Teaching Kids about the False Gender Binary

Today, Kim Frizzle wore a pin that reads "Challenge False Binaries" and began class with an unmarked picture of an American child who lived about 100 years ago.
"Do you know who this is, or when this picture is from?"

"No."

"That's okay. What CAN you observe about it?"

"She has a white dress/a hat with a feather/an interesting haircut... I'd guess she's about 3 or 4 years old... It must be an old picture, not just because it's in black and white but because she's not smiling and usually today photographers get kids to smile for pictures..."

"Great! Yes, this picture is probably from 1884, so the person was about 2 years old. This was one of our country's former presidents: Franklin Delano Roosevelt. See? Here he is all grown up."

"...waaaaaat."

"Do you have a question?"

"Why was he in a dress?!"

So we learned the history of a few cultural norms, including the tradition of dressing boys and girls in white dresses until about age 6 basically just because white was bleachable/thought to be a "kid" color, and how pink and blue emerged (and eventually swapped) as color "codes" around the WWII era.

We looked at the pictures from the Lumberjanes series and noticed how different all the girls look - their body types and hairstyles and fashion choices, quite different from what we're used to seeing in, say, Disney movies.

We talked about frustrations we feel when we're shopping for new clothes and it feels like a lot of choices have already been decided for us.

We learned what "inclusive language" means (they knew the phrase from around the church, but not what it meant). We recalled the Doxology we sing and how in this church instead of "Father and Son" we say "Creator and Christ." (Later on, the kids silenced our activity room just to be able to listen for these words during the service.)

We studied several feminine images for God used throughout the Bible, and talked about the kids' perception (one they brought up) that girls are encouraged to look up to men and sometimes to emulate traits considered masculine, and boys are comparably less encouraged or actively discouraged from looking up to women and emulating traits considered feminine.

We read an article from a mother talking about her 5-year-old son, who agrees vehemently he's a boy and also loves painting his nails and wearing dresses. We learned from this mom that some of the best ways to love people are to listen to them, to use the pronouns and names they ask us to use for them, and not to assign them a label based only on our perceptions of them. (I revised an excerpt from the full text at this link; I removed some major portions and some otherwise significant terms for both time and clarity suited for where they're at right now.)

We learned that sometimes it's good for kids to learn cultural lessons from adults about "how things work" and "why things are," but they should also trust their inner sense of who they are.

And then we spent the rest of the time making fashionable people cutouts to adorn the bulletin board beside the Pride flag. The signs we'll post with them read: "God is gender fluid" with a definition below it, and: "WE ARE ALL MADE IN GOD'S IMAGE."

This is one of the ways I followed up with the kids who asked me about a month ago, 'Why can't boys wear dresses?' Question-led lessons are my favorite lessons.

If you are also an educator/caregiver and any part of this lesson plan would be helpful to you, you are welcome and encouraged to use it.

10 Things About Being Not-Depressed Post-Depression

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For almost two years, this post has been sitting unrevisited and unrevised amongst the drafts of my blog. It's especially interesting to me now to rediscover it and read what it felt like to be no-longer-depressed right on the heels of depression, because I'm currently in a funny combination-state of health and grief and possibility, along with a sense of the changing season and anticipation for all that might mean.

In short, my point-of-view today is vastly different from my perspective while deep in depression but even a little different from when I wrote this list at the end of 2013. And that's why I'd like to share this. Not just to revisit it myself, but to preserve and make visible one more nuance of such an experience. Writers and artists have done well in recent years to show others what depression looks and feels like for them, and I think it's helpful to understand not just the moments during, but also in-between and before and afterward.

I'm revising the writing now for "publishable clarity," but I'm channeling my 2013 self to maintain the dignity and authenticity of the content as though I'm my own ghost writer.

---

To quote Joni Mitchell, "you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone" (Big Yellow Taxi).

Living in the state of not-depressed is so unfathomably different after the experience of depression that I can't help but notice the contrast on a visceral level. At this point, I feel like I can identify what depression "was" for me better than I could ever identify what it "is" while still in the midst of it.

But I'd like to take this opportunity of clear-mindedness to describe 10 things I'm experiencing right now, at this stage of "shortly after" - this odd moment of vivid awareness and general wellness.

Of course, this is only my list of 10 things. This may or may not look anything like what others experience.

1. It will happen again.

-This is threefold: sort of fear/dread, sort of resignation, sort of identity crisis. Who am I with/without this illness? How much a part of me is it? When will it strike and what will it disrupt next? With all of these, there's an underlying sense of "when, not if" it will happen again.

-I'm also still trying to differentiate depression and grief and dark night of the soul. I know I've experienced all 3 within the past 3 years, often overlapping, but in some cases, how do I know what was which? What can I expect in the future?

2. Survivor's guilt.

-The ever-constant questions: Why me? Why did it recede for me and not for others?

-The guilt of healing is tightly entwined with the occasional disbelief that healing actually happened at all, or a disbelief that the experience was as damaging and painful as it felt at the time. Knowing the ways that other people suffer in depression, I sometimes look back and minimize my own suffering by thinking things like, "it 'only' compromised my academic career and social life." I know I should know better - that it's possible for it to have been both debilitating for me and different from others' experiences.

3. Control and lack of control.

-I feel mostly grounded and steady again. And yet, despite my consistent efforts toward health and healing, the improvement seems almost as incomprehensible as the depression itself. How did this happen? Why have I reached this point without using any drugs or medications? What ultimately made the difference, or was it just another change in the seasons of life? Will I ever know?

4. Breadth and depth of perspective.

-Despite the survivor's guilt, I have a relatively realistic and holistic perspective on the past. Except in my moments of doubt, I grasp the reality of the pain that I experienced and the kinds of things that happened in the midst of it - grief, shattered world views, injured pride/self-esteem, community transition and communal suffering. All of it makes sense in a way that defies even those doubts and feelings of irrationality which still linger.

5. Awareness of joy.

-Like painting with a full palette of emotion and sensation. Like the world is in color and motion, and I can actually tell. And it's not that I'm suddenly confined to happiness. Having the full range of emotions is liberating, and getting lost in any one emotion at a time does not feel particularly defining of who I am.

-I also now understand that, mid-dark night of the soul, I was still able to experience non-sunshiny forms of joy even if I wasn't always attuned to them or didn't know how to create them myself, so it was not necessarily an absence of joy as it was a matter of redefining and contextualizing it. Hence the "awareness."

6. Appetite and nostalgia.

-I have not only an interest in food again, but even sentimentality for favorites and specifically for nostalgic meals, like a pub's beef stew that made me homesick for the UK. Rarely could I experience any of that while depressed. It makes me look back and wonder, what was I eating? Was I eating? I don't even know.

7. Reading comprehension and memory.

-Words on the page actually register. I'm still a (lifelong) slow reader who doesn't always skim well, especially when I get invested in something... but I can actually get invested in something I read now. And remember it!

-Even if I don't remember all the details, I can generally recall how and where to access information I've recently seen. My work no longer feels like a literal impossibility.

8. Coherence in conversation and writing.

-Even audible words have recognizable meaning in a way that they didn't before, like my vocabulary has been restored. I can comprehend what other people say, express myself, and participate in actual conversation.

-I have a willingness to ask questions again. I didn't realize how much I'd missed it, how much a part of me and my learning style this usually is.

9. Creative arts and hobbies.

-Just recently I've played piano, painted, finished a novel-length draft and several short stories, and composed my first full song with lyrics and music. Mediocre quality as all of these projects may be, I don't even care. It just feels good to create. I had been doing some writing and piano-dabbling during the depression, but not to this extent, and those things were more of a lifeline than a joy.

10. Unconditional love.

-I'm experiencing boundless love and mercy for others' imperfections as well as my own. Right now no one can disappoint me, and I'm slow to see fault where there may only be a matter of unpredictability or circumstance. I want to hear all sides to everything, or even just be present to people when they can't articulate their experience. Obviously I'm in school for ministry, so I've always wanted to do both of these things, but now they have a new urgency and depth to them.

Loving Bodies

Yes. it is beautiful. But not exclusively important,
and that's what took me a regrettably long time to learn.

It has long been an interest of both feminism and religious groups to foster an understanding of human worth that's not just skin-deep.

As a 20th-21st century woman, I consistently learned from guardians, mentors, and no small amount of media (or counter-media) that I should find a mate who would love me not only for my body but also for my mind.

This, I think, has been a good thing. But even good things have their limits.

Part of me may have always known this, but I really began to think about such standards for love in earnest a few years ago when my grandfather was dying.

He had Parkinson's disease, and by the last years of his life the capabilities of both his body and his mind were irreparably diminished. He was a strong, smart man who eventually could not recognize his loved ones or find his way home or feed himself.

It was not a love for his mind (what it was then or what it once had been) that made my grandmother and the rest of my family continue to care for him until his final moments.

This tangible caring may have stemmed from emotional connection, but they understood what we understand when we care deeply for any human being. They tended to him and gave him every dignity they could. Not just because he had done the same for his parents and children, or because he was once a hardworking and self-sufficient intellectual. They did it because they knew and loved a human being, regardless of circumstance.

When I experienced grief and depression around that same time, my partner and friends and family loved me not because they were in love with my mind (as it was then or what it once had been), but because they loved me, the whole me, no matter what changes I faced, and they were determined to show me that as best as they could.

(Circumstances never define the human being we love, just the ways in which we might show love to them.)

And that's when I knew how beautiful it could be to love a body.

So I'm not willing to let measures of beauty - even ostensibly honorable measures like in the image above - strip me of any amount of my humanity. And I'm not willing to privilege emotional love and mental love so consistently over physical love, whether that physicality is sex, or snuggling, or caring for someone when they're ill, or massaging someone's aches and pains.

For those who know that I'm demisexual, someone whose attractions depend almost solely on an emotional connection, this anti-hierarchy of love may come as a surprise. But the commitment to owning our own reality and affirming others' realities, whatever they may be, is marvelously compatible with seeing oneself or someone else as a whole person. In fact, many of us on the asexual spectrum appreciate physical acts of love as part of our own everyday reality, and our personal values will vary as much as in any other group.

For those for whom this is not a matter of innate preferences but of spiritual edification, consider what "loving bodies" looks like at its best in your religion. For Christians, even traditional marriage vows have included "to have and to hold" and "in sickness and in health," and remember how consistently that incarnate Jesus fed bodies, washed bodies, healed bodies. If we disembody our partners and our communities, we risk losing significant portions of what it means to be people of faith in relationship.

I'd like to challenge anyone wrestling with the merits of physical love to take note of it when you see it over the next few days. It could well be platonic or familial or neighborly, but notice some tangible interaction of profound caring between two or more fleshy humans. Notice how some acts are inextricably interwoven with mind and emotion, and how some are the embodiment of love in their own right.

Will you love some-body?

The Last Day Lament

I led this prayer on the last day of our worship course (the day that we sang all the hymns that the students had written, hence the thematic transition at the end).

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A Seminary Psalm: The Last Day Lament

O God of Time, infinitely and intimately ours,
We are students and faculty facing the end of another semester;
Some of us the end of our journey at Drew.

We are buried beneath literal and digital stacks of paperwork,
Crunching out reports, and recuperating from computer crashes.
We are following guidelines and looking toward deadlines
And yet, despite so many straightforward lines,
We lose ourselves in a whirlwind of expectations.

O God of Grace, whose Book of Life has no column for grades,
We are students and faculty facing constant measurement:
Our mistakes and retakes, our credits and diplomas.
Our publish-or-perish publications, our tenure and evaluations.
We see A's and B's and C's and I's, NR's, and Z's,
And we wonder what they say about us;
About our learning and about our teaching.
We absorb letters on transcripts
As though they spell who we are and what we do.
But our identity is in You, O God:
You call us Beloved.
And our purpose is in You, O God:
You call us to Live, to Learn, and to Love.

Deliver us, O God!
Deliver us from the finality of our finals,
The pressure of our presentations,
The stress of our tests,
And the insidious voice inside us
Insisting that we've come to Drew
For any other reward or reason
Than the one for which You've led us here.

And thank You, God of Song,
That in the midst of our reading and writing,
We can claim this sacred time and space
To give You glory and praise.
Let all that we are and do be a song to You!

Amen.

The Voice of Evil

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"I will separate them, one

from the other,

drive them into

isolation

(cars and cubicles and personal space),

and then

let them believe

that they need to be normalized,

to be like all of those people

that they don't really know

at all."

I'm Not Gonna (An Anthem for Amanda)

A parody based on Love Song by Sara Bareilles

I once heard that Sara Bareilles' anti-Love Song was written not for a romantic partner but for the music industry.  Bareilles wanted to compose songs for the sake of what she wanted to say and how she wanted to say it.  It got me thinking about the kinds of compromises people might make in their professions – especially moral and creative compromises – and the choice to draw the line somewhere.

So this parody goes out to my friend Amanda and candidates for ministry of all denominations, with a special shout-out to the United Methodist Church's District Committee on Ordained Ministry (DCOM).

I haven't had the pleasure of going to DCOM yet, but I've heard a lot of stories about people considering ordination who have reservations about one issue or another that might prevent them from being ordained.  Often this means a conundrum for the candidate: How much can I disclose about what I believe, who I am, or what has happened in my past?  What language will I use in prayer and worship?  Will I speak to God differently while in the presence of my superiors and my parishioners?

I've heard about people who struggle with using patriarchal or lordship language for the divine; people who belong to the LGBT community or who would otherwise ordain or wed them in their pastoral role; and people who have different understandings of what it means to be welcoming, inclusive, or ecumenical and what it means for the United Methodist Church to brand itself with the slogan "Open Hearts, Open Minds, Open Doors."  I've heard about people who challenge the desperate need for quantity over quality: attracting members but falling short of fortifying them and nourishing their souls.  I've heard about people who have lost their ministerial jobs or new opportunities because of health concerns (usually mental health), including one man who was at the top of a committee's list to become their next pastor until they discovered that he'd previously been institutionalized.

The fact that this man and others in all of these situations wrestle with how much to "tell" those who make decisions about their ordination or employment begs a few questions:

Do our churches want clergy who fit a certain image, even if someone must lie or withhold information about themselves, their personal histories, their health, their beliefs, their ideas?  To what extent will they support the virtues of authenticity and honesty?  To what extent are they willing to have diversity among the clergy – not just of race and age and so forth, but also of perspectives and abilities and experiences?

Please substitute the theme "I'm not gonna pray to 'Lord Jesus'" with the ordination-threatening issue of your choice, i.e. "I'm not gonna say I'm a straight man," "I'm not gonna call God the 'Father,'" or even something as broad as "I'm not gonna keep out the outcasts."  It's really about being authentic while pursuing your vocation more than any one theological conflict.

Heading to D-COM
Where you tell me
To breathe easy for awhile
But breathing gets harder
Even I know that
My ministry?
It's too soon to see
And my future's in your hands
(After the part I say what I need to)

Blank stares on your faces
No easy way to say this
You mean well, but you make this hard on me

I'm not gonna pray to "Lord Jesus"
'Cause you're used to it, 'cause it serves you, you see
I'm not gonna pray to "Lord Jesus"
'Cause you tell me it's make-or-breaking this
If I'll be ordained
I'm not gonna lie just to stay
If you want an honest clergy
Then I pray you don't desert me
When I stand
Before you today

I've learned the hard way
That we all say things you wanna hear
God's called on us
But it's still your call
You can still say who's in
What counts as sin
Fill the church with your closest kin
Hello to high and dry

Convince me to please you
Make me think that God wants this, too
I'm trying to let you hear me as I am

I'm not gonna pray to "Lord Jesus"
'Cause you're used to it, 'cause it serves you, you see
I'm not gonna pray to "Lord Jesus"
'Cause you tell me it's make-or-breaking this
If I'll be ordained
I'm not gonna change just to stay
And after all, I think it's wise
That I refuse to compromise
My conscience and lie here today

Promise me you'll leave the light on
To help me be
Whom God has called on
'Cause I believe there's a way
To accept me because I say
I won't pray to "Lord Jesus"
'Cause you're used to it, 'cause it serves you, you see
I'm not gonna pray to "Lord Jesus"
'Cause you tell me it's make-or-breaking this

Is that why you want a "Lord Jesus"?
'Cause you're used to it, 'cause it serves you, you see
I'm not gonna pray to "Lord Jesus"
'Cause you tell me it's make-or-breaking this
If I'll be ordained
I'm not gonna lie just to stay
If there's lordship language in it
I don't want it for a minute
And some silently agree but
I believe that our dear Jesus
Would want me to speak up today

An Open Letter to My Classmates in Prison

A letter written to the inside students in a course that I'm taking as part of my Master's degree. The course emphasizes that students from Drew and those within the Correctional Facility are all classmates, studying together. It is not traditional "prison ministry" but in fact a partnership.

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Dear Inside Students,

I am an Outside Student who may never know what it is to be an Inside Student, or even what it is to be on the inside. Studying in a prison setting is a new experience for me, and I admit that it was just a little bit easier to do it because I was going in the company of friends I already knew and faculty I already trusted.

Maybe you didn't know anybody when you first went in. I imagine it might have been difficult not only to be sentenced but also to be sent somewhere without a familiar face, especially the kind of loved one who knows who you are so well that they can remind you from time to time when you're down and out. For better or for worse, my identity is wrapped up in the relationships I have, the jobs I do, the clothing I wear to portray a certain image of myself—professional or casual or colorful or quiet. So much about these parts of your life might have changed when you got to the premises—old relationships reshaped by new circumstances, new relationships forged, new jobs assigned, personal fashion minimized. Individual identity as we know it in the contemporary western world is difficult to express under such limited parameters. This, at least, is my understanding so far, though I would rather hear your experience from your perspective, and I hope to do so over the next few months.

It's just that, as you began to talk about some of these things, even as briefly as we spoke before we moved on to discuss our actual course material for the term—music's role and expression in different world religions—I began to realize just how much certain elements of your current experience remind me, in some way, of my own. With that, I began to realize how much you could teach me and nurture me in even a few short hours. And lest you think I'm just getting sappy and waxing poetic here, let's just say the potency of the whole thing knocked me on my ass. So that's why I'm writing this. Because, sooner or later, potential energy turns kinetic. Sometimes.

You see, I had never been to prison before this week, but I've been locked up for about five years now.

The officials who give names to such things call my prison grounds Depression. I and others here have known it to be Hell.

Maybe you are locked up here, too. Maybe you know many prisons. As far as I can tell, knowing one is one too many.

Whatever built the walls around you, I can't possibly imagine that I know what you are experiencing. No two prisons are the same, nor are two people's dealings with depression. Incarceration and depression are not the same. But they share common ground. I think you and I may share common ground.

I may have shown signs of anxiety and depression in childhood, but I was what The Powers That Be consider high-functioning in most aspects—yes, I was (am) awkward and content to spend inordinate amounts of time alone, reading or writing or messing around with art supplies to no remarkable end except personal relaxation. But I had some extraordinary friends and high marks in school and a surprisingly positive attitude, which all mostly outweighed the low self-confidence and the phobias and the panic. So maybe that's why the first major lockdown five years ago still took me by utter surprise.

Since then, I was paroled a few times—had brighter days, months, seasons here and there. For a little while I thought I'd even gotten out for good. But somehow I keep finding myself in Depression. It's not always exactly the same as before; the way that the pain and the exhaustion and the loneliness manifest changes a little every time, I learn a new lesson now and then, and what exactly I am able to accomplish while in the thick of it varies, but it's just a different circle of Hell. It's just a different cell on the same old block.

It's a place where sometimes it doesn't even matter that I have relationships and work and clothing to identify myself; because my relationships become strained with heightened conflict or in my isolation, my work suffers in the midst of mutism and fatigue, and dressing myself becomes either a mindless ritual or a burden. These are just outward signs of the inward loss of identity, an inner hopelessness in the realization that I am not me, or at least I suspect that I am not me but I'm having trouble remembering who I was in the first place.

Even worse, I begin to wonder, what if? What if this is me now? What if I am stuck with this me for the rest of my life? What if signs of healing and hope aren't even real, like a mirage in desert heat? What if I'm only healing because I'm too scared of being broken, and in my haste, I'll put the pieces back together wrong?

Maybe I don't need to worry too much about being hasty. These days I am undergoing some sort of really long, drawn-out parole process. One step forward, two steps back, and a splurge of two steps forward when even I don't expect it—makes it hard to replicate it when I want to. I am not quite in but I am not quite out, either. I still haven't figured out how to earn my way out, how to prove myself worthy of freedom. It seems kind of arbitrary, if you ask me.

I imagine it may take longer than usual, because this last bout really threw me for a loop. I've never been so thoroughly stripped of what I thought made me who I am. I've never been so voiceless and vulnerable. I've never had so little concentration and common sense—utterly unable to retain information, picking up a hot baking pan with my bare hand, falling asleep and boiling off a whole pot of water, forgetting things and forgetting that I've forgotten things. I've never failed so damn perfectly to care for myself with the most basic tasks or to complete the coursework that I've had my heart set on doing ever since I discerned a call to ministry, a call which thus far refuses to go away in spite of my inabilities and failures. And I've never felt so scared of the next time I'm going to end up here; scared that someday I won't make it out.

When I first sought help, a school administrator asked me to paint a verbal image of what I was facing. It was no easy task since so much of my depression was and often still is a sort of mutism, a struggle for words.

One of us, whoever it was, eventually described the proverbial pit. In the midst of this metaphor, she talked about how hard it can be to climb the ladder and get out.

I looked at her in genuine awe, because the part of my brain that was visualizing the pit suddenly short-circuited: "There's a ladder?"

Not in my pit! At least, I didn't see one there, even while actively seeking help. I knew I needed to start talking to people about what was going on, but I still didn't see the way out.

I guess I wonder if no amount or type of treatment is going to get me entirely out of Depression. And even if I do get out, I'm always going to carry around this record. It's going to make people look at me differently. It's going to make it easier for some people to know and trust me, but it's going to make it harder for others. The more I try to bury it, the more persistently it will sow doubts in me about what I'm capable of doing and whether or not other people love the real me. The more openly I speak of it, the more authentic I will feel; but the more authentic I feel in that, the clearer it will become that this struggling, fragmented person is in fact who I am.

Before we left for the correctional facility to meet you, we heard from a former inside student who said she eventually realized: "I wasn't who people in Blue said I was. It was a bump in the road that didn't define who I am or could be." She said that we outside students would be gift-bearers, bringing hope; bringing your minds outside of the wall—to our everyday world, to the worlds of the texts we read and the music we hear. She said it's easy for a person's mind to become trapped along with her body and to become immersed in despair and loneliness and uncertainty because of where she is.

What you may not realize is that I am in the opposite situation: my state of mind easily incapacitates my body, and I don't know how long I will live in this situation. I do know that partnering with you in this course that has everything and nothing to do with liberation—this foray into the music of the world's religions—is already helping to liberate me in some small way. That's because this program challenges the very definition of liberation.

In my case, my mind is locked up, and coming to see you and work alongside you means that my body is not imprisoned by the state of my mind.

It means that I have something meaningful to go and do; bright, friendly people to speak to and listen to, even when my inner consciousness tries to persuade me to shut down and shut people out.

It means that I will spend a few hours of the week with people who value freedom as much as I have come to.

It means that even my mind will be freed in a way I may not have known was possible; learning your insights and seeing the world anew through your lens, just as the outside students share our ideas and perspectives with you.

You may want the freedom of stepping off the premises more than anything else. Maybe a freed mind, as our orientation speaker called it, is just one small freedom you willingly accept for now. I want to step out of the grounds of Depression and free my mind as much as I want my next breath. But if it turns out that I reside here all my life, or if it follows me out the door like any complicated past that one would rather leave behind, it does not need to mean that I am lost to it.

That is what I have learned from you already. And I have learned that we are not so different, you and I, in at least this much: We are not who they say we are. And if someone has convinced us otherwise, then we must help each other to remember who we are and imagine who we will be.

See you in class,
The Outside Student Inside Different Walls

Letter to Grandpa

I offered the following letter as the eulogy at my grandfather's funeral this week. Grandpa just recently celebrated his 91st birthday and lived with my parents and grandmother for the past two years. His health and strength, both cognitive and physical, deteriorated gradually due to Parkinson's Disease, and he received home hospice care for the past 10 months. (I wrote about him here in October 2010 as well.)

This gradual process was painful for him and for all of us. Indeed, it raised many theological questions for me. And while I still do not have all of the answers (nor do I expect to), I do believe I have been given the most important one. The one about identity - who we really are; why we love and are loved.


Source

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Dear Grandpa (my godfather and my "Grandsprout"),

The earliest memory I have of you is walking with you in your vegetable garden in Brooklyn. One time, I found a stick there and you let me bring it home for our dog like some kind of souvenir. (Because I was visiting one of the coolest places I'd ever been, and I had to go out and share a part of it with somebody.)

That's how I feel about the love that you and Nana have shared. That needs to be passed along to everyone. It isn't just your garden variety kind of love. It is tenderly planted, lovingly grown, and devotedly protected. It has deep roots and widespread branches. But the best part is that you were always inviting us to walk in your garden. You and Nana both loved so many friends and family members, too.

You loved us with every bowl of soup and plate of manicotti, every fresh-baked loaf of bread, and every homegrown veggie. You loved us in the way you cared for your parents and your neighbors. You loved us in wanting the best for us, and in reconciling when it was time for reconciliation.

And then there is what I learned through all the people who have been loving you and caring for you. Your wife, your children, our extended family, our church congregation, ministers and chaplains, and our own personal fleet of angels: the caregivers and aides and healthcare professionals who may have pulled up in the driveway as strangers, but came through the door as friends, and left the house as family.

Because love like this means that there are no strangers, only more people to feed. (And we like that.)

As the dementia progressed, it was so difficult to see everything we thought made you "you" slowly begin to slip away - your sharp mind, your memories, your strong sense of self. We loved those things about you. But they weren't why we loved you. And I finally realize that there is a difference.

I believe that we receive grace from God not because of what we do or who we think we are, but because of who God is and what God does. And I believe that we are to love each other like that as best as we can: not because of who we think we are or should be, but because of who God says we are - that we are all meant to love and be loved. Unconditionally. No matter the circumstances.

The last memory I have of you is from Christmas. Nana and Mother and Dad and I were playing Apples to Apples and laughing so hard. And you were laughing with us. The joy we felt in each other's company was palpable.

Grandpa, we miss you now that you have continued on, but you aren't far from our minds or hearts. And I hope the joy that I feel in knowing that you are at peace today is just as palpable as our joy together on Christmas Day.

Love,
Sprout

The Impromptu Travel Companion

As I mentioned in the account about the time that I did not sleep in a ditch, I was, for the most part, a lone traveler.

Until Tim.

Short curly brown hair. Slight space between his two front teeth. Europe Guide Book glued to his hand. Backpack big enough to carry a limp body.

In a nutshell, the antithesis of me with exception to the friendly disposition - friendly enough that the likelihood of him actually carrying a body around seemed fairly low.

I'd taken what might be considered the Incognito Approach to backpacking. I dressed casually in plain prints and colors - minimal logos and lettering - and carried only the bookbag I'd used in high school. In any given place, if I looked enough like I knew where I was (not frequently the case, but nevertheless), I imagine I looked more like a student than a tourist.

And generally, that was more accurate. Between budgeting my trip and realizing that my own priorities tended to be less the museums and attractions than plain people-watching and wandering around town, I spent much more time "playing local" than tourist. True to the guide book in hand, Tim preferred to scope out good restaurants and famous landmarks.

On the other hand, he also liked to scope out the McDonald's in each place he visited, not to eat there but to check the price of a cheeseburger for means of comparison. Apparently you can tell a lot about a city by how much the fast food costs. I was slightly less interested in this undocumented study and slightly more willing to treat it as a scavenger hunt.

There was one thing that Tim and I had in common, though: we had each done the majority of our journey on our own. I'd found that traveling alone seemed more to my benefit than a liability. Not only was I more alert than one may be with a group, but also silent (i.e. less boisterously American), save for the occasional simple phrases to get around. I felt safe on my own.

Theologian Paul Tillich has said that "Language... has created the word 'loneliness' to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word 'solitude' to express the glory of being alone." In between great times of meeting up with friends along the way, I was rather enjoying some glorious solitude.

And as any vacationing being knows, the moment you taste solitude is the moment something or someone stumbles upon your quiet place.

Cue Impromptu Travel Companion. How he went from "fellow tourist" to "impromptu travel companion" is essentially a tale of one man's spontaneous decision to co-opt an acquaintance's plan for a detour through Bologna, Italy, but don't worry, because in the end he turns out not to be a criminal, as far as I know.

So Tim 'n Kim hit the road. Or the train tracks, as the case may be. It might have made for a fun photo in a travel journal or backpackers' catalogue, me with my puny high school backpack and him strapped to that trailblazers' bodybag. It could have doubled as a jetpack if the thing wouldn't weigh him down so much.



On the train, I spent most of the time writing while Tim pored over his traveler's guide book. We were happily quiet company, but all it took for me to miss the glory of solitude was for Tim to ask about what I was writing.

Ain't nobody ask what I'm writing 'less they don't wanna live.

I am not usually what folks would call a "sharer."

I know, strange personality trait for a blogger, but the truth is this: my first blog? I told about three people that it existed. Socially, as do many people, I have very wonderful but very few confidants, which somehow carried over into my willingness to share my writing - even my fiction. In my first (and last) creative writing workshop, I dreaded shopping work, which is oddly a central part of the process.

And one of my college professors once asked, if I wanted to be a writer, why had I never tried to submit any of my work for publication? Was I not even curious? Was it a simple fear of rejection or was it actually that I refused to open up to the point of being a writer who avoided readers?

Blogging (v. 2.0) has actually been a challenge to myself to be more comfortable with articulating the silly and the serious to others; to force myself to complete short pieces of writing meant to be read rather than hoarded. It's taken me a long time to get to this point of openness.

And by all means, I think it's fine for people to be reserved. Privacy and dignity are obviously not shameful, especially in a world of "over-sharing." But some part of me - the part that began AmenAbility, the part that doesn't lose herself in her writing but rather remembers the world as she writes - was ready to be more open to people. And not just as the Giant Ear, a role that I quite like to take on, but also, perhaps, as a Voice.

Why has it been so difficult to embrace that?

So while it was easy to resent the Impromptu Travel Companion for interrupting the glory of solitude and for reminding me that I was the Awkward Loner hovering over a notebook like it might disintegrate if someone else so much as glanced at it, this unusual meeting was also a thought-provoker for me. Made me contemplate why I was so defensive about a fictional story. Because it wasn't already complete? Because it wasn't high quality and it would injure my pride? What, then?

It made me think that maybe, if I pour so much of my being into what I write (yes, even the silly things - especially the silly things), I don't want to wait until I've completed a masterpiece before I'm willing to share my work with other people. I'm all for promoting quality over quantity, but maybe there is something to sharing besides thinking that something is good enough for an audience, that something is done and thus needs no additions or alterations.

My life is thus far unfinished, too, and by no means a work of art. I expect it could use quite a few changes and, I like to think, many additions. It could end tomorrow or it could end years from now - I don't know. But I do know that I don't want to keep life contained and avoid living it with others, either.

So I'll take my chances.

The Male Stewardess Anomaly

About a month ago, I was with a great group of young adults at a swanky shake shop (and when I say swanky, I really just mean that there were shakes with Reese's peanut butter cups). Those on my end of the long pieced-together table were among the silliest, funniest people I'd had the pleasure of meeting for some time. I'd have suspected it was the sugar if it hadn't already started before they ordered.

I can't even recall most of what came up in the course of our conversation, but I'm sure we invented a few words of our own. The bizarre factor escalated enough that my boyfriend and the man across from him (who together bridged the Bizarre Table and the Fun But Far Less Troublesome Table) began a secret experiment, interjecting random once-off statements just to see where we would fly with them.

Come to think of it, that's where the jet-propelled cows came from.


Camo Cow is ace at hiding a jetpack.

In any case, at some point the chat came 'round to flight attendants. (No segue implied; trust me, there was none.) And in the midst of the tangent, someone dropped the phrase "male stewardess."

"There's a word for that," someone else interrupted: "Steward."

All perfectly true. While many people opt for a gender-neutral term like "flight attendant," both "steward" and "stewardess" are valid. For some occupations, I've noticed a potential increase in referring to women in the position by the traditionally masculine title, such as "actor" rather than "actress," what I take to be an intended neutralizer.

Such gender-specific nouns are their own breed of beast, but what I find no less debatable is the use of a modifier, as in a "male nurse." As long as we see this as necessary, there can never be understanding of neutrality.

I used to be (...am?) a word snob. I loved words - loved discovering them and learning how to use them. I loved definitions and connotations and semantics, and sometimes it seemed like spelling was the only test that didn't strike fear into my heart.

But as I've gotten older (and as my spelling skills have increasingly come into question), I've grown into a new sort of linguistic love.

I love the power of words: a phenomenal extension of definitions, connotations, and semantics. I love the power that they hold and the power that we are able to bestow upon them.

But people often assume that a word can have only a certain meaning, and sometimes they're afraid to bend it. It may be a way of honoring the tradition and background of the word, but it may also cheat it of a little bit of modern meaning. While we can't weaken all of our language with linguistic anarchy, we need to remember that we have power over how we use it. We shape our language as much as our language shapes us.

We limit people. We limit ourselves.

When we discussed this at the table, one person furrowed her brow in uncertainty. "'Nurse' for a male still sounds weird."

"It won't," I said, "if people use the word that way."

Revelation

Inspired by part of a class assignment, here is another reflection prompt for you. Simply meditate on it, write it down, or discuss it with a friend or a group:

Reflect on a time that someone else saw something in you that you did not see. Did this revelation surprise you, and why? How did it affect your perception of yourself, of others, or of life? How did you respond?

Do I Look Illegal?

Before taking Religion and the Social Process (i.e. fantastic mandatory course about diversity and social justice, and how the church both helps and hinders in different contexts), I confess I knew little about immigration.



Thanks to J. for sharing this video with our class!

As one who never knew before quite what to say in discussions about immigration, I particularly appreciated a document from the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service debunking common myths. View a copy of it here.

Among the debunked myths are the alleged "illegality" of the majority of immigrants (63% of 31 million foreign-born residents are documented), correlations between immigration and crime rates (U.S. born are incarcerated four times more than the foreign-born), and the supposed drain on the economy (most immigrants arrive after age 18, at which point the U.S. receives "the benefit of their labor without the cost of their education"). Other facts focus upon education, employment, taxes, difficulties in obtaining citizenship, and the struggles particular to families.

It's accessibly written and very much to the point, but it's easy to get lost in the statistics. If just for that, I found one of the other sources we read to be particularly compelling. The American Friends Service Committee provides personal testimonies from an affected population with relatively little self-sovereignty: youth and children.

From the mouths of babes, we hear difficult truths.

To thirteen-year-old Kadiatou, one's worth depends on "having papers," and she believes that her older brother "does not have a chance to be something good in life like the other kids who have papers."

In caring for five younger siblings, including an infant, Jocelyn learns that being a "mother" is much more difficult than she imagined.

In one testimony, a family's lack of new clothing is only exacerbated when the clothing that the children do have is the cause for much of their victimization at school; what could be an insignificant opinion about fashion becomes a vehicle for bullying and aggravated trauma.

Vineta longs not only to fulfill her parents' wishes for her to "have a better future than they had," but also to pass such aid along to others in need, having dreamed of education and career not only for the sake of having them but also to help those without homes or parents. She acknowledges the difficulties that her family faces as well as those that challenge families who may lack even what little she herself has.

Voicing a similar understanding of the prevalence of these problems, Bassidi likewise hopes that his own story has an impact and that Congress will take action.

I have since found audio for many of these testimonies. Hear them and read more about the kids at this link.

I knew little before I read the words of Kadi, Jocelyn, Vineta, and Bassidi; before I saw their photographs and their drawings; before I read the statistics from the LIRS and thought of these families' faces. And I may still never know just what it is to be an immigrant, perhaps to be not only "undocumented" but also labeled "illegal," as though my very being were a crime.

But here is what I do know.

I recently worked full-time as a porter for a cleaning company.

I worked with many immigrants and first-generation Americans. My first supervisor was a competent, respectable man from Egypt. My usual cohorts were the Latina ladies who helped me practice Spanish, lent me hair-ties when we swept 31 hot staircases or weeded the sun-exposed rooftop, and taught me how to function in a uniform intended for a man's body - apparently one without pores that require air.



There, I was in the minority in almost every sense: one of the few females, the youngest, one of few Caucasians, a fourth-generation American, and decidedly not bilingual despite having studied four other languages. And, whereas most either were regular employees or hoped for longer-term work, I knew at the time that it was a temporary position; I was already preparing to attend graduate school this fall. Yet the limited time that I was there and the differences between us did not hinder our ability to forge friendships and work cooperatively and efficiently.

In another building placement, I generally had to work independently and did not get to know many of the other employees, who often arrived en masse for an evening shift. Of those whom I did meet, many had emigrated from Latin America and Eastern Europe.

Before they heard me speak, however, they had little way of knowing where I had been raised, and one evening as they arrived and I packed up to go home, they speculated to one another: "Maybe she's German. Maybe she's Irish. Look at her hair," until one person finally approached me directly.

It was bizarre to be in a position of "defying expectation" – to be a U.S.-born student working toward graduate school in an entry-level job involving restrooms and dumpsters.

However, most intriguing to me in retrospect is that overhearing the group's conversation influenced how I then identified myself. I automatically responded with my ancestral heritages when I really should have just replied, "I'm American. I'm from New York."