Brain-washed and defensive

In my decades-long navel-gaze, a rustle of truths I've kept under wraps has fluttered to the surface.

I hate being misunderstood—even more, I hate that when I am misunderstood, I join the accusing voices in misunderstanding myself.

Because the still small voice inside is vulnerable to the power of suggestion, I typically pick ideological megaphones to shout things at me so I won't accidentally adopt my self-doubt as truth. I line up, like a chess piece, finding the right square to stand in and make the moves prescribed for me. Frustrating when I think I'm a Queen who can move anywhere on the board, and instead am reminded that unlike all the Queens in this particular bunch, I am merely a Horse, whose moves are not interesting, powerful, or legitimate, as, say the Queens.

Which is shit, because anyone can move anywhere on a board of red and black squares that one pleases, unless one has agreed at the start to play chess, at which point it is perfectly possible that I am a Queen (who else gets to decide that?). Besides, chess isn't the only game in town, nor the best, nor the right one for everybody. And who said that we're playing chess? Maybe I want to play checkers or run through sprinklers or throw the chess board right into a dumpster! (This is an example of me shouting down the megaphone-people—the critics, rule-givers, and brain-washers.)

It happens with intimates too—not just those zany online peer groups or zealous church communities or xenophobic political factions.

The way I manage that craving to be understood is to begin by understanding the other person. It's the old trope—if I do it for you, I'll get it back. Which, incidentally, is not at all how it works, despite the megaphone propaganda to the contrary. Not everyone wants to be understood as a primary, bottomline-ish craving. Some people, apparently, just want a foot rest (as in, doormat for wiping muddy boots), or an example of what not to be—they pick you. Or in this case, me. They want affirmation, not conversation.

Unfortunately, if those I credit with some version of authority misunderstand me, I jump in easily with the critics and spend sleepless hours of the night examining my conscience—did I operate in self-interest or with patient, thoughtful care? Am I defensive (well obviously) or am I wanting to open space for considering another point of view (well obviously!).

Today is President Obama's 2nd inauguration. It happens to land on the national holiday that celebrates radical Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday—the man whose prophetic voice got him assassinated; a man who was both defensive and visionary, who could not make those against him understand him, but who chose to carve out space for his community in spite of that unending, "Wait. Now's not the right time to have this conversation."

Andrew Sullivan made a glorious statement today about the experience of abject failure when we strive to realize our ideals in a lifetime:

Over the years, I've never let go of that understanding of conservatism's core truth - that all politics ends in some version of failure, that we cannot change and should not want to change the whole world over night, that constant failure is integral to human life and action - and the key spur to fleeting success. But I've also come to accept and more firmly believe that the flip-side to that must never be cynicism or retreat or nihilism. It must be to play our part where we can to fight injustice, knowing that our achievement will be partial, knowing that as soon as we have solved problems, new ones will replace them, and knowing that the process never ends. In fact, the true hero is the one who acts even in the knowledge of inevitable failure, who puts the realizable good before the unrealizable perfect. Yes, over the last six years, Obama has helped me understand his method of community organization, of leading from behind. And it is as conservative in its understanding of how society really changes from below as it is liberal in its refusal to relent against injustice.

"Leading from behind" reminds me of Bonhoeffer's "God from below."

Let's get really practical for a moment. I'm about to be both defensive and earnestly hoping to carve out a little space for those like me—equal parts.

In the quest for an ideal family, I've skidded through a slew of philosophies, therapies, and paradigms meant to ensure a happy long-term married outcome. And wound up divorced. My achievement has been partial—to find the peace we craved, I deprived my kids of the long-term in-tact family I championed. I solved one set of problems, ushered in a whole host of new ones.

Yet that doesn't have to mean failure, or the end, or second-class citizen status in the land of families. Does it? Should it? No happiness to be found now? Our experiences not valuable to relate?

To embrace failure as an essential feature of justice-seeking work is a radical proposition. It means that I would rather not pretend the ideal for social approval and will risk personal failure for the sake of modest improvements that lead to a measure of freedom/change/growth. It means that I plead "Bullshit" when someone attempts to point out that 3 steps, or 4 principles, or 1 person, or "true commitment" or the right God are all that are needed to reach the dream-state: utopia.

Moral resolve starts not with official permission to act, but with seizing a moment to describe the contours of personal and collective experience in the face of "shushing" (to challenge the over-arching narrative of the ones who control the dialog of what the ideal is and should be).

"Leading from behind" looks like the gathering together of the powerless to create the moral strength of collective voice—it takes courage. It's easy to feel misunderstood, to wonder if your voice will ever be more than a whisper of personal truth when those with the megaphones shout you down.

Which brings me full circle.

Obama said today in his inaugural address:

Being true to our founding documents does not require us to agree on every contour of life; it does not mean we will all define liberty in exactly the same way, or follow the same precise path to happiness. 

The key to America's confounding vision is in the last phrase above: "it does not mean that we will all... follow the same precise path to happiness."

I'm worn out by the various prescriptions for happiness being bandied about because there is no one-size-fits-all cure to this thing called life. As Sullivan rightly states:

...constant failure is integral to human life and action...

Any theory of being that doesn't take our human frailty into account will be ill-fitting clothes long term.

In my need to be understood, I'm realizing a little bit each day that part of my growth curve is acknowledging openly, in front of others, just how imperfectly I've made the journey to 51. Crushing for an idealist. As my aunt used to say, "Idealists are shocked a lot in life."

Signed,
Shocked
--born in the same year as our flawed, idealistic, extraordinary, human president

Bone-weary

Jim says sleep matters. That I need more of it. He believes in sleep. It helps you forget, and that moment when you wake up, there's a gap (a tiny space) between memory and new possibility that is inhabited by blankness. That space is smaller than it used to be, for me.

I wake up a lot—mostly to pee, but also to endlessly adjust blankets and nightgown and pillow.

I'm tired—the kind of tired that makes death look welcome. Not suicidal. I wouldn't take my life. I just wouldn't be all that upset if my life ended. It would be the end of worry and disillusionment. It would also mean rest from the endless striving to get it right.

I'm sick of writers who urge us to be hopeful or to forgive or to notice the good all around. I want to tap into that happier energy that I know is to be found, but I want it in small, safe doses—like a quiet time under a blanket wrapped up with my sweetie and no pressure of any kind to perform or help or make things better.

I like happy that comes from a good football game or a well-timed text. I'm an unbeliever in big happiness. My deconversion started a few years back. Big happiness is an illusion, like answered prayer.

Instead, my life feels more like one of those "add a bead" pearl necklaces. A little white shiny orb of happy shows up in the strand from time to time. That's it. Beautiful, surprising, predictable in feel, but infrequent. Besides, everyone hates the masterfully carved diamond rock hanging prominently between two perfectly shaped breasts. That kind of happy is for someone else; someone I would probably envy and eventually hate.

I didn't run today, or yesterday. I slept. My body is fighting a sore throat and ear infections; I am trying to take the good advice to rest. I want to run. There's freedom in it for me—a good healthy happy of endorphins and silence and body and pain. Maybe tomorrow.

For now, I'll do the next thing. My word for the year is "declutter." There are many declutterings ahead and all of them sound both promising and daunting. I've started, though—taming the physical universe that revolves around me in a swirling tide of paper, shoes, fabric scraps, book bags, too many appliances, dog smells, old toys, tatty blankets, and food wrappers.

And I want a routine that lets me sleep off the bone-weariness. Decluttering of schedule will be right behind this paring down of stuff. I'd like a happier energy, too. Please God. I don't mind if you turn me back into a believer by answering this one prayer.

Caught off guard

It's been years since I believed in hell.

Until yesterday.

My daughter and I discussed living abroad over tea, at a kitchen table in the sunshine.

I admitted I wasn't good at it the way I had imagined I'd be. I've never felt more lonely, more needy, more American than when I lived in France and Morocco. I couldn't shed that craving to belong, to relax, to be happy in my own skin. Being an exchange student felt alien enough.

Add the burden of saving souls in a Muslim country... unbearable weight. Sure, I spoke Arabic, made friends, led someone to Christ. I baked bread, took baths in the Moroccan bath houses, handwashed diapers, "jephaphed" floors, and watched the necks of my chicken dinners wrung in front of me. I peed in "toilets" infested with bugs, incubating fecal germs, and used my left hand for toilet paper. Yes, I did that. Easy stuff.

It was the crazy-making mental gymnastics that did me in. I suffered existentially, theologically. The daily confrontation with hell—with original sin, with God's indifference, with my white western Christian privilege—combined with personal hells I lived inside the four tiled walls of my apartment that made me miserable... an on-going "something's missing" or "something's not right" angst.

I tried to explain to my daughter how I walked 4 miles to town every day, pregnant, too aware that each person I passed moved inevitably toward a fiery, eternal end. I used to sob, pray, and walk, while men ogled me from behind, my bulge hidden from that view. I couldn't be angry. I felt distraught, desperate. In disbelief, I watched human beings go about daily life unaware they were destined by a "loving God" for forever torture... just cuz. Just cuz they had the misfortune of being born in original sin (like me) but in the wrong country.

Talking about it to my social-justice loving adult daughter felt awkward, hard—yet suddenly true, again—that even if I saved every last Moroccan alive in my lifetime, I'd still have to deliver the news that their grandparents or dead relatives were already in the inferno, since not enough obedient western Christians had followed the call to spread the Gospel, particularly to Muslims, for you know, centuries.

I haven't thought about that missionary in a long time—me, at 23. I wanted nothing more than to make a difference that outlasted me. I watch my kids head to various countries, happy to put Facebook in French, eager to prove that their lives matter, and filled with the "right to matter" that comes with being middle class, white, English speaking, and educated.

I didn't matter. My work—a vapor of impossible theology. I never did meet missionaries as troubled by hell as I was. That disturbing truth had as much to do with the unraveling of my faith as any hapless hell-bound ignored-by-God Berber.

I sat in my seat at the kitchen table, and shook, looking at my hands in my lap. I was 23 again. I choked back a sob but a decades-old rush of tears escaped anyway; embarrassing. My daughter, startled, got up from her chair quickly, walked to me reassuring, "Oh Mom. It's okay." She put a hand on my back. "They aren't in hell. It's not real. It's okay, Mom."

But it's not.

It's still not okay.

It's never okay to believe people are destined for eternal torture and that it's your job to be a part of stopping it. That's a damned theology that put me in a living hell (such abusive religion!), all while I gave my virginal idealism to making a difference. What sinister faith to sell to a sincere young person. I feel so sad for my youthful self—all that I wanted to do, give, be—but the game was fucked before I began. Insidious, evil, twisted theology, damning not a single Moroccan, but damning me.

I can't ever get those years or that earnestness back. It's enough to make me cry. Still.

The antidote to endless, tedious, unhelpful marriage tips and articles

I'm noticing a trend. Marriage articles are written for the sake of confirming some set of values that ought to be inherent in a marriage. There are exceptionally good ones and not so good ones too. But the most interesting part is how few men weigh in on them. Women—we write them, read them, adopt them with religious commitment and sober personal resolve. Where are the men? Where are their remarks, their thoughts, their affirmations? Nowhere to be found. They must feel secure on the whole in their marriages since this need rarely rises to the top like cream.

The list of ways to stay married is as long as the institution itself.

But I'm sick of the list. I'm sick of the clever twists on lists.

My primary number one idea of relationship has changed:

1. Don't put in more than the man is willing to put in.

In fact, do less. Do less than he does. After all, he comes in with swagger, privilege, the memory of a woman meeting his needs (mother). Be more presumptuous. Expect more from him than from yourself. Demand your way a couple times a week and see what he does.

Most women's natural default is to caretake. You'll wind up doing that anyway. So do less. In those marriages where the wife is a nag and the husband is trying to "please," I know this sounds backwards. But the truth is—the man's withdrawal and cowardice comes from the same space as entitlement. You think you can "sneak by" without confronting your wife and saying your needs, you think bringing home the income or taking care of the yard or watching the kids is enough to keep her at bay. She's just doing the louder version of what the hard-working, earnest, less confrontational women do when they try to apply forgiveness and sharing and caring. Women who nag are saying, "Show up!" to men who are simply going along to get along. Women who never require the man to show up or have a man who dominates the space use a different strategy—they pretend they are happy.

Here's my second idea:

2. If you don't feel good, things aren't good.

Quit pretending that your marriage is great when you hate doing the dishes, yet he expects you to do them by his silence and "never offering," and you have continued to do them finding a way to justify to yourself that it's okay because he does the checkbook. What? If this exchange of services has not actually been negotiated as a true trade off, you are lying to yourself about the state of the marriage—those damned dishes 22 years in feel entirely different than in year 5, 10, or 14. And why don't you do the checkbook or share it? That's the most dangerous place for a wife to live: in ignorance of the finances. More divorces reveal the gross mishandling of money than affairs. Everything in a marriage should be shared and if no one likes doing it, negotiation or hiring out has to occur.

If you don't feel good, if you don't like something, if you are pretending to be happy when you are not.... guess what? You're not happy. Your marriage is not good.

By the way: you are pretending to be happy if you feel uneasy until your spouse seems happy. If you are not happy on your own, if your spouse makes you nervous or you have to make sure things are okay with the spouse before you feel happy, you're not happy and your marriage is not good.

3. Stop forgiving.

That's right. Hold onto that grudge long enough to see what's happening in front of your fucking nose.

Let me say this as a caveat: if you get a divorce, go ahead and forgive the other person for fucking up your life or for the fact that you were too big a weeny to grow or change or say what you need. Forgiving at that stage is the only way forward.

But if you are married right now? Quit forgiving things. That's just your way of hiding your real pain that you are too afraid to mention or else "someone will get mad." Forgiving as a guise for how shitty things are sucks! Stop doing it. Forgiveness in marriage can only be meted out after a sincere apology by the offending party that comes unprompted by your demands for it. If you have to ask for an apology, the other person is UNCHANGED. Do what you need to do to make the point that what happened is not okay with you (leave, take the kids to your mother's, go on a shopping spree, withhold sex, stop making the other person's meals, sleep in a different room, drive home or get a taxi, yell, get thee to your therapist). Don't let the person off the hook in your mind by pretending to forgive what should not be forgiven! Yes, occasionally a spouse forgets to buy your tampons at the store. If a sincere "Oops, I forgot" follows, forgive. But if every time you ask for something to be picked up at the store, and only 50-60% of the time yr partner remembers, you have a REAL problem! Stop forgiving. Start demanding. Get your needs met.

This is unconventional advice, I realize. But I wish I had taken all of it in my marriage. The biggest mistake I made is believing that my good will was matched by my marriage partner. Yet check out our book shelves. Who had the books on marriage read and alphabetized? Who recommended therapy? Who joined groups and suggested prayer and accountability? Who spent hundreds of hours of her prayer life devoted to asking God to heal, restore, fix, save, help her marriage and partner? Me. Who went on as though nothing happened the next day? Who expected to be forgiven every infraction no matter how painful? Who blamed the partner for not being accepting enough? Who relied on declarations of "I'm not perfect" as a salve to the wounds? Him.

I've heard it said that no relationship is more important than your personal development.

I want to restate that: Your personal development is essential to the possibility of a happy healthy marriage. If your development includes speaking up for yourself and the marriage goes to hell, you never had a marriage worth saving, forgiving, protecting to begin with. The idea of self-sacrifice, giving, serving—these are all adopted by women. Rarely do men put in the same committed energy to figuring out how to "save" their marriages through self-effacing strategies. They are much more likely to ignore, go on as if nothing happened, to expect forgiveness and second chances, to require you to be better to them than Jesus while they remind you that they are not perfect and deserve your understanding and lovingkindness.

What if we all got a lot more honest?

How about finding out if your marriage is tough enough, strong enough to handle the real you?

What would happen if you simply said what you really meant and did what you really wanted and stopped doing and saying things designed to "heal" or "save" or "protect" your marriage?

I wonder.