We are not so separate.

My son has started drawing me “kind of like a pumpkin” and considering how difficult it was to get the milk from the bottom of the grocery cart this morning and, eventually, stand up again, I think I’m embracing the image.

It’s that time. When, though you want to save it up knowing a sieve of sleep is coming in the form of a live baby, rest is slippery and complicated. (At what point do the pillows become more of a nuisance than a relief…) When all the things that need to be sorted or planned or written down seem too tiring, so instead you waste energy searching for the perfect, stupid […insert baby product here…] ad nauseam. When (in my limited experience) people begin pointing a little and laughing a little at your convex mid-section and you just hope, HOPE, that you’re not showing any midriff.

We wonder what he will look like and how each of his brothers will embrace and challenge and give in and resist his arrival. We pray for a similarly smooth birth, and hope for that same nurse that was at the other sons, the same room as them, because wouldn’t that be fun, and for new and different eyes to see a new soul, a new person who stands apart from our other frameworks.

I also pray my stomach skin doesn’t end up mid-thigh length by the time this is all said and done.

The physical expectancy we witness in ourselves, in a 1st grader, in a preschooler, and in our community, because of this little son, is so helpful for nurturing a faith-expectancy in the bigger, more abstract places in which we long for change. The growing, the nearing, of a baby’s life–of so much that is certain but so much mystery–echoes, no, foreshadows, the next chapters we long to read elsewhere. For that one person’s freedom and self-confidence. For that new job. For the courage to enter a church. For the resolution to an injustice that has steamrolled our security, our savings, or our very family. For peace in a wandering, distant mind. For wholeness in a bankrupt marriage. For a friendship that is like the mountain air.

May the pregnancies we see offer spiritual meaning to our day. May the new cries, the new mess, the new skin of a baby whisper to us, lead us, forward in our prayers and hope. May we find our future, our next step, in the daily occurrences and observations that seem commonplace. We all carry the longings; we all have the sleepless nights of needs and worries. May something as simple as an awkwardly large pregnant woman or a squawking newborn babe indicate the holy, the next, and the coming in our own lives for our stories are shared. We are not so separate.

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Because Our Therapist Cried // 6

It was a startling and somehow calming thing to see our therapist cry when he heard about our past year.

We had made the appointment with him after a long hiatus, knowing that we would be facing some big life decisions and wanting a trusted, third, outside party to help us, the not-marriage-experts, maneuver the new waters. Little did we know when we set up the date that we would soon be thrown into a battle that would mean losing her in the least ideal way, losing trust in two powerful systems in our city, and losing our energy for the initial discernment process that had led us to this new round of counseling.

At this particular meeting, we were about a month and a half into the new reality. Since we had seen him, we had lost a dear friend suddenly, our organization had gone through major shifts, we had lost another dear friend after a long battle, we had completed the foster licensing process, become a family of five, participated extensively with reunification services, and lost our first placement after over 8 months in the middle of the night due to an abuse allegation that was never substantiated by anyone or anything but that we would never be able to overthrow. Yes, it was like a bad run-on sentence.

We had never seen him cry before.

Appropriately enough, we felt like crazy people sitting there in the therapist’s office. The stories and accounts of the last two months, as abbreviated and clear as we tried to make them, were just too fantastic, too ridiculous to assume the listener’s full belief. And yet the stories, as is the case for many people, were all we had; they were all we ever had, even beyond that point in time. His tears suggested that he might just believe us, even if he didn’t understand all the details, and we were surprised and quieted when over and over, other people believed us too…just like he did.

Looking back, I think that even our official accuser believed us more than his original informant. I think that the majority of the folks in the department who wrote up neutral, shrug-of-the-shoulders-type reports about us believed us. I think that there were only a few people whose judgment and wounds and defensiveness about God-knows-what were for whatever reason allowed to drive everything into the shit hole we found ourselves in. Paranoia, fear, and vindictive constructs carry much farther than the majority of the reporting people’s well-wishes, friendly asides, and personal opinions. This came in to play again and again when professionals from top to bottom would tell us that something went very wrong but they could do absolutely nothing to help right it. That old saying, “the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing” (Burke) became a lot less inspiring and a lot more painful.

As the months rolled by and we continued to fight for the truth at every opportunity, the battle never died out. We thought many times, this week, the outcome of this event, this correspondence, will determine if there’s a way through or if the door is shut completely on truth or if we are completely done with this. And None of the Above would happen. There would always be some unbelievable (usually bad) development, a way to challenge, a person to write, or a returned piece of mail…something. It was an incredibly drawn out journey of disappointment. And so the stories continued.

Along this journey we became different people. It was the brand of pain and wondering and futile fighting that leaves you grappling with a new self and a new orientation for a long time; it would take a long time to get acquainted with Who Are We Now in the wake of this tale. What meaning could be gained, what stones could now be turned, what scars were incurred as a result of withstanding (surviving?), this mysterious suffering.

She was never far from our minds even when the battle went beyond any hope of her return, however temporary the return would be. In the middle of all the paperwork for truth, I worked on her baby book so I could send it on a hopeful journey to its rightful owner: her. I remember writing on one page about how her biological mother loved her, shown first by carrying her and giving birth to her—something my own mom has told me about mine. Childbirth is so messy, so violent and private and so terribly long, no matter how short it is. The process can literally and figuratively scar you for life. The product is unknown and scary—a new person who will definitely not meet everyone’s expectations, a stranger who will now rule your life.

Eventually, I found the strength to look at this injustice through a lens of re-birth—of change and new and now what. I had to crawl back to that looking glass many many times as the aftershocks of the ordeal continued throughout our family.

I think this crawling was possible because our therapist cried.

Because people believed us, in our own circles and beyond. People believed the accounts of injustice, the ludicrous pain and the asinine journey. When we felt crazy and we wished we were making it all up, they knew we were not. They bore witness to it, they knew we were wronged, that she was wronged, and that it was not the end of the story. Resurrection people waited for what would come next and we were allowed not only our stories but our slow, changing rebirth.

There must not be a better way to suffer.

Thank you.