Hard

This way of life - living out loud - is hard. It’s good, in many, many ways - but it’s hard, too. Most of the people who read this blog don’t know me, but many do. And it’s hard, sometimes, on the people who know me. It’s hard on my family, and my friends. Sometimes I wonder if it’s hard on my poor neighbors, who have to know SO MUCH about us. When I see them outside and they say, “How are you?” It’s funny, because they already know. It makes us closer and further apart somehow- I don’t know. At this point, when I meet a new neighbor- I know immediately, by her face, whether she reads the blog or not. It’s weird. When one of them invites me to coffee, I want to say, “Perfect- could you bring along four hundred extremely personal essays about your life so we can start on even ground?”

Anyway – I think living out loud is the hardest on me. I mostly love writing this blog, it serves me, heals me, and it satisfies the creative cat constantly clawing at my insides, trying to get out. It helps me make sense of things, holds me accountable to myself. Forces me out of my cozy, dangerous hiding places. Usually, I crave writing time because it makes me feel good. But sometimes it doesn’t - sometimes I don’t want to write at all – like today - but I still do. I write when I don’t want to write because I have learned that my writing helps my readers. And so I feel a responsibility, a calling, to keep showing up and keep telling the truth about my life and heart and struggles. But it’s not easy. It is not easy at all to allow yourself to be so vulnerable. But this is how I have come to understand that I’m supposed to love the world, right now. So I do it.

Loving tirelessly - doing your job - is hard.

I wrote an essay about Beyonce, about sacraments, last week and in it I mentioned that I believe I have four children, and that one of them is in Africa. Someone read that post and left this comment.

Anonymous said...

Hi Glennon... may I make a gentle reminder that you DO have four children? Please don't discount the one you chose not to raise on this earth. I'm wondering if that's part of your desire to adopt, to make up for that decision?

SEPTEMBER 18, 2011 7:52 PM

The commenter left it anonymously, as is her right. She left it hidden there at the end of the comments section so that not many people, other than me, would read it. I wanted to bring it out into the light today. It’s always, always better to bring darkish things into the light. They become less scary.

When I first read this comment, I felt …creeped out. Like I had looked down at my bright shiny sparkly heart and found a hairy, poisonous spider crawling all over it.

Obviously, the commenter is referring to something quite personal that I shared two years ago, in the Testimony that I gave to my church. She’s referring to my abortion. This stranger thought it was okay to bring this up two years later, publicly, attach it to my adoption, and suggest that my family’s effort to adopt a child is no more than an attempt to escape and redeem the guilt she assumed I must feel as a result of my abortion.

My, my, my.

First- Let us be clear, she had every right to make this comment. At Momastery, most of us have agreed to an unwritten rule that we don’t use the truths I tell against me. But no one’s forced to follow this unwritten rule. I walk onto this field everyday without armor or weapons, by choice, and so the risk is that every once in awhile, someone will ignore the rules and shoot, and I’ll be hit. It’s the way it goes. It happens. Usually privately, through email. But it seemed time for you, my Lovies, to know that it does happen. It hurts, and it always, always makes me want to quit writing this blog. But I don’t. When I want to shut off my computer, take my life back as my own, curl up into a protective roly-poly ball, I don’t. I come back here because I want to keep loving and remaining open, even though neither love nor openness are easy.

This is why each time someone says they can’t do the Monkee thing because they’re not into the “warm fuzzy, sticky sweet love thing” I want to say HUH? Trust me, Momastery love is not warm fuzzy sticky sweet love. It’s tough as nails love. It’s having your heart ripped out, putting it back together, and offering it back to the same world that just tore it up…the next day. It's running toward pain and grief and brokenness instead of away from it. It's turning the other cheek till you get whiplash. It’s resisting the overwhelming desire to quit, to save yourself for yourself. It’s exhausting and uncomfortable. Sometimes it’s ugly, like using your bare hands to search for gold in piles of crap. BUT WARM AND FUZZY, STICKY AND SWEET - IT’S NOT.

So, anyway. When I read this comment, I had many reactions, none of which I will discuss here. In general, I was surprised, creeped, angry…but less so than I’d have been a year ago, which makes me think I might be getting better at this.

I try to live my life the same way that a carpenter who lived two thousand years ago lived his. Once he stood on a hill top and explained how to love well to a huge group of people hanging onto his every word, shocked by the countercultural ideas he suggested aloud. And recognizing it as The Truth. He was telling them nothing new, actually. He was just reminding them of everything that was already written onto their hearts.

The first time I read the things Jesus said about love, it all rang so true to me that my heart about exploded. It rang hard, but true. Jesus said that when someone hurts you, you should turn the other cheek. He said that you should love the one that hurt you, and you should turn the other cheek over and over and over again. Seven times seventy- seventy times, I think. I’ve been writing this blog for over two years, so I think I’ve gotta be getting close to that number. Let’s just say that the five hundredth and thirty ninth person who tries to hurt my feelings is going to get her ASS KICKED.

But anonymous, you are not lucky five hundred and thirty nine. So, since my Jesus insists, I must turn the other cheek. The beautiful thing about turning the other cheek is that it forces you to break eye contact with the person who has slapped you, and this little turn changes your perspective. Now, all of sudden, you are looking away, forward, to something better, more beautiful, and your heartbeat settles, and your palms stop sweating.

So here I am. I’ve turned. I have a new perspective. I have tried to do what my friend Meghan often suggests, which is to “listen for the love” in what’s said to me. And so I am going to try to answer your pseudo-question, anonymous, with love.

I have no doubt that my abortion has something to do with my desire to adopt. As does my parents’ teachings that we belong to each other, and my Sister’s passion for the powerless, and my gift at mothering, and the extra money and other resources that God’s given me to steward, and my faith, and my relationship with my husband, and my teaching experiences with underprivileged children, and on and on and on. I, and my dreams, are the sum total of everything that has ever happened to me and everyone I’ve ever met and every book I’ve ever read and every song I’ve sung and every friend I’ve loved, and every mistake I’ve made.

So, I would be silly to pretend to be certain that the two - abortion and adoption - are entirely unrelated. Everything is related to everything, obviously. I will tell you that I’ve been discussing my passion for adoption since high school, years before I knew that abortion would become part of my life. So clearly the direct correlation you’re trying to make is wrong.

I would also like to address your suggestion that through adoption, I’d be assuaging my guilt for my abortion.

Please, let us address that presumption here. Anonymous: Let me be clear. I don’t have any shame about my abortion. None. I know that’s hard for people like you to hear, because if you are a Christian and abortion has been a part of your life, you are supposed to beat your chest and gnash your teeth forever and repent for the rest of your life and then join crusades to end abortion by any means necessary, and speak through tears to large and small groups of people and swear to them that abortion was the worst mistake you’ve ever made and explain that you pray for your dead baby in heaven every night. THEN your sinner-self will be embraced by Christian society and used as a poster girl. Literally, likely.

But I won’t say or do any of that that, ever. Because none of that is true, for me. I know it’s true for some, and I respect that Each has her own path. But it’s not true for me. I did the best I could at the time with the resources I felt I had.. I’ve apologized, yes- but mostly to myself. I feel sad sometimes for the lost girl I was and I am fiercely protective of that precious me who had to go through that scary day and the days that preceded and followed. Far from ashamed, I’m really, quite, quite proud of her for making it through. I don’t feel ashamed. I feel forgiven and whole and I know that God never let go of my hand before, during, or after my abortion. God and I are clear on this issue. We actually, believe it or not, worked it all out long before your counsel was offered.

As Maya Angelou says. “We do the best we can. When we know better, we do better.” Amen. There is no room for shame or regret in my life. I'm too full. I am too forgiven, too adored, too fully loved, too full of ideas and dreams and passion to waste my precious life pretending to be crippled by something that is imaginary. Shame is an illusion. It can disappear so easily.

To this day, I will admit that I have confused feelings about the abortion issue. I think that “issues” like abortion are really just “people” so it’s probably best to think of them as such. One at a time. One person at a time. I don’t feel shame about my abortion. But I don’t love abortion either. Both/And. I think there are probably better ways.

But I also think that if you really, really hate abortion, it might be a great idea to go volunteer at a Boys and Girls club, to meet and get to know young people, to become a mentor, to offer a kid another way to experience love and connection- so she doesn’t go looking for it in the wrong places. To try to jump into the mix before it’s too late. I sometimes feel like the picket lines at the clinics are a little too late. Offering unsolicited, creepy suggestions on a stranger's blog who had an abortion fifteen years ago is certainly too late.

As for me- in keeping with the one person at a time theory….I think that if a young friend confided in me that she was pregnant and was considering an abortion, Craig and I would hold her and love her and tell her that she was loved and that she had many choices.

I think we would tell her that she could live with us and we would make sure she was taken care of, physically and financially, and that if she wanted to keep the baby we would help her start her life.

I think we would tell her that if she didn’t want to raise the baby, we’d raise the baby for her.

And I think if she decided that abortion was the only way, we would hold her hand through it and love her afterward and demand that she know that she was as loved and adored the moment after as she was on the day she was born.

I know that’s not how everybody feels, and that’s okay. It’s just how I feel.

Love You, Anonymous.

G