Weird Bird in Love

I recently marked the anniversary of three years of priestly ministry. Thanks to a colleague preaching this Sunday, I’m taking my usual Tuesday-morning sermonating time to reflect a little on ordained ministry. I carefully brought all my journals with me, the lovingly-handmade-by-Tilt notebooks that I filled with doubt, joy, perplexity and hope while going through the discernment process and, more intermittently, in the years since. Then I left them somewhere – at home on the cabinet in the dining room, I think. Ah, well – I can muse without props.

Here is one musing: noticing what I’m wearing today. I’ve been working hard on my wardrobe, the last few months. I started exercising with some regularity – nothing dramatic, and I’m not looking for dramatic change, but it’s changed my sense of myself. I have some confidence that I’ll stay the size I am or possibly a little smaller, so I’ve gotten rid of a lot of things that were really a little bit too big and thus looked baggy and dumpy on me, and I’m gradually replacing them with things that fit well and look, I think, pretty good. I’ve also gotten more and more confident about being able to shape my own style. I remember vividly a session in the changing room of a consignment clothing store in the town where I attended a preaching conference, in the months between graduating from seminary and beginning my first job. They had several suits in approximately my size, and I was utterly convinced that I Needed Suits. I ended up buying two suits that day – both fit me tolerably well, & though expensive, they were cheaper than new. I even paid to have them altered – the sleeves were too long. Read the rest of this entry »

We are wrapping up a visit with my parents and brother – drove here on Monday, heading out tomorrow, Friday. It’s been lovely. We have read to and played with Zag and the Bean, and built blanket forts, and constructed a ghost pirate shop, and gone shopping, and played with our clearance Zhu Zhu Pets, which are strange and ridiculous. We have cooked, ordered, and eaten fabulous food – Thai take-out, adobo salmon, gingerbread, goat-cheese jalapeno grits, Dutch spiced marzipan cake. We looked at all of these, on our respective Apple devices, and laughed about them. We talked about sewing. We read this poem out loud to each other. We talked about Biblical interpretation, and romance, and liturgy. Tilt consulted with my mother extensively on design for a flyer for a workshop she’s planning. We went to see the Tintin movie in 3D, which involved wearing wonderful dorky black glasses. Right now a discussion of public opinion and religious belief is circling around me. Life is good.

This is long and probably deeply boring. But I’d welcome your advice. Even if this situation resolves, I need help thinking it out, because other ones like it will come along.

Ben came to church on Sunday. Nobody had ever seen him before. He looked slightly scruffy but not outside normal range – unshaven, wearing a somewhat shoddy down parka. He hung around for coffee hour and chatted with some folks. When he finally got my attention, after working over pageant plans with the pageant team, he told me that he’s unemployed and really looking for help and for work. He lives nearby & said he’d often passed near our property and thought about all the work he could do here, on our many trees – he worked for a pruning and landscaping company for a long time. I thought, Hmm, this could be useful, and told him I’d talk with our Buildings & Grounds folks about it. I tried to be clear that we have a process for hiring contractors, we don’t just jump into things – and that our funds are tight and we hadn’t been planning to pay to have any of that kind of work done this winter, though we know it’s needed. But I let him think there was a chance something might work out, because I thought there was. I also gave him $20 – explaining as I did so that I can’t and don’t usually give away cash. In the Episcopal Church, clergy generally only have access to their charitable funds via check – which works fine for paying someone’s rent or water bill, but limits other uses. Sometimes that’s frustrating, but overall I think it makes good sense.

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First off, my daughter. She turned two recently, and she’s fabulous, she really is. I just wrote her a second-birthday love letter, a habit I’m trying to keep for both kids. I thought of posting it here, as I’ve done in the past, but it somehow feels too fragile and private, talking about how much I love my child out here in the odd echoing anonymous public of the internet. I suspect I’ve just fallen out of my previous habits of self-revelation, since I now write a blog entry approximately once every two months. Ah, well, perhaps the pendulum will swing back. Anyway. My daughter. The Bean. Two. Fabulous.
So I sew her things. It’s fun.

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So at work, I sometimes order stuff from a company that prints banners and other promotional materials. And this company is really insistant about giving me free magazine subscriptions when I place my orders. They don’t carry Mothering or Cricket or McSweeney’s or anything else I’d consider paying for, so thus far I’m getting Disney Family Fun (which I clicked on because my friend Sarah, not the type to fall for something just because it has Walt’s name on it, said it had some good ideas in it sometimes), and Martha Stewart Living. It’s a little embarrassing having them pile up in my mailbox at work – I’m the *rector*, for Pete’s sake. But only the parish administrator sees them. Amusingly, they don’t have my name on them – they have the parish treasurer’s name, because her name is on the church debit card. She is an amazing human being, and decidedly not the Martha Stewart Living type.

Anyway. I picked up a new pile today, including the Halloween issue of Disney Family Fun. Naturally, it has a feature article on clever Halloween costumes. And one is featured on the front – a little girl dressed up as a paper doll. See? So cute.

But wait. A paper doll costume. So… she could be dressed up as anything that anyone modestly competent could draw with markers on posterboard. And they go for… a blue dress? With a hair bow and a purse? Seriously?

She could be dressed like a wizard. A Valkyrie. An Egyptian queen. An aviatrix. A toreador. Come on. Markers on posterboard – the sky is the limit. And … a blue dress?

I can’t help wondering if this is more than a lame magazine cover. If this isn’t something about…. limiting little girls’ dreams, their imaginations, their aspirations. “I could look tidy and cute in a puffy blue dress!”

Whatcha think? What would *you* draw for that little girl?

I learned today that the previous rector of my parish wrote a monthly column for the church newsletter in the voice of her dog.

It was apparently wildly popular.

I’ve just been writing columns as my boring human self. I feel so … disappointing.

Maybe I should get an iguana?

Writing about the trip a little reminded me that I used to use this blog as a way to record some notes about my growing and changing kids. And after vacation, when I’ve had some time to really soak them in, is a good time to jot down some memories and observations.

About our Zag, now 6 and as clever as clever. Zag is discovering the delights of being a big kid. In the final two months of kindergarten, he went from sounding out three-letter words to reading at a second-grade level. It’s hard to tell how much he reads to himself – I think he does a lot of “coasting,” reading bits here and there and enjoying the pictures in whatever he’s working on – but anytime he gets serious about it, he’s got the skills. Any month now, maybe any week, he’ll turn that next corner and start reading by himself in earnest, and we won’t see him again until he gets interested in girls.* The reading is just a piece of it, though. We stumbled into geology as sort of a running theme of our recent vacation – gathering interesting rocks in several creeks, visiting two different geology museums – and he really took to it, not just following along but taking it in and working it over. He had a summer school course on bugs, and now he spots bugs and tells us what they are. Tonight he was telling me about the geology and history displays he wants to set up in his bedroom. He’s always had phases of intense interest in something or other – Egypt, mining, ninjas – but it seems like he’s owning it intellectually in a new way, enjoying knowledge and inquiry. When we baptized this boy, we prayed, as we pray whenever we baptize a child in an Episcopal church, that the Holy Spirit would bless him with an inquiring and discerning heart, and the gift of joy and wonder in all God’s works. It’s lovely watching those gifts unfold.

About our Bean, 21 months old, bright and imperious and utterly charming. Oh, those big brown eyes just melt me. She has a lot of words (one of the most recent: “Pod game,” meaning she wants to play a game on my iPad), but what’s striking is how much she understands – and thinks, and plans. We stopped at a big water park one afternoon on our trip. We didn’t tell the kids about it till a few minutes before, because the weather was dicey and we weren’t sure it would work out. So I told the Bean, “We’re going to a water park, where we can swim!” When we got there and I got her out of her seat, she held up a doll (”girl”) and a blue dino and said, “Water?” I said, “Oh, do you want to take those in the water?” and absentmindedly stuck the dino in our bag and the doll back in the car. In the dressing room, while I was getting her suited up, she found the dino and immediately started looking through the bag for the doll: “Girl? Girl?” I hadn’t really taken her seriously – but she had, in fact, understood that we were going swimming, and picked out two toys she wanted to take with us. (Fortunately, she took the lack of the doll fairly well.) I am learning not to underestimate my daughter; she knows what’s going on and she knows what she wants. She hustles us out of bed in the morning: “Up? Glass(es)? Dress? Up! Come!” She fills us in on her agenda: “Dada. Sit. Book.” She defends her turf (as a little sister must): “MINE,” sometimes pointing at herself to make things crystal clear. She gets mad at us for doing things for her instead of helping her do them herself, and sometimes even gets mad that she needs help at all. Lord help us, she’s starting to have opinions about which parent does things for her: “MAMA push chair!” But this all makes her sound bossy – which she can be, but she’s also quite even-keeled, and so sweet. I got a little weepy about having to leave to go to work, the first morning back after our trip, and she noticed I was crying, and patted me on the head, and said, “Happy.”

About both of them together. Oh, those two. They play off each other. They’re definitely close enough in age to have a real, robust sibling relationship – they can make each other laugh like nobody else, and they can make each other mad like nobody else. We’ve started occasionally calling the Bean “Me Too,” because whatever Zag does, she wants to do. At a park on our big drive, Zag needed to empty gravel out of his crocs and I sent him over to a nearby bench to do so. The Bean witnessed this and refused to proceed to the picnic table for lunch until she, too, had gone over, sat on the same bench, and had me make a show of emptying out her sandals. It works the other way, too – whatever the Bean is playing with or doing suddenly becomes very attractive to Zag. This is a little frustrating if, say, we’ve hauled her off to play with Duplo so that he can do Lego in peace – and suddenly he wants to play with Duplo more than anything else.

They drive each other nuts sometimes, but very clearly, they really love each other. And I really, really, really love them. My kids.

Lancelot Andrewes (alt):
O God, not of us only but of our seed,
bless our children among us,
that they may grow in wisdom as in stature,
and in favor with you and with all.

Amen.

* Or boys, of course. But my guess, FWIW, is that it will be girls.

I am approaching the end of my first honest-to-goodness vacation from my first honest-to-goodness job as Person In Charge. We will be away a total of twelve days, plus an extra day out of the office to pack, prep, and load the car – which was awesome; it was great to have time to do that right and not have that panicked chaotic rush to get on the road. I wish I had a day off at the other end for unpacking, resting and re-entry, but it just didn’t work out that way this time… Ah, well, at least we’re returning midweek so it won’t be long till the weekend.

It’s been terrific. I haven’t heard a peep from my church, God bless them. Tilt and I, and many of the people we’ve been visiting, sort of like talking about liturgy and churchy stuff, so I can’t say my mind has been entirely away from my work. But such conversations have been recreational, not professional, and haven’t broken my sabbath. I’ve played with my kids, and shopped, and talked with family and friends, and done art projects, and read, and chatted with my husband, and eaten a lot of good food, and drunk a quantity of good beer and wine that, while not by any means embarrassing, is far greater than I would likely consume in any ten-day period that was not vacation.

We are, this moment as I type, alomst 18 hours into 30 hours of total drive time on the trip, and knock on wood, it’s gone pretty well. The kids have been troupers. We’ve been experimenting with having some of the driving happen between 7pm and 11pm, putting the kids to bed in the car and using the time when they’re asleep and we’re still up & alert enough to drive safely. That works well with Zag. The Bean isn’t crazy about sleeping in the car; it was really bad th first time, and so-so the second time. We’ll see how it goes this evening, our third big drive day.

Five days into this vacation, I was so happily detached from work and so-called “real life” that I really didn’t want to think about going back. I was counting the days, reassuring myself that I still had plenty of vacation left. But inner process is a wondrous thing. A night or two ago, I noticed that subtle inward shift where the heart turns homeward. I miss our house and our garden. And my sewing corner. I’m not itching to get back into the office – though I know I’ll re-engage happily enough when I go – but I am sort of, provisionally, almost, kind of, ready for this trip to draw to a close.

It’s been sweet and a bit sad, this trip, that our Bean, now 21 months, has started naming and identifying people – which also means she can be sad about leaving them. She’s currently in the back seat chattering about Sadie (”Dadie”), our almost 4 year old friend (daughter of the Bean’s godmamas) whom we just parted from this morning. The Bean spent much of our last long drive, from my parents’ to the godmamas’, asking if we could go back to Gamma and Gampa. It’s a blessing to live close enough that when we need another visit, we can just plan one, without plane tickets having to be involved. But still, it’s so lovely to see our kids building closer relationships with all their grandparents that it perversely makes me long for even more time together.

Speaking of time together… When I have some time away from work and with my family, one of the things that percolates up to the surface – maybe the Big Thing, really – is that I desire and need more focused time with my daughter. It feels so good to be around her, with plenty of time to talk and play and snuggle. It feels so good to have enough free time to spend some focused time with each of my kids. That’s a lot harder to achieve, in the average work week. Zag is, as he has always been, so closely bonded to me. I come home from work and he wants my attention and my time – and those are legitimate needs. The Bean is more ambiparental, if you will – she wants time with me too, but both because she’s the little sister and tends to get drowned out, and because she’s also so close to and at ease with her daddy, it’s easy for my home time to be more focused on Zag. I remember the dynamic from when I was being primary parent to Zag, while Tilt was working full-time – even while he was home (and even though he wanted to spend time with his son), it took conscious effort for the person who usually meets the toddler’s needs not to go right on meeting the toddler’s needs when the other parent is around.

I want to give the Bean more time – and give myself more time with her. But it’s going to take some attention and intention to figure out how to do that without taking time away from Zag, who also needs and deserves it. I’m sure these are elementary issues for people who’ve parented two (or more) children for longer than we have, and I welcome advice and encouragement.

We just had our parish picnic, and I’m feeling a need to process. No drama, just subtle dynamics I’m still trying to sort out. (I feel like I need to do a Critical Incident Report, for the CPE survivors out there.) So I’m gonna blog about it. This may be a long one, but if you’ve got the time to read it, I’d welcome your thoughts.

So there’s a woman in my parish – let’s call her Alice. She’s probably in her late 60s. Active churchwoman, active in diocesan life, past deputy to General Convention – a deeply committed and deeply involved Episcopalian. And I was warned about her before I even came to this parish. I was warned that she was controlling – that she ran the parish like her kingdom – that she sabotaged ideas she didn’t like – that she had made the lives of previous clergy very difficult.

I still don’t know how fair any of that is. Those warnings mostly came from folks at the diocesan office. I have since learned that Alice put up a stiff fight a few years back when the diocese was selling its campground, which Alice’s family is very attached to. She seems to have a bit of a reputation as a troublemaker, at the diocesan level. At the parish level…. I’ve heard a lot of stories about Alice. But the common thread of those stories is, “I do coffee hour/ushering/parish life/….. because Alice told me to, fifteen years ago.” And not infrequently, the coda is, “And now I’m tired of it, and I quit.” (I am working hard and, I think, largely successfully to be a non-anxious presence as all those stories unfold. Anybody who’s been doing the same ministry for 15+ years deserves to quit without being hassled about it. Any really essential roles will eventually get filled, one way or another.) So I’ve heard a lot of stories about Alice strongarming people into doing what she thought needed done – or, to look at it another way, about Alice holding the parish together through sheer force of will, during some rocky years. As challenging as it is to recover from Alice’s domination, who knows where the parish would be if she hadn’t done what she did? And I haven’t yet heard a story about Alice being unkind or unethical. Maybe those stories exist and nobody’s told them to me yet. We’ll see.

At any rate: As far as I can tell, Alice and I are doing OK. We have sort of a tentative friendship. She decided before I arrived that she was going to step back from nearly all of her ministry roles in the parish and take a “sabbatical” – she even quit choir. Now and then – sometimes at my request, sometimes unprompted – she sends me an email that says something like, “This is what we’ve done at Shrove Tuesday in the past….” The phrasing is never “This is what you should do,” or “This is how it has to be” – it’s “This is how we’ve done it.” She’s a very smart woman, and I think she’s honestly trying to be helpful. I think that she would very much like it if things kept being the way they have always been, but she also realizes she can’t keep running it all forever, & that in letting it go, some change will happen. So… I would say Alice and I are finding our way, bit by bit.

What I’m finding much more difficult than dealing with Alice, is dealing with the hole Alice leaves by stepping back from her former central role. There’s a lot of what I would almost label learned helplessness around here. If Alice doesn’t make it happen, people just stumble around in confusion. My first experience of this was the Shrove Tuesday pancake supper. One of the gentlemen of the church asked me, “Will we have a Shrove Tuesday pancake supper?” I said, “I don’t know. Will we?” It took a little while for me to understand that his question was really a question about the Alice-vacuum – “Will this happen if Alice doesn’t make it happen?” Very much to his credit, that gentleman stepped up and organized Shrove Tuesday, which went very well.

But it keeps happening – the Alice-vacuum – in things great & small. Sometimes, for smaller things, she just shows up & does it – like their Mother’s Day observance. Sometimes she communicates with me about what needs doing, and who might be willing to do it…

Which brings us to the parish picnic. I asked for, & she sent, a long document about the food, the set-up, the games. She suggested a sign-up sheet for various roles – set-up, grill, clean-up, etc. I created a sign-up sheet, & made announcements about it for a couple of weeks, including an invitation for someone to take on the role of Picnic Point Person & make sure all the roles are covered. (During these weeks, I had this inner dialogue with myself repeatedly: “IT IS NOT MY JOB TO RUN THE PARISH PICNIC AND I MUST NOT LET IT BECOME MY JOB. BUT it’s important for there to be a parish picnic…. So I’ll just post a signup sheet/buy a few prizes/help organize the grocery shopping *this year* ….”)

Nobody signed up. Well, almost nobody. Someone signed up to run the grill; someone signed up to buy the cake; someone eventually signed up to bring prizes for the games (though she did NOT want to run the games, due in part to past dynamics with Alice, as far as I can tell). Nobody signed up for setup or cleanup. I had no idea whether anyone would show up. I spend way too much time worrying about whether this picnic would happen.

I wanted the picnic to happen. Alice has other ideas – like a summer outing to the theater – that I can take or leave. But there’s something pretty archetypal about the end-of-the-year parish picnic. And it sounded like it was important to people! – the food, the games, the blankets spread on the grass, kids playing bubbles and drawing with chalk on the sidewalks, the lounging around in the sun together…. It sounded like a keystone fellowship event. I wasn’t going to take on responsibility for making it happen RIGHT, but I felt an obligation to make sure it happened at all…

I contacted Alice early last week to touch base about the lack of volunteers, and she offered to do the shopping, and said that she and her husband could do set-up if nobody else did it. I was relieved to have her help – and I thought, Well, I appreciate her stepping back from leadership roles in many areas, but it would be just fine with me if Alice ran the parish picnic for another decade; that’s a perfectly appropriate role for a long-serving matron of the church!…

The picnic was today. And it was OK, fine, lovely…. but. It felt unstructured. Nobody seemed to know when go to outside. Nobody knew when to start the games. We eventually pulled a couple of games together and played them. I think exactly three people got involved with the games who were not either my family, or Alice’s family. Maybe ten people played in both games, total. Maybe forty or fifty people stayed for lunch (out of 70 at church). But they started trickling away pretty soon. There were maybe 25 there when we started the games. I don’t know, it’s hard to put a finger on. People like to sit and eat together, that’s fine, but it didn’t feel rollicking. It didn’t feel like it had a life of its own.

A telling moment: Early in the event, while people were still milling around trying to figure out how to transition from coffee hour to picnic, I found myself standing briefly with two other women of the parish, who were trying to figure out who was in charge. Maybe John, who’s running the grill? No, John says Alice is in charge. But Alice says she’s leaving (no idea what that’s about; she was there before the event and after it, so if she left, it was to sit in her car during the picnic itself…). So if Alice isn’t in charge, who can tell us what to do? The question, it transpired, was whether it was OK to bring out the side dishes and put them on the outside table yet. I suggested that they could make their own decision based on what made sense to them. They looked at each other, looked at me, shrugged. One of them said, “OK, I guess we’ll bring them out.” And they did. And of course, that was fine.

That’s the moment that brought the phrase “learned helplessness” to mind. I truly don’t think Alice meant to do it, but she has these folks believing that they need her permission to bring the side dishes from the kitchen to the picnic table. That’s… not good.

So… the picnic, as a whole, felt flat to me. Underwhelming. OK, but not a rollicking good time. And I don’t know why not. I fretted a little, vaguely, about whether I could or should have done anything differently (before reminding myself for the umpteenth time that organizing the parish picnic is NOT MY JOB). Did the picnic underwhelm because Alice would have done more to round people up, organize and bully people into being there and doing stuff and playing the games and having a good time?

Or is it the opposite: is the picnic stale and under-attended because people are a little weary of these events that were Alice’s signature events?… I think especially of those games. My husband and my son and I, making a good show of being gung-ho; and Alice’s two teenage grandkids; and three other people. Something tells me we’re not meeting a widely-felt need, there.

Which all means that maybe it *isn’t* OK after all if Alice runs the church picnic for another decade. Maybe people around here are just weary with anything that has the faintest echo of Alice’s past bossiness around it.

So… *does* the parish picnic matter? Is this an outworn paradigm? Does this event have Alice’s fingerprints on it too much to be salvageable? – should we try something entirely different next year? ….

Your insights, reflections, further questions I should be pondering, are always welcome….

I’ve been on a sewing tear. I got a great book for Christmas that’s inspiring me, and I’m still exploring/enjoying the free!!! serger that came my way last fall, and I have a sewing station in this house which, while far from perfect, is muchly much much better than the one in the old house. So I’m having fun with fabric. I finished a pair of pants and a light pullover raincoat I’d started for Zag way back last summer, and I’m working on a batch of skirts and a batch of T-shirts.

Here’s a shirt I just finished for Zag, and one of the skirts – terrible photos, hardly  Etsy-worthy, but hey, at least I’m posting pictures of something!…

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