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mothers, miscarriage, and a voice

I often use this blog to post silly videos and random by-the-seat-of-my-pants entries to laugh a little at life. It’s a good outlet for me, and while I’m not necessarily interested in growing a huge readership, I know that I have a nice little group of stalwart followers (thanks, y’all!).

Every once in a while, though, I do get serious, and it’s always about something that’s close to my heart. If there’s one thing that my vocation as a teacher has exposed me to, and that I’ve taken absolutely to heart, is that each of us has a story that’s yearning to be told. Our lives are unique — filled with many joys, but also pains. They go hand in hand with this thing we call the human condition.

Bloggers are sometimes guilty of always presenting the best side of our lives. It’s lovely to share photos of family get-togethers that look like Norman Rockwell paintings, and I’ve been guilty a time or two (ha!) of taking a picture that is cropped just right so you don’t see the laundry basket or the pile of papers that gets moved from the table to the counter, and back to the table. It’s all about illusion, isn’t it?

While I love to get hilarious comments from readers over fun posts, it’s actually the serious disclosures, like this one, that get feedback. Why? Because we are all suffering in some way. Each of us, and we so often miss opportunities to connect with others and share these hurts. We can find much healing in the simple act of sharing and discovering that we are not alone in our suffering. Both empathy and sympathy are gifts.

Karen Edmisten, author of After Miscarriage: A Catholic Woman’s Companion to Healing and Hope talks with Pat Gohn this week on a special two-part edition of Among Women Podcast on a subject that is dear to my own heart. I experienced two miscarriages early in my marriage. Twenty-five years ago, the subject was not brought up in polite company. The doctors were horrible to me … one dismissed my second, very early miscarriage, as nothing more than a chemical pregnancy. I don’t even know what that’s supposed to mean. Needless to say, the scars from such an experience go beyond grieving for a lost child.

Pat and Karen discuss this topic with tenderness and honesty, two essential qualities that go a long way in helping women heal, connect, and hope. I hope you pass this along to other women. If we haven’t experienced miscarriage first-hand, the odds are very high that someone close to us has. Share it.

 

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we can often solve our own problems

I love this video! How many times do we allow ourselves to be stuck on an escalator when all we had to do was keep walking?

Ideally, we should just keep going forward, but there’s nothing wrong with hitting the reset button every once in a while and going back to the beginning to take another route (like the stairs).

Hooboy! It’s kinda like going to confession, isn’t it?

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a little mid-Lent pondering

Story-telling on the big silver screen — especially science fiction with cool special effects, captivates me. I recently re-watched Avatar, James Cameron’s blockbuster commentary on deforestation and celebration of generic Earth Mother spirituality, for the sheer beauty of the cinematography.

I could do without the enviro-politics and pantheism, but the relationships were compelling. In fact, I was struck by a beautiful bit of dialog.

The main characters express their love for each other by saying, “I see you.”

I love that. It speaks to a vulnerability that, I admit, can be very frightening. To be seen — really seen — by another person is both excruciatingly painful and terribly liberating.

What an act of love to open ourselves in a such a way. To be seen like this is to say here I am — this is all of me — and I hope it is enough.

It takes every weakness, every fault, and exposes it side by side with what we hope are our best qualities.

There’s no guarantee in that kind of exposure — what if when all is said…and done..and seen, it really isn’t enough?

I’ve been thinking about this for some weeks as I work through a consecration to Jesus through Mary. Like Mary, I’ve been pondering a lot of things. Things I’ve never really thought about too deeply.

In fact, I don’t think I’ve done much pondering in my life. It’s an old-fashioned way of saying thinking, but it’s more — it’s meditation and deep thought.

I admit I’ve been deep in thought, pondering the meaning of this consecration. I’ve sat for hours before the Blessed Sacrament, exposed on the altar (Jesus exposed? Me? Both?), and I’ve pondered many things.

On a very practical level, I understand that Jesus and Mary can see me, can look into my heart and soul and see what’s really there. It’s quite another thing to be an active participant in this relationship and consciously, intentionally, open myself — not to scrutiny, which is what we might fear in human relationships, but something much more — an intimacy beyond my understanding.

It is saying  here I am — this is all of me — but instead of wondering if its’s enough, it’s the consolation that all of it, all of me will be transformed, reformed, conformed into something, someone, better.

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