Writing, Parenting, and Working in the Mess: Authentic Spirituality and Social Justice

In exactly a week, S will turn 16. In two days, my father’s sweetheart, green card denied, will head back to Greece for good, praying that after what we hope is a brief, medical bump-in-the-road is resolved, he will be able to join her. In five days, S’s brother, one year younger than her, will move across the country to his new home with his soon-to-be-adoptive father, a kind, smart man who works at a college in the south. On the day M flies with his new father, F, to his new home, S will wake up after her first real birthday party; last year’s hardly counts, because it was also her adoption party, and included a ceremony and 100 people. This year, she’ll have over a small group of peers who have been kind enough to include her, as much as possible, in their activities. And then, S and I and our dog will drive to Ohio, where in addition to trying to sort out my father’s medical issues and expenses, I’ll attend my 20th high school reunion. This week, I developed an urge to go back to t...

It is four in the morning, and I can’t sleep. Sometimes I wish real life was more like fiction—that there could be a neat ending to a story, and then the next chapter is about something else, something new and different. But our lives have no readers besides the people who love us enough to stick by us. And the people we love certainly don’t get to see the cleaned-up versions we would present later in essays or stories; they either see too little or too much. My father was deemed cancer-free a few months ago, after a dramatic but ultimately relatively harmless (in the long-term sense of the word) battle with lung cancer. After a messy divorce, but before the bankruptcy that led to the loss of his small business and the home where I was raised, he reconnected with his high school sweetheart, who has spent much of the each year with him in the U.S., miserable except that she gets to have his company. After the doctors said he no longer had cancer, he made plans to move back to Greece wit...