She Lived in a Shoe

Take out the dog, the blond hair and the knocked-up appearance. Then add a tazer.

*I wrote this last fall, but that doesn't mean it's not still happening on a nightly basis*

Here's a snapshot from last fall of just another typical night here at the ranch...

I tried to make dinner, which my current viral inhabitant has made sure that I can't smell, The Golf Pro called in mechanically impaired from his parents house where he had taken the van to find out why it kept dying.  They had to keep it overnight to find out why.

While I attempted dinner, they attempted a soccer game in the living room, then they apparently held a meeting and voted that instead of having five 10-minute showers each, they would simply elect a single representative from among them to have one 50 minute shower instead. Shower by proxy. sigh.

Next, the baby stabbed himself up the nose with a paint brush and bleed all over a bunch of stuff. After that, nobody ate the dinner and The Dragon Lady made a guest appearance and yelled all my kids into bed. Then she stiffed me for gas. Nice. Apparently she's been taking lessons from The Golf Pro on that.

I can only vaguely recall anything after that. I probably twitched a lot and became unconscious at some point.

And that is why I can post things like this on my Facebook page...

Ta Da!

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So, yesterday was exciting.  Or more specifically, those 6 hours of intensity that usually occur between school pick up and bedtime.  Those magic hours were so full of fun that by the end of the night I had posted this on my Facebook wall:

 “I just want to say, this is what parenting looked like in my house tonight…as if I had tried something exceptionally stupid (having kids) and ended up in the burn unit for my troubles. Now, in unison everybody “…and then we’ll do it all again tomorrow.”

Earlier in the day, I had taken this picture, which also ended up on my Facebook and IG feeds:

I like the picture above.  I like it a lot…but after the Dragon Lady had come over and put out the smoking ruins of my night I started to get all twitchy about posting these.

First, because I just knew that my mother was looking at that glass of wine and that kid in the same picture together (the one that was captioned “Lunch”) and immediately thought about all the Mormons in our family who are able to see my timeline and she probably got all tense because she raised a sinner and people can be ‘Judgey’, and this line of thinking made me all twitchy because I don’t think I’m a sinner, but maybe this means I’m a lousy Mom because I took a picture of my child near alcohol (Mormon roots set deep), which meant that I had stained him spiritually.

I’ll probably never get all the Mormon off of me, which is ok, but it comes up in the oddest places. For instance, I can’t have my kids handle anything alcoholic. At All. But I notice that when we take them to The Golf Pro’s parents place they will totally hand my 12 year old a beer or a glass of wine and instruct them to take it out to one of the adults, and I am always a little floored by this careless form of child abuse.  I suppose it is natural to them because they are Catholic and we all know about the Catholics and the wine and stuff RIGHT THERE IN CHURCH!  And also because Cocktail Hour at the Country Club during the 60’s and 70’s was a type of religion too. I have always argued that there are no such things as ex Mormons, Catholics or Jews when it comes to one’s sense of identity. Perhaps this is also true of the Country Club set.

Anyway, Not only did post a picture of me corrupting my child, but I also posted a cartoon with a caption that seemed to imply that I regretted having my children, and I wanted to clear that up.  I love my children more than my next breath of life…and I have, on occasion, felt that having them was tantamount to self-immolation in the name of a good cause.  You know why I have felt like this?  Because I am sane, that’s why.

Parenting is so ridiculously hard that I feel that you’d have to be crazy not to think, even for one moment, of running away from these little need machines who are unconsciously trying to assassinate your very identity.  It doesn’t mean I would do this all again if I had the chance.  And that is why having kids is the sickest relationship you’ll ever have.  There are just so many moments that you think if you don’t get away from these abusive people for just a moment that you’ll lose your mind…and then, the minute you are away from them, you think you have lost your mind. And your ability to breathe and think and reason.  Sometimes it’s hard to know which one of you is the stalker on any given day.

So, when I put in 6 hours with my seagulls kids that look like this:

Then it can only be sane to wonder what you were thinking in the first place by having kids.  I mean, even when I was pregnant I recognized the irrationality of the whole act.  “Hey, wait a minute, did I just commit my entire life to somebody I’ve never even met?  What kind of effed up, Russian mail order bride idea is that?”  If you have even the slightest acquaintance with intelligence, you have to question so drastic a decision.  The good news is, that despite living with scenes from The Birds, the questions are short lived.  But I’d still like to give up my part as the Tippi Hedron character…

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Before I give you the guacamole recipe, I’d like to remind you of the quote I mentioned over in my Photo Play section about taking pictures that are like really ugly babies. Lots of them. Because my food photography, it’s going to be me sharing lots and lots of really ugly babies while I learn how. Please, don’t blame the food. It tastes much better than I’ve made it look.

So then, in order to celebrate the perfection of guacamole season, I’m posting The Dragon Lady’s Guacamole recipe.  Originally, it was sans lime. We decided to go with it this time. Then, we decided it was a mistake. It was better without. The tomatillo added the tartness that we were looking for. Try it out. Let me know how you like it…

Put it all in a bowl and mix…

“I don’t measure. Ever! Sometimes I want more onion, sometimes less. Sometimes lemon, sometimes lime. Just have fun and lots of avocados.
Mince the following and mix:
1 tomatillo
1/2 small onion
2 small yellow peppers (aji amarillo – similar to a banana pepper)
1 tomato
2 cloves garlic
1/4 cup cilantro
1 tsp fresh lime juice
Dice 4-7 Hass avocados in their shells, and add to the other ingredients. Fold or mash.”

I stored the little bit that I didn’t eat in this mason jar with the seed and it kept for a couple of days in the fridge. It was awesome. Did I mention how much I love avocado season?

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(Warning: An injection of insulin will be required at the end of this post)

Go ahead and set the scene in the car. I have picked up The Kryptonite Kid and his sister from school and am driving to the older kids school to pick them up.

“Mom?” It is my 6 year old daughter, The Informant,  who is speaking. “Do you want to know what He did?”

“Don’t. Don’t say it. I mean it,” said the Kryptonite Kid from the seat next to her.

Well, I’m intrigued now. But I down play it, knowing that is the best way to get information. I think I could teach classes in reverse psychology by now.

She takes a deep breath, so she can get the whole thing out in the rapid-fire, no-punctuation method that is best used for the selling out of compatriots, “At recess, Jack and his girlfriend, they went behind a tree and they kissed!” she announced gleefully.

The Kid jumps in “Mom, I just want you to know, that is totally true…And I did not want her to say it.”

I had heard about a girlfriend over the Christmas break. He was looking forward to getting back to school because he missed her.

“So what do you like about this girl?” I ask oh so casually.

“She’s just cute…all the time. Plus, she has this hat with a polar bear on it and sometimes she watches me play basketball.”

Well, ok then. It’s pretty hard to have better reasons than that when you’re 8.  I didn’t quite know how to think about this at the time.  It was completely unknown territory to me. The 2 older boys had never even come close to using the word “girlfriend” had never kissed anyone that I had heard of, and I’m pretty sure I’d hear about it. They’re terrible at keeping secrets.

The Kryptonite Kid? For the most part, he’s never even heard of a secret. Clear as glass, he is, and true to form, he gives me the rest of the story.

“You want to know the good part Mom?”

I don’t know? Do I?

“She didn’t scream.”

“Well, that is good,” I say. “They shouldn’t scream when you kiss them.”

I’m pretty sure I’m supposed to be telling him not to kiss girls and stuff, but in all honesty, I’m too fascinated by all this to stop it before I get the whole story.

“But the bad part was we had to wait for like 10 or 15 whole minutes for a teacher not to be there.”

“Oh, uh, well, where did you kiss her?”

“On the cheek.”

This relieves me with it’s sheer innocence. I am powerless at times before this kid. He’s just that sweet. And then he rushes to reassure me some more, you know, just to be clear…

“But we didn’t have sex.”

At this point, I don’t wreck the car. I do mention that, hey, he doesn’t even know what sex is and that it isn’t a good idea to talk about things if you don’t know what they are. But I keep it all low key. There will be a quiet bedtime discussion about perhaps waiting to kiss any more girls…other than his Mom, along with a quiet prayer that we don’t hear from this girls parents or the Principal, and we’ll leave it at that.

But, WoW. He kissed a girl. And I have another small bullet of ammunition to put away for later use on the older boys when they get too cocky. I’ll be able to remind them that their little brother beat their time by a good 4 years or more.

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That Was Fast

“I love my husband of course, but it’s nothing compared to what I feel for my children.”

The speaker at the time was The Golf Pro’s mother. It was quiet a long time ago, and although I was somewhat baby hungry, at the time, newly in love with her son, it seemed like an awful thing to say.  12 years later, my life has told me otherwise.

My love for her son, as it turned out, went on hiatus for a while, and during that time I made some decisions about my life and it’s long history of infertility in order to better determine the course I was headed.  The results of that decision turned 12 the week before last, and I have had a long time to reflect on the irony of my reaction to Golf Pro mother all those many years ago.

In essence, I was single when I had my first children. The father and I shared custody, but we weren’t then and never intended on having a romantic relationship, and I have wondered in passing about the difference in the structures of families where the marriage comes first and the children second. It’s a land I’ll never live in, loving someone else first and then creating children with them. I only ever saw that coastline from a distance.

But there have been plenty of times when I’ve been glad that the children came first. I absolutely treasure those first three years when it was just me and them. From the moment they were born, every love song on the radio became about them. They became my partners in that way that happens for single mothers. It’s a  different kind of romance, but a romance none the less. I was lonely every day of my life before they came. I never have been since. I didn’t know that would happen the moment they were born onto this earth.

My bed was theirs, there were no complicated parenting dances to negotiate, no irritated mate demanding his equal share of my time. It was just me with these little beings who filled my world like a new Sun for me to orbit. I could give myself over to them and only them, without guilt. I fell so hopelessly, biologically in love with them during that time that nothing else would ever come close to the delicious draw that they were. (Do not mistake this for love at first sight. I did not experience that at the birth of my children – I never expected to, but that’s another post). I was theirs and they were mine, and nothing penetrated the bubble of wholeness around us.

Ever since then, I have wondered how people without children can date someone who has them. You never, ever get to come first. I mean, if even in healthy marriages the children move into primacy with both people, how can that translate if it’s only a biological priority for one of you.  I suppose, in the best of all possible situations competition doesn’t really happen and you both remain, for the most part, on the same page when it comes to your goals for your children, but in the land of blended families, well you can never come first, and I think that is a difficult thing to understand before you have children of your own. It is likely difficult even after you have your own, but I thought Louis CK summed this up in one of his bits about having children. You’re so devoted to your spouse before you have kids. You love them so much that you’d die for them. You literally think sometimes that you’ll DIE without them…then you have kids, and you’re looking at your spouse and thinking “Who are are YOU to me? These kids are my blood. I’m related to them.”  It’s kind of like that.

I was not involved in a romantic relationship when the triplets were born, and I have often thought that was a good thing.  I can’t think any relationship would have survived the complete exhaustion and personal neglect that came with that first year. The truth was, I had nothing for anyone else for quite some time. So as far as that distant statement from The Golf Pro’s mother goes, I could never imagine loving anything as much as I love my children. There isn’t anyone I wouldn’t throw on the fire for them.  They are the alpha and omega. Eternity and everything beyond.

Illustration in point: A few months ago Middle Son and I had a very hard day and I had come down really hard on him…overly hard. My language had been wrongfully harsh and needless to say neither one of us felt good about it. Towards the end of the day, as things gradually and quietly began to heal, with all the little extra touches and kindnesses that often bridge such  moments, I said to him, “I want you to know one thing…you (and your brothers and sisters), I will never love anyone else as much as I love you. From now until I’m in the grave, you’re it for me. In time, you’ll grow up and fall in love, but for me I’ve already met the love of my life. I’m done. There won’t be anyone else who will ever mean more to me than you.” And as I said it, I marveled at the complete sincerity with which I was able to say it. I would never again have to wonder about the greatest love of my life because I had already met them.

Happy Birthday Reasons for Living…

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So, I’ve been doing the single parenting thing of late and if I have a few more mornings like the one I had this morning, I’m going to rethink that whole homeschooling thing. Except it’ll be the kind of home schooling that involves nun’s habits and rulers.

The Golf Pro has been absent on a pretty much full time basis as his father’s health has begun to decline in a very serious way and they face their first real end of life chapter in the story of their family. That’s never an easy time for anyone, and it’s made even harder by the terrible theft of dementia and slow, incredible cruel crawl of lowered physical function. He is fulfilling his role helping his mother to both care for him and get through what is likely the most difficult challenge she has ever experienced. Good man. Good son. Go, I say. We will be alright here until you get back. At least that’s the story I’m peddling to him.

The reality of the single parent parade, which I’ve done before in various ways, is rather more like this… I caught the mouse that was trying to find a home in my home, which was pretty psychologically scarring for me, but more I suppose for the mouse.  I still feel like I violated some kind of pact with life.

Two hours later, after I had used two empty, frozen pizza boxes to relocate the ex-mouse to the trash I saw a kid in the garage finish his tasty green apple and just blithely dispose of the core by tossing it nonchalantly over his shoulder.  These are the moments where autism is the only thing that keeps me from going for his throat.  On another kid, that’s total cause for a beatdown.  I ought to just hand the rodents the keys and move out instead of the mouse-proofing I’m doing.

The heat has been out. It’s been out for about a week since I couldn’t bring myself to lie and say “Yes. I think I smell gas out there,” and I am far too terrified by my own ineptitude and any combination of gas and fire, we’ve been playing the “Ozarks  Family Christmas” game at night and sleeping 4+ to a bed. Last night I managed to fit 5 of us in my bed, but we had to sleep from left to right in a coordinated manner.  It’s like they are staging their own little “Occupy:” movement right here at home. Still, I have acclimatized so successfully to the Southern California weather, that by 64 degrees, I am already Donner-party cold and ready to eat the kid next to me who keeps destroying my house.

Our mornings with just the 7 of us look mostly like this morning did. Once I accepted that I wasn’t really going to call six kids in sick to 2 different schools, I got everyone to school in two stages, so we were only half late.  In the first group we had someone who looked as if they had been drawn by a cross between Maurice Sendak and Dr. Seuss…you know, if they were both on crack. The other child in that group came downstairs with a kind of reverse Mohawk because he had “combed his hair with gel.” O.o  He wasn’t very happy with me for fixing it, insisting that his Dad had shown him how. Oh yeah?  I’ve never seen Dad wear that particular look. Get in the car.

In the second group we had another ugly gel incident and I learned that if an 11 year old with a full head of hair looses an argument with gel, he can make himself look exactly like Rudy Guiliani in his pre-makeover days.  “Was Old-Guy Comb Over the look you were going for?”  “No.”  “Do you want me to fix it?”  Double Bonus? He doesn’t know who Eddie Munster is and that he is his twin. He also doesn’t know that I was totally lying when I told him that it would dry and fall into place during the day.  I’m guessing he’ll work it out by the end of the day. I mean he’s not in those gifted classes for nothing, right? RIGHT?  (Note to self: Must hide the gel. Also, Axe deodorant in the hands of two 11 year olds can cause vision problems).

In the midst of all this, the school district and current sports commitments have scheduled a nice chunk of my time for me in the name of education: DARE Project x3, Talent Show, Mandatory Parent meeting for Outdoor Ed, Toys for Tots, Science Project x3, 6^th grade International Taste Festival (75 “tastes” of food from your culture to share), 1^st grade Holiday performance, 3^rd grade Holiday party, Basketball and basketball pictures and basketball Holiday Potluck, “Technology” day (are you serious?!) and the 6^th grade panoramic picture…in 10 days.  I would respectfully suggest that the school district has lost it’s mind.  I mean December being traditionally the BUSIEST freaking month of the year.  Technology Day?!!  Seriously, are the kids in this district still bringing in pet rocks for show and tell?  I’m trying to talk at least one of my kids into bring in a flashlight so they can spend the day turning it off and on and being amazed.

And the International Taste Festival?  I’m all for cultural exchange. I think it’s a great idea, but why in HELL would you schedule that for December?  Something says these 6^th graders are about to get their first introduction to Vegemite, thereby winning my kids the “Least Popular Taste” award for this thing. But really, do I seem bitter at all?

Just to put the cherry on top of the sundae, my daughter is in a state of total Attachment Disorder freefall since her first Mom fell out of her program, and her suffering is awful to see while we try and help her process her rage and self-destructive behaviors into a useful crucible that will produce, I hope, a wicked-hard self-love in the end. It would also be good if they other kids didn’t stage a complete uprising against her in the meantime. Mostly, during the days with them all, I spend enormous amounts of energy attempting to defuse and soothe inflamed emotions among the members of the Small Social Skills Theater group I direct here.  But that’s another story I guess…

Right now, the kid sitting next to me is licking peanut butter off his shirt and I still need to get my tree up. Somebody cue Vince Guaraldi and let the Snoopy Dance begin!

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The Orange County Press Club. And BlogCrush. Tonight. I really, really want to go…but there’s homework…and excuses.

At least that’s what they feel like. I want to go to this event. I want to try once more and pretend that I don’t have an increasingly growing social phobia, or that the words haven’t been freezing in my soul once more since summers end.

In between the anxiety, I look at the lives that social media allows to happen in front of me now and I seem to spend just enough time watching them to be filled with the fuel of envious self-loathing before I make myself pull the plug and try and really assess what’s happening here.

Are their lives really much better than mine?  If they are, what choices are they making differently?  Should I just continue the self-flagellation of that old saw that I’m making excuses while they’re making it happen?

If that’s true, then I wouldn’t let the fact that my niece called yesterday to tell me that she’d had a relapse in her sobriety stop me. That she’d had to leave her current program and could she drop off some personal items at my house while she figured out how to regroup and walk towards a future without self-destruction.

And I wouldn’t let the fact that we both know that the son and daughter we have come to share will need to be out of the house while she does this because our daughter has been equally destructive and filled with rage she does not know how to process this week. Some weeks are a little better…and some weeks are truly terrible, terrible events, filled with little sleep and wildly uncontrolled behavior and screaming, demon-possessed, somebody fetch me a priest, day and night rages.

If I really wanted to go I wouldn’t use the fact that my 3^rd graders teacher, in what might be the most sadistic gesture by a teacher yet, has assigned a report about his first “Ancestor” to arrive in the country (this happens to be my mother) which is due tomorrow. It’s not the report that I object to; it is the fact that buried in the fine print of the assignment is the fact that he must make a doll of that “Ancestor” to accompany the report.  Do we really need to balance out his education by improving his doll-making skill set? I hate the Pilgrims sometimes.

For a few tired hours my brain has tossed back and forth between two solutions to get this item off my list.  I could quickly sew together a rather misshapen muslin headed thing and let him draw a face on it with a sharpie, or I could run to Target and look for a Barbie that resembles as closely as possible a slightly more glamorous version of Laura Petrie from the Dick Van Dyke Show, which is pretty much what my mother looked like when she arrived here in her early 20’s from Australia.

In the end, an unrelated phone call investigating religious solutions for my 6-year-old daughter (she clearly wants to attend church and so I am making it my business to get that for her and support it. I can be a potential atheist on my own time) prompted a friend’s husband to jar my brain out of 3-D thinking. So simple really, but I am still getting woken up 4 and 5 times a night, so I would never have come up with it. He will now draw a “paper doll” of his GrandMarsha and cut it out. I love solutions…and I wonder they’ll take it the wrong way when I include the part about the savage Indian attacks she endured in a passive-aggressive expression of defiance for the doll making assignment.

If I really, really wanted to be out making a career and being fulfilled I would not allow myself to use the fact that children have gymnastics and water polo today, and that I feel especially compelled to make sure that they get there since we opted out of baseball practice yesterday due to the fact that my three 11 year olds seem to be dangerously close to turning in the dumbest science projects in their class, despite their readily-apparent native intelligence.

I really want to go. I want to not look as disappointing as I look compared to those other women who are not letting their equally challenging lives stop them from taking advantage of the opportunities that are coming their way and using them to make even more wonderfully wonderful opportunities.

I really do want to go, but even if I did, I’m afraid that I would do that thing where I freeze up and drift desperately to the fringes to lurk in paranoid shame, even when I don’t know why I’m doing it…just like the last time. But in a fantastic gesture of hope, me and Xanax want to try once more to put on our “normal” suit and be part of the thing that interests us.

I’m just not quite sure how yet…

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I’ve been sick.  Really, stupidly life-stopping sick.  In bed for weeks, can’t get up, call in teams of people to cover for my ass, wheezing, antibiotic taking, inhaler sucking, pre-pnuemonia, throw out my back by coughing, useless to both god and man, just smother me with a freaking pillow, kind of sick. It’s a beautiful thing to have a calendar that looks like this…

And not have the energy to get out of bed. I am posting the calendar in a shameful attempt to garner understanding. From myself mostly. Because the level of guilt that I experienced over being so completely out of commission that I had to have all kinds of help from my pit crew still plagues me.  I understand that intellectually, guilt shouldn’t be a factor at all. But it’s there nonetheless.

And it was this swirling candy-coated mist of guilt, forced bed-rest and PMS that shoved me hard from behind and sent me falling down the dark stairway into the cellar of depression…Or it could have been the fact that my temporary crown cracked as well and that was the last straw for my camel and it’s already crippled back. Whatever. The result was the same…another theft in my house of self, because that’s what depression does; it steals. It steals time, energy, hope, sometimes life itself.

So, it got a little more time from me, but I comfort myself in knowing that it was really crappy sick time, not bright, shiny, productive time. So that’s just a bit of a middle finger to depression, you know, from me to you Peggy Sue.

But in the midst of pondering the world from my dull-eyed, horizontal position, Seth McFarlane tap danced through. While I listened to the demons whispering low, and softly monotonous into my ear, telling tales of my own worthlessness, and triggering gut-deep thoughts of how I don’t matter, Mr Family Guy is plugging his new album for christsakes!

I know this because I was driving to the therapy appointment I share with my 6 year old where we use crayola and other mixed media to heal her attachment disorder (sometimes hand puppets are involved) and NPR segued into a voice that sounded like angels had produced a love child with Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Bing Cosby.  Then they told me it was Seth MacFarlane from his new album and I almost skidded off the road. What? Who is this freak of nature and why do some people get to do EVERYTHING?!!!

Bitterness, envy and barely suppressed rage can sometimes be good, in that it triggered just enough friction in my zombie-like psyche to put a crack in the shell of hopelessness that had been growing around me over the past month or so. By the time I had reached my solo appointment at the top of the elevator and she brought out the crayola, oil pastels and hand puppets, I broke open like a pinata there in her office and I supposed by the end of it, the wound that had been growing over the past few months was partially cauterized.  And I’ve started a second course of antibiotics since the first one only dented things. And slowly, I try and climb back up the hill, for I AM SISYPHUS…or perhaps it’s Spartacus. Either way, I’m somebody again.

I still haven’t solved my issues with meritocracy and pull yourself up by your bootstraps or how some lives just seem to be showered by the favor of the gods, or why Seth MacFarlane gets to do EVERYdamnTHING. But I already know I’m going to buy his album, because it’s truly beautiful. See if you don’t thing so yourself…

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Things he believes in…

That money is dirtier than other items and you shouldn’t handle it without sterilizing yourself afterward

That swallowing gum is very bad for you.

That his car still needs premium gas to run efficiently (hasn’t been true in at least a decade due to the way they build engines these days).

That you will ruin the heels of your shoes by slipping them on without tying them all the time.

Actually, this last one is just mildly annoying to him when he yells at the kids. I always wonder how he hasn’t caught me doing the exact same thing even once in the 20 years we’ve known each other. I don’t think I have tied my sneakers in 35 years.

But here’s another thing that came up last night that we might not feel the same about. God. I guess his mother recently expressed a concern that The Kid didn’t have any particular indoctrination or know how to say a prayer or anything.  So I asked him how he felt about the whole thing. He said that he felt like they should at least know how to pray.

30 minutes later I had made his head explode by asking him questions about his tenets and the state of his own faith in general that may or may not have ended with the question, “If they find intelligent life on another planet how does that affect religions that are Christ-based?”  I do things like this. The question of faith is not a simple matter for me and I have always taken it with fair amount of gravity. When they told him when you die you go to heaven, that was good enough for him.  This is fairly reflective of our attitudes toward life. It also explains why, as an individual, he travels through life in a far less troubled state.

At least some of the reasons for the relative state of our relationship with religion has to do with the religions we were raised in. His background is with the Catholic church and mine is Mormon. You can be an active Catholic, but just as often, you can attend Mass on Sundays and be entirely comfortable with your ticket to Heaven having being punched. On the other hand, there really  are no casual Mormons. It is a highly demanding lifestyle with a church structure designed to weed out the casual types. So religion, to me, has always involved a very active, daily faith. When the blogger, Dooce wrote that it was years before she felt ok about drinking coffee, I can relate to that totally.

But that night, we discussed the Old Testament, the New Testament and Satan, among other things. (I once fried a Mormon missionary this way. If you tell them that you don’t believe in God, they’re ready for that. But if you tell them you don’t believe in the devil, you’ll absolutely confound them with that one.  The young missionary I made this announcement to was still blown out of the water an hour later). Then The Golf Pro asked me THE question. “Well, don’t you believe in God?” Can you hear the crickets filling the void of uncomfortable silence?  sigh. Yeah, that’s me these days. I don’t know.

At the risk of alienating most of my family and the majority of my readers, I am going to confess that I might be one of the only people in history for whom having children actually lessened my faith in God. Usually, it’s the opposite, right? The normal process of having children, of being the conduit through which the mystery of the human soul appears on earth, is that it increases one’s faith and connection to the esoteric veil of heaven. Makes total sense, right? And I can assure you that no one was more shocked than I was to find that it didn’t happen that way after the birth of my own kids.

I don’t know what I believe anymore. I do know that I take the question seriously and that I don’t exactly rest comfortably here in my void of spirituality. I was always a profoundly spiritual person. I was the kind of teenager who was fascinated by mysticism and Eastern religion and who took “The Bible as Literature” as an English course. But over the years, I have struggled to find  within myself of any type of spirituality at all. I’m loving science, but that profound sense that God made the world? It’s mostly gone. The world still fills me with awe and wonder, but I don’t know if I feel the Great Oz is behind the curtain any longer.

“Don’t you believe in God?” All I could really tell The Golf Pro was that I felt that I could no longer really connect to the idea that I saw direct evidence of God in my life. Things you could explain as workings of faith, could as easily be explained in a dozen other ways and I had to ask, did I believe in God only because it’s what I had always been told. Mother Teresa’s posthumous confession that she lived in spiritual darkness most of her life is entirely understandable to me. She referred to it as the complete absence of God. I suppose the difference was that she suffered greatly from it. My suffering does not reach such levels.

I have chosen not to indoctrinate my children into any particular belief, arguing instead for their right to have a spiritual journey that will be uniquely theirs. Instructing them, I hope, to be wide open and respectful in this area and to use a simple yardstick for any religion they encounter. Does it make the lives of it’s followers AND non-followers better? Are they in the business of telling you who the enemy is? Who to hate? Because if they are, in any way, you’re in with the wrong group. Do they respect the beliefs of others and preach tolerance and compassion? Do they demand that you act in any way against what you know it right.

If it’s important for The Golf Pro to share his religious beliefs with The Kid, then I can support that. But it can’t be just empty words and you have to be ready to answer the questions that will come your way with meaningful conviction. I don’t know how to have faith in the house in any other way.

I’m including this because Mormon missionaries played a pivotal role in my separation from faith too.  Soon, I’ll tell you the story of my 6 year old, a chess game, a Mormon missionary and a jarring realization.

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An unusual late night conversation about religion between The Golf Pro and I revealed yet another way in which our relationship mirrors that of Elaine and Puddy from Seinfeld. It’s pretty clear one of us is going to hell.

Yep. I’m going to hell…but when I get there, I’ll be naming names.

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