Anticipation

Some words carry uniformly positive connotations.  Others are definitely negative.  The word anticipation, though, is an example of a word that can go either way.  Try looking it up in a thesaurus.

Two of the synonyms offered in the thesaurus I used were "hope" and "joy" - definitely positive words.  After all, don't you get the warm fuzzies thinking about how you anticipated Christmas when you were a child? 

Anticipation can also bring a great deal of dread.  Any time you've said "Just get it over with!", you are trying to avoid the pain of anticipation.  So, the thesaurus entry for anticipation also reads "apprehension" and "premonition" - negative words for sure!

I've been thinking a lot the last week about this mingled joy and fear as I anticipate Arthur's arrival.  This week, I hit that point in pregnancy where I'm ready to be done being pregnant.  I think this is a totally normal, perhaps even physiological response that allows a woman to prepare for labor, delivery, and everything that comes after.

Frankly, I wondered if I would feel this way during this pregnancy.  Would I just want to stay pregnant forever, knowing that my womb is probably the only place on earth where Arthur can grow and thrive?  Would I look forward at all to his birth?  Would preparing for the big day bring only fear and weeping?

Thankfully, the answer has been no.  I've been surprised over the last few days at how ready I am to hold my little boy, just like any mom who is full-term.  How little I have dreaded collecting and packing things to take to the hospital.  How exciting it was to feel some contractions this week.  How somehow I have that same nervous but happy anticipation I remember from the week before my daughter was born.  I'm so glad God has allowed me to have this normalcy.  There's hope and joy in my anticipation.

Don't get me wrong...I'm not deluding myself into thinking everything will be normal.  In fact, I'm a little upset that my body thinks that everything is normal.  When I leak milk at night.  When I look at the extra pounds that it has collected so I can nurse my baby.  When I'm wakeful in the middle of the night, ready to rock a little one.  My body obviously hasn't received the memo.

But here's how I think I can explain my excitement.  If someone has promised you a yummy ice cream cone, do you look forward to it more or less depending on how big it is?  No!  You just long for the moment when you can taste it, no matter if it is gone in a couple of licks or if it is so big that it melts before you can eat the last bite.  Just because the time I get to have with my baby may be shorter than usual doesn't mean that I don't want that time to come.

I'm excited for Arthur's birth.  But I'm flummoxed when I try to think of after.  It struck me as odd this week when I bought milk that expires on Arthur's due date...I might have said goodbye to him by the time the milk goes bad.  When I realized that the next time our bi-monthly Bible study meets, I may be home alone, sore and with empty arms.  I've wavered between trying not to think about the "after" at all (because I'm so scared of what it may hold) and trying to anticipate what it's going to be like (because that's the kind of person I am...)  Here's where the apprehension and premonition come in.

I'm hoping that it's like a roller coaster.  (Well, I know it will be like a roller coaster...but in a different way...)  I am not a terribly brave roller-coaster rider.  I'm the one who has to be talked into entering the gate and dragged through the line.  Who clams up and gets really quiet when we get to the front of the line and our car pulls up.  Then a few minutes later, the ride is over and it seems that all the fearful anticipation might have been worse than the actual fear I felt on the ride.

So, there you go.  That's what it's like these days anticipating Arthur.  

No More Chocolate?

Our favorite fro-yo place

After the last month or so, I have decided that a large part of parenting is teaching one's child to deal appropriately with emotions and feelings they cannot control.  Allow me to explain.

I cannot make my child feel happy when I tell her that she can't have a cookie or she can't watch Do-Mi-Mi (The Sound of Music) right now.  I cannot make joy spring up in her heart when I tell her she has to wait.  I cannot make her like to eat green beans. 

I came to this startling realization when we took her out for frozen yogurt for the first time.  Every toddler's dream, right?  Chocolate ice cream pouring into a bowl out of a spout in the wall, then you get to put berries and cereal all over it.  I could barely get a bite in edgewise.

Then it happened.  We ate the last bite.  My daughter was crushed.  She began to sob "Mo chaw-chaw!  Mo chaw-chaw!" when she looked at the bottom of the cup with only little dribbles of melted chocolate.  As I scooped her up for us to make a quick exit, I said "I know how you feel, sweetheart.  Mommy wants to cry when the chocolate is all gone too."  I was kind of jesting, but not really.  In that moment, I recognized that if I, as an adult, still want to cry when the chocolate is all gone, the difference between me and my toddler is not a lack of sadness and disappointment, but a willingness to express that sadness and disappointment in a societally acceptable way, or even to just keep it to myself.

So, my job is not to change my child's emotions...that, in fact, is outside of the range of my powers and will have to be left to God, the only One who can change hearts.  Instead, I have to teach her how to express (or perhaps not express!) her emotions in an appropriate manner. Come to think of it, I had a similar challenge with many high school students.  So, I think this is going to be a lesson that takes a while to teach.

When I look at my toddler wailing "No!" and running off to bury her head in the couch in disappointment any number of times between 4:30 and 6:00 pm, I feel a little overwhelmed (How can I teach her to be a functioning member of society?), a little amused (It really is the end of the world when you have to wait!) and a little sympathetic.  I see myself in her.  While I don't (always...) cry and cover my face with pillows when I don't get my way, I still feel about the same way inside.

One of the most beautiful pictures in the Bible is the idea that God is our Father.  When you consider all the love, compassion, teaching, provision, and nearness that a parent gives his child, you are getting closer to understanding who God is and how He feels about us.

God isn't demanding that I change my initial emotional response to life.  He knows that some circumstances in my life will elicit fear, sadness, anger.  Psalm 103:13-14 are some of my favorite verses on this matter.

Just as a father has compassion on his children,
So the Lord has compassion on those who fear Him.

For He Himself knows our frame;
He is mindful that we are but dust

I know He won't give up parenting me, teaching me to respond to my disappointment in a way that honors Him (just like I can't give up teaching my daughter not to throw fits!).  But it's so good to know, right now, when I often feel weak and frail, when I often feel like crying "No!" and throwing my body on the ground, God knows and understands.  And rather than despise me for it, He loves me, like I love my poor little girl who can't deal with life when the chocolate is all gone. 

Feel the Love

I do think that flowers show love, though ;)

I often have to apologize to my husband for not being a typical, touchy-feely romantic girl.  To me, love is not holding hands and kissing in the middle of the kitchen while dinner burns.  Love is holding hands and kissing when all the dishes are done.  But no one makes movies about that. 

I know there have been eloquent books written on how different people communicate and receive love differently.  My favorite example of this, though, comes from a song in the musical Fiddler on the Roof.  Teyva's wife Golde apparently has the same "love language" that I do.  Here are a couple of the verses:

(Tevye)
"I know..."
But do you love me?
(Golde)
Do I love you?
For twenty-five years I've washed your clothes
Cooked your meals, cleaned your house
Given you children, milked the cow
After twenty-five years, why talk about love right now?
 (Tevye)
"I know..."
But do you love me?
(Golde)
Do I love him?
For twenty-five years I've lived with him
Fought him, starved with him
Twenty-five years my bed is his
If that's not love, what is?

I don't want to say that feelings have no place in love; obviously, they do.  Human emotion is a powerful and beautiful thing, and love is perhaps the strongest of human emotions. 

And yet real love is not primarily emotion.  Or perhaps it would be better to say love is not solely emotion.  Love is action.  If you were asked to prove how you know someone loves you, chances are you would begin to list things they do.

That's how God proved that He loves us, and how He explains what it means to love.  I John 3:16a says "We know love by this, that He laid down His life for us;"

It doesn't stop there, though.  In I John 3, God keeps explaining what it means to love.
..."and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren. But whoever has the world’s goods, and sees his brother in need and closes his heart against him, how does the love of God abide in him? Little children, let us not love with word or with tongue, but in deed and truth." 

God showed what love is when He sent Jesus to die in our place.  But He also gives us an incredible opportunity to show what love is.  If you have been saved, God's love abides in you.  And I John is clear that God's love abiding in us isn't just a touchy-feely love.  It isn't even a love of words.  It is a love of action. And we have a responsibility to live out that love.

One of the ways I know right now that God loves me is because of all the beautiful love I am receiving from God's people.  People who carve out time in their day to write me, call me, text me, visit me, allow me to visit them, bring me coffee or lunch.  People who send meals or restaurant gift cards.  People who mow our lawn.  People who sit with me, cry with me, and pray over me.  People who think of sweet, practical ways to serve me and provide for my physical and emotional needs and then act.

 I feel like I have been allowed to feel God's love a little more during the last several weeks than I have at other times in my life.  And one way I have seen and understood God's love is through His people.  Their love gives me a glimpse of how incredible His love is.  

"Showing God's love" is such an over-used Christian catch-phrase that we may not consider the gravity of what He allows and requires us to do.  If you have been saved, His love literally lives in you!  The way that we treat others may provide for them the most concrete understanding of how God loves them.  How's that for challenging?  So many people in my life have risen to this challenge, and I am so grateful for their love, or rather, for God's love coursing through them and to me.

 ^"Now as to the love of the brethren, you have no need for anyone to write to you, for you yourselves are taught by God to love one another; for indeed you do practice it toward all the brethren who are in all Macedonia. But we urge you, brethren, to excel still more."
 ~I Thess. 4:9-10 NASB

A Scaffold

 

Yesterday a (large!) group of ladies from my church gathered to pray for me and my family.  It was a sweet, sweet time.  It amazes me how God uses His people to allow us to tangibly feel His love.  More on that later.

I was most struck, though, as I looked around the room, at the wide age range of women there.  Women older than my mom.  Women my mom's age.  Women 10 years older than me.  Women 5 years older than me.  Women my age.  Women a little younger than me.  I realized then how blessed I am by the diverse relationships in my life.

My favorite educational theorist (yes, that makes me a nerd...I never claimed otherwise...) is a man named Lev Vygotsky.  Of anything I studied in school, his ideas most influenced how I wrote curriculum, organized my classroom, and taught.  Two of his hallmark ideas are "scaffolding" and "the zone of proximal development". 

The zone of proximal development consists of all the tasks a student can't quite do yet.  Vygotsky theorized that if students never step outside of the "zone" of skills they have already mastered, they will never grow and master new skills.  Furthermore, he posited, if they only spend time with other children who are in the same zone or with adults who are far beyond them developmentally, it will be hard to push them into that zone of proximal development.  Instead, they need to see other children who are just ahead of them developmentally.

For example:  My daughter's fork and spoon skills are still lacking.  But if I just keep letting her feed herself with her fingers, she'll never learn to use a fork and spoon.  I may have to push her to practice, allow her to get frustrated, allow her to fail, mop my floor a lot, use Shout spray a lot, and eventually she'll get better.  Additionally, if she had a slightly older sibling who used a fork and spoon moderately well, she might be more proficient at this point.  Mommy is SO much better at fine motor skills that it's a little overwhelming to think of trying to match her.  But 3-year-olds?  Their abilities with silverware are within reach!

Which leads us to Vygotsky's idea of scaffolding.  You know what scaffolding is, right?  Those temporary wooden or metal structures used to allow workers to reach heights on a building they would not otherwise be able to reach so that they can build, clean, repair, and more, one level at a time.  It's like a ladder, but much more sturdy.  Vygotsky wrote that we often set high educational goals for children and then somehow expect them to leap from the ground to the roof of a skyscraper, metaphorically speaking.  A good teacher builds scaffolding for her students...recognizing all the tools and skills they will need to reach that high goal and then teaching them in an appropriate order, one step at a time.

***Soap box*** In my opinion, a lack of understanding of scaffolding is at the heart of much of the push toward "critical thinking" in educational reform.  Policy-makers and administrators want students to be critical thinkers but don't seem willing to entertain the idea that there are many, many small steps that must be taken on the path to critical thinking and that students won't spend 100% of their time in school at the top of Vygotsky's skyscraper.  By dismissing the scaffolding, the lower-level learning that must take place in order to be able to critically think, they frustrate teachers and students alike.  ***End of soap box***

Now that you've consumed your educational theory for the day, let me explain what this has to do with the women at my church.  I realized, I have a scaffold. God has placed amazing older (not old, just oldER...) women in my life, women I long to be like.  But sometimes I question if I will EVER be like them.  Their wisdom, grace, life experience, and godliness are at the top of that skyscraper.  They've been married for decades, raised children, taught others, and dealt with people issues and life issues that would overwhelm me.  But it's nice to look at the top and dream!  It's nice to know where I should be headed.  The amazing thing is, these women aren't just my mom's friends.  They have purposefully engaged themselves in my life, serving with me, asking me to serve with them, teaching me, taking me out to lunch, writing me notes, listening to me, counseling me, praying for me, and so much more.  And that was even before Arthur was a blip on an ultrasound!  Imagine what they are doing for me now.

Then there are amazing women who are just a little older than me.  The ones in my "zone of proximal development".  They have been married a little longer, are half-way through raising kids, and just finished learning a lot of the things that I am trying to learn right now.  If I get a little too depressed comparing myself now to where I should be 20 or 30 years from now, I can look to them.  They give me a half-way step, show me where I should be 5 or 10 years from now.  They have practical advice for my life still fresh on their minds because they were just there.  I've taught their kids in Sunday School and they've let me watch their parenting process.  When I was the working woman and they had a house full of babies, they let me come over and play.  They freely share the good, the bad, and the ugly.  When I wonder how to keep a marriage loving even in the middle of life, I watch them.  When I need to see how to allow life's circumstances to shape me, I can look at how they've changed in the last 10 years. 

Then there are my dear friends who are in the zone with me.  The ones with toddlers gripping their hands and with cheerios all over the floors of their cars.  The ones I call when I HAVE to get out of the house and see an adult and who totally understand if I don't have any makeup on.  The ones who will talk about pregnancy and poop and fevers and dishes and all that other exciting...haha...stuff that consumes my mind.  The ones who will share the wisdom they learned from their moms and other wise, older women.  The ones who say "Well, this is what we've tried..."

I got all weepy yesterday as I looked at the women who have walked through life with my mother and mother-in-law for 20 years, hoping and praying that my same-age friends and I will have the same testimony of love and friendship 20 years from now.  That we can get together and pray for our children.  That we can be the older women a new group of young women want to be like. That we can continue to be there for each other for however long God allows us to be together.  Having people who are right beside me makes life so much better!

It's easy (and good) to surround ourselves with friends who are exactly in our stage of life.  But we'd be stuck in our current "zone" if we didn't build relationships with women of all ages!  We need a scaffold to help us learn life, just like students need a scaffold to help them learn any large skill.  My life is so incredibly blessed by a scaffold of friends, women who are of every age and every stage of life.  I need the wisdom and example of the older ladies.  I need the reminder and hope of the ladies who are just ahead of me.  And I need the sympathy of the ladies who are right with me.  Being literally surrounded by all of them yesterday made me realize what an amazing community I have, and caused me to cry out in thanks to God, who has brought each one of these dear women into my life, each for a specific reason.

Maybe someday I won't be at the bottom of the scaffold ;)

The Giver

15 years ago, I read a beautiful book called The Giver, by Lois Lowry.  The year it was published, it won the Newberry, the award given to the best juvenile literature of the year.  It is a profound look at the human experience through the eyes of a boy who is coming of age in a dystopian world.  Before you roll your eyes and say "Oh, another one of those teenager dystopias...", understand that The Giver was written more than a decade before The Hunger Games, Divergent, and all the other books written by authors about my age who probably decided to write their respective books when they read The Giver in middle school.  Lowry's prose and her ability to get to the heart of the human condition in one children's novel puts her head and shoulders above the authors of all the trilogies you've been reading.

And The Maze Runner doesn't deserve to be mentioned in the same paragraph as The Giver.  That's why this is a new paragraph.

The rights to make The Giver into a movie were sold long ago, and I've been waiting, mostly fearfully, to see what hash some production company would put on the big screen.  Last night, my wait ended, and there was no hash.  I'd like to thank Walden Media, Jeff Bridges, and everyone else who allowed the simplicity and profundity of the book to hit theaters untarnished.

What follows is my attempt to explain why last night was an incredible experience.  But as I've said before, narrative often explains better than propositional explanation.  Rule number 1 of writing: Show, don't tell.  I'm telling below, The Giver shows.  So, go read the book. 

The theme of the story is that human emotions are a treasure.  They are what allow us to make wise and ethical decisions, and they are what make life worth living.  We are so afraid of negative emotions - fear, pain, loss, anger, heartache.  And yet, without these, we can't experience joy, love, peace, hope, beauty.

If you've read the book or watched the movie, you'll understand why my husband and I were both weeping on and off in the next-to-highest row of the movie theater.  Sometimes it was the shots of little babies.  Sometimes it was the montage of colorful images meant to represent the human experience.  Sometimes it was the sheer force of the story.  Sometimes it was that I'm 8 months pregnant. 

Arthur was in our minds the whole time.  We cried because Arthur won't get to experience much of the messy beauty that is life.  He won't see a sunset or hear Christmas carols or laugh at frolicking animals.  We cried because he won't have to experience much the ugliness that is life.  He won't be abandoned or hungry or scared. 

But mostly we cried because we are so thankful for human emotion.  It is really no fun to feel the fear and pain we are feeling right now, or to anticipate the loss and heartache we will feel after Arthur is no longer with us.  But the whole point of The Giver is that it is this very emotion that makes us human.  We can't rid ourselves of the ability to lose without saying goodbye to the ability to love.

Usually I get mad at myself when I cry.  But last night I was happy that I was crying.  It means that I can experience the height of good and beauty as well as the depth of despair.  I can cry, but I can laugh too.  I can hurt, but I can also feel joy.  And those good gifts are so good that I would never trade them to spare myself from the ugly parts of life. 

I'm so glad I get to be pregnant.  To carry my husband's child.  To feel Arthur kicking inside of me.  To watch him blink on a sonogram.  To see my daughter "share" her lovey with the baby inside of me and give my tummy kisses.  What a beautiful part of human existence! 

I could only avoid saying goodbye to Arthur if I never got to be with him in the first place. 

"In the day of prosperity be joyful, and in the day of adversity consider:
God has made the one as well as the other," ~Ecclesiastes 7:14a (ESV)

Words

I am a strong believer in the power of words.  Taking thoughts and putting them into words helps an individual understand his or her own ideas, distill them, and be able to grasp the ramifications of them.  It requires that person to be more precise and clear about what is going on in his head.  When I taught philosophy, I often had students write not because I needed to read their thoughts (although doing so was a great privilege!) but because I wanted them to find the words for their own thoughts.  For hundreds of years, men and women have kept journals or diaries for this same reason.

Words also allow ideas to be communicated from one person to another. Games like Pictionary and Charades are based on the fundamental concept that we communicate quite efficiently and effectively with words. To try to get those same ideas across without words is a challenge that brings with it equal amounts of laughter and frustration.

You may think that I am a biased linguistics nerd (which is true...) and give words altogether too much credit.  But God does the same thing.  In John 1, the name He picks for Jesus is "The Word".  Without Jesus, God might have dwelt in our heads as a vague, imprecise idea.  But then the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.  God told us exactly who He is and what He is like in the person of His Son.  Jesus is a tangible representation of God's character, one that we are more equipped to understand.  Linguists of the world, you are hereby validated!

Sometimes we avoid the clarity and understanding that words afford out of intellectual laziness...we just don't care enough to take the time to put our ideas into words.  Sometimes, though, we avoid speaking or writing our thoughts because we really don't want to acknowledge what they mean.

Yesterday my husband and I sat down for one of many difficult practical conversations we have to have in the next few weeks.  Most couples, I am sure, talk a little bit about their plan for childbirth.  You know, who will watch the older kid(s), when to leave for the hospital, what to pack, what preferences you have for during labor and delivery, who can come visit while mom is still in a hospital gown, etc. 

But we had to change that list a little.  Who will get our daughter there in time to take a picture with her little brother?  Who can come visit while Arthur is still alive?  What do we want to pack to occupy ourselves for a lonely night in the hospital with no baby to nurse and cuddle?  

These are issues we've both thought about over the last month.  But words are so powerful.  When I heard these questions coming out of my mouth, I broke down.  Those are words you never want to hear yourself say.  Putting those ideas into words makes them so tangible.  Once the words are out there, you have to confront the reality that they represent. 

So, we confronted some reality.  And it hurt.  But after we talked and cried and cried and talked, God dried our tears and comforted our hearts.  He has been so good to allow our grief to ebb and flow in such a way that it rarely overwhelms us. 

"This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him." - I John 4:9 NIV