Patheos (& Other) Peeps: Christian Piatt on Fatherhood, Anxiety, and Love That Longs for Expression

May 25, 2012 By Ellen Painter Dollar 2 Comments

Every Friday, I feature something written by one of my fellow bloggers at Patheos, a web portal devoted to religion and spirituality, or by another blogger/writer whose work I admire. This week I am discussing Christian Piatt’s new memoir as part of a book club discussion hosted by Patheos.

Our recent trip south for my mother-in-law’s funeral reinforced something I know all too well but prefer to ignore most of the time: My children’s genetic legacy includes a fair amount of darkness. Substance abuse. Depression.  Suicide.

I do not say this to trash my husband’s family. On the contrary, our time in North Carolina for Ruby’s funeral was a testament to both her survival through 88 years of hard living, and to the beautiful, intelligent, hard-working children, grandchildren, and extended family who gathered to remember her.

But there are a few too many holes in the family tree to overlook the probability that buried somewhere in the genes that my husband passed on to our children are some poorly understood propensities toward self-destructive behavior.

We have coped with a fair amount of physical illness, my own and my oldest daughter’s, as she and I have navigated life with fragile bones that snap and shatter far too easily. I have said that I hate OI (osteogenesis imperfecta, our shared genetic bone disorder). And I do. I hate it. I used to hate it for what it has done to me and my body. Now I hate it even more for what it has done to my beautiful daughter—to her body, but even more so, to her spirit.

Having witnessed the spirit-crushing effects of a physical malady, I am certain that witnessing one of my children being tormented by a mental or psychological disorder—the sort of thing that is all about crushing one’s spirit—would be harder than caring for them through physical illness.

This realization is bizarre to me, given that when Daniel and I chose to make our genetic legacy a factor in our childbearing decisions, we focused solely on my genetic legacy—the one that makes bones break. As I wrote in No Easy Choice:

The ability to match certain problems to certain genes tempts us to forget that all human lives are subject to risks, known and unknown. My family history and Daniel’s are great examples. My OI mutation was easy to target because it was known, it had predictable effects, and the physical ramifications of passing the mutation on were clear: Our child would break lots of bones. Daniel, coming from a family with a significant history of substance abuse and depression, as well as diabetes, brought plenty of genetic risk to our childbearing, but we didn’t focus on those risks because, compared with OI, they are less understood, less precise, and less likely to affect our children when they are young.

We focused on my genetic legacy because we could. But our children remain vulnerable even though their risk of inheriting my OI has come and gone. And the soul sicknesses that could afflict them are, to me, far more frightening than physical maladies that have clear causes and treatments.

I have been thinking about all of this—the irony of focusing our childbearing angst on fragile bones when there were worse things to worry about—because I recently read fellow Patheos blogger Christian Piatt’s memoir, PregMANcy: A Dad, a Little Dude, and a Due Date (Chalice Press, 2012). Childbearing angst is precisely what Piatt’s book is all about. Specifically, it chronicles his journey through his wife’s pregnancy with their second child, illuminating the worries and changes that dads-to-be go through while their wives are pregnant.

This is a book about young parents with young children making childbearing decisions. Even though I also wrote a book about having a second child, I struggled a bit to relate to Piatt’s story. Now that I have a middle schooler and an upcoming birthday that practically screams, “MIDDLE AGE!” I no longer qualify as a “young” parent. The subjects on which Piatt focuses in PregMANcy—worries about how another baby will affect family relationships and checkbook balances, precocious witticisms from his then four-year-old son, the many types of bodily fluids that permeate a young family’s days—are central to a life that I am no longer living.

I’m pretty sure that I am not Piatt’s target audience for this book. Given the subject matter; Piatt’s facial hair, trendy glasses, and combined profession of writer and dabbling singer/songwriter; and his penchant for sprinkling mild profanities into his prose, I’m assuming the prime intended audience is young hipster dads deeply involved in early fatherhood. My husband, although he sported a goatee for a couple of years, has a very nice pair of glasses, and is a very involved dad, is definitely not a young hipster dad. He’s a librarian, first of all. Whatever the definition of “hipster” is, I’m thinking “not a librarian” must appear somewhere on the list. And he beat me to my upcoming middle age-ish birthday by two months.

All that to say, reading PregMANcy was a bit like reading a travel narrative about a place I visited a long time ago. I recognized the scenery, I recalled bits of the journey with both nostalgia and relief, but my reading lacked the visceral connection and anticipation of reading something about a place that I’m in right now, or plan to visit imminently.

That is, except in those few places where Piatt went a little deeper, and a little darker.

In a chapter called, “Spawn of Crazy,” he contemplates the foolish decision to have kids when one has “at least four consecutive generations of nuts.” In Piatt’s case, those “nuts” took the form of suicides, alcoholism, and his experience of being institutionalized as a teenager, followed by a “dark night of the soul,” in which he heard voices and lost weeks of his life in a fog of psychotropic drugs and booze.

I wanted to know more about this part of Piatt’s story, this grappling with the darkness we pass on, along with brown eyes or curly hair or a penchant for math. Not out of some voyeuristic desire to gape at another family’s skeletons, but because I am learning that this is the stuff that continues to haunt and challenge us as parents, long after we stop worrying about birth plans and sibling rivalry and sleep deprivation and how to get baby puke and toddler poop out of the carpets.

How do we forgive ourselves for bringing our children into a world that can wound them so severely? How do we work alongside them to build a path to life and health and light, knowing that they can, at any time, choose to take a different path altogether? How do we love them, knowing that we cannot possibly keep their hearts from breaking, we can only nurture hearts strong enough to keep on beating despite the scars, and wise enough to know they can’t put themselves back together without help?

These are the parenthood anxieties we don’t ever outgrow. So why do we do it? Why say “yes” to that second (third, fourth….) baby? As Piatt says,

“We don’t have kids because we’re guaranteed the results we want. We have them because the love contained within us longs to be expressed.”

And then we worry.

 

P.S. Christian also blogs for Patheos; loyal readers might recognize the name, as I’ve linked to his stuff before. He has a funny weekly post on bizarre church signs. Check out his blog here.


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This is What Love Looks Like

May 24, 2012 By Ellen Painter Dollar 1 Comment

A mother, mother-in-law, aunt, grandmother, and great-grandmother dies, and we gather. We walk through Ruby’s house, running our hands along the dresser tops and counters and armchairs that witnessed her raising five children, cooking thousands of meals, going over the books for the business she built with her husband, making and receiving phone calls from the family and friends who gave her life its heft and texture. They witnessed also the far too many calls Ruby made or received sharing the worst kind of news, about a brother, a father, two sisters, a husband, and (God help us) two sons. And witnessed too her world narrowing to one favorite recliner in the TV room, her door opening to a parade of hired help who allowed her to stay as long as she could. Which was simply not long enough for her. In her last months, lived in a nursing home, she would call people to ask that they tell Jim—her late husband, my father-in-law—to please come get her. She wanted to go home.

She is home now, with Jim, and the others. And perhaps, as her minister put it so beautifully in her funeral homily, now Ruby can finally ask—and receive answers to—the questions she did not dare voice when she was alive, all of them starting with one word: “Why?”

These are the questions that plague us all, aren’t they? At least, if we are lucky enough to have people to love. Because those people get hurt and sick, they die when they shouldn’t.

Why?

My work has taken a back seat this past week, as being with our family (not to mention managing the hundreds of details that need attention when a family of five takes a last-minute 1,200-mile round trip excursion) has taken center stage. This morning, I eased myself back into my regular routine by reading an article by Stanley Hauerwas, the renowned Christian ethicist at Duke Divinity School whose endorsement of my book remains a high point (very, very high point) of my publishing journey thus far.

Hauerwas wrote an essay for an Australian news site reflecting on disability, particularly on the conundrum posed by the word “disability” itself. Too often, the word allows others to dismiss, to belittle, to overlook. Yet it also opens the door to help, support, and services that can allow people with all manner of physical, intellectual, and/or psychological limitations to survive and thrive.

I came upon this article on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Religion and Ethics portal because Hauerwas included my book, my family’s story, among those he used to illustrate the tension involved in labeling disabilities—and in living with them. He asks, “How are we to rightly regard [people with disabilities] as precious creatures of God and yet wish they might not suffer from their disability?”

This remains the central tension in my own grappling with our family’s life with disability. How is it possible that I treasure my beautiful daughter just as she is, because I do, and yet also wish that she had strong bones? How is is possible that I treasure my own life, because I do, and yet also know without a doubt that, were I to have the chance to live life without these fragile bones, crooked spine, grating joints, I would gladly take it?

Hauerwas doesn’t fully unravel this tension in his essay. But he does say emphatically that we cannot begin to make sense of it without stories, stories like mine, which he holds up along with several others as examples. Here he draws on philosopher Eleonore Stump’s work on narrative and suffering:

Stump begins her account of narrative by quoting Isak Dinesen that, “All sorrows can be borne if you … tell a story about them.” Stump confesses she is not sure Dinesen’s claim is true, but Stump is sure that reflection on suffering is better with the help of a story…Crucial to Stump’s argument is the contention that there are things to be known by way of a narrative that cannot be known by more analytical modes of reasoning.

Hauerwas concludes by reflecting on my story and that of Alex Sider, who has written about his godson Martin, who has autism:

Sider is right to wish that Martin was not autistic. Dollar was right to wish her daughter had not been born with brittle bone disease. Dollar was right to rejoice that her other children did not suffer from her disease.

But let us rejoice that Sider and Martin have one another, that the Dollar family exists, for without stories like theirs we would not know what love looks like.

Well. It is hard to put into words how such an affirmation of my family’s story makes me feel, especially now, in the aftermath of burying my husband’s mother. It feels good, like someone gets it—what I was trying to do. (That the “someone” happens to be a renowned theologian is icing on the cake.) It feels hard, because Hauerwas’s essay articulates questions for which we do not have clear answers. It makes my heart hurt, because he is affirming my family as a blessing just as my family has begun life without one of its members.

But mostly it feels like Hauerwas has articulated something that is not only true of the story I tell in the book, but true of our family’s entire story (and all family stories), a story that stretches back and back, encompassing Ruby’s story and so many others, and reaches toward the as-yet-untold stories of our children as they grow into adults.

Last week, we buried a mother, mother-in-law, aunt, grandmother, and great-grandmother whose life had been full, hard, long, tragic, joyful. We gathered for a funeral, and we cried some, and we watched our children giggle with their cousins; splash in the hotel pool; gape at old photos of a glamorous young grandmother, their aunts and uncles as toddlers, and a grandfather they never got to know; get a better grasp on the family tree through a keen study of grave markers at the family burial plot; and stuff themselves with sweet tea, fried chicken, coconut cake, and Cheerwine. And so, even as we mourned and retold stories of Ruby’s long life, we were creating new stories, stories that our children may one day pull out to tell their own children.

We are right to wish that Ruby was still sitting in that favorite recliner, making and receiving phone calls, planning where to go out to lunch, and fussing over whether her church committee members would make sure there were sufficient paper products on hand for a funeral lunch. We are right to wish that, in her 88 years of life, she didn’t have to know how it feels to receive the worst of news far, far more times than any one person should have to do so.

But let us rejoice she had us, we had her, and that her remaining children, children-in-law, nieces and nephews, grandchildren, and great-grandchild have one another, for without stories like hers, like ours, we would not know what love looks like.

 

 

 

 

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Goodbye to Ruby

May 16, 2012 By Ellen Painter Dollar 2 Comments

On Monday morning, May 14, my mother-in-law, Ruby Kimrey Dollar, died. Which makes my husband an orphan (his dad died of colon cancer in 1988).

I cannot speak for what my husband is feeling, and in fact, he may be trying to figure that out for some time to come. We’ve lived in Connecticut—a 14-hour drive from Daniel’s childhood home in North Carolina—for 13 years now. For the first 10 or so of those years, we got down to North Carolina at least twice a year to see Ruby and the rest of Daniel’s family. Ruby even made it up here a few times when Leah and Meg were babies—a feat close to miraculous for someone who didn’t like to fly and who lived her entire life within a several-mile radius of where she was born. During our children’s lifetimes, Ruby’s health was never robust. But the kids at least have some memories of visiting her at her house. Those visits largely revolved around where we would go for our next meal, so that now, when we say we’re heading south, the kids immediately start fantasizing about meals at Chick Fil’ A and Steak ‘n Shake. (True to tradition, on our drive south this week for Ruby’s funeral, the first meal we stopped for was at a Chick Fil’ A in Fredericksburg, VA. Ahhhhh……) In between meals, the kids would play hide and seek in Ruby’s huge backyard, build forts with Daniel’s old Lincoln Logs, and forage in the treasure trove of old toys (1970s-era Star Wars toys anyone?) that filled Ruby’s basement.

But for the past couple of years, as Ruby’s health failed and she eventually moved into a nursing home, our visits south became less frequent, and sadder too. We began spending the majority of our time in N.C. with Daniel’s siblings, who have children and grandchildren to keep our kids entertained. We would go visit Ruby wherever she was at the time, either the nursing home or the hospital. But the visits were short. Conversation became hard as she began to slip into forgetfulness, couldn’t always place where she was and what we were doing there, and frequently drifted off to sleep mid-conversation. The kids would give her kisses and hugs and pictures, but they became quickly bored.

So it’s hard to know what any of us are feeling, or should be feeling, upon Ruby’s death, because in so many ways she was already lost to us. And Daniel and I have carried some guilt and discomfort at being so, so far away as she declined, while his brother and sister did the hard work of regular visits, conversations with doctors and nurses and nursing home staff, and responding to ever-more-frequent medical emergencies.

As a daughter, a daughter-in-law, and mostly as a mom, it just boggles my mind that someone’s mother can die and our lives will essentially continue just as they have.

Eventually. But for now, we’re in North Carolina for her funeral, to remember her life, which was far from extraordinary in some ways, but more than extraordinary in others. She buried a husband and two of five children, and yet continued to love life and to thrive on connections with other people, particularly her family. Until her health made it impossible, Ruby was always up for a meal out and good conversation with a friend or family member. And as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that even some of Ruby’s quirks that drove me batty contained layers of wisdom. I’ve written about two of those quirks, her fierce holding on to every object that ever came into her home, and her passion for the church’s bereavement ministry, which mostly involved feeding people.

I’ll be taking a break from blogging for a few days as we gather with Daniel’s family to mourn and celebrate.

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