commonplace Wednesday: Carry On, Warrior

I'm a newcomer to Glennon Doyle Melton and her blog Momastery.  A friend on Facebook shared one of her blog posts and it resonated for me.  Her book, Carry On, Warrior, is essentially a collection from the blog, with a few new pieces added as well.  I expect it's a great place to start catching up on who Glennon is and what Momastery is all about.

I'm about 60 pages in (288 pages total) and here's what stays with me - Glennon is good company for this work of family and life.  I'm not certain that a book is the best medium for her style of writing but her perspective, humor, and faith are welcomed.  Her commitment to being open and kind encourages me, nudges me, to be live an open and kind life too.  She holds a Christian faith that allows for her own discernment and discovery.  She seems not to be solely bound to the rules and mores of religious authority.  I appreciate that.

This is probably my favorite quote from the book:

I learned that in these disasters, all we can do is tell our In Case of Emergencies that their grief is real, and if it lasts forever, then we will grieve with them forever.
As far as I was able to tell during those two years, there was nothing else worth saying. It was not going to be all right, ever. Everything doesn’t happen for a decent reason. I was Sister’s In Case of Emergency and I couldn’t fix her emergency. I couldn’t do anything at all except feed her, hold her when she cried, pray angry prayers, keep showing up, and hope that time and my home and presence would offer healing.

I learned the truth of this approach to grief & comfort in the early days (years?) grieving the loss of my father.  I was comforted most by the friends who came over to just be with us.  And those well intended platitudes about the better place that dad was in or that it all happens for a reason just landed clanking and empty in my ears and on my heart.  I remember in particular that my beloved Miss G was able to fly home from college for a few days and hang out with our family.  We did ordinary things, like clean the kitchen from all the food that people kept bringing us.  We did these things together, in good company.

In the years since dad's passing, I've been near for other friends and their grief.  I hope that I've practiced what I've felt to be true.  I hope that I've given more time to showing up, bearing witness, living as good company, and grieving with them than the other things.

Life offers, holds, brings, is, a lot of grief.  Both from the blatant disasters and the subtle disintegrations.  I'm still grieving the birth of a child I didn't plan on, even though he's become the son I love dearly and fiercely.  I'm grieving all the advantages and opportunities that I've thrown away.  I'm grieving the independence I had a single child-free woman.  I grieve lost friendships and old lovers.  I think the same kinds of comfort apply to all of these kinds of grief.  It's the comfort of time and good company of friends who are just with us through it, who just keep showing up with us.

These days of job and motherhood are often lonely for me.  It's difficult to coordinate schedules to see people, once I get beyond the difficulty of reaching out in the first place.  So I sometimes grieve alone, which feels incomplete somehow, like maybe grief needs a witness to be truly met and healed.  Sometimes I stuff the grief or put it on hold.  And sometimes I find comfort in a book that comes alongside me like a friend would and says, "Yeah, me too."  For me, Carry On, Warrior is one of those books.  

my education as Autism Mom

It's been about a year since Little N received a formal diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder and it's taken me almost that entire year to understand and accept the diagnosis - and start to grasp what it means for Little N's future and for our family.  I compiled a reading list fairly early on but have been slow in actually reading the books.  Slower still to let their contents mull and make connections in my mind.

My current book is Unstrange Minds.  I'm halfway through chapter 4 and so far, these three thoughts are staying with me:

1) Little N has straight-up, 100%, classic Autism.  Not Autism-lite.  Not a wrong diagnosis such that he really is a typical kid after all.  It's Autism.

Here are some excerpts from the text that confirm this for me:

"None of them could consistently use pronouns correctly.  A child might ask for milk by saying, 'Do you want milk?' because that is exactly what he heard his mother say."  p. 48 

That's exactly how Little N communicates his needs.

"They hated changes in routine, in the arrangement of furniture, or even the path taken from one place to another.  Many would eat only a small number of foods, refusing to try new foods or even to accept the same foods prepared in different ways.  There were also sensory problems.  Most of the children were highly sensitive to particular noises, such as running water or the sound of a toilet flushing." p. 49

Again, this is Little N.

"... the core features of autism - a triad of impairments in social interaction, communication, and imagination (with repetitive interests and activities)...." p. 61

Little N, short and sweet.

2) We are so lucky and fortunate to have this diagnosis today rather than any other time in history.  If Little N was growing up 60 years ago he'd be facing a diagnosis of schizophrenia and institutionalization.  As recently as 20 years ago the school system wouldn't have known what to label him or how to help him.  The prevailing assumption was mental retardation.

Today the school system is where Little N is receiving special preparation in a developmental preschool for his future academic study.  He also receives speech and occupational therapy as well as support developing social skills.  Additionally, the school system provides a special program for children with Autism, which Little N attends twice a week in a class with just 3 other children working with 1 teacher and 2 aides.

When we received the diagnosis last fall, I hoped (maybe expected) that there would be someone like a case worker or our pediatrician to hold our hand.  I strongly wanted someone to hand us a map with a clear course and connections to resources and support people.  But that didn't happen.  It's very much a path and resources that you have to locate and identify and meet and participate with all on your own.  I'm overwhelmed at times.

When I read about the history of Autism I am amazed and grateful at how much and how quickly things have changed.  Right now Little N is getting all his instruction and additional support at the public school 5 blocks from our home.  That's amazing and wonderful and such a gift for him and for our family.

3) The book's author, Roy Richard Grinker, waited until his daughter was in middle school before he started writing the book.  I don't want to wait.  I'm striving for a balance of immediately capturing our lived experience with Autism and presenting a well-considered mull that only time will tell (and later retell a little bit differently again).  I want to convey the flux of experiences, new understanding and ideas, the mixed emotions.  I want to share the work and the celebrations along the way.  I want to assemble some meaning, maybe not conclusions but at least perspective, grown from living as an Autism family.

Plus, I'm a text person.  Putting an experience into my own words helps me to acknowledge what is happening and to make sense of it.  Writing with the knowledge that folks are reading adds another layer of accountability for me.   It's an additional push to keep me in motion taking the next steps for Little N and for our family; taking the next steps that deepen and broaden my own understanding of Autism.

As my understanding develops, writing is also a way to share with others, both folks that care about Little N and folks navigating their own experience with Autism, what it can be like and maybe provide some resonance, some company for the journey.  Ultimately, I hope that our story will be positive and resourceful and support others in doing the same.  And loving! - because our little family does have so much love.

eat, pray, love

"Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it, you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it. If you don't you will leak away your innate contentment. It's easy enough to pray when you're in distress but continuing to pray even when your crisis has passed is like a sealing process, helping your soul hold tight to its good attainments."
Eat, Pray, Love p. 260

You've already heard of this book. It's a hit memoir that women around the country have been devouring for a couple of years. It even has a fansite!

It requires some suspension of disbelief to get into it at first. Following a grueling divorce and all the identity & faith issues tangled up in that, the author takes off for a year in Italy, India, & Indonesia. Sound like your life? Or anyone you know? Me neither. So we accept that and move into her descriptions, dripping with flavor and feeling, the new people in her life, and her reflections and discoveries. Then she does start to sound real, accessible, and relevant.

Her time in each location took a different focus: Italy was about pleasure; India about devotion; Indonesia about balancing the two. These three are significant themes for me too. In recent years I struggle to remember what gives me pleasure or what pleasure is worth. Her stories of Italy keened my own senses to recognize and value pleasure in my life. The question of devotion has risen a few times in this blog, so reading about the effort she exerted to stay put in the ashram in India (& with herself) to practice meditation and all struggle and transformation that wrought challenged me to push myself (a little) more. Balance is where the two extremes cooperate in one life. For me, for a spiritual path to be real and valid it must be possible for a regular person, working a job, living as part of a family.

Gilbert, Elizabeth. Eat, Pray, Love. New York: Viking. 2006

surprise

I've started looking for books and resources that address unplanned pregnancy when a woman has chosen to carry the child to full term. Surprise Child: Finding Hope in Unexpected Pregnancy is the first that I've read. The author shares her own story of two unplanned pregnancy intermixed with the stories of other women she interviewed.

The book does a wonderful job of giving the reader a virtual community of women going through an unexpected pregnancy. Each chapter addresses a month of pregnancy through the different women's experiences and the feelings it evoked in them. Each phase has its own mix of emotions as well as choices to be made.

In the Readers' Guides at the back of the book I found the more pragmatic and applicable material that I was really interested in. Here, the author poses questions to help a pregnant woman, singly or with her partner, to process emotions, make plans, recognize changes and make choices. Some of the question topics that stood out for me: feelings when your chances of a miscarriage lessen, facing your grief & resentment, recognizing a redirection of your life & redefining success for yourself, what kind of mother do you want to be & what can you or are you doing to be that.

Book details: Fields, Leslie Leyland. Surprise Child: Finding Hope in Unexpected Pregnancy. Colorado Springs: WaterBrook Press. 2006
Book website: http://www.surprisechild.com/
Learn about the author: http://www.leslie-leyland-fields.com/

Magdalen

I've just read Elizabeth Cunningham's The Passion of Mary Magdalen and I recommend it gleefully. In this fun, insightful, challenging, thoughtful, bittersweet & salty novel she reveals Christian and Pagan and Jewish as one whole, shows us the gospels freshly, and stirs our desires. At least, she did for me.

Cunningham navigates the lofty terrain with the grace of one who knows where she is and where she is leading us. Her writing is confident, clear, grounded, and always in motion. There are lots of opportunities to turn away - I confess I nearly put the book down in the first section after finding it to be just a period piece romance novel. But even then the character of Maeve Rhaud (aka Mary Magdalen), in Cunningham's prose, intimates an invitation to something more satisfying. And where she leads, into material long espoused and explained by synods and theologies and Sunday morning sermons, is new and you want to explore it for yourself.

Here's how to find it: Elizabeth Cunningham. The Passion of Mary Magdalene. Rhinebeck, NY: Monkfish Book Publishing Company. 2006.
And here's a website for the trilogy (in development, I think): http://www.passionofmarymagdalen.com/
Follow the links to learn a little more about Elizabeth Cunningham here: http://www.highvalley.org/index.html
Or check out other reader's reviews (& buy it?): http://www.amazon.com/Passion-Mary-Magdalen-Cunningham-Chronicles/dp/0976684306