Posted on

Country Roads, Take Me Home

IMG_0856

Three weeks ago I sat in an apartment in Los Angeles with six Iranian women, most of them in their fifties and sixties. It felt like home, with comfortable couches and a large table and a small cat that kept getting into trouble.

One of the women told me how the Iranian authorities came and arrested her husband. Took him away without saying why or where they were going. She spent the next 24 hours visiting every hospital, prison and morgue in the city. Three days later she heard from him. He had been in solitary confinement. They had given him one phone call to see if he could come up with money for bail.

Another woman told me the story of her son’s suicide, how he had missed Iran so much after they moved to the States that he became severely depressed. She and her husband heard the gunshot as they watched television one night, and they ran to his room. She cried as she told us how she wrapped him in a blanket and sat with him in her lap as they waited for the ambulance, how she kept believing he might still live until she saw the way the paramedics weren’t rushing off, and we all cried with her.

Then one of the women in the apartment screamed and shouted. The cat was on the table, eating the desserts. Someone shooed it off and everyone else laughed. From tears to laughter in the time it takes a cat to disappear into the shadows. Then the room grew silent. I took a deep breath. The woman whose son had taken his own life sighed, then looked at me through kind eyes and smiled a sad smile.

* * * * *

I found out a few days ago that a friend from high school died on Monday. His name is Peter. He was a young man, in his thirties, a Lutheran minister. He had a wife, two daughters, and a son. It was cancer, that piece of shit disease that keeps trying to establish hell on earth.

I don’t think I’ve seen Peter since high school. I remember one day, my senior year, all of us guys on the soccer team went to his house and he shaved our heads before our final home game. It was a right of passage of some kind, a minor rebellion.

I remember watching my long brown hair hit the floor. I remember the sound of the hair clippers as well as the sound of him laughing. I kind of remember his father, our middle school music teacher, walking through the house and mumbling about how much better we looked with our hair intact. But I could be making that part up.

* * * * *

I haven’t prepared well for this winter. The snow has impaired my ability to collect the wood I cut in the summer. Last winter I just went out each week and brought in what I needed. This year, with over two feet of snow now melted down to eight inches of icy slush, navigating the paths through the woods is still fairly impossible.

Anyway, I was out the other day with my warmest coat on and my hood up. I carried each large log, one at a time, from the log pile to the porch where I split it and stacked it. At one point I caught my own reflection in the door, and for that brief moment I thought I was my dad. The salt and pepper beard, the same eyes, something about my face: the combination of these things made me think I was looking at my dad.

I thought, for that brief moment, that those we love really do live on in us. My dad is still alive, thankfully, but seeing him there, in me, it gave me hope that someday, when he’s gone, I will still see him from time to time.

* * * * *

On Tuesday, around 2pm, I walked through a city parking lot in Lancaster. All around me, the sound of traffic, the honking of horns, the drawn up shoulders of people ready for spring and fending off the cold.

Then I heard it. Someone shouted my name. I turned and looked behind me, through the parking lot, and there they were.

My friend Peter’s parents. I felt the wind get knocked out of me. I walked toward them and they looked tired, very tired, and I didn’t know what to say except two of the truest phrases I’ve said in a very long time.

“I’m so glad to see you.I’m so, so sorry about Peter.”

I hugged his mom for a very long time. Then I hugged his father, our old music teacher. He used to always play “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” in class, and John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads.”

Life is old there, older than the trees, younger than the mountains, blowing like a breeze.
Country roads, take me home to the place I belong.
West Virginia, mountain momma, take me home, country roads.

We parted ways, and I told them I’d see them Sunday at the service. They said they would really appreciate that.

Tonight I’m sitting in the living room, thinking about them, hoping they’re okay. I hear my own children running through the house upstairs, long after bedtime.

I hope Peter’s parents will see reflections of him everywhere, the way I saw my dad in my own reflection. I hope they see him in so many things: the music he loved, the way he used to say certain things, the beautiful children he left behind. I know these reflections can never replace the real-life people we lose, but maybe they can be something. Maybe they can help us hold on to the hope we have.

I hear her voice in the morning hour she calls me, the radio reminds me of my home far away.
And driving down the road I get a feeling that I should have been home yesterday, yesterday.

Country roads, take me home.

Posted on

Why I Wanted Our Fifth Child to be a Girl

IMG_0419
 

“If you don’t want to know the baby’s sex, now is the time to look away from the screen,” the ultrasound tech said, so Maile closed her eyes and I looked down at the tiles.

“Would you mind writing down the sex on a piece of paper for us?” Maile asked, her eyes still squeezed shut. When she closes her eyes like that, she looks like a little girl, I thought to myself. I thought of Madeline L’Engle’s words:

I am still every age that I have been. Because I was once a child, I am always a child. Because I was once a searching adolescent, given to moods and ecstasies, these are still part of me, and always will be.

“No problem,” the man said. He was a straightforward man with a kind voice and very little expression.

“Do you ever, you know, is it always easy to tell if it’s a boy or a girl?” Maile asked, trying not to express any doubt in the man’s unquestionable abilities as a magic waver of the ultrasound wand. He looked at her and waited just a second before answering. The pause gave his words added effect.

“At 20 weeks, it’s easy to identify the baby’s sex,” he said, matter-of-fact, like an elementary school teacher answering a child as to whether or not one plus one always equals two.

So that was that. He folded the slip of paper and put it inside an envelope. Written on it was either the word ‘boy’ or ‘girl.’ My sisters would take the envelope to a friend of ours who makes cupcakes, and she would open the envelope and then fill the cupcakes with blue if it was a boy or pink if it was a girl. On Sunday at my parents house some family members would gather and we’d count down and bite into a cupcake and there it would be, boy or girl, the new shape of our family.

We never did these sorts of things with our other children. We always waited to find out until the final push, the first little wail, the anguish-ecstacy of a life breaking into the world. But these are new days. New times. And we are, all of us, changing.

* * * * *

“So what are you hoping for?” everyone asks, and in the past I would have said “A healthy baby” or, if I was feeling particularly ornery, “A human.” But now that I’m older I hold myself to a lower degree of scrutiny. I am less affected by what I used to consider weaknesses of character. I am who I am, and while I still strive to become a kinder presence in the world, use a softer voice with my children, and be more sensitive to the needs of my wife, I also understand that God loves me deeply, just as I am.

So when people asked me what I was hoping for, I answered in a straightforward voice without hesitation, “A girl.”

And I did hope for a girl. At first I wasn’t sure why. I love my sons fiercely and tenderly, so the thought of another son wasn’t something that filled me with bad feelings. This made me even more curious. Why do I want a girl? Then it came to me, through the foggy cloud of self-awareness and personal history.

I didn’t know if I had it in me to be a good dad to three boys. Two already stretched me. I remembered the amount of time my dad spent playing ball with me, the only boy. I remembered growing up with a sense of uniqueness, the only son of Merrill Smucker, the oldest child. I have a very good father.

Parenting girls has never weighed on my mind. Perhaps because I grew up with three sisters, or perhaps because some of my best friends as a child were my female cousins. Whatever the cause, I feel relaxed with my girls, sufficient. I feel that the love that I have for them will be enough.

The arrival of  our fourth child, and second son, Sam, was a surprise to me. I think I always assumed I would have one son, that I could be the same father to my boy as my father was to me. But as Sam grew up, I found myself fighting off feelings of inadequacy. I didn’t have time to play ball with both of them, separately, every day, as my own father did in my memories. I didn’t have the energy to be what I felt Cade and Sam needed me to be. I couldn’t be the same dad to them that my father had been to me.

So at the thought of having another boy, I felt myself shrink back. The voices in the back of mind stepped closer to the foreground.

You should be a different father than the one you are.You could be a better father to your sons.

“So, what are you hoping for?”

“A girl.”

* * * * *

On Wednesday night, four days before the planned revealing of baby number five, we got snowed in. Our half-mile lane was blanketed in two feet of snow. There was no way we were going anywhere, at least not for a few days, so we holed up in the house. I stacked wood outside the house for the woodstove and Maile made all kinds of delicious food for the stretch ahead of us.

On Friday, I started getting a toothache. A bad one. And not only were we snowed in, but we had no pain reliever in the house, nothing, and my dentist was closed for the week. I spent Friday night soaking my mouth in ice, then miraculously drifted into a long night, a fitful sleep.

Maile would dream that we had a boy, but that by the time he was a toddler we still hadn’t decided on a name for him. A little boy walking around, nameless, us still undecided.

On Saturday things didn’t look much more hopeful. My neighbor usually plowed our lane, but his plow wasn’t large enough for this amount of snow. My friend who had a plow had been plowing for his business for 48 hours straight and couldn’t get all the way down to our house in the southern tip of the county. The revealing for Baby #5 was 24 hours away. My sisters threatened to go ahead without us. Then my dad swooped in.

“I’m going to come down and see if we can figure something out. Plus, you need some Advil,” he said. He called me 45 minutes later.

“Hey, I’m out here at the end of the lane and I can’t get the Jeep in. I’m going to ask around and see if anyone has a plow.”

He called back thirty minutes later.

“Do you know your neighbors?” he asked. “You’ve got some really nice neighbors. I talked to the couple in the house at the corner and she’s calling around for someone to come plow your lane. Then I met a little old lady who lives in the small house across the road. They’re trying to help, too.”

Let’s be honest – I’ve lived at the back of that half-mile lane for a year-and-a-half, and I’ve met one set of neighbors. Now my dad comes down to our area and in the span of 45 minutes he was best friends with everyone on the block.

As I hung up the phone, it hit me: I am not my dad. I would have been content to wait until the snow melted, or to sit tight until a friend found the time to come down and help us out. But my dad was canvassing the neighborhood for help. I could have lived in that house for ten years without meeting our neighbors, but my dad got to know them all, and remembered their names, in less than an hour.

And that sentence flashed through my mind again, like a bolt of lightning.

I am not my dad.

A burden the size and weight of a two-foot snowfall lifted from my shoulders. My dad was a wonderful example to me of what a dad should be: loving, accepting, encouraging. He challenged me to make good decisions and to accept responsibility when my decisions were off-kilter. Those are things I can do for my boys. But I don’t have to be him. I can be the dad I am to my sons (and my daughters).

In fact, I have strengths as a father that my dad did not have. If I have a third boy, it will be okay. And I will be enough.

* * * * *

We sat around the table and one of my sisters counted down from three to one. Everyone took a monster-sized bite out of their cupcake (except me – you know, that toothache – so I just pulled mine apart). And then, unplanned, unrehearsed, everyone shouted out together.

“It’s a boy!”

I found myself getting unexpectedly emotional. And so happy. Because I will be a good father to this third boy, of that I am determined. I will be the father he needs.

I looked at Maile and she was crying and I smiled.

“It’s a boy,” I said, shrugging my shoulders, laughing, because it was the kind of joy that forces you to respond.

* * * * *

On Monday morning my dentist fit me in for a quick visit that turned into an on-the-spot root canal. The difference I felt in my mouth before and after was unbelievable. It was the difference between pain and no pain; pressure and no pressure. It was the difference between downhill and uphill, the trajectory of a life.

It was the distance between trying to be someone else, and then suddenly discovering that I am sufficient.

(I’m going to begin posting once a week. The posts might be a little longer, but I’m going to settle into this rhythm for a bit while I work on some other projects. I hope you’ll keep coming by – look for new posts every Wednesday morning.)
Posted on

A Naked Confession: I Have a Problem With Lady Liquor (A Guest Post By Seth Haines)

3221042802

Today’s guest post is brought to you by Seth Haines. I first came across Seth’s blog while following the story of his son Titus. Seth is a true gentleman, a deep writer, and the kind of Christian I hope to be someday. After reading this guest post by him, head over to his blog and check out some of his other poignant writing.

Welcome to a naked moment.

Today, I reckon it’s time to let you in on a little secret, and I won’t talk much about it again for a while. I hope you’re okay with that. We’ll call this a hit-and-run confession. I reckon I should tell you to “listen up,” or “pay attention,” but since this is a place of semi-permanence, I’ll just come on out with it.

I have a problem with lady liquor.

I reckon I could spin the whole story for you; I could tell you the moment when my drinking went from something resembling social to something resembling moronic. I could tell you about a sick child, or the pressures at work, or the burnout of living a typical American life, or the plaguing doubt that nags, that makes me feel like the finest of Christian frauds. The precise excuse for my over-indulging ways, though, isn’t really the point—not for this particular piece, anyway. The point is this—I’m not so much different than some of you.

Am I?

Do you know this pain? Perhaps you’ve been stung by loss of the runaway father, the dead mother.  Maybe you’ve felt abused by the church, or otherwise accused by it. Maybe the Christian clique had at you. Perhaps you’re friends turned tail. Maybe you’ve been singled out for your sinner’s ways. Maybe you’ve been abused, raped, or murdered in some small way (there are a million ways to die alive, you see).

In any event, I don’t suppose I’m special among you. I reckon there are more than a handful here that sing the hymns of the risen Christ on Sunday morning and drink, or eat, or spend, or puke, or sex, or systematically theologize their way into the icy numb during the rest of the week. It’s such a convenient escape from dealing with the underlying pain, such an awful comfort. Isn’t it?

I had a therapist once ask me why I ran to the bottle. He asked what I heard in the quiet moments. I told him that I heard the accusers, the accusations from all the perceived injustices. They were in the cave of the soul, he said. I know he is right.

Sit for a moment in the silence. Listen. Do you hear them, too? Are the accusers in the cave of your soul? Do you deal with their voices, or do you avoid them? Do you confess it to your husband, your wife, your friend, your therapist? Or instead, do you shrink deeper into your most favored coping mechanisms?

Don’t make a deal. Nothing to see here. No eyes on me.

Shrink violet, shrink.

Perhaps this post is all too much for you. After all, don’t we all feel alone in our out-of-placedness? Yes, maybe some of you were quite comfortable in it, and then, along comes this stranger here at Mr. Smucker’s place, and he’s confessing the same things I’ve felt for years.  I’m here to tell you, you can hide behind your vices, pretend that I don’t see, but my vision is x-ray. I see through the drinking, the affair, the over-systematized theologies. I know that the thing, the addiction, is not really the thing at all. I know the addiction is a just a coverup, a ruse to hide the pain. And if you strip those ruses away, what comes screaming to the surface?

That’s right. The pain.

Ask yourself, in moments of clarity, of stone-cold sobriety, do you ask whether Jesus is a figment of your imagination, whether God is real? Do you have fond dreams of dying–not suicide–but of dying? Do you see the prospect of death as release?  Do you lust after money and power so much, that you poor yourself down and skinny yourself up to try and assuage that guilt? Do you have so much money and power that it scares you, that you wonder whether you are the rich man who’ll sooner be screwed than enter the eye of the needle? Perhaps you love your spouse, perhaps you don’t, but do you know whether God loves you? Do you know whether he likes you? Do you wonder whether God will ever speak again, and whether he ever spoke in the first place? Do you wonder whether it’s just your noggin talking to you? Do you hear your accusers casting aspersions, telling you that you’re unloved, unworthy, a thing to be discarded?

I know that the pain makes you ask these questions. How do I know this? Because you are my brothers and sisters. Because I’ve heard these accusations. I’ve lived with them, and by-God, I’ll live with them again unless a better way finds me.

See, the truth is, you can see through me, too. Your vision is x-ray if you let it be.

It’s been decided for me—I’m moving from a place of addiction to freedom. How you ask? I’m not running from the pain anymore. Instead, I’m sitting in it, I’m asking how it feels, and whether it’s true. The process hurts, there is no doubt, and I know I’m not finished just yet. The voices in my soul-cave are myriad, and the guano in here is hip deep. But if I sit with the accusers long enough, if I ponder the lost father, or mother, or the haunting injustices, if I still my soul, if I pray that simple prayer, “Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner,” something magical happens.

Magic?

Yes.

I hear the echo of something still and small. It tells me that no matter the pain, no matter the doubt, no matter the addiction, “I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” (Matt. 28:20)

This is my naked confession.

Please take a moment and check out Seth’s blog.

Posted on

This Woman Prepared For a Double Mastectomy…By Dancing

We steel ourselves against the challenge to come. We fight it with heavy sighs and clenched jaws and a firm resolve. We are like dour-faced pilgrims, preparing for the long journey. We count the cost.

But what if we faced the upcoming climb with joy? What if we stared in the face of this next test, this next hearing, this next marathon, with a peace that no one could understand?

What if we danced before we climbed?

If we somehow managed to do that, it would look like the woman in this video, preparing for her pending double mastectomy by holding an impromptu dance party.

This kind of dancing in the face of a difficult journey is not easy. It almost always requires a strong community, a band of people willing to rise up alongside us and dance as well, even if they can’t join us on the road, even if they are only there to see us off. This is the kind of friend we all need, the kind of friend we all need to be – willing dancers, ready to celebrate even the embarkation into dark and stormy waters.

* * * * *

Speaking of cancer, a good friend of mine from high school, Peter Perella, could use our help.

Peter has been diagnosed with metastatic sinus cancer. He was treated 3 times previous to this, but it has returned and spread. As you can imagine, Katie and Peter are overwhelmed with the depth and breadth of this and are working through the details of the impact of this on their family. With the recent prognosis and with the family’s blessing, we have created this personal contribution fund for the Perella family.

If you, or someone you love, has had to fight cancer, you know how taxing it can be, in every way. Please consider lightening the Perella’s financial load by donating HERE.

Thanks.

Posted on

What I Found Inside an Old Doc Marten’s Shoebox

pic7On Monday night we took out the old Doc Marten’s shoebox and opened it up. You have to hold it in a certain way so that it doesn’t completely disintegrate in your hands.

“This game is called Settlers of Catan,” I told the kids. They stared at all the pieces as I pulled them out of the shoebox, intrigue and skepticism tugging back and forth in their minds. How could something so complicated, so messy, be any fun? How could something so messy, so complicated, NOT be fun?

So Maile and I started sorting through plastic bags of cards and pieces, all while explaining the rules. The robber. The harbors. We couldn’t remember if it was clay or brick. Oh, well. And that’s how the next fifteen minutes or so went.

Then, at the bottom of the box, I found a blue notebook. I opened it. Inside I saw four names: my sister’s, my brother-in-law’s, Maile’s, and me. Under our names was a long list of scores, a system we had created in order to keep track of who won the most games over a fairly long period of time.

And suddenly I was there, in that second floor apartment in Great Missenden, England. I was there when it was just the four of us playing, and I was there when it was the four of us plus two very large stomachs (Maile and my sister were pregnant at the same time). And I was there when we played Settlers while rocking two newborns in their small bouncy seats or on our laps or while the girls breastfed and refused to trade wheat or sheep.

We spent many an entire Saturday there, in their apartment, playing Settlers for ten hours straight. We were hooked.

Those England times were long days. Long years. There was the time we opened our first store in Victoria Station – we were so full of hope, and I worked 33 17-hour days in a row. Then there was the time, three years later, that we closed Victoria Station, my brother-in-law and I packing up the shop, removing all the equipment, slowly lowering the clackety-clacking storefront shutter one last time, then walking through the empty, late-night train station, wondering if we could have done something different, something better.

“Check this out, Maile,” I said, holding up the book. She smiled.

“No, seriously,” I said. “Look at this.”

I held the book closer to her and she peered in at it. Then she took in a small breath.

“Wow.”

The date of our last recorded Settlers game was eleven years to the day. January 6, 2003. That seemed ironic. A lot can happen in eleven years. Four children, two miscarriages, one on the way. One job, three businesses, two of which ended without much fanfare. Ten books. A lot of white hairs.

A lot can happen in eleven years.

The passing of time reveals itself to us in the most random, powerful ways. Which means you can’t always be on guard or prepared for how the next thing you stumble on will remind you what you were doing ten years ago, twenty years ago.

Eleven years ago.

What would I have thought if eleven years ago God or an angel or someone, anyone, would have told me what I was about to go through in the next eleven years? What if they could have walked me down that path, in advance, preparing me for what was to come?

I’ll tell you what would have happened. I would have been terrified. I would have seen the challenges, the despair, a few of those long, difficult years, and I would have wondered how in the world I was going to make it.

We have no idea where we will be in eleven years. No idea what disasters and triumphs will come our way. And what a blessing that is, our lack of foresight. For all of my impatience, all of my striving to bring the future into the present, seeing that list of scores and the date, January 6th, 2003, gave me an incredible sense of peace, and a resolve to live in this moment.

The future will take care of itself.

Posted on

What Happened When We Told Our Kids a Baby Is On The Way

IMG_0462In mid-November we decided to tell our four kids that there was a fifth on the way. Their reaction was not exactly what we had expected.

“Everybody come up to our room,” I shouted downstairs. “Mom and I have something to tell you.”

The sound of eight little feet pounded up the steps, slip-sliding their way into our room. All six of us crawled up into the bed. The kids eyes were large and curious – that is where we have the most serious of conversations, in our room, sprawled on the bed. This is where we talked to the littles about, as Sam calls it, “private-cy.” This is where we read together. It is, in other words, Holy
Ground.

I found myself getting more and more excited to finally tell someone. Anyone. We had been keeping everything quiet, keeping our hope caged up like a small bird. But here it was: a chance to tell. I wondered what it would be like. I wondered if, in saying the words aloud, it would seem more real to me.

“Mom and I have something to tell you,” I said quietly, anticipating their cheering and shouting. I paused for a moment.

“What?” they all said. “What is it? Tell us!”

“I’m going to have a baby,” Maile said.

The response was not what we had expected. Let me rephrase that. The response of our oldest two children (ages 10 and 8 at the time) was not what we had expected. The younger two leaped to their feet and cheered. Sam screamed with delight, over and over again, “I’m not going to be the youngest anymore!” Abra grinned, her blue eyes wide and full of hope.

But the older two. Ah, the older two. I keep forgetting they are full-fledged people now, with their own hopes and dreams and expectations. Cade’s eyes filled with tears and his lip got all trembly. Lucy openly wept. Maile and I looked at each other. What had we done?

“What’s wrong?” Maile asked, on the verge of tears herself.

Cade spoke first, his voice wavering.

“I…don’t…really…want…our…family…to…change,” he said, balling up his fists and rubbing his eyes.

I leaned over and put my arm around Lucy.

“And why are you crying?”

In the most mournful voice possible, she replied.

“I don’t want another baby to die,” she said, through those hiccup-sounding sobs, then burst into tears again. Lucy had taken the previous miscarriage very hard. She had been seven years old, and very much looking forward to a baby to treat as her own. For her, the possibility of encountering that pain again was a scary, overwhelming thing.

Maile and I looked at each other. I was hugging Lucy and she was holding Cade’s hand. After ten minutes of assuring and reassuring and explaining and encouraging, the four of them went back downstairs, returning to their busy childhood lives.

I turned and looked at Maile.

“Well, that went well, don’t you think?”

* * * * *

Anxious about change.

Scared of death.

I realized that the reactions of my oldest two children pretty much sum up the foundational fears of most of humanity. Most people I know avoid change because it’s scary and unknown and makes us feel insecure, like a soft-shell crab. And you don’t have to look far in our culture to find the fear, or denial of, death. We flock to any remedy that keeps us younger, our hair less gray, our skin less wrinkled, our age less apparent. We want to be young forever.

We surround ourselves with noise because at the heart of silence lies an awareness of our mortality. Noise helps us forget the steady, onward march of time and the inevitability of our passing.

Change.

Death.

The reaction of my oldest two children has me thinking about the coming year. Because, a baby! It’s not that both of them won’t be ecstatic to have a baby in the house. But the fear of change and the fear of death steered them away from wanting this new thing, this new adventure.

What changes are you avoiding because you’re afraid?

What potential deaths (failures, mistakes, the end of a relationship, potential discomforts) keep you from moving into an area of life where you know, deep down, you want to go?

* * * * *

Related Post: Miscarriages, Waiting, and “Do Not Be Afraid”