Patience
From today's epistle: "We always thank God...when we pray for you...we have not stopped praying for you and asking God to fill you with knowledge of God's will through all spiritual wisdom and understanding. And we pray that in order that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and may please God in every way: bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God, being strengthened with all power according to God's glorious might so that you may have great endurance and patience...
Today, I feel enveloped in this prayer, as if St. Paul and Timothy wrote it for me. And I am lifting my friends up in the same prayer, fully grateful for their love for me, for all I am learning from them--most importantly, "endurance and patience." Yes, I am learning endurance and patience from the most unlikely teachers, or, perhaps, the most likely: old friends, new friends, my garden, and an old printing press.
I have always been in love with gardening. My family had a gigantic garden, and I loved everything about it--turning over the soil, putting in the plants, tending them, picking the vegetables, finding ever new and creative ways to cook zucchini. I had a sneaking suspicion that I would not truly learn to love my home until I put a garden in, and I wasa right. I feel a new sense of groundedness since putting in about 10 tomato plants, 10 peppers, different varieties, eight eggplants, four okra, and several different herbs. I almost didn’t plant a garden this year; I had no time to do it before leaving for Greece, and the planting season was over when I returned. I had to scrounge around town for plants, sometimes getting them from friends, sometimes purchasing half-dead plants from one of the nurseries in town. There are things I wish I could have planted: zucchini, cucumbers, spinach, beans—but that wasn’t meant to be. Still, turning over the hard ground, removing left over sod by hand, putting in the plants, nursing them back to health with organic concoctions I’d read about but never tried, and weeding—especially weeding—have done wonders for my soul. These actions are teaching me to wait.
And in the process, deeper friendships have also grown, as neighbors have stopped by to offer advice (about gardening, adoption, and other spiritual matters), to make witty comments ("You must be from the old country," said one 80-something year old who is trying to marry me off to his son), to offer new plants, or simply to admire the work. These chance meetings are teaching me to pay attention as much as the act of weeding is teaching me to love every moment for its smell, its feel.
I am at the most difficult part of the adoption process. Everyone I know who has ever adopted has warned me about this part, but I didn’t listen; I thought that since I was adopting out of foster care, I would have a child shortly after my home study was complete. I left Greece thinking I would hear about my child when I returned; I continue to wait. Each time I get a file, read about a child or sibling group, and dare to say “yes,” I begin imagining myself parenting the children, start thinking about how my house will need to change—then wait. And wait. What are those social workers doing? What’s wrong with this system? Why can’t I get any information about where they are in the process? Have they picked another family for these children? Have they gotten caught up in another case? And what are the kids doing now--how are they doing, and where are they?
Already they feel indelibly connected to me--even those I have had to reject. "Reject" is a word a friend of mine said I shouldn't use, but it's the reality. These children have been rejected enough in their young lives--it would be insulting to call it anything else. Yes, I "rejected" them for good reasons, because I knew I was not the right parent for them--still, there is a twinge of guilt, and I try to garden that guilt into prayers for their safety, prayers that they will find the family they are supposed to have.
But what of the impatience? I am actually ahead of schedule--I didn't expect my home study to be done until August, but it was complete in May. And ultimately, whether I have a child in my home next week or next year makes very little difference. But I work in a profession that is, in many ways, all about outcomes. I have to report on outcomes of the service-learning program regularly in my grant reports; the program's success is directly related to my continued employment as well. The academic system is based on rewards that are based on how much research academics complete, how well they teach, and how much time they put into keeping the academy going. Even for people like me who are not on the tenure-track, it’s all about self-preservation and achievement, which teaches, for better or worse, that we are in charge, at least to some extent, of our own fates.
Of course, there are parts of the profession that could potentially teach patience—send off your work and wait to find out if a journal has accepted it; wait until long after the end of the semester to find out how your students really liked your class, what they really felt they learned; send out a grant proposal and wait to hear about funding. But in all these cases, if the outcome is negative—if the piece is not accepted, if the evaluations are down from last year, if the grant is rejected—then you did something wrong. There’s no doubt about it; you’ll have to explain to someone what you’ll do better in the classroom, you’ll have to revise your work, you’ll have to write another, better grant proposal. Never mind that students can't possibly completely conceive of what they have learned until much later, or that the effects of any published piece or committee contribution can't be understood without the passing of time.
In many ways, my immigrant background was also very outcomes-focused. While Greeks in Greece are known for taking it easy, caring more about family, friends, and get-togethers than work/money/success, the Greek immigrants realized quickly how hard they would have to work. Many first-generation parents were wildly successful in starting new businesses, getting new churches off the ground, and raising children to do well in American society while also loving their heritage. Still, they counted their children's successes as much more important than their own. They traded tidbits about their children’s accomplishments as if they were the most precious collectibles available. I will never forget my father keeping a copy of the first book I edited my first year out of college on his coffee table—never mind that it was called The Teddy Bear Sourcebook and had absolutely no connection to anything I cared about—it was just something I did for my job. I can’t even remember how he got ahold of it, but no doubt I gave it to him to appease him because he asked if my name had been on the spine of a book yet.
So all of this focus on outcomes, on proving oneself, has been damaging to me over the years. When I choose to value a long phone call with a friend over work on my writing, when I invite friends at the last minute to come over and go to the fireworks when I ought to be catching up on my work, I feel guilty. I am learning to let go of this guilt, but part of doing so has also meant letting go of some of my goals. For instance, I’m still working on my writing, but I am not as focused on getting it published. (I have this luxury because I chose to be a part of academia but not on the tenure track). I no longer feel like if I don’t have a book published by the time I’m 40 I’m a total failure, no longer imagine myself going to my 20th high school reunion and proving to everyone that I became a success after all, even though I was an acne-covered, shy, nerdy, closeted, shame-filled lesbian when I was in high school. And I no longer feel the need to try to prove to my father that my job is important. When he asks questions intended to give him something to brag about to his friends—even more important to him now, since I’m not married to the Greek man he imagined me marrying and haven’t produced any children--I always answer by saying, “I’m happy. I love my life. I have great friends and I love going to work every day.”
This drives him crazy.
But back to the adoption process—I can’t help but think that my impatience is due at least in part to my lack of confidence in myself, a remnant of all those years of being the smartest kid in Greek school, the A-student in "American" school, the one who certainly would never fail but was terrified she would. Some part of me probably thinks I’m not cut out to be a parent, that someone in the system has already figured this out. Couple this with the messages I have received since coming out from the culture at large about GLBT parents, and there's a real problem. It doesn’t matter how glowing my friends’ recommendations were, how supportive everyone who knows about my process has been. There is a part of me that is outcome-focused, and until I have the perfect child living in my perfect family, until I can prove to everyone that a single lesbian can, indeed, be a good mother, I am not good enough.
And herein lies another problem. I’ve chosen to adopt out of foster care, to take a child who has deeply suffered, has been rejected or hurt in one way or another, who may not have been in school regularly, who is, in short, “not OK.” I made this decision largely because, in the process of investigating my options, this seemed the best for me because of my skills, my interests, my lifestyle. A friend of mine recently said, wisely, that I will have to realize that the standards I use to measure my children’s success may have to be different than standards I would have used to measure the success of a birth child, and he is right. My family may not be able to brag about how smart or well-adjusted or funny or talented my child is, because even if he or she is all of these things, they may not be recognizable in the way my straight-A grades were to my family.
In short, I’m going to have to walk the delicate balance of believing in my children, but not worrying about outcomes--beyond the outcome of ensuring they feel safe and loved, that they learn the importance of living a life guided by integrity and love. I need to make sure I don't buy into the things that others consider important. Maybe my child will have straight A’s, get into a great college, have a wildly successful career—but I have to be OK with the fact that he or she may not. Maybe my child will be a really “good kid,” never getting in trouble, never acting out—but in a way, this would be worse that the other alternative, because, after all, any child adopted at an older age who is not acting out is probably internalizing the pain of his or her early childhood, which has got to be much worse. There is the danger of creating a self-fulfilling prophesy; there is also the danger, however, of setting unreachable expectations. I suspect I will have to manage the balance between the two day by day, moment by moment.
When I confessed to another friend that I was having trouble with being patient, with waiting--when I confessed that I felt deeply connected to two children and afraid of what might happen if they did not become mine--she said to me, “Maybe you are not meant to get the children you’re waiting for right now, but that doesn’t mean that you weren’t meant to consider them. Maybe you’re supposed to feel everything you’re feeling because you’re going to learn something about yourself through this process that you couldn’t have learned any other way.”
Thank God for my wise friends. They are sustaining me now--taking the time to talk for hours on the phone, offering their living rooms or offices if I need to talk, praying for me.
And then there are the friends who have not been directly involved in my process, who don't even know it's going on, but who have nonetheless played a huge role in my coping with the wait. One of them is an 80-something retired professor who still teaches occasionally. He also plays tennis, gets writers to visit Morris, volunteers for the DFL, gives lectures about Walt Whitman at the local Senior Center, writes regular angry letters to the paper…and for all of these reasons and more, I have a great deal of respect for him. (I’m also a bit partial to him because he was the head of the search committee that hired me).
Recently, he came to my office and told me he had Parkinson’s. "It's getting worse," he said. "I can still play tennis and run the press, but not for long." And then he surprised me with a question: I be willing to take it over? I knew the press mattered to him, but I had never been particularly interested, even though I loved the poems and invitations and other pieces he had printed over the years. But I said yes, nonchalantly, too busy worrying about getting ready for my summer class to think through what I was doing.
And then he asked again, a more serious look on his face—he wanted to make sure I really understood. “I want this to go on,” he said. “And I would be counting on you.”
What a gift to get this kind of request, to be trusted in this way. My immediate reaction was that this was an impossibility--I am teaching two summer classes, helping to plan a major community event, involved in other community organizations this summer...not to mention the adoption process. But something about the way he asked me made me say yes.
I had my first lesson last Tuesday, and I loved it. It took me two hours, approximately, to set and then dismantle my name and address. In the process, I learned how to find the letters and numbers in the tray, the age-old logic of where they were placed, to tell the M's from the W's, and to set the type so that it aligned perfectly and tightly, ready to be printed. He was the most patient teacher I’ve ever had, just watching, occasionally correcting what I was doing. When I told him so, he said, "Damned right. That's one thing I know for sure. I'm a good teacher." And, as I was searching for the capital “M” for my last name, and then setting it upside down and having to turn it around—I realized that I was supposed to pay more attention. My mind slowed down. I won’t claim it stayed slowed down—the conversations I refer to with my friends happened later in the week, at other moments of near-panic—but I was there, and I was focused, and I was letting myself care about nothing except correctly setting that “M.”
The friend who told me I was going to learn from this, no matter the outcome, also told me that this time in her life—also a time of great change without much control—made her feel like she was riding a river. “It’s not violent exactly,” she said, “but it’s not totally safe, either. But I know I’ll get washed up somewhere, and that it will be the right place.”
Iwas immediately reminded of my last visit to Magganiti before I had to leave Greece. Magganiti, my father's village, is perched in the mountains, but at its foot is the most beautiful beach in the world. On this particular day, the sea was crazy wild, and we probably shouldn't have been in it. At first I fought for awhile, swallowing water, considering fighting my way back to the shore, but I was determined to get in one last swim before leaving Ikaria for at least another two years. And then I remember letting my body go at some point, thinking to myself, I can’t fight this. I have to trust that this place that birthed my family, this history, will take care of me. And then I was able to ride the craziness of the waves. Eventually, tired, I swam back to shore and sat on a large rock and looked over the ocean. On that rock, I felt so at peace—I remember thinking, “Whatever happens next, I have this memory now. I know how to let go. I know I'm not in control.”
I need to carry that peace of not-knowing and not-controlling and not-fighting into the next months, years, however long it takes to have a child. In the meantime, I’ll keep weeding, keep nurturing my plants. I’ll keep learning to set type, enjoying the weekly lessons with my elder, wise teacher. And I’ll enjoy the time I have with friends.
This weekend was the annual Prairie Pioneer Days in Morris, a weekend of fun activities celebrating our community--and best of all, most of them occurred in the park right across the street. My house was full of people who gathered before and after the annual Prairie Pioneer Days talent show on Friday and the fireworks on Saturday and the parade on Sunday—former students, new friends, old friends—ranging in age from one to 62. Last night I looked around at the people on my porch and realized how lucky I was to know them, to have had the opportunity to see some of them (former students) grow into amazing, thoughtful activists. How lucky, too, to live in a town that is relatively safe for GLBT people thanks to the work of the first queers to come to Morris, including a 60-something friend who was on my porch last night. We talked about soldiers we knew who were coming home, about what was left to get done for the Relay for Life next weekend, about friends we had lost, about the Prairie Pioneer Days parade the next day (today).
I am lucky to have friends who teach me "endurance and patience," who lift me up in whatever spiritual tradition or practice they have--porch conversations or telephone conversations or prayers or some combination thereof. I am reminded of what matters, how sometimes we find ourselves inexplicably living the life we want but didn't know we wanted. My life that is ready to open even more widely for my children, whoever they turn out to be, whenever they come. How blessed I am to have come this far, to be preparing to bring children into this crazy, lovely, broken-but-always-healing life. How blessed I am to be sure that I will be stretched and changed--that I will continue to learn and grow--because of their future presence in my life.
Today, I feel enveloped in this prayer, as if St. Paul and Timothy wrote it for me. And I am lifting my friends up in the same prayer, fully grateful for their love for me, for all I am learning from them--most importantly, "endurance and patience." Yes, I am learning endurance and patience from the most unlikely teachers, or, perhaps, the most likely: old friends, new friends, my garden, and an old printing press.
I have always been in love with gardening. My family had a gigantic garden, and I loved everything about it--turning over the soil, putting in the plants, tending them, picking the vegetables, finding ever new and creative ways to cook zucchini. I had a sneaking suspicion that I would not truly learn to love my home until I put a garden in, and I wasa right. I feel a new sense of groundedness since putting in about 10 tomato plants, 10 peppers, different varieties, eight eggplants, four okra, and several different herbs. I almost didn’t plant a garden this year; I had no time to do it before leaving for Greece, and the planting season was over when I returned. I had to scrounge around town for plants, sometimes getting them from friends, sometimes purchasing half-dead plants from one of the nurseries in town. There are things I wish I could have planted: zucchini, cucumbers, spinach, beans—but that wasn’t meant to be. Still, turning over the hard ground, removing left over sod by hand, putting in the plants, nursing them back to health with organic concoctions I’d read about but never tried, and weeding—especially weeding—have done wonders for my soul. These actions are teaching me to wait.
And in the process, deeper friendships have also grown, as neighbors have stopped by to offer advice (about gardening, adoption, and other spiritual matters), to make witty comments ("You must be from the old country," said one 80-something year old who is trying to marry me off to his son), to offer new plants, or simply to admire the work. These chance meetings are teaching me to pay attention as much as the act of weeding is teaching me to love every moment for its smell, its feel.
I am at the most difficult part of the adoption process. Everyone I know who has ever adopted has warned me about this part, but I didn’t listen; I thought that since I was adopting out of foster care, I would have a child shortly after my home study was complete. I left Greece thinking I would hear about my child when I returned; I continue to wait. Each time I get a file, read about a child or sibling group, and dare to say “yes,” I begin imagining myself parenting the children, start thinking about how my house will need to change—then wait. And wait. What are those social workers doing? What’s wrong with this system? Why can’t I get any information about where they are in the process? Have they picked another family for these children? Have they gotten caught up in another case? And what are the kids doing now--how are they doing, and where are they?
Already they feel indelibly connected to me--even those I have had to reject. "Reject" is a word a friend of mine said I shouldn't use, but it's the reality. These children have been rejected enough in their young lives--it would be insulting to call it anything else. Yes, I "rejected" them for good reasons, because I knew I was not the right parent for them--still, there is a twinge of guilt, and I try to garden that guilt into prayers for their safety, prayers that they will find the family they are supposed to have.
But what of the impatience? I am actually ahead of schedule--I didn't expect my home study to be done until August, but it was complete in May. And ultimately, whether I have a child in my home next week or next year makes very little difference. But I work in a profession that is, in many ways, all about outcomes. I have to report on outcomes of the service-learning program regularly in my grant reports; the program's success is directly related to my continued employment as well. The academic system is based on rewards that are based on how much research academics complete, how well they teach, and how much time they put into keeping the academy going. Even for people like me who are not on the tenure-track, it’s all about self-preservation and achievement, which teaches, for better or worse, that we are in charge, at least to some extent, of our own fates.
Of course, there are parts of the profession that could potentially teach patience—send off your work and wait to find out if a journal has accepted it; wait until long after the end of the semester to find out how your students really liked your class, what they really felt they learned; send out a grant proposal and wait to hear about funding. But in all these cases, if the outcome is negative—if the piece is not accepted, if the evaluations are down from last year, if the grant is rejected—then you did something wrong. There’s no doubt about it; you’ll have to explain to someone what you’ll do better in the classroom, you’ll have to revise your work, you’ll have to write another, better grant proposal. Never mind that students can't possibly completely conceive of what they have learned until much later, or that the effects of any published piece or committee contribution can't be understood without the passing of time.
In many ways, my immigrant background was also very outcomes-focused. While Greeks in Greece are known for taking it easy, caring more about family, friends, and get-togethers than work/money/success, the Greek immigrants realized quickly how hard they would have to work. Many first-generation parents were wildly successful in starting new businesses, getting new churches off the ground, and raising children to do well in American society while also loving their heritage. Still, they counted their children's successes as much more important than their own. They traded tidbits about their children’s accomplishments as if they were the most precious collectibles available. I will never forget my father keeping a copy of the first book I edited my first year out of college on his coffee table—never mind that it was called The Teddy Bear Sourcebook and had absolutely no connection to anything I cared about—it was just something I did for my job. I can’t even remember how he got ahold of it, but no doubt I gave it to him to appease him because he asked if my name had been on the spine of a book yet.
So all of this focus on outcomes, on proving oneself, has been damaging to me over the years. When I choose to value a long phone call with a friend over work on my writing, when I invite friends at the last minute to come over and go to the fireworks when I ought to be catching up on my work, I feel guilty. I am learning to let go of this guilt, but part of doing so has also meant letting go of some of my goals. For instance, I’m still working on my writing, but I am not as focused on getting it published. (I have this luxury because I chose to be a part of academia but not on the tenure track). I no longer feel like if I don’t have a book published by the time I’m 40 I’m a total failure, no longer imagine myself going to my 20th high school reunion and proving to everyone that I became a success after all, even though I was an acne-covered, shy, nerdy, closeted, shame-filled lesbian when I was in high school. And I no longer feel the need to try to prove to my father that my job is important. When he asks questions intended to give him something to brag about to his friends—even more important to him now, since I’m not married to the Greek man he imagined me marrying and haven’t produced any children--I always answer by saying, “I’m happy. I love my life. I have great friends and I love going to work every day.”
This drives him crazy.
But back to the adoption process—I can’t help but think that my impatience is due at least in part to my lack of confidence in myself, a remnant of all those years of being the smartest kid in Greek school, the A-student in "American" school, the one who certainly would never fail but was terrified she would. Some part of me probably thinks I’m not cut out to be a parent, that someone in the system has already figured this out. Couple this with the messages I have received since coming out from the culture at large about GLBT parents, and there's a real problem. It doesn’t matter how glowing my friends’ recommendations were, how supportive everyone who knows about my process has been. There is a part of me that is outcome-focused, and until I have the perfect child living in my perfect family, until I can prove to everyone that a single lesbian can, indeed, be a good mother, I am not good enough.
And herein lies another problem. I’ve chosen to adopt out of foster care, to take a child who has deeply suffered, has been rejected or hurt in one way or another, who may not have been in school regularly, who is, in short, “not OK.” I made this decision largely because, in the process of investigating my options, this seemed the best for me because of my skills, my interests, my lifestyle. A friend of mine recently said, wisely, that I will have to realize that the standards I use to measure my children’s success may have to be different than standards I would have used to measure the success of a birth child, and he is right. My family may not be able to brag about how smart or well-adjusted or funny or talented my child is, because even if he or she is all of these things, they may not be recognizable in the way my straight-A grades were to my family.
In short, I’m going to have to walk the delicate balance of believing in my children, but not worrying about outcomes--beyond the outcome of ensuring they feel safe and loved, that they learn the importance of living a life guided by integrity and love. I need to make sure I don't buy into the things that others consider important. Maybe my child will have straight A’s, get into a great college, have a wildly successful career—but I have to be OK with the fact that he or she may not. Maybe my child will be a really “good kid,” never getting in trouble, never acting out—but in a way, this would be worse that the other alternative, because, after all, any child adopted at an older age who is not acting out is probably internalizing the pain of his or her early childhood, which has got to be much worse. There is the danger of creating a self-fulfilling prophesy; there is also the danger, however, of setting unreachable expectations. I suspect I will have to manage the balance between the two day by day, moment by moment.
When I confessed to another friend that I was having trouble with being patient, with waiting--when I confessed that I felt deeply connected to two children and afraid of what might happen if they did not become mine--she said to me, “Maybe you are not meant to get the children you’re waiting for right now, but that doesn’t mean that you weren’t meant to consider them. Maybe you’re supposed to feel everything you’re feeling because you’re going to learn something about yourself through this process that you couldn’t have learned any other way.”
Thank God for my wise friends. They are sustaining me now--taking the time to talk for hours on the phone, offering their living rooms or offices if I need to talk, praying for me.
And then there are the friends who have not been directly involved in my process, who don't even know it's going on, but who have nonetheless played a huge role in my coping with the wait. One of them is an 80-something retired professor who still teaches occasionally. He also plays tennis, gets writers to visit Morris, volunteers for the DFL, gives lectures about Walt Whitman at the local Senior Center, writes regular angry letters to the paper…and for all of these reasons and more, I have a great deal of respect for him. (I’m also a bit partial to him because he was the head of the search committee that hired me).
Recently, he came to my office and told me he had Parkinson’s. "It's getting worse," he said. "I can still play tennis and run the press, but not for long." And then he surprised me with a question: I be willing to take it over? I knew the press mattered to him, but I had never been particularly interested, even though I loved the poems and invitations and other pieces he had printed over the years. But I said yes, nonchalantly, too busy worrying about getting ready for my summer class to think through what I was doing.
And then he asked again, a more serious look on his face—he wanted to make sure I really understood. “I want this to go on,” he said. “And I would be counting on you.”
What a gift to get this kind of request, to be trusted in this way. My immediate reaction was that this was an impossibility--I am teaching two summer classes, helping to plan a major community event, involved in other community organizations this summer...not to mention the adoption process. But something about the way he asked me made me say yes.
I had my first lesson last Tuesday, and I loved it. It took me two hours, approximately, to set and then dismantle my name and address. In the process, I learned how to find the letters and numbers in the tray, the age-old logic of where they were placed, to tell the M's from the W's, and to set the type so that it aligned perfectly and tightly, ready to be printed. He was the most patient teacher I’ve ever had, just watching, occasionally correcting what I was doing. When I told him so, he said, "Damned right. That's one thing I know for sure. I'm a good teacher." And, as I was searching for the capital “M” for my last name, and then setting it upside down and having to turn it around—I realized that I was supposed to pay more attention. My mind slowed down. I won’t claim it stayed slowed down—the conversations I refer to with my friends happened later in the week, at other moments of near-panic—but I was there, and I was focused, and I was letting myself care about nothing except correctly setting that “M.”
The friend who told me I was going to learn from this, no matter the outcome, also told me that this time in her life—also a time of great change without much control—made her feel like she was riding a river. “It’s not violent exactly,” she said, “but it’s not totally safe, either. But I know I’ll get washed up somewhere, and that it will be the right place.”
Iwas immediately reminded of my last visit to Magganiti before I had to leave Greece. Magganiti, my father's village, is perched in the mountains, but at its foot is the most beautiful beach in the world. On this particular day, the sea was crazy wild, and we probably shouldn't have been in it. At first I fought for awhile, swallowing water, considering fighting my way back to the shore, but I was determined to get in one last swim before leaving Ikaria for at least another two years. And then I remember letting my body go at some point, thinking to myself, I can’t fight this. I have to trust that this place that birthed my family, this history, will take care of me. And then I was able to ride the craziness of the waves. Eventually, tired, I swam back to shore and sat on a large rock and looked over the ocean. On that rock, I felt so at peace—I remember thinking, “Whatever happens next, I have this memory now. I know how to let go. I know I'm not in control.”
I need to carry that peace of not-knowing and not-controlling and not-fighting into the next months, years, however long it takes to have a child. In the meantime, I’ll keep weeding, keep nurturing my plants. I’ll keep learning to set type, enjoying the weekly lessons with my elder, wise teacher. And I’ll enjoy the time I have with friends.
This weekend was the annual Prairie Pioneer Days in Morris, a weekend of fun activities celebrating our community--and best of all, most of them occurred in the park right across the street. My house was full of people who gathered before and after the annual Prairie Pioneer Days talent show on Friday and the fireworks on Saturday and the parade on Sunday—former students, new friends, old friends—ranging in age from one to 62. Last night I looked around at the people on my porch and realized how lucky I was to know them, to have had the opportunity to see some of them (former students) grow into amazing, thoughtful activists. How lucky, too, to live in a town that is relatively safe for GLBT people thanks to the work of the first queers to come to Morris, including a 60-something friend who was on my porch last night. We talked about soldiers we knew who were coming home, about what was left to get done for the Relay for Life next weekend, about friends we had lost, about the Prairie Pioneer Days parade the next day (today).
I am lucky to have friends who teach me "endurance and patience," who lift me up in whatever spiritual tradition or practice they have--porch conversations or telephone conversations or prayers or some combination thereof. I am reminded of what matters, how sometimes we find ourselves inexplicably living the life we want but didn't know we wanted. My life that is ready to open even more widely for my children, whoever they turn out to be, whenever they come. How blessed I am to have come this far, to be preparing to bring children into this crazy, lovely, broken-but-always-healing life. How blessed I am to be sure that I will be stretched and changed--that I will continue to learn and grow--because of their future presence in my life.
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