Motherhood - she gives and she takes away, she blesses and curses at will and will never leave. Motherhood has given me stretch marks in places I never knew one could have stretch marks and fat in places I never had before. She has given me extra skin on my stomach and robbed me of nice puffy fat in my boobs - the results of which I hope you are not now imagining. She has destabilized my hormones and widened my hips. Motherhood has cause me to say things like “I don’t think so young lady” and “does that stain remover get puke out of linen?” I have intimate knowledge of how far a vagina can stretch and then how much it can swell. She has inflicted upon me maladies like hemorrhoids, mastitis, plugged ducts, thrush and prolapse. In many ways, Motherhood has not been kind to me.

Motherhood is also a great and wise teacher, a humbling presence and a force of patience.  She has taught me that I am not the center of the universe, that if my plans do not go off without a hitch I will indeed survive and that the greatest joy can often be found in snotty kisses and pummeling hugs that knock me on my ass. Speaking of being knocked on my ass - Motherhood has wore me down in the best ways I could have ever imagined. I dread to think of the person I would be now if I hadn’t conceived, nurtured, birthed and breastfed my girls. Learning to gently discipline my toddlers has taught me more than it has them.

So, Motherhood, we might have a love-hate relationship but I have a feeling I wouldn’t like the me I would be without you.

Happy mother’s day to me - and thank you Motherhood.

Tags: motherhood, mother’s day

Shayel (my almost 6 year old): Mommy, you are the queen of me and the princess of God

yes indeed oh little wise earth child, yes indeed

Please consider supporting my friend and fellow Revolutionary Dan on his mission to Madagascar. This is a really unique thing Dan is doing and we’re so proud of him (not like we had anything to do with it but you know… hehe).

Click here to go to Dan’s personal page on World Venture’s website.

I do layout and design for a woman’s literary magazine that seeks to provide a safe space for expression of honest womanhood in all it’s raw and varied forms. I’m proud to be part of this venture and am privledged to lend my skills. I am also honored to be friends with the inspiration and driving force behind it. Heather has helped me become a little less cynical about the possibility of beautiful and honest friendship.

While at this point our advertisers are local to the Northern Colorado region (for now), we send the magazine anywhere in the US. I thought I would take this opportunity to promote this unique publication to men and women alike and encourage you to subscribe. Our website is still in process but you can visit getbornmag.com for a sneak peak and to subscribe. The magazine contains essays, short fiction and poetry and we are always looking for content.

We are also always looking for cover photos that communicate the complexity of REAL womanhood and the hope of “getting born”. At this time we do not pay for submissions.

Keep in mind when I say “honest”, and “raw” I’m not being cute, get born explores the harsh realities of womanhood (the season of motherhood in particular but not exclusively), often with humor, but just as often not. We also do not censor so you will find cussing. I would encourage you however, not to let that deter you. Sometimes a few well placed swears can communicate a powerful message of freedom and “getting born” (some of you might recall some of your choice words uttered in the throes of labor *wink*)

In the vein of honesty, here is a little piece I blogged awhile ago called “It’s Not All Pink Balls of Fuzziness”. This was written to explore our faith journey - which I edit here to intertwine with the other journeys we are on as women, of being born, becoming a woman, giving birth and becoming born again as we find our feet and our stride and spread our wings.

***

Sometimes it’s awesome and fuzzy and all kinds of pink balls of loveliness.
Sometimes it’s barbed, angst ridden, doubt filled and all kinds of black balls of frustration.

You fear, you hope, you dream, you love and laugh and learn, you question, doubt, grapple, wrestle and postulate, theorize and hypothesize but at the end of the day you realize that this God you are trying to serve the best way your feeble humanity is able, THIS God simply IS. Coming to earth, serving and loving, healing and getting angry, doubting and getting frustrated, being tempted and questioning while bleeding in a garden. When we add OUR story to THIS story we have a beautiful but very human thing going.

And then we get to add our humanity to another’s humanity and do all those messy things together with them and we join together to connect with the Missio Dei, the God at work on the Earth - and in that, we continue the story. We become vessels of reconciliation and healing, peace and restoration. At our best, we are incarnations of Christ, and at our worst, we are at least trying.

***

that is living, that is getting born

Now that I’ve expressed my concern about friendship within church I want to add a thread of tension to the mix. I believe that we need to treat one another better in our churches, we need to show more grace, more forgiveness, more authenticity (i.e. stop pretending that you’re ALWAYS just oh so happy because God has blessed you with just oh so many wonderful blessings and God is oh so good and thanks be to him from whom all blessings flow when you know full well much of the time that’s a crock). We need to be quicker to forgive and not so quick to become angry. We need to listen more and be more accepting of differences.

But here’s my thread of tension - we cannot attend to our church relationships at the expense of all others. We MUST HAVE MORE FRIENDS OUTSIDE OUR LOCAL CHURCH. Our relationships need to be more eccumenical across the spectrum. “Friendship evangelism” is an awful term IMO (it just feels manipulative to me because of the connotations of the term evangelism), but the truth is that we need to accept that no one wants to learn from a Christian who just appears in their life to spout of spiritual platitudes on occasion. And no one wants a Christian in their life who can’t learn from anyone else. The era of people turning to distant authorities to learn and grow is fast ending. People want to learn from friends who happen to have some knowledge and experience in a certain area, they want to turn to friends when they are in need, not just professionals with whom they have no intimate connection.

But perhaps even more importantly - we cannot be good Christ followers if we do not learn from the other, if we do not open ourselves up to the reality that “the other” has something to show us about God because *gasp* God is actually present outside our own Christian world. We cannot be good Christ followers holed up in our churches because I can GUARANTEE YOU that Christ is walking “out there” and if we’re not “out there” we’re being left behind.

There are a few key dysfunctional patterns of relationships with Christians that I have experienced personally and seen in others (typically).

1. We have ONLY Christian friends and preferably only Christian friends from our own church (after all, how is a person supposed to have the space for other friends when they spend 3 days a week in meetings or services at their church)
2. We have Christian and “non Christian” friends but they are kept in exclusive networks that don’t cross (part of this is often that our Christian friends act so weird and only talk about churchy things that our friends who aren’t Christians are understandably freaked out by them or that they have been hurt by Christians in the past and are gun shy)
3. We have friends in and outside of the church but our church friends are kept at a distance because we can’t be real around them without getting ourselves in trouble which means they are no closer than our “friends” at work.

Most people don’t do any of this intentionally, it’s just what they know. It’s what’s been modeled to them and the reality is that it’s usually easier/more comfortable sticking with those you know. I get it, I really do. But if we’re really going to be missional - to join with the missio dei, the God of mission - we HAVE GOT to get over this. Because missional is not just stepping outside of the church to do evangelism or acts of charity or service every once in awhile. It’s also not just about making a few atheist friends and having drinks every once in a while. Part of missional is dissolving that dividing line altogether.

So yes, I believe we need to attend to the superficial friendship problem in our churches but we need to maintain that tension of also developing friendships beyond just our local church body and then working to fade the dividing line between the two “worlds”.

One of the things I’ve discovered in my time in the church world is that church friendships are almost exactly like work relationships, except people see each other even more infrequently. This applies perhaps even more so to leaders - even amongst each other. Which means you’re “friends” or at least “friendly” as long as you go to the church. Leave the church and you can pretty much bet that’s the last you’ll see of anyone at the church. I’m guilty of contributing to this and participating in it as much as any one but it must stop.

I believe this is one of the reasons so many people become disillusioned with church after awhile. This either needs to change or people need to appropriately shift their expectations. I personally would rather see it change.

Taking a cue from a woman (mom, wife, copastor, and beautifully flawed human) I deeply admire and hope to become better friends with in the months and years to come, I would like to share my top 12 (I’m gonna top Kathy hehe) utterly humiliating beautifully HUMAN things about me. Let this be a lesson to you if you aren’t yet a mom that you cannot be a perfect mom nor should you try. Let it be a lesson to you if you are not yet married that you cannot be a perfect wife, nor should you try. Let it be a lesson to you if you think that I am perfect, that I have it all together - - I do not, nor do I try. And finally, let it encourage you and lift you up that you’re not alone…and you never will be even when you feel in your marrow that you are the only fuck-up out there.

1. I don’t like playing with my kids - especially pretend play. I find it mind numbingly boring and stupefying. The best they can squeeze out of me any given day is a 10 minute board game.

2. I have on more than one occasion asked my sensitive and emotional 5 year old what her problem is (using those exact words).

3. I often forget to feed my children - this keeps them thin at least.

4. When I do the laundry, I sort out all my husband’s clothes and dump them in a pile in the bedroom. They stay there that way until he wears them or puts them away.

5. I leave my children alone in the bathtub together.

6. This is a conversation that happens almost daily, usually around 6 after David’s been home for an hour or so “What’s the plan for dinner?” *shrug* “I dunno, I’m having a peanut butter sandwich”. That is if he’s lucky enough to catch me on a good day and not get “how the hell should I know, get your own damn food”.

7. On more than one occasion my children have watched 5 tv shows, played a video game for an hour and watched a movie… back to back while I worked on a project.

8. I often refuse to let my kids play with playdoh, the tea set, painting, markers, etc. just so I don’t have to clean up the ensuing mess.

9. I let my 2.5 year old drink soda - esp. when she throws a big enough fit.

10. I use chocolate as a bribe - and I do mean BRIBE.

11. I once left a load of laundry in the washing machine for 3 days and had to rewash it after drying it because it smelled so bad.

12. I often stay in my “pjs”, no makeup, not having done my hair until 15 minutes before my husband is due to arrive home.

…I can think of so many more but those are the first 12 that come to mind.

Recently, 2 questions about kids and the Bible came up on a parenting message board I’m a part of - 1. how much to censor and 2. how to use the Bible to teach issues of godly character and behavior. Here is my take on those issues that also touches on some good conversation we had at a recent dinner party.

Censoring

I have 2 beliefs about this.

1. in Christianity we often injure our children spiritually for the unimportant things.

2. we often underestimate how deeply spiritual children are in the important things.

Having said that, we could argue till Christ comes back about what the important things are but I will say this -

Children have a very deep, real and mystical connection with the Divine and they are capable of understanding the characteristics of God that we know are the same characteristics he wants us to demonstrate.

Children also are very sensitive to violence and injustice.

As a general rule I won’t expose my children to religious things that I wouldn’t expose them to in other domains. I’ve never understood how parents who they themselves don’t watch rated R movies took their 9 year old to the Passion of the Christ simply because it was about Jesus…knowing how violent it would be. I’m not going to talk to my kids about how David cut off Goliath’s head because I would never tell them a story like that outside of the Bible at this age, nor would I let them view something like that in a cartoon in any other context. (that’s my judgment, I’m not making a value judgment for anyone else)

I also see no necessity in talking with my kids yet about hell (my oldest is 5). Firstly because I myself don’t believe in an eternal “dante’s inferno-esque” hell and secondly because all it would do is serve to instill fear for really no reason. Along those lines, I refuse to worry my children about the rapture and the whole notion of people being left behind. Now, of course, I’m not a pre-trib dispensationalist so that wouldn’t make sense anyway but I had so many nightmares as a kid about this very thing that it’s close to my heart.

Put simply, I would say, censor those things that really aren’t ultimately important. Does my sensitive 5 year old need to know about the foreskins in the baskets story? Probably not. Or the stake through the head? Not likely.

One of the discussions we had in Revolution awhile back was related to this. Most of us who grew up going to Sunday school see the Gospels and key bible accounts through the lens of a felt board story. It’s hard for many of us to take them seriously and we’ve had to experience an exorcism of sorts to purge our minds of that imagery…but it never fully works.

So whatever we DO tell our kids, it won’t be presented in in a sing song felt board kind of way. If we can’t tell it straight up then it means they’re not ready for it yet.

Character/behavior

I don’t focus a lot on the “God doesn’t like it when…” type stuff. We teach godly character in a way that is integrated holistically with life in general. We teach that God is just and merciful and holy and we are created to be like Him but I don’t try to prooftext scripture to drive home the point that Shayel shouldn’t lie. I never want my kids to associate fear and shame with God - holy reverence and a desire for right living but not fear and shame. And it’s very easy at a young age to use fear and shame to manipulate - - even unintentionally.

We really just tell our kids that we are a family and we are to work together to care for one another as a family because we love one another. And we talk about demonstrations of love and self sacrifice in the life of Jesus if it makes sense at that time. We talk about how if everyone just did what they wanted to do, nothing would get done. Sometimes you have to do something that you don’t want to do because if you don’t, the consequence is not desired. We talk about the pay off when you persevere and we talk about how God knows that these things are hard and when people put the Bible together, they knew that some of these lessons would help us remember and so they were included in our Scriptures and they are good things to learn.

Much of this of course comes down to age and maturity as well as localized culture. If we were ranchers and our kids were exposed to slaughter houses, they would probably be able to learn more violent imagery at a younger age. So I’m sensitive to that and certainly not dogmatic across the board. Our kids will learn different things presented differently as they get older but these are my overall guiding principles.

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