Month: April 2005

Life Is Not in the Details

I’m all about the details. My husband might tell me what, but I want to know when, and who and how and what were they wearing? Conversely, when I launch into a story with a simple point, I can see my husband’s eyes glaze over when I embellish the tale with the adjectives and adverbs, the less-pertinent-to-the-story subpoints.

He’s a pastor and so he tries to protect me from the harsh realities he deals with on a regular basis. If you tell him something in confidence–or even something in passing conversation–he will not divulge the details to me. And not just because of his professional duty. Or because he can’t really remember the details. No. He purposely shields me from stuff like that. The detail stuff.

But I am all about the details, as I might have mentioned earlier. So, when someone telephones him and shares their good news (a grandbaby born today) and bad news (some weird finger-webbing, most likely correctable), I pry. I want to know. Did she have an epidural? How big was the baby? Webbing? He doesn’t know and even if he does know, he’s not telling. He’ll sometimes think of me and remember to ask about the sex and weight of the baby, but not always.

He’s not keeping me in the dark for some sinister purpose. As spouses often do, he’s treating me as he’d want to be treated–and he just doesn’t want or need the details. So he figures I’m better off not knowing the details.

Yesterday was his day off. He visited a child in the hospital, a five-year-old with a mysterious blood disease. Later in the day, he visited a man dying of lung cancer. The doctors opened up his chest, realized his disease had progressed too far, and sewed him back up.

I spent yesterday ignoring the rumbling pain in my stomach while tending to the needs of six children. And everytime I wanted to gripe, I stopped cold.

My husband is healthy. My kids are fine. Rambunctious, but fine. Strip away all the details and that’s what really matters.

All I Need is a Moat

Some days, I look at my boys sitting on the couch, caressing their Gameboys, and I wish we didn’t live in a fortress. I wish I could shoo them out the door so they could ride their bikes until dusk. I wish they could stroll down the street to the marsh preserve and wind their way through the swampy ground, searching for pollywogs in the ditches.

But I know for a fact that a sex offender lives on our street. And I’ve seen news footage of children snatched from their front yards. I know all about Amber alerts and bad guys who prey upon children.

We don’t even let our children play in our own front yard. I know we’re not alone, either. I think as times have changed (or as our perception of the world has changed), Americans have begun to hunker down inside the safety of their homes. Instead of children playing a pickup game of basketball in the park, every house has its own basketball hoop. If I look out my back window, I see trampolines in two different yards and a big wooden play structure in another. Each home has created its own little playground for its smaller inhabitants.

We no longer play communally in our neighborhoods. Oh, sure, the children will play at each other’s homes, but they do not run and holler in the streets like we used to when we play kick the can with all the neighborhood children.

At the risk of sounding like an old fogey, I recall back in the day (in the 70s, when we called low-rise pants “hip-huggers” and thongs were what we wore on our feet) that the setting of my childhood was not just my house and my back yard, but my entire neighborhood. We lived in a planned development full of cul-de-sacs and looping roads. If you drove past the “Whispering Firs” sign, you’d cross a small creek before going up a hill and meander through a street full of split-levels and ramblers. Our house was a small rambler on the corner of a cul-de-sac.

We moved into our house when I was five and I stayed there until I was twelve. In those seven years, I had the freedom to go as far as my feet would take me within the boundary of our neighborhood. I’d wander past the houses to the undeveloped fields and forests beyond. We’d play in the waist-high grasses, trampling down areas we’d pretend were houses. Other times, we’d go down to the creek where the mud would suck at our sneakers and oftentimes, we’d go home soggy. I greeted each dog in the neighborhood as I circled my block alone. I rode my bike in endless loops around and around the block.

That would never happen these days. It’s really no wonder American kids don’t get the recommended exercise. We don’t allow them to walk far enough to raise their pulses. I used to ride my bike with its banana seat a few miles down the road to buy candy at the gas station. I never wore a helmet.

The American preoccupation with keeping our kids safe seems to contribute to the plethora of organized sports and the craziness of rushing here and there with a vanful of kids. In my day, our mothers didn’t take us anywhere. We didn’t even have a second car. We stayed home and ran the neighborhood and raced our bikes around the block and tried to keep from falling into the creek. On rainy days, we played Barbies and Monopoly and yelled until our mothers held their aching foreheads.

I wonder if homes aren’t getting bigger and bigger because our world has become smaller and smaller. Families used to live in smaller spaces, but inhabit larger outdoor spaces. New houses now have bonus rooms and great rooms and a bathroom for every person. Instead of sending kids outside to play, they’re inside all the time–unless they’re in the family van, heading for activities. Or they play in their private custom-built backyard play structures and jump on their trampolines. (Except for my poor kids who have only a ramshackle backyard full of overgrown laurel hedges and ivy-covered fences. Fortunately, my boys need only sticks and stones and dirt to be happy and they find the laurel hedges to be a perfect climbing place.)

I don’t know. Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like I’ve barricaded my family behind some kind of invisible barbed wire fence. I wish our kids could climb trees and meander to the school playground alone and explore the woods. But we just can’t take the chance.

All we need is a moat and our fortress will be complete. I just hope it comes with pollywogs.

Belonging

Pentecostals believe that speaking in tongues is the initial sign of being filled by the Holy Spirit. I grew up in such a church, full of hand-waving and tongue-speaking and swaying bodies and incoherent laughter and weeping. Although my mother wasn’t as strict as her mother (in their household, no playing cards, no chapstick, no secular music, no shopping or working on Sundays), we weren’t allowed to do things other kids did. For instance, “rock music” wasn’t allowed, so when we watched “The Donny and Marie Show,” when Donny began to sing “I’m a little bit rock and roll,” we had to turn the channel. We went to church three times a week: Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday night. We did not swear, not even “geez,” or “gosh.”

But religious upbringing aside, I felt like an outsider at school. I was the tallest girl in my class. The teacher’s pet. I wasn’t familiar with contemporary music. I didn’t take ballet class. Small things.

Then my parents divorced at a time when divorce was a rarity. From one year to the next, my world stopped spinning and then reversed directions. Everyone else was going west to east–eye make-up, boys, parties, dances–and I was going east to west, hibernating in my room, tending to my wounds, reading books, dreaming. The girls I had played with on the playground were now riding in cars with boys while I was trying to figure out my place in my reconstructed family.

When high school ended, I couldn’t move far enough away. I figured no one would ever marry me, so off I went to Bible College. After graduation, I fully intended to suffer for Jesus in some far-flung land. My theology was a bit wacky in those days and I thought that’s how God worked.

Even there, though, I didn’t quite belong. I couldn’t quite fluff my hair up like the Southern belles. I didn’t want to take a class for “Pastor’s Wives”–I wanted to learn homiletics (preaching). I wasn’t religious enough. I balked at using the spiritual slang expected of me. I grew cynical and suspicious and even a little hostile.

I wasn’t there to get my “MRS” degree–I was trying to find God’s plan for my life. I graduated feeling like I didn’t quite fit in the denomination. I couldn’t swallow what they were spoon-feeding. I didn’t want to play, didn’t want to network my way through the church hierarchy. I’d sit in (daily required) chapel and make lists of Christian curse words to amuse myself.

Years later, after abandoning the denomination of my youth, I’m the Pastor’s Wife. I shrug off that title and go so far as to “forget” to mention my husband’s profession when I meet new people. I’ve heard maybe a dozen sermons in my almost 18 years of marriage. I’m the cobbler’s children without any shoes. I’m a Christian, a devoted follower of Christ, but I don’t sit in the pew and I’m not quite one of them. I don’t really belong. And I can’t really identify with the pastor’s wives, either. They all seem so together, so holy, so obedient.

Our family lives in an affluent town where people buy property just to tear down houses so they can rebuilt extravagant homes with a view. People own second homes to vacation in. They drive new cars and own boats. I don’t fit in. I don’t have a career. My hair will simply not behave.

The past few days, I’ve heard pundits and politicians and analysts speak and I’ve thought, they don’t speak for me. I read articles about mothers and I rarely see myself in the descriptions. When I hear about modern families, I wonder who these people are, because they aren’t us. They aren’t me. On television, I never find a representative of me. I don’t find myself in novels, either. I’m certainly not in the movies. I’m not even on the religious channel.

I feel isolated in so many ways. Where do I fit? Isn’t it pathetic to wonder this at the age of forty? And yet my wondering these days is not fueled by angst, but by a gradual dawning. I suspect everyone feels like an outcast on some level. We’re either the wrong color or the wrong height or too fat or too skinny or we live on the wrong side of town or we never did memorize our multiplcation tables or we don’t “get” the hype over American Idol. We just don’t fit in.

What I love about growing up is that you get to create your own little world. You can populate your world with people who recognize you, who understand you, who make you feel not quite so alone.

And along the way, you discover that it’s all right to be the tallest girl in class, the one who is a Republican (even though it’s so not cool), the one who likes Barry Manilow and bypassed the whole college-drinking thing.

I don’t really belong anywhere. And rather than feeling alone, I feel liberated, the way you feel in a strange city where no one knows you. Throw caution to the wind, because you’ll never be back here again.

[*UPDATE and CORRECTION* “Seafoam” asked this: I’m curious as to why you’ve only heard your husband preach about a dozen times in eighteen years. Have you always worked in the nursery during the church service?

I wondered that myself, so I started thinking back. First of all, my husband’s only been pastoring for 15 years, though we’ve been married for 18. In our first church, I was in charge of the children’s church, so I taught children during the sermon. In our second church, I taught two-year olds during the sermon. Then we adopted twins, so I really had my hands full. In our third church, there was no nursery or class for my then-almost-2-year old twins. I sat with them in a makeshift nursery. Eventually, I started teaching the preschool class. Then I had a baby, so I was back in the cry-room with him.

When we moved to our current church, my baby boy was less than a year old and hated to be left, so I stayed with him in the nursery. When he was two or two and a half, I began to leave him in the nursery and I remembered tonight, as I pondered this question, that I actually did sit in church for some months. I did not teach Sunday School. I did not have nursery duty. I sang in the choir and I listened to the sermon. So, I have to retract my previous “12 sermons in 18 years” statement. I must have heard fifty sermons (a year’s worth) before I gave birth again to a clingy, noisy baby who still won’t stay alone in the nursery without having a nervous breakdown. She’s two and a half and the day will arrive soon when I will be able to leave her.

And then I’ve been recruited to teach a brand-new preschool class starting next fall.

Thanks, Seafoam. I stand corrected and hope that answers your question.]