Saying (and doing) Grace

I’ve been thinking a lot about grace.  Not a constant thing -- because, who has time?! -- but it has been sneaking around the back edges when I drive home from the gym, or check facebook, or consider some comments made by a friend.  You probably know that I’m not a very religious person.  Not anymore.  I’ll spare you my spiritual history, but I will tell you I was raised Southern Baptist in GA.  That bit of history is important because it informs how I think of the word “grace.” 

In a religious sense, it has a couple of meanings.  It can mean a prayer before eating, as in “Shelley, will you say grace?” (a question you really can’t answer in the negative.) It can also mean the act of God that forgives sins.  Grace is the acknowledgment of wrong and the release of responsibility for that wrong.  It is a letting go without turning away. 

I’m not sure many use “grace” as a prayer anymore.  It was that way in my grandparent’s home – on my dad’s side.  We had many family dinners, with heaping plates of casseroles and cobblers.  My grandfather had a daily prayer that served for all but the most formal events, when the floor might be given to someone more loquacious, but his version was this:

“Heavenly Father, pardon our sins.  Accept our thanks, for these and all thy many blessings.  Amen.”

Simple.  Probably some derivative of some formal prayer that, for him, ceased to be anything but part of the ceremony of dinner.  But I can tell you that it is imprinted in my and my brother’s head.  And it says a lot.  Forgive us.  And thank you.  We know you do a lot for us.  Bye. 

Strangely, this has connected in my mind with the facebook game where people tag one another and you have to list 3 or 5 things a day for 5 or 3 days.  Varies.  But the end result is you have 15 opportunities to be thankful.  I’m feeling pretty darn lucky at this point in my life, so it wasn’t hard, but the act of taking the time to be thankful – sitting down and writing the things that bring me pleasure, make me feel like this life is awesome, kick me in the pants and say “LOOK AT ME.  I’m beautiful.”—that was fantastic.  Because I am grateful.  I really enjoy being alive.  I don’t know if that’s because I had my cancer diagnosis so young and it made me a little more aware or if I’m just one of those floaty, daydreamer types that gets lost in the light in the clouds.  Doesn’t matter.  I am thankful. 

But grace is not just about being thankful.  It’s also about the wisdom of staying open.  For me, and I venture to say –for everyone—that’s harder than being thankful.  It means considering others in a way thankfulness does not.  We allow them to step away from guilt or shame or anger without recrimination.  Sometimes, I guess, they don’t step away.  The life they choose to live is one we don’t like.  And, the way I see it, we don’t have to like their life.  Their mistakes, their wrongs, their poor judgment, are theirs.  We hold them to society’s rules.  God holds them to his.  We, if we’re strong, we give them grace.  We don’t shut them out.  We don’t turn away. 

I’ve been talking about God like he’s a part of my life and he’s really not, but he is part of how I think about grace.  If there is an ultimate example of forgiveness, I think the Bible gives us that.  I think the gift of Christianity is that it is inclusive; you don’t have to be born into it.  It is a community you can join.  Just by being born, we have all been thrown into this community where we share our feelings, our pictures, our accomplishments, and – yes – what we are thankful to have.  It is a technological world and a world where human interaction is changing.  We can express ourselves in ways I never dreamed would exist when I was a freshman in college.  That time for me was eye-opening: so many different people, so many different views.  And we were all desperate to share and be heard.  This time seems like a world-wide freshman year.  (I didn’t handle freshman year all that gracefully.)

So I want to handle this time gracefully.  I have children who I want to grow up to be big-hearted and accepting.  I want them to love this world and love the people in it.  I want to model that life for them.  However, I’m a pretty judgmental girl.  I say that to be fair.  Because I’m also honest.  I struggle with stupid people and mean people and evil people.  I also have to say I think I’m pretty good at letting other people do their thing if they aren’t mean or evil.  It might have to do with how little I care about their thing, but still.  If there is a God, and he made us in his image, maybe that allowed him to see us as worth saving.  Seeing that promise in each other is a challenge. 

My son is autistic.  Very mildly.  But it makes him weird sometimes.  He has annoying behaviors.  He doesn’t get social cues.  It can irritate me.   I also love him very much.  He is a tremendous joy.  He is sweet and smart and helpful.  And he’s funny.  However, there are certain things he just can’t do.  He cannot control some of his tics – which come out like disrespectful obstinacy.  He cannot be a sunny, personable kid in the face of frustration.  He is close to my heart.  He’s my first and he’s probably the most like me.  So, maybe it is easier to give him grace.  Sometimes, on a good day, I can look at him and let it go.  I can see past his difficulties, his bad choices and I can just love him completely.  I can be thankful for everything that he is, the whole package.  That, to me, is grace. 

Someday, I hope my grace extends much, much further.  I hope that I can connect with the little bit of me that is in everyone, despite religion or political affiliation or just plain stupidity.  And that I can love them as completely as I love my son.  But, for now, I’m thankful for this.  Amen.

The Mother Life

I’ve been thinking about writing this post for a while.  It’s about motherhood-- but it’s not about mothers, not really, and it’s not about my memories of my mom or how I feel as a mom.  It's not even about what kind of mom I think I am or should be.  Maybe that’s why this has been percolating in my brain for a while.  This is sort of a loose association with motherhood, about how motherhood changes -- not just you -- but who the people in your life will be.  Motherhood: it’s not that you choose only to be with your children; it’s also who will choose to be with you.  

I’m going to try and describe this by telling two experiences I had soon after I had my son, Jack.  First, you might need a little background.  Shortly before I got pregnant with him, I left a job with an underwriting firm where I was a software developer.  I went back to school to get a poetry degree, an MFA.  At my previous job and in graduate school I was surrounded by interesting, bright people.  Granted, the ones in graduate school (in poetry, no less) were more intellectual and a bit more eclectic, but my working world was filled with good communicators, responsible people, and people I liked.  I was pretty happy with my circles. 

Along came baby Jack.  We moved to the suburbs, which I fought, and renovated a house.  Friends from my old job threw me a baby shower and some of my friends from my MFA program showed up, sprinkled in with friends from high school and college.   I met the neighbors, many of whom were young mothers.  I joined a mother’s group at a local church, though I was not a member of the church.  I was trying to find a place.

However, I was struggling.  I felt alone.  Gradually, I found myself more and more alone with Jack.  At the time, my husband was still working a job downtown and was gone during the day.  He would come home around 5:30 or 6:00, not late, and take Jack while he cried (he had colic) and walk him so I could get a break.  Ultimately, the weight rested on me.  I was the mother.  I was nursing every couple of hours, changing diapers, trying to institute some sort of schedule – all the things new parents do.  It is a constant thing.  Even as I got the hang of it, it was still all-consuming. 

One afternoon, I broke.  I don’t remember anything in particular setting me off, but I was tired and dirty and felt like I hadn’t thought about or been touched by or been heard by anyone in the world but a 10-week-old baby.  I couldn’t stop crying.  (Looking back, I’m pretty sure this was some post-partum depression and had been building for a while, but – well, hindsight is 20/20 and all that…)  I called my husband at work and, bless him, he recognized that this was an emergency.  I don’t think he’d ever heard me even close to that upset.  I was not myself.  So, he came home from work early.  Told me to take a shower and get out of the house.  I didn’t even know where to go, but I cleaned up best I could and went to a restaurant around the corner that looked nice.  (For those of you who live close by, it was Ritter’s.)

I walked up to the hostess stand and the hostess, tall, thin, beautiful and totally put together, looked at me and said, “Oh honey, what’s wrong?” and that was all it took.  I fell apart again, snotty-nosed, can’t-get-my-breath sobbing about inexpressible hopelessness that was my life.  This darling woman hugged me, put me in a private booth and brought me a glass of wine and talked to me like a friend.  She calmed me down, fed me, introduced me to the owner of the restaurant and made me feel normal.  She had three kids and felt much like I did after the first.  She talked about how it can be a hard transition into motherhood, but to not feel alone.  She said that people don’t always talk about it, but that many women feel this way at first.  She told me how it gets better and that my feelings and body will get better and that my baby will soon do things that engaged me in a totally new way.  She bought me dessert and wrote me a sweet note with her name and number on it.  She saved me that night.  Honestly, she was an angel.

We didn’t become friends.  I’ve never seen her again.  I kept the note for a long time, more as a reminder that there are truly kind people out there than anything.  I wrote my own note to her boss telling her how amazing that experience was for me.  Apparently, she didn’t work there for long after that night.  Not sure whether she was just moonlighting that night or what.  But that part doesn’t matter.  It was who she was for me that night that matters.  She was my first real connection with other moms.

One of the things she said (and my husband said, to be fair) was to work harder for a little “me” time, so I continued to hold onto my MFA friends and studies.  Myself and a couple of the other ladies from the program agreed to meet once a month for a workshop.  Another friend and I set up a study group to prepare for comps.  It required some wrangling of my husband, but I made it work.  He wasn’t happy to be left with the baby for so long.  All my cohorts lived downtown, about 30-40 minutes away.  So the commute, plus some study/workshop time, plus the trip back, meant that he’d have to feed the baby a couple of times, change him, and probably put him down for bed.  Jack didn’t take a bottle well, so it was hard.  I got some grief, but it was important to me to feel like I still had this, and it wasn’t that often.  We tried for every other week. 

I truly appreciated the group.  Really, it was just three of us, though sometimes another poet would show up.  We met at a restaurant or coffee house, which was a treat for me, and we’d have dinner and read each other’s poems and critique them over coffee, which was also a treat for me.  We balanced each other really well.  One was older and loved form poems, sonnets mostly.  She was a stickler for details.  The second was more of a gypsy.  She had a wonderful way with image and a sort of far-reaching spirituality in her work.  I was somewhere in between.  We met regularly for a while, or as regularly as we could.  As the semester got more stressful, it got harder to meet.  They had to grade papers or felt their time would be better used studying.

I sent them what I thought was an irreverent, cheerleader-y email telling them that I was committed to this group, that it was important to me, and I pleaded for their time and attention.  The response was not what I expected.  One woman didn’t respond, but from the response of the second women I could tell they had talked about it because she spoke for them both.  My tone was inappropriate and hurtful.  I was no longer in the group.  That was that. 

I was crushed.  One, that they – having known me for years – would excommunicate me on the basis of a poorly worded email, and two, that they would do so knowing how much that group meant to me (because I had just told them.)  It was awful.  I apologized.  I tried to defend/explain myself, which was a mistake.  It only deepened the rift.  I resented having to defend myself; she wrote back with a truly horrible reading of my original email, including the fact that I did not use a salutation, which was rude. That they were so very willing to think the worst of me still hurts.

So why are these two events in my blog about being a mother?  Neither is really specific to mothering.  They are “around” mothering.  They are the relationship products of me becoming a mother.  Granted, I could have walked into Ritter’s with some other problem and gotten a similar welcome; I could have had a falling out with my workshop over something else had  I not been desperate to keep some part of non-mother-Shelley intact.  But this is how it worked out for me.  These were people who influenced those first few months of being a mom.  One of the events showed me kindness and inclusion; one showed me the wrong kinds of sensitivity and judgment.

I’ve said it before -- being a mother is hard.  The people around you can help to make it easier, or harder.  I guess, too, they help you to be the type of mother you are.  Being kind I can do.  Being less judgmental takes work.  Mothering is a growth process, not only in your children, whom you nurture and educate and  love, but also in yourself.  These two moments crystallize for me the way women can be with one another, as a community and as individuals.  Whether we try to “lean in” or become a SAHM, or both, we share something special, as women.  We can choose to be mothers, or not.  We can choose to move to the suburbs or stay in the city.  We can choose to homeschool or choose between public and private.  However, we don’t always get to choose how we feel or what happens; some things are out of our hands.  Maybe if we choose what kind of woman we want to be and make the rest of the choices accordingly, we’ll also be surrounded by people who want that for us, too.