little white lies

April 30, 2012 By

I’ve been thinking lately about the concept of lying.  It seems to be acceptable in the world we live in to lie about things that don’t matter. What you had for lunch.  Your plans Friday night.  Where you bought your shirt.  White lies, people call them, as if labeling them a certain color washes them clean and sanitizes all the dirty out of them.  But sometimes lying is just lying, regardless of the color.  Have you ever said your child is sick or you can’t attend an event because you had company? Your kid is sitting there playing scrabble and your company is really just your neighbor who came over to tell you your gate’s open.

When we lie, the truth is distorted.  The strings of words coming from our mouth are all tangled and knotted.

I’m one to talk.  I’ve said a shirt costs forty bucks when it was really $49.99 plus tax, or claimed I read a book that I only just started, or told a friend I had plans when I was just really lazy and tired and didn’t want to change out of my pajamas.  After all, you can usually justify it.  You had plans that night to watch trashy television, now didn’t you?  Doesn’t that count?

Yesterday in the car, my son was screaming for iced tea.  A shrill, piercing scream that made me want to pull the car over.  I almost just gave in and handed over the dang cup.  “Want tea mamaaaaaa!” he wailed.  He tries to wear me down, that kid.  He’s a persistent one.

“Let’s just call it water so he won’t want any,” my daughter said.  I could see her rolling her eyes and covering her ears.  Just make it stop. It makes sense, really.  He’s only two years old. It might generate a moment of peace, and he wouldn’t know the difference.

It’s technically a lie.  But it’s a stupid, white lie that doesn’t matter. No one gets hurt, and there are more important things to stress about than calling tea water, for heaven’s sake.  The light changed to green as I pondered a response.

“But it’s tea,” I said as I dreamed of Advil and a quiet room where no one was screaming.  “Let’s not call it something it’s not.”

It’s tough to teach children the value of words.  It’s all we have, really, to showcase our faith.  Our value.  Our honor.  Others might not notice if we tell them we ate a hamburger when we really had a fish sandwich.  But we are allowing our mouth to mold into knots.  We allow our mind to bend the truth like hot metal, and those habits are so very hard to break.  It becomes easier.  Lies come out faster.  Evil can always find a weak place to enter in.

You control your own mouth, even if it’s full of twisted, dirty lies.  It’s your job to untangle them.  Correct yourself.  Apologize.  After all, speaking the truth is pure.  It is sparkling and buoyant.   The words we use should mirror our very character – full of strength and freedom and beauty.

As it turns out,  you didn’t go to the dry cleaners. You haven’t started those edits.  And tea is just tea, my sweet baby girl. 

Lies are never white, after all.

Filed Under: Inspirational, Religion Tagged With: , , , ,

diamond dust

April 2, 2012 By

I am no stranger to eye surgery.  I’ve had so many of them you’d think it would be easier just to rip the thing out and replace it with wood puddy.  I’m sure all eye cancer survivors are familiar with this feeling. But the last one was different.  It could have been because I was at a different place.  Or used a different surgeon.  Or, quite possibly, it could have been the fact that I was awake the entire time.

It all happened in a blur – the doctors telling me that I had a cataract that simply must be removed, that my eye was dangerously close to exploding with excess pressure, that my retina would forever be damaged.   The procedure had to be done sooner rather than later or face rather ugly consequences.  But I was pregnant – over six months so – and I didn’t want to do it.  But there I was, faced with the choice of having surgery while pregnant, IV drugs and anesthesia seeping into my son’s developing little brain, or waiting as each long day stretched on to see if my eye would blow up like a defective bomb.  Did they think I’d risk anesthesia drugs when I wouldn’t even eat feta cheese for fear my unborn child might get botulism? That’s crazy talk.

So I asked the logical question.  Can I do it without anesthesia? After all, Lidocaine would numb up the eye so I couldn’t feel any pain.  Right?  “Uh, I guess,” the doctor said.  He said he had a heart patient once that couldn’t have anesthesia or his heart would stop, and that guy lived.  This was his one eclectic example.  Awesome.

But on the day of surgery, it wasn’t a joking matter. A much older nurse walked in and repeated that I was to have eye surgery with only a small amount of IV anesthesia.  “You are mistaken,” I said loudly (how did I know she wasn’t actually hard of hearing?).  “No anesthesia,” I said.  “None at all.”

Another nurse came in to start an IV, which is apparently a requirement whether you have drugs or not, and we all listened with a fetal heart rate monitor to my little boy, kicking and spinning happily in my belly, oblivious to the word outside the womb. Finally, I saw the surgeon.  But instead of assuring me that this would be fine and my decision to go IV-free was a noble one – he thought it might be wise to let me know that moving, even a slight bit, could have disastrous consequences.  I didn’t find this little lecture particularly comforting.  Does one tell an astronaut that one false move might mean he’s forever thrust into the abyss of space, never to return to the life and family he knew?  Not helpful.  But there he goes, telling me to be still.  Like moving during awake surgery would be something I planned on doing.  “Can’t you tape my head down with duct tape?” I asked.  He snickered at that, which I thought was a perfectly reasonable request.  “Won’t do any good,” he replied.  “If you were going to move, no tape would hold you.”

Then, as my face turned to the color of copy paper, he told me that since my eye was full of oil (to hold up my tired and radiation-damaged retina), which is “not like normal folks,” it was also possible that his incision might cause the oil to come rushing out like slicing a hole in a water balloon, running into places it shouldn’t.  “That would be a real emergency,” he said.  He waits until now to tell me this? “Well let’s try to avoid that,” I said, seeing my husband out of the corner of my good eye kicking the floor.

Finally, I was wheeled to the OR.  Along the way, I was lectured by the anesthesiologist that at any time he would start IV anesthesia if I couldn’t handle the pressure, or got too anxious.  “I’ll be just fine,” I lied, thinking about oil oozing out of my eye and into my brain, laughing and dancing with freedom.

The temperature in the OR felt something like Alaska in the dead of winter, so they covered me with warm blankets.  They began to strap probes to my chest and someone stuck a breathing tube in my nose.  “What the heck’s that for?” I asked, but everyone was so busy they didn’t answer.  Then, I realized why.  After wiping half my head down with iodine, they stuck a piece of plastic down around my face with a hole in it in the center to expose the surgical field.  The rest seemed to cling like saran wrap and came down on all sides.  It now made perfect sense why all the nurses were asking me if I had claustrophobia.  I think perhaps I do, just a bit, when my face is covered in plastic so that the only way I can breathe is to assume oxygen is coming in through the tube in my nose.  Huh. Didn’t see that one coming.

 

So there I was, sucking down oxygen, my arms secured to my side with Velcro straps, waiting.  Dear Lord.  I just can’t do this on my own.  Finally, after a few shots of a numbing agent, the surgeon went to work.  I tried to imagine I was lying on the beach in Aruba the summer my husband passed his bar exam, the night we sat on the sand and watched the moon edge into the night sky.  I used those tips they gave you in yoga and childbirthing classes, relaxing and breathing in deeply.  I told God that this effort was for my unborn child, which should count for double, so maybe this thing could just hurry-on-up.

Then, I heard my surgeon ask the nurse for an instrument (I’m making up the words of the instruments since I don’t remember the exact medical terms).

“I need a 2.75 septical,” he ordered.  Pause.

“We have a 2.8 septical, Dr. Walters,” she said clearly in response.

“I actually need the 2.75,” he replied.  Suddenly I’m ripped from Aruba and I’m back in an operating room, feeling like I’m participating in my own nightmare.  I wanted to yell at the nurse.  “He wants a 2.75!  Give him what he wants, damnit!”  I was screaming on the inside. I thought I might be shaking. Suddenly, the nurse’s voice reappeared.

“Here it is, doctor,” she said, as she must have been attempting to hand it to him.  Another pause.

“Actually,” he said, “I don’t trust your instruments.  Can you rip open my emergency kit?” he asked someone in the distance.  “That one there, right by the door?  Reach in and grab by 2.75 septical.”

Of course, the emergency kit.  During surgery where I can’t move or my eye oil will come oozing out and bad things will happen.  And I’m freaking pregnant.  Does any of this shock me?  Of course not.  That’s exactly my luck. But I am usually not awake to hear about it.

Annnnnd, he was in my eye again, doing something important.  Suddenly, I was sweating.  Why was I covered with so many blazing hot blankets?  I couldn’t find the moon anymore. And my nose had a sudden itch that couldn’t be scratched.  After what felt like an hour, I tried to speak.  Being fearful that talking might make me somehow move, it sounded more like “whaddadon.”

“Well right here, I’ve got an instrument with diamond dust on the bottom,” he said, emphasizing the word diamond like it was supposed to be really impressive.  “I’m just doing a little scrubbing.  You’ve got lots of debris in here I’m trying to get rid of.”

“I sure like diamons,” I muttered through my clenched jaw.  He snickered at that one.

Eventually, it was over.  They ripped the plastic off my face, unhooked my arms, and let me breathe good ‘ol OR air without a breathing tube.  As I was wheeled back to the post-op room, where my husband was waiting, I felt strangely normal.  “Pretty easy,” I lied.

My son is two years old now, full of energy and strength.  He is a wanderer, my boy.  He likes to be outside, exploring and running and feeling the dirt in his hands. He is strong.  He is healthy.  He is perfect.  I use my eye to wink at him, my precious son, as he runs around the back yard with disheveled hair.  I have my hand on my hip, about to stir up a batch of brownies.

“Ya’ll be careful on that slide,” I’ll yell through the open window.  My heart is filled with a surge of love as I see him.

Diamond, or no diamond, I am so incredibly rich.  I am filled with so many blessings I feel like my soul might burst instead of mere oil.  I am lucky to survive.  I am lucky to be linked with such a strong, beautiful man.  I am lucky to have two children who take my breath away on a daily basis.

But truth be told, it’s not really luck.  I’d have run out by now given the comedies of my life.  I think instead it’s grace, and a love greater than one I’ve ever known. God was there then.  He is there now.  Guiding and holding me still when my body is full of tremors and doubt and fear.

Sometimes that love is too overwhelming for me to take in, like a basket full of diamonds twinkling in the light of the afternoon sun.  I sure like diamonds.  They remind me of things that are pure, and unchanging.  Things that last forever.

Filed Under: Eye, Health, Humor, Motherhood, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,

ribbons

March 20, 2012 By

I have articles from the Department of Justice sitting all around my ankles, sprayed out like a fan in neat little piles.  I haven’t strayed far from the computer for hours and a babysitter is attending to my daughter.  A half-started and half-witted attempt to summarize the laws of Medicare fraud lies unattended on the screen in front of me as deadlines await.  Deadlines that amount to paychecks, that amount to more gardening supplies and summer sundresses and art camps.  I will finish it on time.  I will somehow find the energy.  God let me finish.

It’s not that words are hard to come by.  I live in words. I both admire and abhor them.  I want to stomp on them like ripe grapes and feel the juice squirting out between my toes. The problem with words is that I simply can’t escape them.  I am drawn to words that make me laugh or cry or feel something different.  Legal writing doesn’t invoke that same emotion, which is why I drift into my daydreams.   Dreams of stories and beauty and adjective-filled rooms filled with light.

When I lie in bed at night, with dishpan hands and a tired back, my fingers tap away at some imaginary keyboard in the sky.  I can hear the repetitive sound of my hands striking the letters like summer storms on a metal roof.  Rapping and pelting and beating down while I’m trying to sleep or pray or just lie there in peace.  I try to shake them from my head, but like the ringing in one’s ears, it’s a fool’s game.

So I keep driving to the grocery store, or to the bank drive-through. I drop off my husband’s dry cleaning and help my daughter cut out caterpillars out of yellow construction paper. But sentences keep forming like ribbons out of my brain, some constant output I can’t seem to shut off.   My daily life is so busy I don’t often do  anything with them.  They are just mental litter, thrown away like discarded trash. There are times I just want words to leave me be.  To allow me to sit silently without thinking, or hearing that incessant tapping of the keys, or the phrasing of sentences.  I want to scream at them to shut up already.  Sometimes, I just want to sit and not think of all those stupid, stupid words.

But we all have our gifts, whether we are paid for them or not.  We all carry with us some unyielding urge to create, albeit in different forms.  I firmly believe that God chose to give each of us the gifts that we were meant to have, and there’s little way around it.  According to Exodus, the Lord told Moses that he chose Bezalel, son of Uri, to oversee the task of building the tabernacle. “I have filled him with the Spirit of God, with skill, ability and knowledge in all kinds of crafts — to make artistic designs for work in gold, silver and bronze, to cut and set stones, to work in wood, and to engage in all kinds of craftsmanship.”  Exodus 31:3.  Paul explained in 1 Corinthians 12 that all the gifts we have been given “are the work of one and the same Spirit, and he gives them to each one just as he determines.”

I may, or may not, ever get paid for my words.  The novel that took me years to finish, with nights of sobbing and mornings of great exaltations, might never be read by the New York Times or by a single woman in the suburbs of Chicago.  The words that plague my sleep and dominate my fingers might be small to most.  But they are ultimately from God.  They need to be used and cultivated so that when they spring forth from my head, they are as tulips rather than dandelions.

I thank God for words, even though sometimes they feel like a burden.  But when the burden is for a higher good, and the purpose so great, can one really complain?

Lord, please let my words and the aching of my heart be acceptable to you, in your sight, and in your most perfect glory.  Thank you for these ribbons that flow from my thoughts.  Help me piece and string them all together as jewelry fit for a king.   

Filed Under: Religion, Writing Tagged With: , , ,

scatter

February 22, 2012 By

Our children are spoiled rotten.  Not spoiled in the sense that they have a pony and get to eat graham crackers every morning for breakfast and win arguments by failing around their arms and screaming.  They’re spoiled because they get to live in a home with their own bedroom, packed with soft blankets and stuffed animals and books. They never have to feel hunger pains shooting from their stomachs, drink sugar water for sustenance, or live in bombed-out basements and see their father bleeding to death on pile of rubble.  My daughter skips around in peaceful oblivion, thinking of ballet and scavenger hunts and Miss Piggle Wiggle’s magic cures.  My son is learning his A-B-C’s and likes to eat peanut butter bars. How sheltered they are.

When I read about what’s happening in Syria, how families are torn apart and blown up for crossing the street or hunting for a piece of bread, it makes my heart ache.  It seems so far-off and foreign, like a movie that’s covered in mist and gunfire and the music of symphonies.  Like I can somehow shut the pages of the New York Times and it will all go fading off into the distance, credits slowly rolling.

But there’s nothing beautiful in this tragedy.  Some of those children will likely survive, which seems the worst of it.  I can only hope their mind locks down the memories, although they will surface someday in dreams, etched like a third-degree burn onto their heart.  The welling up of tears will be gone and only a hollowed-out black hole will remain, their soul empty and waiting to die.

The last few weeks, I’ve been inordinately stressed about my daughter’s educational experience, of all the silly things.  I’ve been wringing my hands about how little fun she’s having these days, learning math and handwriting and all those repetitive sound tests.  I call my mother and my good friends and say things like “Shouldn’t Kindergarten be more fun?” and “those classrooms need more color, I tell you what.”

I complain about how the discipline and structure of private school seems to tug at my daughter’s natural buoyancy, and I don’t want anyone to break her creative and independent spirit.  She might not always follow the rules and complain about having to walk too far.  She might gripe about picking up her toys or having to eat her broccoli, but isn’t that just what children do?  Let’s allow them to be young and have fun.  Why should we make life so hard for them?   Wimps, I tell you.  Spoiled rotten wimps.

Jesus, the great teacher, said that “behold, the hour is coming, indeed it has come, when you will be scattered, each to his own home, and will leave me alone.  Yet I am not alone, for the Father is with me.  I have said these things to you that in me you may have peace.  In the world, you will have tribulation.  But take heart; I have overcome the world.” John 16:32-33.

My children are spoiled because we spoil them.  We worry about trivial things and place great emphasis on what matters very little.  We allow them to complain and whine and worry about making their lives comfortable and entertaining.  As if their lives aren’t comfortable enough.  Perhaps we should be worrying less about how fun their lives are and about how better to equip them for their own spiritual battles to come.

My thoughts drift back to the Syrians, cramped in basements and locked away from the sun or their grandmothers or a decent day’s food.  I weep for you, sweet children.  I tear my clothes and fall to my knees in angst for your innocence.

This world is a fallen, scornful place.  That is true. Your world is ugly and empty and smoldering.  In a sense we live in that same world, albeit on the opposite side of the globe, and the ugliness not so obvious.  We, too, are busy scattering like cockroaches into our own basements, except we don’t have the luxury of having nothing left to rely on.  We have BFFs and soft down comforters and bottles of wine and cheerful husbands to console us. We don’t see the reality of war.

Jesus taught us of peace.  Of taking comfort in things unseen.  Of complete surrender.  Despite the smoke and blood pouring down city streets, He has overcome this world.  My dear children, I hope you will someday feel this truth.  It makes all the difference.

Filed Under: Religion Tagged With: , , , ,

Devotional for the screw-ups

August 19, 2011 By

Let’s just be honest.  I would NOT be perfectly happy living in a double-wide trailer, trying to decipher smudged expiration dates on ground beef packages in a Wal-mart somewhere in Oklahoma. Not in the land of opportunity.  Not in a country filled with air conditioning and sugar soda and live musicals.  I don’t need much.  I can take or leave Neiman’s.  But I’d work two jobs and struggle and save and find a way to move into an apartment with fake granite countertops and at least wear fancy dresses from Target.  This might mean I’m a horrible example to humanity.  Perhaps I treasure material goods over all else.  Well at 6 am, people, the only thing on my mind is a grande pike roast coffee with two raw sugars.  It’s just human nature, for goodness sakes.

 

Someone asked me recently how I professed to be a follower of Christ’s teachings when I am so ambitious and competitive.  “Those are goals of the world,” this person said, “as opposed to the teachings of Christ, which is to serve others over self.”  I was caught off guard.  I never really thought of the two as mutually exclusive, like to follow Christ you should just chill on the bottom rung of the ladder, eating peanut brittle and snickering, watching those other poor saps climb to the top.  If I had only known, I’d have never graduated college or gone to law school, clawing and scratching my way to wonderful, fulfilling jobs.  I could have gone to work at Wendy’s and saved me all that trouble.

 

I think there is a fine line between living the life God called you to live – using the talents and strengths you were born with to their fullest potential – and crossing the line toward an unyielding race for power and wealth.  As painful as it can be, I think it’s good for folks to question your faith and call you out in public once in a while.  It makes you actually wonder if you are living out the life God wants you to live.  And maybe, you’re not.

 

I like to be reminded of what’s most important in a way that’s real and honest.  A devotional for the screw-ups.  I want a mirror to constantly reflect my own life back in my face to make sure I’m using my talents for God’s glory and not my own.  But for goodness sakes people, don’t reflect life directly into your eyes.  You’ll see a long history of acid-washed jeans and huge bangs and pants that were intentionally baggy at the hips and tight at the ankles.  This might cause permanent blindness and defeat the whole point of the exercise.   Aim it at your cheek or something.  

 

I walked into a Christian bookstore to find such a book. Daily devotions for “real women.” I thought I’d just know it when I saw it, like there would be a woman on the cover with a red wine stain on her shirt and her hair pulled back in a greasy pony tail, attempting to make Chicken-with-40-Cloves-of-Garlic while her kids are in the background drawing on each other with markers. But as I would unfold the stories, day by day, I would unearth a person who was genuinely happy with her life.  Who had found her true calling. I’d be drawn to her and feel we were kindred spirits, reading with interest how she found time to worship when she needed to make peanut butter sandwiches. She would remind me in daily increments that I’ll totally make it, even if I did slip up and say a creative slew of curse words to my boss in a fit of anger about a budget report.  She would gently remind me that such behavior is not becoming to the person God calls me to be, and I’d agree, realizing that such words defame God and are icky and crass like the shoes that I refuse to give up to Goodwill. Do it! she’d say. Put them in a paper sack in your garage and haul them off!

 

Most of all, she would tell me that it will be okay.  That I didn’t have a choice to be ambitious.  After all, we all must answer to the call God gives us the best way we know how.  And just maybe, she’ll tell me about her own momma, sweet thing, who scrapped and saved in their double wide outside Tulsa to buy everyone Taco Bell.  Just to make sure I’m really getting the point.  Jesus spoke in parables too, but he used classy stuff like wine and wheat stalks instead of double cheese burritos.

 

So I looked for this book to tell me I was okay, most of the time. But all I saw staring back at me on the shelves were pictures of teacups, fake steam gently rising to the top, all calm and pink and reflective, sitting in pretty little displays. Women with great teeth and well-combed hair reflected in great detail how busy they are vacuuming and praying at soccer games.  They are probably kind and lovely women, I’m absolutely and/or possibly sure of it, but where were the milk stains and reading glasses?  Where were the unmade beds and dirty dishes?  What about the burritos? They didn’t chastise me for not praying every morning and tell me there is no valid excuse (none!) unless I’m in the hospital undergoing surgery for an abdominal infection.  Then, maybe I get a pass.  They just kept being nice and respectful.  They keep flashing that unrelenting, pasty smile. I need honestly, people. I need that gut-wrenching kick in the pants.

 

So I sighed and kept walking through the store.  Past the school supplies with “I Heart Jesus” scrolled in bubbly letters.  I strolled past the scripture mints and the bible covers and the ceramic plates that proclaimed the goodness of all things biblical.  They had complimentary coffee, but the house blend was empty.  Figures. I pondered for a moment whether my life would be exponentially better if I just owned a tea kettle emblazed with a quote from Psalms.

 

As it turns out, there isn’t a book geared for overworked moms who are intimidated by all those perfect teeth.  Maybe I’ll write it.  I’ll encourage these women to keep going, despite the fact that they drank one glass of wine too many and let their kids watch cartoons the following morning for three solid hours.  Despite the sippy cup that used to contain milk but somehow got stuck in-between the minivan seats and turned into curds and whey.  Despite missed life lessons and botched biblical opportunities and tangled tongues.  We can remind each other that tomorrow’s a new day.  There are more battles to overcome and morals to teach.  Keep praying!  Keep trying!  Refrain from insulting Oklahoma!

 

There goes that ambition again, wild and out of control. Maybe one day I’ll be lucky enough to sit through a tornado on the high plains, scared and shaking, wearing a cheap Wal-mart dress and hugging my knees.  I’ll hear God’s voice as clear as an arrow and realize that this world is but a wind that will pass.  That his love is forever.

 

It’s possible I might hear God where I am, through the limestone rock that encases my house, amidst the hum of the air conditioner, beneath the sound of my surround-sound stereo, over the laughter of my children, and despite the jangling of my Tiffany bracelet.  But I really have to listen. That’s what a devotional should really be about, anyway.  To drown out the nonsense and keep your ear to the ground.

 

Keep listening.  It’s easy in Oklahoma.  Not so much everywhere else.

Filed Under: Humor, Motherhood, Religion Tagged With: , , , , ,

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