letting go of ladysplaining

Last week I returned to the clinic where I first put on my professional helper hat, four months after graduating from social work school and three months after having our first child. Frances! What a tiny magnetic force she was, the center of my world. I would race home on my bike at lunch time, my breasts tingling and aching and letting down milk about three blocks before I arrived at our house (I swear I could hear her crying from that far away), where Mike would be pacing and bouncing our frantic hungry baby and looking at me with grim desperation as I took off my helmet and dropped my bag on the kitchen counter. How could you have taken so long? 

She never did take a bottle. So I nursed during my lunch break, and then again as soon as I came home, and somehow she kept on growing and growing and eventually ate solids. But those first weeks working full time were harrowing for our little family.

They were at my first social work job, too. I liked some of the doctors and nurse practitioners and nurses, but other people terrified me. Like the BFFs who ruled medical records and spoke rapid slangy Spanish to each other peppered with explosive laughs (over jokes I never understood) and turned their steel trap-style minds to any problem they felt inclined to address. It reminded me a little of my one and only summer waitressing. I was timid and usually confused; I'd go back into the kitchen and repeat a question four times before someone heard me and made fun of me and then sent me away empty handed. I'd wander back to my table, demoralized. Um, I guess we're all out of salsa, sorry. I was never quite sure who to ask when I needed help, nor how to ask for it. I had no bluster to speak of. I could barely make eye contact with anyone on the crazy wild kitchen staff. I wished then that there was a way to do my job and disappear simultaneously.

The clinic was full of gutsy funny smart people who knew how to do everything. I was a hesitant, slow-on-my-feet, earnest 28-year-old with no experience, a newborn, and busted Spanish language skills. I felt so white and prissy and bumbling. I didn't have an office then; I floated between rooms. The front desk person in dental was supposed to check in the patients who were there to see me. Sometimes she didn't tell me when someone was waiting. I was so intimidated; I never confronted her. I'm pretty sure she liked it that way.

But over time, the staff at SouthEast accepted me. I began to like wandering into medical records, watching Confy and Enerys tease and laugh in the endless aisles of actual paper files. Confy had every single record number memorized. Eventually people were willing to work with me; they trusted both my good intentions and capabilities. And I loved the patients. I had a million ideas for them and for the clinic, a scant handful of which actually came to fruition.

Then we moved, for Mike's new job. I cried.

And now, unexpectedly, I'm back at SouthEast. The reason we're here is Mike's cancer. That almost impossible-to-accept reality colors everything we do in Lancaster with a strange, uncomfortable light. But even so. I am profoundly glad to be back.

I was hired by a big mental health agency with whom SouthEast now has a contract to provide integrated behavioral health services to patients on site. On my first day, I set up at a desk in the provider's office, tackling technical challenges while I waited for a patient to show up on my schedule. One by one, nurses and doctors and front desk staff and even Enerys came by and greeted me with enormous smiles and hugs. She told me Confy had just retired.

What?? No Confy?

Oh my goodness. It was delightful. We asked about each other's kids and jobs. I exclaimed over how fabulous everyone looked. They really did. Just gorgeous. My jaw began to hurt from smiling.

Every once in awhile I'd stride into the nurses's station and introduce myself to the new (i.e. hired at some point over the past eight years) providers and nurses, asking if anyone had any People with Problems to send my way.

Eventually I snagged two. Success.

The next day I was at a different site, a beautiful space built after I left, where more happy reunions awaited. I got to meet with another couple of patients, but still had a lot of down time. I decided to tackle an online training I needed to check off my list.

While I did it, I listened to an interview with Glennon Doyle Melton. She said she had recently trained herself to refrain from asking for advice from 38 friends every time she had to make a decision. She said that now she just makes decisions. Her new hurdle? Learning to refrain from explaining herself.

That one caught my attention. She said women are always feeling compelled to explain their decisions.

Oh yes. She called it. Soy yo: la mujer who explains. 

It's as if we feel the need to justify our very presence, our particularity. Oh, this? I had to wear this. I'm backed up on laundry. Oh, my kid's school? See, we debated public vs. private endlessly and I really thought hard about it and though I do support public school I knew my kid was struggling...and money? Oh yes, I know, it's expensive and we can't really afford it but we applied for financial aid. And probably we won't stay there anyway. And I can understand how you feel about it, too.

I explain myself to myself. Meagan, it does seem like a bit much to have Beatrice in school full time when you don't need it every day. I know, Meagan, but I was so worn down by the summer and really needed a little time to deal. And what if Mike gets really sick again soon? That's hard for Bea. And he has to go back and forth to New York so often. So it really is okay that I'm not working and not scrambling to take care of Mike for a few hours while she's at school.

Why don't I just say: she's fine. It's fine to take some time for myself. 

Probably because taking time for oneself isn't really perceived as fine. As women especially, we're supposed to lean in and take care and maximize and multi-task and account for our activities every waking moment. We're to justify every bite we eat, every time we volunteer or don't volunteer at our kids' school, every job we take or don't take, every two minutes spent meditating or flossing or frosting a birthday cake (post the evidence online, further justification) - basically every choice we make.

So it's hard to do the work of living one's life: to assert's one acceptability and lovability through making decisions and showing up and proceeding. But when we do, I think that helps others do the same.

In the middle of that first marvelous series of happy reunions at SouthEast, a woman walked past my desk who looked vaguely familiar. I moved towards her, smiling. She smiled back. Hi! I said, meeting her bright eyes. Meagan! she said. I gave her a big hug. Then we started chatting and I realized I had met her for the first time briefly in the hall of the mental health agency that I work for the previous week. She sees patients for therapy at the clinic part-time.

It was a new work acquaintance, the sort that normally doesn't merit a huge goofy smile and hug in greeting. But it worked out just fine. She was so warm; we sat down and had a good collaborative talk about a client.

It made me think: what if I greeted everyone that way, with genuine delight? What if we approached every meeting as a happy, unexpected reunion?
 
What if I walked into every new space the way I walked back into my old clinic, with the simple confidence that it was good to be there? That I had something worthwhile to give, and to receive?

I didn't explain away my exuberant hug to my new colleague. In a rare moment, warmed through by so many reignited connections, I didn't feel the need to. The majority of the people I met at the new clinic were strangers to me, but I walked into each encounter with neither hesitation nor fear.

To give others the gift of your face, your open gaze, you have to assume the space you occupy. You have to first know that your presence is good; then you can give it away.

Maybe it's just age, or experience, or the fact that I have a positive history at SouthEast. But I think it's something more. Because wow wow wow did I feel grateful for the change that eleven years has wrought in me. Feeling loved and valued has emboldened me to take up my role and my choices - to live inside my skin - more fully, more peacefully, and with fewer explanations. So that I can love and value and embolden in turn.

Please believe me, dear readers, when I tell you this true thing: it is very, very good that you're here.

make it beautiful

Sometimes the realizing-one's-youngest-child-is-growing-up sadness hits me. Hard. I have to reckon with the fact that there will be no more babies, that I am much older now, that we are well into another time in life marked by soccer games, math homework, pleas for phones, shifting boundaries. 

But I breathe a sigh of relief when I think that Beatrice's recent confrontation with the terrible inevitability of death marks the last time I will walk closely with a three year old through that singular developmental milestone's anguish. (Also, thank heavens there will be no more potty training, or worry over weaning a toddler). But back to death. I went through it with Frances and Gabriel at this age, and it broke my heart into a million pieces then too. Not that the process is over - not that it's ever really over. But the initial realization has hit.

I can't in good conscience tell you about the conversation that came about and then escalated at the dinner table in such a way that all of our hearts broke together. With Mike and especially my older children involved, I can't really tell the story of something so intimate - I think it is theirs to tell. I have to make space to allow my growing dear ones to articulate these sacred, saturated moments for themselves. 

In the On Being interview with Marie Howe that I referenced recently, she said that art is a kind of safe container for the brute, painful knowledge we all live with, which is that all our earthly relationships will end. Death will take us away from our children, from the ones we most adore. It's the separation, I think, that evokes the anticipatory grief and terror. But art can hold those feelings for us, rendering them tolerable, even beautiful, even transcendent. 

Children especially love to tap-dance around death. They are drawn to the ghoulish: Halloween, ghosts, skeletons, mummies. I'm going to kill you! they holler at one another in the heat of play (and argument). They love games with names like Murder. I don't know why she swallowed the fly. Perhaps she'll die! All these songs and games are ways to get close to the finality of death while keeping it wrapped safely in melody and story.

And then I think of Beatrice's anguish last night, sitting in my lap, asking over and over again: will I die? do people die? without the aid of art, nor any armor at all - with her bare defenseless soul exposed. She experienced a kind of agony that merited the rending of garments, the tearing of hair. For real. 

When it became unbearable, and also late, I told her it was time to read some stories. Frances and Gabriel sat with us, all exhausted by sadness, all gathered around picture books. They were a balm. And then Beatrice requested four songs, instead of our usual two, at bedtime: The Dock (which I figured out a few days ago means the Doxology) and Amazing Grace, please, then Red River Valley and Wild Mountain Thyme. As I sang I felt how these beloved songs are about the same things: God's grace and love, the pain of endings and goodbyes, the inevitable changes life brings, the joy of connection. They make beautiful, hold-able, the truths that define our lives together.

Do not hasten to bid me adieu.

After all the tearful children were put to bed, I stretched out on the couch and read and read until it was very late and I had finished Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson. I could not put it down; I barely breathed. I hesitated before picking it up, because I knew it would not offer distraction to my weary heart (unlike Narcos, my first choice, but Mike wouldn't watch it with me - it was already too late). Rather it would take me down further into its brokenness.

Which was true. But it rendered the pain of loss just-bearable, and exquisitely beautiful too. Reading that book was like being in someone else's dream, mixing memory and fear, the immersive sensations of childhood, the words we say and don't say, into a narrative that flowed with a logic all its own.

August, the narrator, is grappling with overwhelming loss. Of her intimate friendship with three other girls she says we opened our mouths and let the stories that had burned nearly to ash in our bellies finally live outside of us.

The phrase stayed with me. I started a new job this week, one in which I will have the honor of listening to the burning stories of others, and the ashen stories too, that live dry and bitter deep in the gut. I think it is the work I am meant to do. But without art, it would be impossible.

why the debate made me cry

In sixth grade, my reading teacher was named Mrs. Gillis. She was stern, ancient, given to bouts of yelling, possessed of an impossibly straight spine. She also occasionally stepped out of the classroom and left us, 30 eleven and twelve year olds, to work independently for excruciatingly long minutes at a time. Because of her prison warden approach to teaching, students were especially tempted to raise hell every time she turned her back. Often, I braced myself for chaos. 

One day early in the school year, and thus early in my tenure at a rough urban middle school, a boy who shall remain unnamed took advantage of one of those unmonitored moments to jump out of his seat, scurry over and squat down next to mine, grab the bottom of my wide-hemmed blouse, pull it out, and look right up it. 

I remember the shirt. It was Espirit. It was turquoise and sleeveless and had buttons up the back. Despite my weird shy white girl status, I felt very cool wearing it. But it turns out that fashion cannot save you from meanness. That boy nearly put his whole head up inside my new name brand shirt, then pulled back, looked up at me and said: Girl! You ain't got no bra on! You need a bra! 

And then, booming, to the class at large: She don't wear no bra.

A week or two after that, I was in reading, bent over my work. The classroom, organized into long rows of desks, was full and quiet. Mrs. Gillis was writing on the board. Suddenly I felt a sharp yank on my hair from behind. The same boy had grabbed my ponytail and pulled. He pulled so hard that my desk slammed backwards into the two empty desks behind me, sending all three desks, in their cold metal feet, squealing and scraping across the linoleum floor. What an awful sound.

It echoed in the quiet class. Mrs. Gillis' back was turned when it happened. She yelled at us for being disruptive.

Again, I only remember my stunned silence. Fight, flight, or freeze. (I think freezing is my specialty.) But the thing is, I knew I was powerless. Mrs. Gillis was old and pissed; she didn't want the details. My tormentor, a boy who for reasons unknown spent a few awful weeks picking on me in terrible ways, was a fast-talking, skinny, tough, charismatic kid with not a lot of capacity for self-control. That school was a place where violence was commonplace and normalized. Other kids thought he was funny. Hell, sometimes I thought he was funny. He had a kind of social smarts and influence that emboldened him to push boundaries all the time. 

In those awful moments, it seemed there was nothing I could do to regain any power or sense of safety. There was no comeback I could invent to reestablish a shred of social standing; there was no gesture I could make to protect myself; there was no adult to appeal to for help. 

Maybe in the end he was caught, or suffered some consequence. Honestly, I don't remember the aftermath of either episode. I mostly remember the feeling of silent helplessness and shame, unable to secure help, unable to even find words to defend myself with. And I know I never went to school training bra-less again.

I had forgotten about that kid. Until last night, in the middle of a conversation with Mike about the debate, he came back. 

Watching Trump stalk around Clinton, listening to him make assertions and bluster and interrupt and throw up his hands, was profoundly uncomfortable. I loved Hillary more than I ever have as I watched, because she kept her calm in the face of that menace. At one point I was afraid he was going to push her. How does she do it? How does she stand there, just a few feet away, and smile calmly?

I know I'm not alone when I say the debates are tough for me to watch. 

Afterwards, we talked about how it doesn't seem to matter what Trump says. His support doesn't seem linked to the content of his speech. That's why he can say anything he wants. It seems to be more about the assertion of power. As long as he appears powerful and confident, it just doesn't matter. So coming back at him with information, or policy details, or TRUTH, means very little - at least in terms of "winning" in the crudest sense.

I felt increasingly despairing as we talked. How can it be that so many people admire the worst kind of man? I wondered: what would a noble and effective response be? What could Hillary honorably do in these debates that would somehow make him less appealing, less valid? Because truly, I told Mike, he is just like a blustering mean boy in school. He is the kind of enraging person that it can feel impossible to win against. He is a person that makes you fear there is no justice.

I started crying. I felt a kind of helplessness, unable to imagine what another woman could do in the face of this charismatic, shameless meanness, with TV cameras running and millions of people watching her every blink in order to tweet about it.

And then I remembered that boy announcing to the class, after a careful, forced investigation, that I was not wearing a bra. 

Hilary handles Trump way better than I handled that bully. But the very idea that a presidential candidate could stir up that memory makes me want to cry all over again. 

We let Frances watch the beginning of the debate. I regret it. How can a mother protect her girls (and boys) from the worst kind of men, when PBS broadcasts one of them stalking the floor of a presidential debate? And what more would that lost boy in the sixth grade have been tempted to try, if he had been emboldened by the example set in 2016? 

welcoming

 

Every afternoon my heart beats just a little faster as I approach the long benches where the children in the primary classes are seated, waiting to be picked up. I scan the small faces, looking for Beatrice. I love to see her before she sees me, and I love to surprise her. She lights up. 

I get the best hug, and then a flood of words about the things she did in school, and then, inevitably, she turns to her friend You Jie. And the two of them turn to me and plead, usually while jumping up and down, to have a play date. A very very very long playdate. A sleeping over playdate. Which bed can I sleep in at your house, anyway?

But I don't know You Jie's parents. So every day I tell them that as soon as I talk to You Jie's mama or papa we will plan a time to play. But honestly, I haven't been trying very hard. 

One of the hardest parts about Mike's illness, especially for the children, has been our compromised ability to host. Kids are loud and unpredictable and there have been times over the past 15 months that I've wanted to muzzle our three so that Mike could feel sick or sleep in relative peace. At those times adding more kids would be a set up for disaster: I'd be driving myself crazy trying to contain the mess, and they'd be wondering why Frances and Gabriel's mom is such a stressed out nag. 

Last fall was especially hard. The children were all starting at a new school, and at the same time Mike was very, very sick on chemo and radiation. I found myself meeting other parents and awkwardly inviting my children over to their houses. Socially weird, yes, but my kids' loneliness and disorientation was breaking my heart. I knew they needed time to solidify new friendships and also knew the last thing Mike needed was more children running up and down the stairs. 

So I'd ask: could our kids get together to play? And could you deal with them? At your house? I was so raw and vulnerable then, and I would try not to cry over our helplessness, and try not to focus too much on the fact that this other person had smiled politely and said hello, how are you? and my response was that my husband has cancer and because of that we moved abruptly and we are feeling lost and uncertain about the future and can my kids come play at your house? Oh, and it's nice to meet you too. And please know I'm normally not this needy and weepy and you don't have to be afraid of me or my children. We're not like this. Not usually. We won't make you uncomfortable, at least we'll try not to. And please don't judge me too much. But anyway, when would be good for you?

It wasn't easy, but for the most part it kind of worked. Ask and you shall receive. Seriously, it's good advice. People have been marvelously kind and generous with my children (and, by extension, me).

But getting back to hosting: I really hate the feeling of hesitating before I ask someone in. Hospitality is a virtue that I hold dear. Feeding people feels so good. So, when Mike came home from his first treatment on this clinical trial and it became clear that it was not going to knock him out like previous treatments have...? I still hesitate - is it okay? is Mike sleeping? - and then I remind myself, it is okay. 

Last night, on a whim, I implored Tessa to bring her family over to eat some pasta in the twenty minutes we had left before she and Gabriel had to go to soccer practice. And they came! And brought green beans. It feels almost unreal to me, that I can spontaneously bring four friends into the kitchen and pass around the parmesan and watch our families eat together without any internal twisting up over whether we are too loud or if I should make everyone go onto the porch because so many people might be stressful. But Mike was right there, one of the people eating pasta. 

And so yesterday, I mustered up my courage and waited for You Jie's mom at pick up. I introduced myself and did something I haven't been able to do with a new small friend in a long time: I asked if You Jie could come over to play. 

We all ended up walking home together. The little girls held hands, looking back at us and grinning, almost disbelieving their good luck: the dream was finally becoming reality. On the way home, I ended up telling You Jie's mom about cancer and living in my mom's house and all of it in response to her innocent get-to-know-you questions, but I felt okay. So many of those tears that pushed up against my words last year, every time I had to meet someone new, were about the difficulty of perceiving myself (or imagining others' perceptions of me) as needy and messy and broken. 

Church people like to talk about radical hospitality. More than just greeting people at the door: a much deeper kind of welcome. The way Beatrice encounters her friends outside her classroom in the morning, running to greet them, yelling out their names, grinning uncontrollably - talk about radical welcome. The children hang their jackets on the hooks outside and then run into the class, straight up to their teacher Jane, greeting her with enthusiastic delight. It makes me melt every time I see it. When they say good morning, eyes a-sparkling, what they are really saying is: you are wonderful, Jane! You are precious, and we absolutely love to be here with you! 

Welcoming people with that kind of boundless acceptance - opening wide the doors without hesitation - feels really, really good, as any of the kids in Beatrice's class would tell you. 

I fumbled a bit talking to You Jie's mom but I didn't feel like crying or protecting myself, and this too seems like a hospitable gesture. It's the kind I've been practicing for many months now. I haven't always been able to share my home and my kitchen, but I have tried to share my experience with you, to welcome you in to my brokenness. 

Once Katie told me she and another friend joked about how they might try hosting Meagan-style. What style is that? Oh you know, she said, making the salad as people come in, and asking them to help chop or stir, having a messy art project underway all over the kitchen table. 

I guess that is my hosting style. Even under the healthiest of circumstances, guests in my home see how I make the sausage. In fact, I ask them to help me make it. 

Which is maybe like this blog. Come in, come in! Let me welcome you to this messy interior space! Would you like some moments of grace, and moments of terror? While you're here, could you help me make sense of this heartbreaking, beautiful, broken world?

To be radically hospitable, maybe one is obligated to bring her own vulnerability and raggedness to the encounter. Otherwise it doesn't hold the potential to heal; it isn't an authentic connection. When you offer someone a glass of water and look him in the eyes, it's impossible to hide. You're exposed. This is why being around the primary classroom is so profoundly joyful: they all look you in the eye, and invite you to do the same. They are so comfortable seeing and being seen, just as we are.

This ambition to open the doors of my unpolished self for strangers and friends - any of whom might be angels - is essentially self-motived. It feels amazing, when I am strong enough. I am welcomed when I welcome. And I like to think that the more I can share myself fully with all kinds of people - especially annoying people, and needy people, and unsuccessful people (the kind of person I am afraid that I actually am) - the more I can offer radical hospitality to the weirdest and most neglected among us, the more comfortable I will become with that gesture, and the more I might offer the same radical hospitality to myself. Weirdo that I am. 

What would it be like, to offer that kind of delighted acceptance to oneself? To what depths might a generosity and a gracious receiving, circling back in one continuous internal gesture, fortify our spirits for all the tragedy and joy inevitably coming our way?

Welcome, me. You are wonderful.