a room for all of it

Most days I am fine 

I really am

But sometimes

I wonder if there is a quiet room

Where one could go 

And let the bottom fall out

cry for a thousand years

And wake up

Tear soaked and sated

Or a quiet room 

Where one could go

And rest like 

Knocked out sweaty 

Discombobulated sleep

And wake up

Not weary

A room where all of it 

Is not too much

And there’s enough time

And money

A room where no one tries

To fix it

Answer the questions

Sell their cure

I really feel fine most of the time

But if there was a room

I’d go in there 

thanks for the food love you bye

Tonight my teens emerged from their bedrooms long enough to wash a couple of forks and fill our pastel sundae bowls with goulash before retreating to their caves. “Thanks for the food love you bye” they said, and the words stuck with me.

I remember the first time I dropped Toby and Brynn off at Vacation Bible School. I wrote about this back in the Kansas City days, with the not at all melodramatic title of Driving Away: Motherhood and Dying. In retrospect, the time did not pass as quickly as I feared. I have had lifetimes of moments with all of them. I’m not in any hurry for them to leave, but 1 is out and 2 are on the verge of independence and I am not as scared as I thought I would be.

Parenting for me has always been deep enjoyment of the present with a little ache for the past and a very quiet dread for the future. I worried about them going to school. I worried about puberty. (I was on to something with that one). I worried about every age and stage and without fail I have fallen in love with them all over again at every stage. Are they loud, complicated, imperfect? Yeah. Are they perfect? Yeah.

Part of my “deconstruction” has been letting go of my fear for their souls. I love them, raise them, train them, pray for them, laugh with them, answer hard questions with too much candor. I don’t let my eyes glaze over when they monologue. I press them to be gentle, to be empathetic, to be kind. I press them to be true to their own hearts. I try to listen with curiosity instead of judgment. I am back to parenting by heart, and it has relieved so much anxiety.

So now, I face new seasons. Penny starting school, R2 finding his stride with his peer group, Tristan hitting his teen years, Toby and Brynn driving and working and changing and developing these iron backbones about what matters to them. And soon, more independence. But I’m not afraid, the dread is gone. Will they leave me, eventually? Will they face struggle and heartbreak and loss? Will they have realizations that my imperfect parenting left marks that need to be healed? Yeah, probably. But the same way that I agonized over leaving my little redheaded boy at preschool and he came home a little wiser and funnier but even more Tristan, I know that the evolution of every one of these humans will be beautiful.

And when Penny is grown and she goes off to conquer the world and tells me “thanks for the food love you bye”, well, then I’ll probably lose it.

ABOUT KEVIN PROSCH AND THE MESS

see me at 7 years old, singing my heart out to a cassette tape in my sister’s kitchen. see my heart opening and understanding that the sign that God waved over me was love. see me crying because the singer was crying and I hurt for him, because the song hurt him. “we need your help, God,” he choked out, “we need your help real bad…”

see me singing his songs for my whole life, relating to his brokenness and his rawness more than any other musician

see me meeting him as a young youth leader and hearing from his own mouth how broken he was and how his self described sin had wrecked his life

see me reeling after we dropped him back at his hotel because our hero had real skin and bones and blood. and gangrene.

see me angry and laughing and incredulous when he said “countless women” on a paper but forgiving him because he was sorry and he was broken and human

those songs. not just the worship ones. the “secular” ones. one where he says “please, God, stay away from me…”

was he telling us the whole time

see me, so angry and disgusted at his selfishness and his crimes and his evil but still feeling the ache for the guy who needs God’s help real bad

it’s not simple. it’s not clean and there are no answers. but I miss the simplicity of dancing in the kitchen and knowing God waved a banner over me.

come to me and i will give you noise

I remember when internet comedians Rhett & Link first published their stories of religious deconstruction. I was so sad, and so worried about them, and a little bit worried that were going to drag all of the Mythical Beasts (their fans, including me) to hell with them. Now I am kind of in their shoes.

I cannot say that I have thrown away everything I believed in, I absolutely haven’t. I can say that I am holding almost everything I’ve ever believed with a light touch. Oh, and a few things I have absolutely chunked into the maybe-real-maybe-not lake of fire. But mostly I am wrestling with what I believe and why I believe(d) it and what I really think about the Bible and church structures and charismatic Christianity and the prophetic and you name it, it’s probably on the potential chopping block.

So here’s a category for thought. How do we, the fully-human, process pain and questions and weakness? Because I was always trained to be appropriately vulnerable but not enough that it could hurt or confuse people or lead them astray. So when you are a pastor’s wife and you are really hoping to die, you can say, “I’ve been feeling a little sad lately”. That is pastoral, because if you tell a sheep you’re hoping to spontaneously die, they will be confused and maybe walk right off a cliff. And so you learn to medicate, whether that’s drugs or alcohol or my drugs of choice, movies and books and ice cream, and you medicate and medicate so that you can be numb enough to be a good-enough leader. And you love people, and you’re trying.

In case you were wondering, this is a shit plan. Now you are dealing with unbearable sadness and complicated relationship issues and so much pain and there is nowhere to take that pain, because your weakness is a threat to the souls of everyone, and on top of that you are numb and lying. It’s a broken paradigm.

And not only are you responsible for the eternal security of everybody else, you also might be financially dependent on keeping a thriving church in motion. If you stop to address your failing mental health, how will you survive financially? Who’s gonna feed your kids while you’re nuts? We need better resources to help people in ministry get healthy, safely.

But let’s say you’re “lucky”, like me and your body and your mind and heart just shut down, forcing you to step out of leadership and focus on healing. Now you are part of the larger community. And like most people from younger Gen-X down, you process out loud, online. What if you’re so sick of the restrictions placed on your thoughts and you just want to say what you’re wrestling with? Like a person with feelings. Shouldn’t that be something you can do? Why is it always the people with the largest “Jesus” stickers that try to shut this down? “Just trust God,” they say, like you haven’t spent a lifetime doing that. “Don’t give up on Jesus,” they say, like you would voluntarily give up the only anchor you have. “Don’t talk about this, you’ll lead people astray,” they say.

At what point do Jesus’ biggest fans figure out that he was all about sitting with the hurting and the destitute? At what point can they say, “I will sit with you in your sadness and your anger and your questions, because I don’t want you to sit alone”? At what point can the church quit offering easy answers and fear-based threats and just let us hurt until we feel better? We know the Scriptures. We taught them for a lifetime. We know the easy answers. For whatever reason, that is not what we need now.

So if you’re watching someone grapple with their mental health and their faith and all the moving parts, maybe try to be that person that doesn’t fight the real. Maybe this part is more honest and holy than all the time they were being a shining role model with a shattered heart. Maybe your weary and heavy-laden friend needs rest, not answers.

some beach

When I was a kid, I had a dad. I tend to talk about him, he was the central figure of my life until my teen years when I discovered a boyfriend. But back to my dad. Some of my key memories with him have to do with the beach. Galveston, to be precise.

If you come from a place that has postcard-kinda-beaches you might never understand. But Galveston is ours, and it’s beautiful, too. It’s just that it’s a Gulf beach and anyway, it’s ours. My dad used to take us for the day, sometimes. We’d load up in his tiny little fast red car and drive with the windows open. The freest parts of me are tied up in the memories of those little cars with the wind in my face and zero restrictions on my personality. He did. not. care. I could be as loud or obnoxious or silly, screaming into the overheated air rushing at us down I-45, holding my hands out to push against the current. Somehow I was the safest I’ve ever been, crammed in that tiny car with a giant man driving too fast, probably with the inspection and registration expired. I miss him every day.

And then we’d be at the beach, him, 6’4 and pushing 300 pounds, squeezed into denim cutoffs and me, always small for my age, always wild. He’d be a whale and I’d ride on his back into the current, and then he’d be a shark, coming after me when it was shallow enough for me to get away. He’d sit with his shoulders slumped in the horrific posture I have inherited, his big back taking too much sun, and I would sit beside him and let the waves roll over our legs. I guess my siblings were there. I remember an inner tube/boat being employed to take big kids out into the deep. But I was with my dad.

Later, when he was gone and I was all grown up, I would stand in the same water. I’d buy Chips Ahoy and eat them with a little sand, just like he did. I’d sit, slumped into the sun and remember him, and the babies I lost, and I’d fight to remember who I was. My pain was not the largest thing, not there.

I’ve stood there with the secret knowledge that I was pregnant, letting the sun give me some kind of hope. I’ve held baby after baby in the warm murky water, letting them discover how it feels. I’ve been healed and I’ve been devastated. It keeps calling me back.

It doesn’t take long for me to ache a little bit, when I’ve been landlocked too long. Part of me is longing to get pulled out and brought back, to take too much sun and to sit, safe and contented and connected.

Someday maybe I will be an old empty-nester. (I say old because if you know, you know I started over with Penny). Maybe I’ll have a little place with a wall of windows over the Gulf, and a porch with a hammock. Maybe I’ll wander out in the morning with a cup of tea and my memories. Maybe I’ll sit in the shallow waves with my grandkids and let them breathe while the Texas sun cooks us from the inside. And then, maybe someday, all the pieces will come back with the tide and I will be whole.