would be spent outside, in a beautiful environment, with the whole family.

            Allender aims high with his Sabbath plans: “The Sabbath calls us to receive and to create with God the delight he gives and invites us to orchestrate for his glory. It requires surrender and imagination.”

            For us, the surrender involves letting go of the thousand things we “should” be doing to join in the delight that Allender promises God offers. The imagination comes in finding simple, outdoors activities that have elements that can be enjoyed by all of us.         We’ve been keeping our Sabbaths for more than a year now, and it’s been one of our best family decisions. We’ve seen miles of the Ice Age Trail and have visited every state park within an hour of our house. Much of our Sabbath involves hiking. Often two members of the family pair up for a discussion on the path— conversations that likely would not have happened otherwise. Arguing among kids is kept to a minimum because everyone is moving and has plenty of space. We have found that Allender is correct in how nature and beauty connect us to God.

            Like all spiritual practices, our family’s keeping of the Sabbath has ebbed and flowed. We were terrible about keeping it this past spring, but we seem to do especially well during autumn and winter. Liam’s favorite Sabbath was a horse-drawn sleigh ride last January on a farm just north of Milwaukee-- despite temperatures that dipped below zero. Jacob and T appreciate any Sabbath outing that includes a sand volleyball court. A couple of Sundays ago, it started to rain on our way to Naga-Waukee Park and Jamie moaned, “This is the worst Sabbath ever.” But we found a picnic shelter to eat beneath and the rain ended before our hike began, so even Jamie had to admit it turned out to be a good Sabbath after all.

            I still marvel at our Jewish neighbors and their 24-hour commitment to the Sabbath. Our family Sabbaths are not even full days yet—they are more like Sabbath afternoons. But Sabbath for us has grown to mean so much more than a morning at church. We protect the day as much as we are able, and try not to beat ourselves up when we fall short. Through our Sabbaths, we have found Allender’s words to be true: “Delight doesn’t require a journey thousands of miles away, but it does require a separation from the mundane, an intentional choice to enter joy and follow God.”