Author: aimeelehmann (page 1 of 2)

My lovely girls,

We wake to a world that feels broken. To the realization that greed or indifference or ignorance or fear or downright misogyny, racism, male violence, or hate has prevailed in choosing a leader for our country, a person who goes against everything—every small and great thing—that I have ever taught you to believe in.

How do we reckon with that?

How do I guide you through this reckoning?

Is it even my job anymore?

It isn’t—but I believe it is my responsibility. Perhaps less as your mother—you don’t need me anymore to make your world right—than as an elder of the community that you and I share; as someone who has lived longer on this earth than you and your peers; as someone who has seen the black underbelly of our world and still has the optimism to believe that we will be okay.

And when I say “we” and when I say “okay”—I don’t mean all of us, everywhere, will be okay. And I don’t mean “okay” in that we won’t feel a difference. I recognize that some people—people we know and care about—may not be okay as things go forward. And the “okay” I’m promising might not be what we expected out of life. But if okay counts as being loved, secure, having a backstop, having your largest needs met, then I believe we’ll be okay—and I promise to do everything in my power to leverage my ‘okay’ in a way that helps other people be okay. That is part of what I can do. Use my energy and resources and body and voice to protect and care for folks who will be harder hit than us.

You know your history. There is a German half of you who comes from a story that is unbearably harsh and unjust and cruel and evil. It is a history that has sometimes made you feel embarrassed or responsible for, although we all know that we are the product of our history, not the instigators of it. Still, this history makes us more aware, perhaps, of what has just happened and how it might resonate as our life goes on. But because we are more aware of it, we can also maybe take things more seriously—and realize the terrible consequences of what can happen to a country led by a hate and fear-based power that erodes individuality, democratic systems and ideals; how it silences good people and the kind acts that define humanity. We can recognize, too, that much of the fallout of that hate is through a deliberate process of “othering,” which is where your other half kicks in, too. From my side, you entered this life with the baggage of a US history of racism and economic oppression where people have long been left out of many possibilities in life because of where they come from or the circumstances of how they’re born. Hopefully, I’ve raised you in full knowledge of my own experience of being poor in the years of my post-divorce childhood. Poverty is a kind of ‘othering’ in this land that is ugly and vicious and brings out hate, both in those carrying the stigma and those looking down on them.

In fact, as far as belonging goes, even in your lifetime, you’ve witnessed the ragged edges of it. Your father is an immigrant here; I’m an immigrant when we’re in Germany. Not belonging has cost us both at times—in small but vital ways. You two belong to both countries, which means you’ve skipped the process of paperwork, stress, and the humiliation of feeling unwanted by a country you want to feel at home in. I wish everyone could know the shame of being treated as an “immigrant” in a visa process, to witness the feeling of precarity and unkindness it engenders, even when it has nothing to do with you. And given that our processes have so far ended positively, given our socio-economic status and white skin, our paths to visa status have been much less fearful than others’. Still, I’m thankful that both before and after you two joined our world, we’ve been able to experience both the struggle and adventure of living in other places: countries with different rules and different people and possibilities, and that you two have learned how those experiences make us bigger. Make our world smaller—less scary. Being other places and with other people make our lives more varied and friendlier.

I want to remind you, too, that before you were born, we lived in places with despots in power. Places where no one could trust the leadership; where speaking out could be dangerous; where freedom and choice were restricted. Places like that have existed in the world your whole life span, and mine—and people in them still generally get on with life. It is important for you to know this. That in places where the state is in shambles, everyday life still happens. People wake up, they have breakfast, go to work, they make plans with family and friends—and their lives include good days and happy times and celebrations and weddings and births.

There is so much you know already—you are not ignorant nor uninformed. Your innate intelligence is your own—as is your experience of life. The same way that your choices and your power and your agency is all yours and the good that you are in this world is yours to claim, not mine. And as you grow into your twenties and into your thirties, you will evolve into your power even more.

And I’m proud. Proud of knowing that both of you are good people in this world—and that again, it has nothing to do with me, but with the choices you’ve made. The people you are. And it’s because you are good souls, that I feel blessed.  

But also, it maybe makes this situation even worse now. Because I’m broken-hearted that you have to face this shit that the world has brought to your goodness. This violence and hate and man-splaining universe that has fuckingly arrived at your door.  

So, here is how I will reassure you: Please be reminded that there are always good people and your world is full of them. People who have always stepped up with goodness and kindness, with wise thoughts and good souls and their hard work to create even more good in our world. And know that your charge is to find more of those people. To connect their good souls—to you and to others. To have such a big huddle of good folks around you that your life will steer in the direction of hope and joy and Better. And that your role will not just be to find those people, but to help them when you are able, and let them depend on you when they need—and in your turn, you will ask for their help, because that is true connection. And that if you steer your days with such good folks, you will find comfort and solace in each other’s company, and together you will be part of the growing evidence that there is yet more good in this world. And the more good we know and experience and power out from us, the more good will grow to power out even more.

If we are downtrodden, there will be no one to walk a new path forward. There will be no one to counter their brutality of spirit if we do not practice a spirit of love and connection. We have to create and forge and maintain and practice and leverage and power goodness and kindness in the world—as small as it might be on a daily basis—so that it exists in reality and not just in theory. We need to practice love to believe in love. And that might be offering a cup of tea to a friend to share on a bad day or enjoying together the natural beauty of a walk or a meal. It will be waking up, looking across the table at a face you love and saying, “Wherever we go from here, we do it together and that gives me comfort.” And it will be seeing that person near you giving a small gift of love to someone else that will reignite in you the belief that love exists—and that you are part of it, over and over again.

And know that from small joy will come better days. I believe that. I wish you that. I want you to know, with that, you will be okay.

When I was pregnant with my first child, I worked for a reproductive health organization that promoted safe abortion.

Interestingly, the more my belly rounded, jutting into table edges or obscuring a lap full of paperwork, the more people around me began to see my job as a contradiction and yet, in my mind, it made perfect sense. In fact, the longer my pregnancy went on, the more I believed in the right to safe abortion that I was fighting for.

Around the world, almost half of all pregnancies are unintended—meaning they’re either mistimed or unwanted altogether.

That means a lot of women, at any given time, are grappling with a life-changing situation with no advanced planning and often without the benefit of thorough discussion or sound advice on options.

In a perfect world, the root of unplanned pregnancy—sex—would always be consensual. It would take place between two partners of equal power and economic status and it would be accompanied by contraception every time a pregnancy was unwanted, using a method that matched the needs of both partners.

In reality, sex happens all the time in scenarios where power, economics or needs are not equal; where sex is transactional—a commodity stolen, traded or given in exchange for something else. Sex is used for companionship, control, currency, and survival. And even where sex between two partners is consensual, it still happens without planning (or contraception) and can result in an unintended pregnancy.

My own first pregnancy was unintended in that it was mistimed.

Following a miscarriage and a difficult time getting pregnant afterwards, I was told by my OB that a viable pregnancy would probably take a greater investment of time, resources and doctors than my partner and I had at that moment. We were in transition after several years of marriage, with a relocation on the horizon, so plans for a child were temporarily put on hold. I had just started my job with Ipas (a great reproductive health organization based in North Carolina promoting safe abortion) while my partner finished his post-doc in Brazil, an agreement that meant a year of long-distance living to eventually get us where we wanted to be—together—the year after.

Imagine my surprise, just weeks after my move, to discover that I was pregnant.

After years of working with community health workers and traditional birth attendants on pregnancy, I had somehow missed all signs of it myself. The nausea, exhaustion and delayed period I attributed to a stressful continental move, constant international travel (between several time zones) and a lingering tropical illness. I remember reassuring my doctor, when she asked if I could be pregnant, that it was highly unlikely. But before taking the pregnancy test she insisted on, I humored her by answering her questions:

“What would a negative test mean for you?” Relief. Some disappointment.

“What about a positive test?”

That was more complicated—and seemed, until that very moment, impossible.

“It would be highly inconvenient, but…welcome.”

Later that morning, with nothing more than good advice on how to ease my queasy stomach, I listed all the resources that would allow me to carry that pregnancy to term on my own: a good job, a good income, health insurance to cover my well visits and hospitalization, a supportive (though long-distance) partner, and an extended family that I could call on for help. I knew myself capable of surviving war, drought, malaria and long separations from family and friends. How much harder could a solitary pregnancy be?

How ignorant I was.

The next few months were hell.

With most of my work in East Africa and Europe, I continued my travels as if nothing had changed. But in addition to my growing nausea and general malaise, my body soon added the need to wretch and puke violently to my growing list of symptoms, tossing me into any number of humiliating situations: running out mid-speech at a UN conference; reaching for a paper bag from the seat back in front of me, mid-landing; searching for privacy on a ceremonial opening of a new clinic in Uganda with an entire village looking on.

In between travels, back in the U.S., I coped with no family nearby, a husband working between two continents that were neither of the ones I was working on, a new job and a reputation at stake, fighting my body the whole time.

Many a day I felt totally oppressed, having no control over how my body was reacting or with how my life had taken such an unexpected turn. And yet—I wanted that pregnancy. I was willing to put up with maximum discomfort, embarrassment, and difficulty because I wanted to carry that pregnancy to term. But the experience allowed me, in a new and personal way, to imagine what it might be like to continue a pregnancy that was not only mistimed, but truly unwanted. As my hormones raged, my body morphed and my expectations of what I could do and how, diminished, I could only imagine how a forced pregnancy might feel something like a form of torture.

Because we live in a culture where children are part of the fairy tale we’re all taught to want, we don’t talk enough about unwanted pregnancies. Yet most women spend the majority of their reproductive lives avoiding pregnancy.

In the U.S., on average, women report wanting 1-2 pregnancies over a lifetime. That means they will spend 2-3 years of their lives pregnant, pre- or post- partum but more than 3 decades avoiding pregnancy.

Why don’t we talk about this?

We also know that unplanned pregnancies increase the risk of partner violence—and in the U.S., increase a woman’s risk of homicide.

Unintended pregnancy, especially among younger women, lowers educational and employment potential, increases the chance of poverty, and leads to poorer outcomes for the children of those pregnancies.

Again—half of all pregnancies are unintended—and yet we rarely talk about the reality of unplanned pregnancies.

About halfway through my solo pregnancy, I realized that my loving, supportive partner barely thought about it. He was planning for a change of life once the baby arrived, but I was already living it, a situation reflected every time I saw the reality of other pregnant women in the world, on my visits to clinics and villages for work.

Women of childbearing age assume most, if not all, the responsibility of pregnancy. In addition to their other responsibilities of work, family, home life, and farming (women do most farm work where I’ve lived) they often manage, too, the daily logistics of organizing other people’s lives: parents, children, in-laws. With pregnancy, many of those standard obligations get more difficult and rarely is any work eased. Women with social and financial support may rise to the new challenge, but for those without support, an unwanted pregnancy can easily overwhelm the balance they need to maintain the responsibilities of daily life.

From research, we know there’s almost never just one reason a woman chooses to end a pregnancy: financial reasons play a key role, but also the wish for child spacing or delayed childbirth, partner-related reasons, or the need to focus on other children. The fact that so many women seek an abortion to improve their chances of being a better mother to a current child or a better-prepared mother later on is rarely recognized or discussed in the debate around abortion. Rather, the discussion is often framed along lines that categorize women seeking abortion as selfish or irresponsible.

And yet, most women, in my experience, are more than capable of processing the many possible ramifications of both an unplanned pregnancy or an abortion on both themselves and the people around them and are best able to take that into consideration before making a choice they feel increases their chance for a safe, manageable and better life.

Why do we not honor their thought process with our respect for their choice?

As my second trimester edged into my third, many of the discomforts of pregnancy eased. I still had to deal with massively swelling feet every time I got on a plane and dissolved into tears over the decision of whether to take malaria prophylactics or not during my trips to East Africa, but more and more I settled into my situation. Meanwhile, everywhere I traveled, I met women with vastly different experiences of pregnancy than mine. I was reminded, over and over, that women who do not want or are not able to carry a pregnancy to term will seek a way to terminate that pregnancy whether there is a safe method available or not. They will harm themselves, put their life, their livelihood, their survival at risk because an unwanted pregnancy very often puts all of those things at risk anyhow and the gamble of an unsafe abortion offers them, potentially, a solution that childbirth does not.

This is perhaps the most critical piece of information that is missing from discussions of abortion today in the U.S. because we are far from the days when women had to seek unsafe abortion. But if you look at the health record of the U.S. before Roe v. Wade, unsafe abortion was the most common reason for admission to hospital gynecological services. Many women died from unsafe abortion every year—as they continue to do so around the world where there is no access to safe abortion. I could fill pages with gruesome stories and tragic outcomes but the greatest pity is that those tragedies are avoidable.

By the time I rolled around to my 8^th month of pregnancy—less sick, still traveling—I joined my two nearest African counterparts in Nairobi for a conference on reproductive health.

At the time, all three of us were hugely pregnant.

Between us, we were married, partnered and single. Two of us were pregnant for the first time, and one had a nine-year old daughter. We were Kenyan, Uganda, American and we had each chosen our pregnancy. We entered the conference building like three full-bellied ships sailing into port, an armada ready to fight for the right of other women to choose their reproductive health outcomes the way we had.

Although we spoke most vociferously about the right to safe abortion, we also tied that right to expanded reproductive health services that allowed women the right to plan their pregnancies, to expect healthy pregnancies and to have access to trained medical practitioners. We wanted contraception to include men—not only in the discussion of it, but in the responsibility for it.

We didn’t see safe abortion as a topic on its own but as part of a whole new dialogue around women and health care centered on their needs and choices. And we recognized—even among ourselves as reproductive health professionals—what a difficult and tricky continuum it was to define the morals and codes that normally diffuse the topic of abortion from its place as one of the safest, most standard medical practices into something fraught with judgment.

In fact, one of the most mind-expanding experiences of working for Ipas was the realization that even among those of us who were pro-abortion, each of us still held our own understandings about it: our own questions, our own discomforts. We thought about it personally, based on our own family and upbringing and culture and religion—which is exactly how the decision should be framed. Personally. Independently—or in consultation with the family and friends chosen by the woman to guide her through that decision.

During my time at Ipas, not unexpectedly, a few beloved friends shared with me their news of an unintended pregnancy. Most wanted to talk about what to do next, and those discussions often included abortion. My response was always directed to the woman according to her own individual situation. What was the context of her life, her support system, her finances, her wishes, her wants? Because even as I fought for abortion rights, I didn’t believe it was the only choice for an unintended pregnancy.

I just always wanted it to be a safe one.

By the time my own pregnancy ended—with a hospital birth at the experienced hands of a trained midwife—I had discovered through a screening process that I had a genetic disposition for hemorrhage, the leading cause of maternal death. Luckily, for my birth I had access to a hematologist, an expensive IV drug to stop my bleeding, trained nurses all around, and the proximity of high-end care if anything went wrong. Once again, I reflected on how differently my pregnancy might have gone had I been anywhere else in the world. And I thought about the risk of death that my pregnancy brought with it—one that comes automatically, still, for so many other women around the world.

I could not have been happier with my own pregnancy outcome, but I recognize all the many and varied supports that gave me a healthy child at the end of that process. There were a thousand other ways, and a million other scenarios how my pregnancy could have gone.

For a useful discussion of abortion, I think it’s essential to think outside our own lives and imagine all the practicalities, the risks, the myriad situations that women find themselves in—and offer them the greatest ability to choose for themselves the options and risks they are willing to take to build the life they want for themselves.

Two weeks ago Friday was the start of Passover, an eight-day remembrance commemorating one of the most significant events in Jewish history, a day shared by Christians as Good Friday and leading to the holiest day of the Christian calendar, Easter. Muslims just finished celebrating Ramadan, a month of fasting and prayer that ended with the feast of Eid al-Fitr on the weekend. Just before that came Vaisakhi, a feast of harvest for the Hindus, a celebration that also acts as the commemoration of the founding of the Sikh religion. Ridván, for the Baha’i, just passed as well, a twelve-day period of reflection and festivity. April—around the world—seems a celebratory time for religion.

And yet, sitting at my breakfast table this Good Friday, I realized that in the midst of all these celebrations, for me this time holds loss.

In my youth, Holy Week was the busiest, most solemn, most celebratory week of the year. It started the Sunday before Easter, Palm Sunday, when our whole congregation would process from the church, accompanied by the resounding sound of organ and choir, our palm fronds held aloft, their poky ends dripping the last drops of holy water still left from the priest’s soggy blessing.

That service marked the beginning of the end of a long forty days: weeks of no sweets, no eating between meals, and maybe even giving up a favorite television show or two. It was a time we saved our allowance money for offerings to Catholic missions overseas and tried not to fight with our siblings. During that week, we’d pray Stations of the Cross—restaging the last footfalls of Christ—and booked our turn in the confessional booth, atoning for our sins. On Thursday night, we’d be back in Mass for a celebration of the Last Supper, a two-hour event that included the Washing of the Feet and the commemoration of Christianity’s first Mass. Once old enough, my sisters and I would spend part of that night praying beside my grandma with all the other old ladies, keeping vigil with Our Lord, trying not to sleep as we clicked our rosary beads in prayer, keeping Christ company throughout the night and being witness to his ordeal. On Friday, we’d be in church again, gathering before noon, staying until three, when the sky was rent, leaving us almost in tears as we spent those hours accompanying Jesus on His torture and death, watching Scripture be fulfilled. Saturday’s Easter Vigil—a bit of a letdown after Friday’s drama—was a Mass spent blessing all objects in the church in one endless, monotonous litany of song, in preparation for Easter Sunday. And then came, The Day. The day of celebration that gave the rest of all days meaning in the Catholic faith.

Nothing could have felt more all-encompassing than that week. A week of ritual, and pageantry; recrimination, jubilation, and triumph. Even as children, we were asked to be a part of the guilt, the betrayal, the horror and finally—the celebration. Easter for us was more than jelly beans and egg hunts, it was an act of communal suffering, of joy and salvation. It was the participatory act of redemption.

To this day, when I describe my Holy Week adventure, with all its emotions, to my kids—who know nothing of it themselves—I am overwhelmed by how strongly its sensations come back. That belonging. The importance of it. The magic of that week. Which is what leads, now, to that feeling of loss that I no longer have access to it.

In college, I was still regularly going to Mass. Several college friends were, by chance, Catholic and for all of us Saturday evening was a chance to ditch homework for a few hours in a socially-approved, guilt-free way. We’d leave campus, see “real people” (not just students), gather and sing. It was a time to be quiet and thoughtful in a different way than studying; it offered a peace and solitude that helped me feel full and present in my life. It gave me a chance to question my place in the world; to prioritize its message of social justice and love. It gave me a sense of comfort and home. Drawing me back, week after week.

But college was also a time of growth, of questioning, of looking at things in life you’ve always known and accepted, and developing enough consciousness to ask questions of those things—and boy, did I have questions. And growing reservations.

In my junior year of college, after classes in feminist studies; after co-organizing a local PFLAG chapter (an organization for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people, their parents, families, and allies); and after having lived several years with non-Catholics, non-Christians, and generally, in a wider cultural and geographical sphere than the one within which I was raised, I took my first trip overseas.

I joined a study abroad program in Seville, Spain, not knowing what to expect. At the time, Spain had only been recently released from the grip of Franco’s Fascist, dictatorial regime, so when I arrived, Spain was a mere 11-years-old in democratic time. Seville was a beautiful city—but also provincial, old-fashioned, a second city of Europe located in a country cut-off from its continental neighbors, making it look and feel like an impoverished lesser cousin.  

What I remember of my Catholicism at that point was that I had become critical of the system of the church. Its rules. Its patriarchy. Its wealth. The misogyny entrenched in a lack of feminine roles; roles dominated by saints and whores, and a feminine ideal that was both mother and virgin—a role, unsurprisingly, impossible to attain.

And then in Spain, standing at the altar of the largest Gothic church in the world, the Seville Cathedral, with its Christopher Columbus tomb—whose American voyage had been both sponsored and blessed by the Spanish King and Queen on behalf of God and led to the mass extinction of a continent—where, through a fog of incense, I saw gold fixtures at every turn; where the height of the ceiling extended so high it almost hurt to look into its peaks—a design strategy of the church’s own architects to make sure its supplicants felt not just awed, but afraid. And it was there I pondered that planned powerlessness of the Church’s followers; the planned acceptance of my paltry fate beneath an all-knowing, all-controlling, (male) God; I felt the dissonance of the church’s luxury, its affluence, opulence, with the abject poverty right outside its doors. And I realized, with blunt trauma, the such a structure spoke to me of all I couldn’t accept. I still remember the feeling of that moment—that lighting strike of belief—when I knew that Catholicism was over for me. In one fell blow it happened, the same way it had for the Biblical Saul, just in reverse. And because Catholicism was not just a religion but so intertwined with who I was and what I’d come from, there was no possibility to look for faith elsewhere. With the vessel of belief so totally broken, nothing could replace it.

Over the years, of course, I’ve questioned that decision. But on the occasions when I’ve gone to Mass since, I can’t un-listen to the actual words being spoken without thinking about what they refer to; what they say in the larger context of that church, its history, the world. I can’t un-question the things I disagree with. So as much as anything else nowadays, a visit to church leaves me frustrated; feeling homeless and lonely and sad.

I have, over the years, still had positive experiences of religion and religious people in my life. I worked with a sweet Imam in Mombasa, who helped me find passages from the Koran to support the AIDS education project we were doing in his community. I witnessed the years-long dedication of Sister (Dr.) Julia from Peru, who ran a hospital in the middle-of-nowhere-Kenya and who single-handedly, single-mindedly saved many a rural Turkana from death. I experienced many Catholic schools in Kenya that offered—almost always—a better education for anyone than the one available from the public school system. In Brazil, I myself worked for a Catholic organization that traveled up and down the Amazon helping indigenous people demarcate their land, find access to healthcare, and figure out how to cope with the prevailing society who only really wanted them gone. And when my children asked to be baptized, my partner’s lovely aunt connected us with Pater Korbinius, a gentle, giant German monk, who helped answer their questions and guide them through the process that I no longer believed in.

Because I have also seen the worst of religion. Wars fought in its name. How it’s used, over and over, for justification of inequality and systems of inequity around the world where I’ve worked. I’ve met many missionaries (far too many) who have seemed the opposite of God to me: the couple in Wundanyi, Kenya who couldn’t live without their American washing machine, even as the people around them had no piped water. Or my fellow Portuguese-learners in Manaus, who, in bringing the word of God to the Amazonian tribes, had already decided that even if they brought disease, too, it would be better for the newly-contacted tribes to die after hearing the word of God than not at all. There have also been people like the middle-aged white man from somewhere in the Southern US whose singular, selfish goal to unload all my vaccines from the supply plane in South Sudan meant he could smuggle his bibles into the country while hundreds of children would die of preventable disease.

In my experience, religion has a lot to answer for—the good and the bad—but unfortunately, most strikingly, the bad.

And yet, I still understand the pull of religion. The purpose it gives people. The community it builds. I recognize the strength it provides, allowing people to get through really tough times. I understand how my grandmother’s belief made her difficult life not just bearable, but meaningful in its difficulty, as she interpreted those struggles as a test of her faith, a process of hope, giving her optimism in adversity.

Sometimes, when I think about my own upbringing and how it was so entrenched in religion, I mourn for my children the security that comes with such belief. Because there is comfort in believing someone else is in charge of the difficult things; there is grace in believing that someone benevolent and kind is the life force around us; there is relief in believing that someone is watching out for us, seeing all, knowing all and responsible for making things right.

But because I couldn’t accept my Catholicism anymore, because I didn’t have faith in that form, I could not pass it on to my children, even if I recognize that there are still moments when I notice its remnants in me. That subtle, certain feeling, stuck in the corners of my brain that allows me to trust in something, somewhere, thinking it will help. A belief in a general goodness, a hopefulness that doesn’t leave me. And maybe having God in those moments, if only in the background—is enough. Giving me something to turn to when I feel incapable of understanding what’s going on or how I’ll survive it on my own. A leftover from all those hours, all those years, watching a son-turned-God tortured on a cross, knowing there’d still be salvation at the end.

This last week brought us nearer something that many of us thought belonged to the past: war in Europe.  A war near enough, its victims familiar enough, its burden close enough to feel.

Wars have always raged, but given our luck—of geography mostly—Americans, historically, have been at least one continent away from the day-to-day ravage of war.  Of course, some Americans have been more affected than others in recent years: soldiers, social workers or aid workers who live it daily, but most of the time, war happens so far from our daily lives that it doesn’t fully impact us the way it should.  It takes something out of the ordinary, like this current war, to remind us of all its hazards.

Yesterday, my partner and I were listening to a podcast from Germany. A reporter in Berlin was interviewing people who still remember the last time the Russians came with war.  It was 1945, as the Third Reich was in its final days and Hitler already dead, with the Allies streaming into Germany from all sides and the Allied Russians closing in on Berlin from the East. Perhaps it was the Russians’ lived experience of the brutalities of Leningrad, where German troops encircled the city for three years and starved its population to death; or maybe it was the non-aggression pact signed between the two countries that Germany ignored as soon as Hitler wanted more living space; perhaps it was Stalin’s own scorched earth policy used by the Russians as a deterrent to oncoming German forces; but it was probably a mix of all that and four excruciatingly deadly years of war that pushed the Russians over the edge on their return to German soil.  Whatever trauma they had learned from the Germans, the Russians were keen to pay it back, ten-fold.  In the podcast, we heard older German women say they wouldn’t live through that again.  They’d ask their children for cyanide, as death at their own hands would be easier to face than Russian troops. This was yesterday, by the way, not seventy-odd years ago.

Yesterday, in Berlin.  The lifelong trauma of war.

In my normal, everyday life, I have a hard time with war.  I don’t like war films anymore.  I hate the sound of guns.  When I first came home from South Sudan, I got nervous every time a plane or helicopter flew overhead.

There is something about the experience of war that thrills people who have never experienced it.  Maybe because we’re told so many stories in movies and lore.  It’s a life or death question in a world where we don’t face that option very often, and I can see its appeal—the rush of adrenaline, the heroics that inevitably rise to the surface—and for some in it, it’s surely energizing, adventurous, “bringing out their best.” But for many more, I would guess, war is the thing they’ll spend the rest of their lives recovering from.

What stories can’t convey of war are this: the smells, the annihilation, the exhaustion. The cynicism that hardens the longer the fighting goes on. The understanding that even if there are Good Guys and Bad Guys—and maybe even a God—there is no chance that the innocent won’t be ruined.  There is certainty—a learned and definite certainty—that rules will be broken; rules written in normal life to bring order and justice and calm.  There is also the inevitability that in all wars, stupidity or ignorance or big egos or the wrong person in charge at an important moment will mean unnecessary death and preventable violence, either by accident or design—but serially—and usually with massive moral and existential costs. Even while responsible people look on in impotence and frustration and anger.

There is a constant uncertainty, too, within the certainty of war, that resolves itself into a general mistrust—of anyone, or anything, or if up is still up, or if life is worth living.  The cost of that uncertainty is mind-bending and mind-breaking and comes within a chaos that births a new understanding. The knowledge of seeing and experiencing the absolute worst things that humans can do to each another.

Although most people who live outside warzones never have to know all the ways that one person can starve, wound, maim, kill, dismember, and terrorize another human being, that confrontation—and realization—is unmistakable in war.  Whether experienced as a victim, a perpetrator or a witness, that knowledge creates a new understanding of humans that is, in itself, inhuman.  It resets the most basic expectation of life: that killing is wrong.

Luckily, most humans never need to learn this horror personally, because that experience is psyche-breaking.  And once known or lived, it can’t be unknown. Unlived.

When I think of all the brave Ukrainians joining to defend their cities, I am inspired and impressed like everyone else, but I am also gutted to know they will never be the same whole humans they were before this.  The tech guy who left his computer to grab a gun handed out at the library; the student from Germany who returned to take up arms; they will learn—more quickly than other soldiers in more tidy wars—the true extent of evil that humans can perpetrate.  They will realize, too, the evil they, themselves, are capable of, in a moment of instinct or power or fear. 

That is the piece they are most likely never to recover from.

This war will be over at some point.  It may be weeks or months or years.  By the time I left South Sudan, in the tenth year of the second iteration of a war that looked never ending, I was less human myself.  More cynical, more hate-filled, more caustic and angry than I’ve ever been before or since.  And yet, fifteen years after I left, South Sudan gained its independence. I was shocked, amazed, having given up hope of peace in all my cynicism.  And then, only two years later, my cynicism was rewarded and civil war broke out again.  War is too good for too many people.  Not the ones on the ground. Not the ones losing their souls and lives fighting.  War is good for the people sitting in their cozy offices, getting rich and powerful and making the decisions.  Planning their next attack, which is also their next success, paid for by the lives of others. 

In our hospitals and clinics, we treated mostly women and children while the soldiers fighting for them, protecting them, supposedly giving their lives for them, stole our medicines and food stocks for themselves. The civilians often said they didn’t mind—because without the soldiers, what did they have?  Even less, I guess, although I was never sure and grew to believe the longer I stayed that the relief we tried to bring might only have prolonged the fighting. 

War is never simple enough for a right or wrong answer.

Europe speaks now of a seventy-year peace broken, but if we consider the Cold War; the Soviet takeovers of Hungary and Czechoslovakia; the Croatian, Bosnian, and Kosovan wars; Russia’s takeover of Crimea just a few years ago, peace on that continent hasn’t been so trustworthy. It’s just that most of those wars happened away from our attention.  There is a complaint of racism in the coverage of this war.  The argument that Western journalists are identifying more with these people than others—from Kyiv, Kharkiv, Mariupol, Kherson. But I think it’s human nature, something built into our brains. “These people look just like us,” we think, watching women in their winter jackets and knit beanies; their kids holding the same teddy bears our children clutch; their teenagers scrolling cold fingers across their phones; the Nigerian medical student trekking to Lviv who speaks with the accent of a dear friend; the Indian students standing at the border, twinned by a couple I pass on my daily jog in Ithaca. 

It is all too familiar.  These people could be us; we could be them. We aren’t in their situation, of course, but it’s our ability to think we could be that also reminds me of another piece of humanity.  The better one.  The trait that might be the one thing that saves us in the end.

I would like to think that I’d be one of the people today, standing at the main train station in Berlin, holding up a welcome sign.  I’d like to think that when I send my donation to IRC or CARE that it will be funding the kind of essential work I used to do in another war for other people.  I’d like to believe that there are enough good folks who will open their homes and wallets and minds to the current refugees because all these things tell me that I am still human. 

One of the heroes in my life has always been Mr. Rogers.  When asked what to do in the face of fear, he once told children, “Find the helpers.” I don’t think that’s dated or childish advice. I think it’s very current. Because someone has to do the hard work of taking care, of making repairs, fixing broken laws and abandoned ideals. Someone has to mend the minds and souls and bodies of those affected by war. 

Because they could be any of us.

This blog was bound to come around to parenting at some point as my posts are always the result of some thought that gets stuck in my brain for so many days or weeks—or in this case, years—that the only way forward is to duel it out in my head, often while driving or doing dishes or lying awake at 3 a.m. until the idea comes into clearer shape through words.  That doesn’t mean I solve it; writing is just a way of making more sense of something that doesn’t inherently make sense to me…which is a long way of saying that I’m writing about parenting not because I’ve figured it out, but because after doing it for over two decades, I‘m still struggling at the job.   

What is parenting?

A responsibility? A reason to celebrate? A source for Instagram and Facebook posts?

A career? A part-time job? A reason to drink?

All of the above?

At its heart, parenting is the cultivation of a child into who he/she/they will become. 

Farmers across the world cultivate crops. A thankless, tireless, devoted job that’s essential to life and yet most of us never give it any extended thought.  If we did, we’d be stunned why anyone would choose such an endeavor. In a good season, crops can be ruined by multiple calamities; forces of nature, fate, genes and simple luck play an outsized role in production.  When farmers do well, their produce is sent off for the benefit of other people, making it look like they spent a lot of time doing nothing. When they fail, there is recrimination and guilt, a lot of second-guessing, and a whole lot of other voices spewing blame.

The similarities between the two jobs are not lost on me.

But if farming is the hard work of raising crops, then parenting is the hard work of raising children; helping those small seeds of life given into our care mature into the vegetables and flowers and trees and shrubs and grass and nettles that populate our human world.

It’s not the same thing as “birthing” kids—let’s specify that. Although if someone had told me mid-partum, or worse, post-partum, that I’d just done the easy bit—when I felt so far out of my depth AND like I’d been run over by a tractor—I’m sure I would have cried even harder; completely overwhelmed by a task I had taken on in utter ignorance and wondering why anyone, anywhere thought childrearing was a good idea. 

Because parenting isn’t the easy job of being able to say, “I brought this child into the world,” and being good with it. It’s not the bragging rights earned because something wonderful got placed in your hands; it’s not the sharing of only the glories of the job.  If truth be told—or rather, if my truth of parenting be told—the essentials of the job are probably the things we tend NOT to talk about. The things we would never brag about. The times when our doubts are the only thing we’re sure of; when our kiddos are in pain or struggling and not only do we not have the answers, but our parenting ignorance might be at least partially at fault for how our kids are suffering in the first place. 

Parenting is fraught with indecision.  The bad decisions we regret.  The waking up in the middle of the night, worrying, so that the next day, we can wake up and worry some more.  It’s asking ourselves all the time if what we’re doing is right. If our advice, our rules, or the decisions we make for them are the right choices; and if they’re the wrong ones, wondering who will bear the consequences.  Because mostly—and it’s a secret mostly for many of us—parenting is the shame of thinking we’re doing it all wrong. Not realizing that sometimes our shame bleeds over, onto our kids.  Wondering if they’re wrong.  As in, the wrong thing. Worrying that not only have we failed our job, but we’ve failed them, too. 

And yet, if we’re doing the main job of parenting, we are—at the very least—being present, and in those moments of rest and quiet and attention, we’re seeing them. We’re hearing them, learning from them.  The kind of learning that happens when we actively listen—even if it’s only after we’ve run out of things to say.

In those times, our greatest work is reflecting back to them what we’re hearing and seeing.  Taking them seriously. Recognizing something big about the little People-In-Evolution before us. Appreciating their smallest ideas, their smallest independent decisions, their ‘unimportant characteristics’ that the rest of the world doesn’t see, or chooses to overlook and that make them exactly who they are. 

That last bit of parenting might be the most important. 

Because if “being seen” is the validation that we exist in the world, then the act of “seeing” someone as the unique individual they are is perhaps the most essential work of cultivating a child.  And it doesn’t have to come from the person who gave birth to a particular soul, but from anyone who can see their special magic. A teacher. A neighbor. A family member. I have a lovely cousin who has birthed no children but “sees”—in all that word’s depth and wealth—her adoring nephews, her step-daughter, her young mentee, and therein, parents them all.

So, what is about parenting that makes it feel like such an impossible job?

Maybe it’s that we’re entrusted with a complete unknown; a soul no one has ever seen before, or imagined before, and although we know their importance to us—perhaps the most precious thing life will ever give us—we don’t actually have the information we need to do the job. We’re given no instructions, no directions, no specific rules or understanding except that old adage: How hard can it be? People have been raising kids for centuries. 

Yet, none of us know what we’re raising. 

We’re given the kernel, the nucleus, the source of a person—but we have no idea what it will become.   

We could be raising a colorful cherry tree. Or a great big willow. It could be a delicate, vibrant, Gerber daisy that looks amazing but has trouble raising its head. It could be a raspberry bush, prickly and juicy and thriving—or a tangy red currant that we first mistake for chokeberry.  It could be a dandelion that goes through its own phases of ticklish delight: bright, flowering joy that turns wispy and fading, disappearing over time; cycling in and out of a tricky balance of existence.    

The bummer is, kids don’t come in seed packages, as handy as that would be. 

Because the main dilemma of cultivating a child is that even though we don’t know what we’ve got, it’s still our job to help them become the supremely distinctive thing they’re supposed to be. Our job is to support and tend them; protect them; care for them long enough for them to find their own determination, their own field, to grow into their own life and soul, and eventually exist without us.

In that process, it becomes our job to step back and watch, knowing that each being on this earth will have its own, singular experience of life that isn’t ours and can’t be ours, and might not even fit the idea of a life we can imagine—and we have to be okay with that.  With the fact that our seedlings might grow into something that doesn’t resemble a plant or shrub or flower we’ve ever seen, in any garden, in any terrain.  And know that it’s a good thing.  Because we’ve raised that seedling to become something of its very own. 

I wish someone had told me when I started out my parenting gig, “This child will be amazing!” and not meant, as most did, ‘this child, because it’s yours, will go on to great and wonderful things!’ but had instead meant, ‘this child will be amazing because it will be the very first of its kind; the one and only of its kind, and it will need your support to figure out what that will be.’ 

Because even if our kids take all the classes we sign them up for, the violin lessons, the travel sports, the theater shows; even if they dress in all the clothes we buy them and end up applying to the colleges we recommend, our best parenting moments will be the ones when they do none of those things, or try and give up on all of those things, and we still say, “I see you building yourself with this decision, and I am so proud of you.”

For at the root of parenting, apart from the basics of teaching children how to stay alive and sane in this insane world of ours, the truth is, how can we know what’s best for them? We don’t know yet who they are because they don’t know yet who they are. They’re discovering it as they go and if we’re doing our job right, we’re discovering it right alongside them.

Which also means, we’re going to fuck up.

Not once or twice, but on a regular basis.

Because we’re going to try to make decisions that would be good for us. We’re going to push them in a way that feels comfortable for us, because we’re still thinking about them from our point of view. We’re going to insist and ask and demand things that feel wrong to them but feel right to us in the moment—and if we’re lucky, later in life they will forgive us for that and those situations will have given them good information for making their own decisions later on, when they better know what’s right for them, having done it already the wrong way at our behest.  And it will be a lesson for us, too, in those moments later, to hear their anger about the bad decisions we made for them and be gracious and humble and able to say, “I’m sorry.”

And hopefully, along our parenting way, we will learn to better listen and hear them when they say, “No, that’s not for me,” or “No, I can’t do it that way.” And we will learn to ask, “What do you think you need?”

For those of you with smaller kids, this might not feel like it makes sense.  You are still the Rule Setter, the Adjudicator, the Master of All Decisions. But those days pass quickly and suddenly you are faced with actual people in your household, wondering how the hell they got there when you weren’t looking.

In my house, once they appeared, I still mistook them for children.  For the beings I was raising in all my abundant wisdom—which meant, I wasn’t listening enough. 

I didn’t hear them when they said, “I can’t do this” or “I hate this” or “This isn’t for me,” mis-translating their words into, “I’m complaining about this but really, I’ll suck it up and keep going because that’s what you and everyone around me wants.”

If I’d been listening properly, I would have heard, “I’m miserable doing this thing that goes against what I want or who I am.” I would have been better equipped to see that the systems and roles I was trying to fit them into just weren’t the right shape or size.  I would have told them earlier that there are many ways to live life—and encouraged them, harder, to find their own.

We all figured it out eventually, but they figured it out first.  I was behind the trend more often than not, because I misunderstood not just their words, but the situation; I believed they were still mere children in the backseat, with me, firmly in charge, at the wheel.  Yet, at their best, my saplings figured out how to reach around me from behind, wrap their spindly, leafy hands around the wheel and get the car going in the right direction. At my worst, I kept control, convinced of my own authority and sureness even as I drove them wildly off track, finally forced to stop; and while I was busy digging around the glove compartment for some out-of-date Google Parenting map, they ditched the car and started walking in their own direction.

Which is to say, what? That leafy tree trunks should be driving cars?

Just this: that we help our children most when we listen; when we take them seriously, when we give them the controls earlier than we see fit. When we encourage them to be themselves and teach them to trust their own instincts, and when we model that trust by trusting their instincts, too, even when—or especially when—they go against ours.  We parent best when we show our pride in their early, small, unique manifestations of self that make them feel wholly themselves.  Believing they’ll grow best when they point themselves in the direction of their own sun as we stand in their shadows, not trying to bask in their glow, but appreciating the view of them, in all their glory, in whatever shape or size they might grow into.

Content that their creation is their own.

A soul slipped from life today.  A friend of my younger sister’s, a woman our age, after a brief but ravaging bout of cancer. 

Her death was peaceful—and tragic.  A blessing and a trauma. For her mother, her teenage daughter, for my sister who spent the last weeks sleeping on her floor, now comes the even harder part—that alongside their relief that she didn’t die in a hospital, attached to a thousand wires, but on her couch, fading into a deep sleep from which she didn’t wake—there also begins a new sadness.  A world that lacks her shape in it.

And so starts the long, hard process of grief. 

Among the many cultures I’ve lived in outside the U.S., most experience grief in a raucous, raging, and very public way.  Their expectation of grief is that because life has stopped somewhere, life in general, for all, must pause in recognition. 

In those communities, people take weeks off work to travel from one end of the country to another to gather with friends and family to spend time actively grieving. Whole villages mourn for days: singing, dancing, sharing stories that memorialize the person who is gone, connecting that soul with all the others who have gone before it; maintaining a taut connection between the living and the dead, and erasing the strict boundary between those two worlds that our society constructs.

In their gatherings, the loved one’s absence is filled, collectively, with bodies and voices of young and old; the silence of death filled by rambling speeches and open weeping and songs of protest or praise. Professional mourners are sometimes hired in—people who know their grief—to rend their clothing, throw themselves to the ground, wailing, shrieking, marking death as the unmissable, undignified, unassailable force that it is.

That’s different from what we do here.

In the Catholic culture I grew up in, there used to be a larger tradition of grief.  Big families—even in my youth—would still spend days together grieving, gathering at a funeral home for three days of visitation, joined by extended family and the wider community to accompany the family’s sorrow with their presence.  Physically and emotionally, they would add ballast to the remaining family members, helping them get through those first unendurable days. Among my Irish forebears, wakes were part of that process, all-night affairs of toasts and remembrances that turned sadder and sloshier the longer the night wore on.

Those versions of mourning, too, although smaller than in my villages in Africa, were also public and shared.  Gatherings that followed even older traditions: of wearing black for a year or hanging black bunting from homes or doorways in an outward expression of grief. A visible call to the outside world that death was among us.

A reminder.  A warning.  A shared experience. 

When did our grief become so solitary?

In the first days after my beloved step-father died, I remember how startled I was at how life could go on around me so normally. From my perspective, the whole globe had tilted; a huge rent in the skies had opened; a gaping hole in the fabric of life that could not be stitched back together. 

Nothing felt like it could or would ever be the same—and yet life around me mocked that truth.  I couldn’t absorb the loneliness of that disconnect.  I wanted the heavens to pour down, to cry out in pain with me.  I wanted people on the street to stumble, dazed, as though their center of gravity had shifted, too; reflecting the reality that I was living.  Life had ruptured, after all.  How could no one have noticed?  Or, what was wrong with me, if I was the only one experiencing this new—and lesser—world? 

 Then one day while driving my kids to school—doing what I was supposed to be doing, getting on with life—I burst out sobbing for no apparent reason. 

“I am bereft,” I thought, giving voice to the depth of emotion I felt, knowing suddenly the concept of that word and how suddenly, I realized how I occupied it.  ‘Bereft’ was a word I had never used before in my own context but which fit the abscess in my soul.  It made sense of the gush of sadness that enveloped me; it filled the hiccups between my sobs; and described the dark plunge beneath the surface I took in a grief so physical, so palpable that it felt impossible to ever resurface.  It was a writhing, aching, solitary pain.  And it felt overwhelming.

*

When I worked in Ganyiel, South Sudan, I had to walk across the Nile. The river, at that point wasn’t the sturdy blue raging stream of other stretches; it was more or less a disperse swamp that bordered a shallow, meandering lake that ended on the other side in another slushy swamp.  At the time, I lived on the left bank of the river but oversaw several health clinics on the other side, a several-hour walk away.  There were no vehicles, so to monitor the clinics with my Sudanese counterparts, we had to start walking early in the morning, having first got permission from both the local rebel and civilian leaders to ensure we weren’t walking into war. After a two, three, or four-hour hike, we’d inspect a clinic, meet the local leaders, figure out what supplies and support were necessary to keep things running, and then walk the whole way back to our camp, needing to arrive before sunset. 

Those were long, hard journeys.

Hiking with my nearly 7-foot-tall Sudanese counterparts, whose legs extended to somewhere around my shoulders, I’d walk last (always the slowest) in a single file line through brush and forest and open fields until we arrived at the edge of the green, swampy river. There, we’d remove our shoes and wade into the slow-moving, reedy, insect-filled waters.  Because of their height, the water reached my colleague’s waists but it hit closer to my chest, so I had to carry my bag and shoes on my head across the river, hoping that the water never got so high I’d have to swim.  Like so many other bodies of water pooled between people and animals, the Nile was polluted by human waste, animal waste, and tiny parasitic worms that could, if they crawled through human skin, cause all kinds of bother.

Had my life been a movie at that juncture, I would have crossed that historic river in full grace, backed by crescendoing music and good lighting that would make me look determined; accepting the challenge heroically.

Instead, I grumbled across, always off-balance as I trudged, afraid with every step of falling in, or getting schistosomiasis, or dysentery as a result of accidentally gulping the water; always trying too hard not to look ridiculous in front of my colleagues. 

I hated those crossings.

Then, at some point, on my third or fourth trip across, I decided that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my hike trudging in dripping clothes. It was time to take control of the situation. 

That morning, I waited until my two colleagues were already in the water ahead of me, before rolling up my t-shirt, tucking it into my bra, removing my skirt, and tying it around my neck like a scarf, before wading in.

It took about two thirds of the way across the river until it dawned on me that my colleagues, already waiting on the other side, would get to witness my emergence from the Nile: mud-swamped and wading ashore in my underwear and bra. 

Clodding forward on two blue-veined legs, chilled and mottled from the water, I yelled ahead.  “Hey guys! Could you turn your heads?  I took off my skirt to cross.”

Which, of course, elicited the opposite reaction. 

Meaning, that as I sloughed my way to shore, feet sinking deeper and deeper into the gooey peat, they dashed forward, hoping to rescue me from the suction force of mud that threatened to topple me over. 

“Something is wrong!” they cried as I emerged, staring at my too-white, too-mottled, too-freakish body that contrasted so drastically to their sleek, blue-black skin.

“You’re right!” I agreed, fully humiliated, nearly naked and enraged by every career decision I’d ever taken that had landed me in the Nile.

My poor colleagues, after wincing in shame at the sight of me, recovered enough to turn away and give me the privacy I needed to brush off the mud and sludge my body had collected on the way across, so I could dry myself with my not-so-dry-anymore-skirt and we could continue our hike.

“Blue veins look a bit strange,” I tried as a conversation starter, trying to normalize the awkwardness of what we’d all just been through. And as our walk progressed, we continued a conversation about skin and skin color; about red blood looking blue through white skin and the science that explained it.  We talked our way through the unspeakable, the unknown.  And on the journey back, they offered to carry my bag and shoes on their heads so I could use both of my hands for balance.  They kept an eye on me, but only until I started to emerge, and then they turned away, waiting patiently until I was at their side again.  What started with my isolation, humiliation, and embarrassment developed over the next weeks into a delicate camaraderie that continued throughout my time there—and through many a difficult walk.

*

I recently read that when someone is going through difficulties, they should cast their mind back to a time when they felt at their best and concentrate on what, exactly, they felt about themselves at the time.  What strengths did they recognize in themselves?  What emotions did they feel?  What characteristics did they exhibit or drawn on? 

Let’s be clear: I was not at my best when crossing the Nile, but in those moments, I realize now, I became my strongest. 

There was a mix of determination and will power that kept me going, but also an acceptance that I was in the middle of something larger than me and there was nowhere out but through. There was humility in accepting the fact that I was not in control, and circumstances that forced me to be vulnerable enough to seek a connection that made my way forward possible. 

Those Nile crossings turned out to be a highlight of my time in South Sudan.  As life-affirming as they were grueling.  As companionable as they were isolating.  As full of my wrath and insecurity—as they were of my colleague’s support and understanding. 

Something about trudging through all that muck and heaviness makes me think of grief.

Maybe that’s how grieving works.  An effort we don’t want, but one that stays with us, even when we do get to the other side. Slinking out exhausted, mud-covered, war-ravaged—but seeking the sun as we go forward. Expecting time to dry us out, crisp us up, allow us go more humbly and vulnerably through life.  And hopefully, in good company, as we allow the folks around us into our troubles; opening our difficulties to them—hoping to discover in that sharing an unexpected grace.

And maybe, too, making the journey not just more manageable, but more meaningful.   

One year ago Friday, we’d planned a gathering at our house.  A few people had already announced they wouldn’t come ‘out of an abundance of caution’ a new phrase invented by Corona.  We debated whether to leave our invite open, but in the end canceled rather than make people uncomfortable by forcing them into a decision given the little information we all had at the time.  What we knew about the virus then, was that it was transmitted from person to person, it was not airborne (which later proved false), and that it was not necessarily deadly (see previous comment). 

That night, instead of hosting a party, we went out to our favorite restaurant and wondered how things would unfold. 

Within days, lockdown was declared and our upstate NY college town had emptied, my mother had moved in with us from Florida, and the dialogue around the virus had changed.  Data proved it might be deadly after all—although only to older people or those with underlying health conditions—yet suddenly everything seemed more precarious than the day before.  And that was the only certainty as days passed.

With two over-70-year-olds in the house (my mother and her Canadian partner), a high school senior suddenly homeschooling, a travel-loving husband abruptly homebound, and a dog who chose that moment to get life-threateningly sick, our life got very small and very nerve-wracking all at once.  Since I was the only one leaving the house, I felt like the designated Emissary-to-the-Outside-World as we adapted, inside, to a new normal. 

For the first several weeks (or months) I remember feeling petrified that I would kill my mother—unintentionally, of course—not careful enough at the grocery store or the gas station, as hospitals filled to capacity in nearby NYC and we watched their temporary morgues overflow.  All I could imagine, if anything happened to my mom, was not only would I be responsible for her death, but that I’d have to answer to my sisters, too, and how they would hate me.  Added to that, in one of those how-could-it-possibly-get-worse scenarios, I phoned my oldest daughter, an ocean away, who told me she had a cold.  A few days later, she updated me via text: “It’s probably Corona.”  Three grueling days of silence followed.

 I started waking at night in cold sweats—anxiety or Covid? 

It was a nervous time for everyone—and yet, as we realized that our one-month lockdown would probably go much longer—people started to adapt. 

Humans are massively resilient beings—that’s something I’m convinced of, having lived in strange or unbearable places myself and borne it; or having experienced how others, enduring even more, have borne it even longer. 

If I believe in one truth in life it’s this: humans can adapt to anything.   

So as people started discussing masks, we started sewing ours in the living room, using leftover fabric from old doll clothes projects.  At the supermarket, it turned out we weren’t the only ones; a new world of floating eyes emerged over colorful, mini-quilts as masked people started populating our town.  Neighbors offered or traded mask patterns and sewed for other neighbors. 

Overnight, plastic went up in front of cashiers, at first only lowly, see-through shower curtains that later morphed into improvised hanging plexiglass, before becoming more durable structures, demonstrating how everyone’s adaptations got more sophisticated as time went on. 

We got used to washing our groceries outside the door (before we discovered it wasn’t necessary), and figured out ways to meet up once Spring arrived, spacing our lawn chairs around the backyard at the required 6-foot distance.  Some people shopped online for the first time and we all learned to Zoom.  My daughter graduated in our living room, in a ceremony that felt both meaningful and well-organized—as we continually learned how to cope. 

As summer turned to fall and we grew tired of—but also used to—the new requirements of life: sitting in parking lots to be called in for appointments, getting swabbed twice a week to teach or study during the semester, sanitizing hands on both ends of a grocery run, we also came to understand that Covid was here for the long haul.  My early optimism of getting it under control (not impossible if we had followed the science), faded as November arrived and Thanksgiving kick-started a new explosion of cases, just as we were relocating for a half-year to Germany, a country which removed most Covid restrictions for Christmas, so everyone could enjoy the holidays.  (???)  Luckily, the Germans re-thought that strategy as hospitals imploded and another life lesson was reiterated: that although humans are amazingly adaptable, they can also be incredibly stupid. 

Now, exactly one year from the date when we first went on lockdown, it’s a good time to reflect. 

People have continued to adapt—surprisingly, so—and we have gotten used to so many things we never expected we could.  When we first got to Germany, where masks are only used indoors, I discovered how used I was to not seeing people’s faces—and how nervous it made me to see so many people unmasked.  And now, used to wearing my required N95 indoors, I will probably panic at home when people are still wearing their homemade face-coverings. 

But to a great extent, as we think about our migration back home in Spring, at least in the US, it seems as if there’s a glimmer of a post-lockdown hope—because of vaccines.  And if anything has surprised me most this year, it’s the speed of the vaccine roll-out.  I never would have anticipated a year ago that already the people I worry about most would be vaccinated against the virus. 

One of the jobs I did back in East Africa was running vaccination programs in war-drenched South Sudan, a place that could break your heart with all its suffering.  Between fighting and bombings, droughts, Nile flooding, crop failures, malnutrition, evacuations and population relocations, vaccines provided protection from at least one type of terror that could kill.  Our teams regularly vaccinated against diseases like Polio, Diptheria, Tetanus, Pertussis and Measles.  

This was an effort.

When we’d arrive at a new location, we had to start by figuring out how many people were there—mainly counting the children, our strategic target.  Then we’d ask local elders to identify community members who we could train and hire as Immunization Workers.  After several weeks of training, our new team members would be ready for vaccines. 

 I don’t even know what goes into vaccine production—certainly another long and complex procedure—but starting with ready vaccines, the most important step in the process for us was getting the vaccines on site.  We benefited from ‘The Cold Chain’ system, an organization of people and logistics that started at the World Health Organization headquarters in Nairobi and ended at our location in South Sudan, almost a thousand kilometers away.  Two flights, several cool boxes, people to load and unload; ice packs, working thermometers and speed was all necessary to get the vaccines to us.  Once we got them, we needed our kerosene-powered fridges up and running perfectly and adjusted every day to keep the vaccines viable.  It was a system, not just of logistics, but of amazing people power—communal power—negotiated between with two countries, several aid organizations, rebel leaders, commanders on the ground, our vaccine teams and the local population.

Each morning in the field, the team would gather at the fridge to unload the tiny glass vials into cool boxes for transport to the community.  If we had done our information campaigns well, mothers and children would already be waiting at the various stations we’d organized, at clinics if we had them or under large trees if we didn’t.  One line would distribute drops of Oral Polio Vaccine; another DPT; Measles vaccines for mothers and children in yet another line.  At the end of the day, each vaccinated person held a little yellow vaccine card stored in a plastic hull—a much-revered possession that many guarded like gold. 

Because of war, populations were always moving and we almost never could stay in one place long enough to complete a 9-month vaccination schedule.  Yet every time we started over at a new location, there would be families proudly waving their little yellow cards.  

Vaccines in South Sudan were nothing to take for granted.  They were the difference between life and death in a place where death from vaccine-preventable disease was a daily occurrence. 

Although I know there are vaccine doubters in this world, they are not the people who have ever seen a whole village of twisted children scuttling about on mangled limbs from polio; or those who have watched a mother sob after losing all her children from measles; or witnessed the body of a seven-year-old boy, muscle-locked and asphyxiating as he dies, slowly, excruciatingly from tetanus.

This is the reality of death by vaccine-preventable disease.  Only those who live in the luxury of health can believe that vaccines are not a privilege, or, when offered: a responsibility. 

Which is why, as I scroll through my neighborhood list serve from Upstate NY, with all its complaints about the difficulty of booking appointments, or the hours spent online being told to check back later, or the broadcast dilemma of figuring out which vaccine is best, I get frustrated.  Or when I read about a nurse somewhere in the US who ‘believes it is his choice’ not to get the vaccination although he puts his patients at risk.  Or when others say it’s too much of a hassle for something they’re not really worried about getting. 

Because I know how valuable vaccines are.  And how much work it takes to get those vaccines out.  And how much good they can do. 

I also find it disturbing, that whole privileged line of thought, when I’m sitting now in a country who can’t seem to get their vaccine roll-out under way, and where my almost 80-year-old father-in-law was told last week that he’s still ‘too young’ to sign up for a vaccine. 

That’s the reality, actually, in most of the world.  In Germany, they’ll get the vaccines eventually, but as Covid is now a vaccine-preventable disease, I know how urgent the timing is to reign it in now.  And while the vaccine roll-out here is probably mere months away, there are other places in the world, places like the rural communities where I used to work, that still lack Cold Chains and health workers and infrastructure and vaccines—and they will wait longer for their protection.  Possibly years. 

So, get your vaccine as soon as you can and encourage others to get it, too.

And then, be grateful.

Because many people have worked very hard, so you can have this protection. 

Our rotating star

There’s been so much talk this year of a Christmas ‘not like any other.’ But for many of us, life has been out of sorts since March, when we first went into lockdown, and even as the new year starts and vaccines flicker on the horizon, we’re still hunkered down and living a rather strangely exceptional version of life.  Which gave me a chance to think back on other years when Christmas was ‘not like any other.’

My first Christmas to have that distinction was my first year out of college, when instead of spending it with family, I spent Christmas with seven other Peace Corps volunteers on the slopes of Mt. Kenya.  In a place and time with no phones, internet, or Zoom calls to connect us, we had to figure out how to make a Christmas celebration out of nothing. 

I’d known my fellow volunteers for only four months at that point and we’d all just recently left our group training base for the permanent sites we’d be living in for the next two years, scattered around the country.  Christmas was our first opportunity for a reunion and something to look forward to after those first strange days of settling in and starting our new lives at our sites, all on our own.  My new home was a little village on the eastern side of Kenya, in the middle of a game park famous for its lions and elephants.  Meeting up with the others, then, meant taking an overnight train from Mombasa, where I rocked away the night in the top bunk of a rickety old cabin that had once been part of the glamourous (and since, rightly-maligned) colonial legacy of the Brits.  For breakfast, I drank my tea from a tarnished silver teapot still engraved with East African Railway in loopy script and watched ostrich, zebra and graceful giraffe racing alongside the tracks as we sped towards Nairobi, the nation’s capital.  From there, I had to catch a ‘speed taxi’—a Peugeot 504 station wagon packed full of people and luggage and chickens—into the foothills of Mt. Kenya to meet the others.  Reunited, we cooked a celebratory pineapple upside-down cake over a kerosene camp stove using two huge aluminum cooking pots and three rocks, a strategy devised by former volunteers and described in the legendary Peace Corps Kenya Cook Book gifted each new volunteer.  In place of a Christmas tree, we crafted a wreath from foraged greens and listened to a cassette tape someone from home had sent, playing songs from Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer as we prepared our pasta dinner.  Afterwards, we went to the local, one-room, candle-lit church for a midnight mass where we were welcomed broadly by the local congregation and invited to sing for them.  Which is how a group of mixed-faith/no-faith Americans from California, North Dakota, Illinois, Washington D.C., Minnesota and Michigan ended up singing an off-key rendition of Silent Night in the darkened shadows of one of Africa’s tallest peaks. 

It was a memorable Christmas, to say the least. 

Several years later, still in Africa, I enjoyed my oddest Christmas ever.  As a new hire and one of a small group of relief workers left behind as an Emergency Team at our location in South Sudan, I didn’t know what to expect.  I knew nothing of Sudan or its civil war—only that I’d been told to stay ‘vigilant’ amidst the increased fighting and indeed, just days into the new year, we did actually get evacuated under heavy fire.  But before that, Christmas happened, with several days of celebration that included traditional Nuer dancing—high jumps launching young men several feet into the air—combined with a strange, imported form of evangelism where dozens of people marched in bright white dresses (among an otherwise naked population) while parading crosses before them in military fashion.  With a mix of horror and humor, I watched in my sun-battered, red sleeveless shirt, absorbing yet another version of what had been done in the name of ‘Civilization’ by decades of missionaries in Africa. 

That evening, my Kenyan colleague and I hosted the other remaining relief workers for dinner: a goofy New Zealander working for the Adventists, a dour French female doctor, and a logistician from Paris named Pierre.  Pierre was a retired chef, so for dessert he treated us to a banana flambe, carrying it, ablaze, through the door of our mud and thatched dining hut.  Unfortunately, on the way in he tripped, shooting flames of rum across our floor, almost setting us and our tukal on fire.  (Months later, after hearing about a fire at Pierre’s new location, I asked jokingly if banana flambe had been the culprit and was told in all seriousness, “Pineapple!”) 

That year in South Sudan, post-dinner, as I stood outside peacefully brushing my teeth in the dark, open air, I searched the sky and located the constellation of Orion, a constant in my life.  Watching its brightest star glow, I reflected on the story of the Christmas star and its supposed reach across the world.  That night, I let it mark for me the long connection between home and where I found myself; thinking how my family at home might be seeing the same star; making me think even more about the connection between all people across time and space. 

Two years (and a lot of war) later, I celebrated my first German Christmas—something that would become a tradition for many of my Christmases since, although maybe it’s good I didn’t know it at the time.  It was not a roaring success.  Maybe because I was surrounded by the trappings of family and Christmas—but none that were my own—I felt more homesick than ever.  I listened to Christmas melodies I didn’t recognize, with words I didn’t understand.  There was no Christmas tree until the 24^th and Christmas Day was almost an afterthought.  We ate tongue (?!) for Christmas dinner and cold salads for Christmas Eve.  The crowning glory came on the 26^th, when the extended family gathered for coffee, the great aunts and uncles of the ‘War Generation’ sharing their reminiscences, who stared my way every time they said, “Die Amerikaner.” I felt singled out and shamed by what I couldn’t understand.  Only years later, once I spoke German myself, did I realize how often those stories they shared of ‘The Americans’ were mostly positive ones; a return to justice and sanity after years of war.

But it was nearly twenty years later that I celebrated my worst Christmas ever—and the one truly most unlike any other.  It was exactly ten days after my mother-in-law’s passing.  In a household steeped in grief, and lacking all her planning and organizational prowess, we felt obliged to pull ourselves together for the holiday, knowing that’s what she had wished for.  But that year, it felt almost impossible to find moments of joy.  In the wake of such raw loss, we wrapped ourselves in the motions of the holiday, hoping that might be enough.  Unpacking the manger amidst the sobbing of my girls; sorting through Christmas ornaments while holding my husband tight; preparing dinner with my father-in-law as our eyes stung and leaked; all of us taking our first bold steps into that heavy new world of absence. 

Yet even that year, one positive memory stands out.  As part of the family tradition I married into, we hold the responsibility of keeping the family Christmas star.  Handed down from the 1800’s, it’s a rather spikey thing that sits atop the tree and balances a twelve-armed star on its tip that rotates horizontally around.  Each arm, shaped like a windmill blade, holds a small figure hanging down from its end, originally carved from wax.  Over the star’s hundred-year-plus history, as the wax figures have melted away, they’ve been replaced with tiny wooden cut-outs each representing one of the twelve months.  Every year, the star is unpacked from its special, hand-built box and everything is straightened and adjusted: the monthly figures ordered and hung, the blades fine-tuned, so everything can find its balance.  Sometimes it takes an hour or more to fix the star atop the tree just so, so when we light the candles below (yes, real candles!) the heat from the beeswax rises up, pushing the blades around, creating in the dark of the Christmas Eve night a beautiful kaleidoscope of light and shadow on the ceiling.  Family lore states that if the star rotates quickly, the year ahead will be a good one.  And that year, more than any other, we needed that.   I’m not sure how many times we adjusted the blades or the branches below, tweaking the exact the location of each candle, to make sure that when the relatives called to ask about the star, we could reassure them that it was racing. 

My memory tells me now that the star that year spun faster than any we’ve seen.

Alas, for Christmas this year we didn’t have the star, or the reassurance that we’re used to it giving us.  We weren’t in Munich celebrating with my father-in-law in person; he didn’t even get a tree.  Like so many other families, we shared a Zoom holiday on lockdown, trouble-shooting tech problems and talking over each other, but at least sharing the same time zone so it was dark for all of us when we lit the candles on our tree and sang together some of those once-unrecognizable songs that have now become for me, too, the sound of Christmas. 

Recently, another writer reflected on the ‘difficulties’ of Christmas this year compared to those of people living during World War II, when again, so many people were separated, often for many holidays in a row.  I tried to imagine that level of loss and distance and restriction and lack of security; the rationing of food and movement and safety to that extent, not just in the short term but year after year after year.    

My step-father used to tell stories of how he spent World War II as a child in Amsterdam and of that last horrific winter—the “Hunger Winter” as the Dutch call it—when his family had to burn their furniture and floorboards to keep from freezing, and dug up tulip bulbs for food.  Or how my mother-in-law, also a child in the war—on the other side—told of being strafed on her way to school and forced to move every few months as women and children were evacuated from the bombing.  I wondered if either of them mourned their Christmases the way we have mourned ours this year?  Or if they were able, back then, to have anything that resembled the Christmas celebrations I later shared with them both? 

It’s too late for those conversations now, but I wish I had thought to ask.

Yet that lack of knowledge made me think even more about what we’ll remember of this year.  What we’ll talk about later—or share once this is all behind us.  Because although we’ve lost out on some of our traditions this year—and the unluckiest of us have lost out on more, maybe even beloved people in our lives—there will still be memories that we’ll carry forward from this time.

It might be that, looking back, we’ll have a source of wonder that we managed to pull off something celebratory at all.  Or pride at how we adapted and learned to take small joys as the important ones.  It might be that we recognize all the things we took for granted before this, and how their lack this year will make them so much more meaningful in the future. 

For me, I’m not yet sure what this year’s standout moments will be.  Like much of life, I tend to realize what was most important only once I look back, after things have settled in my mind.  But the past is always part of the present, too, the way the light from the star I saw in Sudan and shared with my family back home, was really a light blasted out long before, one we could only enjoy many, many years later.

What matters most, then, I hope, is remembering that important moments have already happened for us and will continue happening no matter what comes.  Small moments of grace or meaning or gratefulness connecting us to the people around us—whoever they are and however it happens—or those unusual moments that we mark when something is vastly different; those realizations that force us to recognize what it is that matters most.  And it’s the act of holding these moments with us, and drawing on them later that is the start of memory.   

Maybe that’s what can reassure us, then, in this year of absence: that life will keep happening, that experiences—good and bad—will be shared, marked, and will be the kernel of memory down the road.  Because like our rotating star overhead, it’s the mix of dark and light that creates the intricate pattern that so fascinates us.  The movement and the momentum that guarantees we’ll keep racing ahead like our star, creating our own reassurance that next year will be a better one. And that from all those small moments we’re making right now, when gathered together, that will be a story worth sharing. 

It’s election day and I didn’t know how to spend it.

Worrying, fretting, doom-scrolling?  Thinking of all the things about this country I hate or am appalled by?  Checking the headlines every fifteen minutes?

But if Tuesday is voting day, it’s also my weekly shift at Catholic Charities, an organization that creates a safety net in a society that doesn’t believe in safety nets. 

So that’s what I did with my day.

Today was busy. 

We just had our first snowfall in Ithaca and any time the seasons change, people realize they’re not ready for whatever brutal weather we expect ahead.  This time of year, we’re helping people get warm enough for winter.

Because of Covid, Catholic Charities was closed all summer for donations and I’ve been worried that we wouldn’t have enough stock of warm things to give out, so two weeks ago, I put out a call to my neighborhood list serve hoping for a few donations.  So far, we’ve gotten about 30 bags of warm clothing, blankets, hats, mittens and scarves delivered to my front porch. 

Which means today’s shift started with me already feeling a huge sense of gratitude that I live among people who are willing—and able—to donate.

When I arrived at my shift, people were lined up already before we even opened and it was non-stop traffic the whole time.  There was a lot of gratitude there, too, among the folks coming in.  The people we see don’t take things for granted.  Life has taught them not to expect much from it, which means, on the rare occasion they get what they actually need, it surprises them.  They tend to appreciate those moments; whatever it is they get; and the people who help them get it.

About an hour into my shift, a young man came in.  A nice, polite guy around 25, maybe, who’d been brought by his mom, who had to wait outside because they don’t share a household and that’s our new Covid rule—one household at a time.  He looked like he was living rough and simply asked for a coat.  It turned out (but only when I asked) that he could use a hat, too—but not if we had to search one out, he said, the way we did the coat.  Yet everything warm was part of the new donations, so we had to rummage through a few bags anyhow until we found the XL coat he’d requested, so the hat wasn’t much more work.  When we brought them out, he suddenly asked if we ever have anything bigger than XL, like 3X or 4X, not that he was that large but that he was looking for something like a blanket, something to wrap around himself, he said, in case he needed to sleep.

I asked if he needed a blanket or a sleeping bag—which we also have.  But he said no, nothing he’d have to carry.  So, in the end, he was happy enough with the coat we’d found and then the hat for which he thanked us and went outside.

When he opened door, I heard his mom say, “Now you’ll be warm!” in full relief and happiness.  And as another mom, I felt her emotion; imagining how it would be, the mother of a child who—at any age—was struggling the way her child was, in this case for warmth or housing or a thousand bigger things, and not being able to help. 

Yet she could bring him somewhere where he could get a coat. 

Something about that whole exchange made me want to cry—for her, trying to figure out how to be there for her son; for her son, who will probably still be cold, even with the jacket; for our society, which doesn’t have any solutions for either of them; and for our country, which is going to see a lot more need like that in the months ahead.

But it was good to realize that she did what she could—and there is some power in that. 

And that we, as an organization, could do something too, even if it wasn’t enough. 

It also left me thinking big thoughts on my way home.  Instead of spending my day thinking about elections and the games that powerful people play, I’ve spent a lot of the day thinking about gratitude. 

Gratitude, a word thrown around these days like a fad concept or something to sell on Instagram.  But what I mean by gratitude is this: the way you can feel better because of something someone else does. 

Because my neighbors donated their clothes and warm stuff for other people. 

Because a mom is happy to help her son.

Because some folks have created a safety net that people need; folks just trying to get by.

And it all happens when people think outside themselves. 

So no matter what happens today in those games that powerful people play; and no matter how many other people continue to be greedy bastards, thinking only about their bigger bankrolls—there will always be people who continue to think about others.  And how that sense of working for the better of others makes the world really a better place. 

And that will have to soothe my soul if things don’t go the way I want in the vote. 

Because there is a lot of need in our world no matter what happens today.  And that need isn’t going away no matter what happens with this election. 

But I hope people keep thinking about others.  Keep doing things for other people. 

There is goodness in that.

And for that, I am very grateful.

I went home last week—to Michigan—if home is what I can still call it, having moved away thirty years ago.  I was visiting Ann Arbor, where I went to college, and where my sister and her family now live. 

Like most college-aged people, I didn’t know who I was or what I wanted to do with my life when I was a student in Ann Arbor.  Besides studying, partying, hanging out with my roommates and working all the odd jobs I could to make ends meet, I didn’t expand life too far beyond the borders of campus.  I knew the dorms and the streets that went from one university building to the next; the cheapest pizza place nearest the dorm; and Dooley’s, the bar everyone wanted to get into (although once I finally could, I rarely went because it smelled so bad).  I knew the Kinkos copy shop, the computer labs (remember those?) and the travel agency where I worked my junior and senior year and which probably sparked my later craving for distant places.   

But being back in Ann Arbor, I realize that although I still recognize the street names, I don’t remember where they are now or how they connect or how they’ll get me where I need to go.  Which is odd, to be in a place where once I felt so connected, and now can’t even find my way to the mall.

It’s not that the city’s sprouted new streets or neighborhoods in my absence, but I wasn’t looking for them, back then.  Too absorbed in finding myself. 

The interesting thing is now, when I’m there, I see the place with an outsider’s eye.  Noticing things I wouldn’t have seen back then: the whiteness of the place; the plethora of university sweatshirts advertising local allegiances (in green or blue); the playground moms who look chicer and younger than the ones in my New York town; and especially, the overt friendliness of the place. 

Ann Arbor—and generally, Michigan, in fact—feels very Midwestern to me now.  Which is funny because when I’m in Michigan I don’t feel as Midwestern as when I’m back in New York or overseas.  Which is one of those weird by-products of living somewhere: that you take part of it with you, no matter where you go.

When I left Ann Arbor and went into the Peace Corps, I lived in a tiny village in Kenya.  Kajire was as far from Michigan as I could imagine—which is what I wanted, at the time.  It was hot all year round with only one natural stream that almost disappeared in the dry season—a far cry from Michigan’s beautiful, deep Great Lakes that bound us in all directions.

Kajire had a few wooden homes and some made of cement, but most were still built of traditional mud and thatching and were distributed along the bottom of a hill, stretched out for less than a kilometer along its base.  Without too many large trees to encircle the village, there was mostly scrub brush around, with a few cashew and papaya trees dotted in, along with the occasional Baobab, looking like someone had pulled the tree up by its roots and stuck it back in the ground, upside down. 

There was nothing about Kajire that reminded me of Michigan—and yet, after two and a half years, it also felt like home.  So much so, that as I was leaving, I grieved to realize that if I ever returned to the village, it would only be as a visitor.  I would never again belong to that place and its people the same way. 

I wouldn’t be called, early in the morning with all the other women, to gather around a fire in a smokey hut, awaiting the birth of the newest member of the village.  I wouldn’t be asked to sit with Mama Theresa, the grandmother of the family I lived with, to accompany her dying; holding on to her as long as she wanted to stay. 

I wouldn’t have any more opportunities for what I called my “matatu trance”—waiting for hours, sometimes, for a shared transport vehicle to fill with enough people to make it worth the trip–time I would spend reading or chatting, or just sitting and thinking.  The same thinking I would do as I lay on my bed sometimes, staring up at the ceiling, watching the slow trek of a gecko across the wall, having the largest thoughts of my life.  Thoughts about who I wanted to be; what mattered; what life was all about.

Sometimes, because I was in a hurry or just feeling adventurous, I’d forgo the matatu ride and hitchhike to Kajire, asking the Kenyan drivers who picked me up along the highway to drop me at Kilometer 120.

“What’s there?” they’d asked as I ambled out the door.

“Home,” I’d say, marching into the bush.  Looking forward to my little cement block room, a cool wash from the basin of water I would carry from the well.  Maybe celebrating my return with a warm orange Fanta as I sat on my stoop, watching the chickens peck for insects in the middle of the compound I shared with three generations of parents, kids, goats and mosquitos.

So, what was it about that place that made it feel like home? 

Not the setting or surroundings, with Kajire camped in the middle of a game park full of rampaging elephants, baboons and lions.  It wasn’t the language or the people—they spoke Swahili, Taita and Sagalla—and I was a lousy language learner at the time (luckily my teaching colleagues spoke English with me) and the only non-Kenyan in the village.

So, what was it?

Recently, someone quoted to me Pico Iyer, the travel writer. 

“Home,” he writes, “is where you become yourself.” 

Kajire was the first place I had to entirely start anew.  Creating a life of my own in a world I didn’t recognize.  It wasn’t a matter of ticking off familiar boxes to move forward; it was about finding the boxes—searching them out, asking a lot of questions, getting lost (frequently), making a lot of mistakes, learning to ask for help.  But it was also about sitting still; sitting uncomfortably still at times and feeling deeply alone or sick or afraid.  It was listening, in the quietest of silences for what is there when all the noise is gone. 

It was learning the depths of homesickness.  Crying myself to sleep sometimes because I couldn’t bear the moment I was in.

What I didn’t realize at the time is that homesickness is the opposite of home.  It’s the lack of everything familiar that usually makes you feel safe and comfortable—and yourself. 

For some of us, it starts early in life.  Going on a class trip in the fourth grade to Camp Timbers when the moldy, pine-scented bunks are too cold and the nights too long; or in high school at Pompon camp at an empty college campus in the summer, with all the other high school girls, competitive and overworked, dreading the 5 am practices; or those first weeks of college, when Sunday afternoons have a way of carving out all that’s left of your stomach with a hole, filling it with loneliness and choked-back tears.

In Kenya, my homesickness at first was unbearable.  With two years stretched before me, every night I would dream that I was home, again, with my sisters—meaning that I woke, each morning newly alone, standing on the edge of sobs and the Great Rift Valley, staring into the realization of just how far I was from everything I knew and loved. 

That ache of loss made me wish in those early days that I could speed up time and just be done with Kenya; that I could be at the end of my great Peace Corps adventure without having to go through it.

It’s so sad, now, to think what I would have missed if I could have pushed the fast forward button.  I would have missed all the experiences that came because I was so far from home.  Learning, for instance, that such extreme homesickness could pass.  That I would find my home in that strange-to-me place.  That eventually the people around me would become familiar; that they’d become my family for the time that I was there.  

It took so much of that first year for me to realize that home is not reliant on a particular place or people, but that we find home, time and again, through life.

Last week in Michigan, I got to see a whole host of family members, so on a warm Saturday night, my two cousins, my sister and our kiddos had a rowdy outside-party of cocktails (for the adults), games (for the kids), and stories and laughter (for all of us). 

There was so much joy.

We re-told stories from when we were kids, misremembering things and arguing or correcting one another.  We looked back on things that had happened or times in our lives that hadn’t made sense then—but now do, with the perspective of being older, wiser, more attuned to ourselves. 

We said, over and over, how lucky we felt to be together.  How lucky we were to be able to gather—even if at a distance over a big table—but also over so much time, so much space.  So many experiences that have taken us all out of the selves that we were as kids growing up in Saginaw, Michigan and into who we are now.

That night I had a deep, visceral feeling of home.  It didn’t have anything to do with the place we were.  It was the feeling of belonging—to those people, to our shared experiences, to our valuing similar things in our various lives and places.  But it was also a return—to the me of my childhood, to my history.  Connecting it to all the other versions of me that have existed over the years.

As we sat together, even saying nothing (which wasn’t often), what we shared most was ourselves.  The selves we are now. 

Which took me back to Kajire.  Where I first learned to appreciate the value of sitting and sinking into the life happening around me.  Not looking forward or back, but just being.  It was those times—just sitting with others, exploring where I was in the moment—that helped me dig into who I was at that time.  And to learn that in those little tiny moments, there is so much life. 

And belonging. 

And home.