Reflections on clothes shopping

1. I hate clothes shopping.
2. There is an overwhelming overabundance of clothing that I do not like and would never wear.  There will be no polyester in heaven.  (I am seriously self-editing my word choices here, and I sincerely hope you appreciate that.)
3. I should not buy it if I don’t love it, because then I will not wear it.  It is unlikely that I will love anything that is hanging on a 70% off rack.  But.  Not impossible.  70% off can help to kindle love.
4. Trying things on is exhausting.
5. If I ever do find something that is both comfortable and nice looking, I should buy it, almost regardless of cost.  The rarity of these items protects the budget intrinsically.
6. Sometimes I do buy things that I do not love, mainly because I spent the better part of the day pulling things on and off my body in an attempt to find some decent clothes.  After awhile things stratify into categories: despicable, blech, ho-hum, possible and not-too-bad.  Sometimes after a longer while, not-too-bad turns into Pretty Good, and I buy it.
7. Sometimes something I bought turns out to be better than I expected, a favorite item.  Then I wear it over and over until it has appeared in an embarrassing number of Facebook photos, at which time I try to retire it to unobtrusive Saturday afternoons.

 Me in a dressing room

in a maxi dress 

that I did not buy 

because I felt ridiculous in it.

Word etymology

So the other day, my husband asks me, "What do you think is the connection between the words hysteria and hysterectomy?"

Do not even ask why he was thinking about such a thing.  Just pray for me.  And for him.  Yes, pray for both of us.  Please.

I told him, "Look it up on the computer.  Look under the word etymology, and you will be able to find out."

I've been curious myself, since then, but it was not until today that I finally remembered to follow up on it.  I used Dictionary.com (this is my credit to them... not up to MLA standards, but I am not trying to steal any information from anybody).

HYSTERECTOMY is from the Greek word "hystera" which means womb, and the Greek word "ektome" which means a cutting out.

Then I looked up HYSTERIA, which gave me no information.  However, it pointed me to the entry for HYSTERICAL where I found that HYSTERICAL comes from the Latin word, "hystericus," which comes from the Greek word "hysterikos" which means of the womb, suffering in the womb, from "hystera," the Greek for womb.  Originally, the word HYSTERICAL was defined as a neurotic condition peculiar to women and thought to be caused by a dysfunction of the uterus.  The usage of the word HYSTERICAL to mean very funny began around 1939 and comes from the notion of uncontrollable (read: mentally unstable) fits of laughter.

I am not sure whether to take umbrage at this, or whether to accept serenely that unstable emotions and womanly complaints have been associated and connected for hundreds of years.

Results are in...

The results are in from my biopsy.

They are negative.  I am ok.

God is good.

Thank you.

Breast pain

If you are a man, you may not want to read this.  Just warning you.  I mean, you may have already figured it out from the title, but I want to make sure you are fully informed.  Some topics addressed in this post will be uncomfortable.  In fact, even if you are a woman, you may not want to continue reading.

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When I was an early teen, like all early teen females, I began to develop breasts, and this was excruciatingly embarrassing to me.  I had no desire to grow up, and would have happily stayed straight, skinny, platonic, asexual, genderless, and neutral forever.  I did not want to be a woman.  I most certainly did not want to be noticed for being a woman.

The solution was to hide in loose, floppy clothing as much as possible.  Since it was the late seventies, this was quite possible, peasant blouses being plentiful on the fashion scene.  I didn't know whether it was more mortifying to be seen with a curve on my chest or a bra strap showing through my shirt, so I compensated with layer upon layer of gathered calico.  Sometimes I didn't have enough layers to vary them throughout the week, so I wore the same things over and over, more willing to bear the humiliation of repeated outfits than the humiliation of exposing my development.  I hated breasts, despised, loathed and feared them.  And yet, there they were.

One spring day I was walking home from junior high, walking diagonally across Sorenson Park.  It was sunny, and my book bag hung heavy in my right hand.  As I walked, the book bag banging into my leg at each step, a pressure began to build in my right breast.  It was quite uncomfortable.  I wrapped the handle of the book bag more tightly around my hand and soldiered on, trying not to breathe too deeply, because something was catching in my breast with my deeper breaths.

At one point, the pressure increased suddenly and intense pain exploded in my right breast, reverberating and expanding.  Involuntarily, I leaned forward and cried out, pressing my left hand to my chest above my breast as though I were saying the pledge of allegiance, but the other-way-round.  Nobody was near me, but at a distance people populated the park.  Although I felt as if I might fall to the ground, I was determined not to call attention to my breast.   I did not look down to check whether blood was running out of my nipple as my senses suggested.  Pulling my right arm in as tight as possible to my side, using my left hand to rub my ribs where they joined my right shoulder, I continued moving forward, forcing myself to breathe, forcing myself to take steps.

By the time I arrived at home, the pain had subsided.  I never said anything to anyone about this experience.  I was too flushed with shame, and I didn't know how to explain it, anyway.

Since then, I've always felt lumpy, tender spots under my arms.  Under my arms.  Ha.

When my children were babies, I used to bathe them together.  Once as I was soaping one of them up, I said, "Let me wash your armpits," and the child said, "Mommy has big armpits!"  Another child (just as wet and soapy) replied in disdain, "Those aren't armpits.  Those are milks."  I never bothered to correct that terminology.  I liked to think of them as milks.  I felt it reflected their most noble purpose: nourishing infants. 

I always felt happy and surprised that my lumpy, tender milks were able to feed four babies.

"Do you do breast self-exams?" the doctor would always ask, and I would hem and haw, and not be responsible and talk about what I felt.  "They are tender," I would say.  "I have a fair amount of breast pain."

Then the doctor, an older gentleman with strong, warm fingers, competent, reassuringly clinical, would quickly check me himself, and it seemed like he was being thorough.  I always felt quite safe and relieved after the doctor's exam.  He never found anything.  Then they'd send me for a mammogram, and that never showed up anything, either.

But I knew that what I was feeling was up under my arm, in the part that never came under the rays of the mammography equipment.

Then my sister got breast cancer, and over the course of a number of conversations, I somehow learned that the doctor had found her cancer, her lump, and it was a tiny slippery thing that moved back and forth and was easy to miss.  Her mammogram had missed it.

On October 21, one day before I had a scheduled doctor's appointment, I was bathing and washing my armpits.  Once again, I thought I felt something.  This time, I somehow had more guts than usual.  I put a finger down firmly to trap it from one side and came at it from the other side.  I caught it.  It was there, a lump, a bump.  A specific thing.  After I almost fainted and then recovered myself, I decided it was good that I already had an appointment scheduled for the next day.

The doctor sent me for a diagnostic ultrasound, and from there they sent me for a core biopsy, which I had Thursday afternoon.

Core biopsy.  You go in, and they find the lump again with the ultrasound (actually, they were looking at two lumps), and they mark your skin with a pen to show where stuff is.  Then they get you all ready for the procedure.

You're already lying on your back with rolled towels propping you in such a way that your breast is at the top, the apex of your being.  They frame the breast with pieces of blue cloth, like a draping, but somehow different.  It lies there, a poor, crumpled pile of shriveled flesh five inches above your head.  A nurse swabs it with betadine, painting it orange which in this case is perfectly appropriate, as it is Halloween.  The betadine is cold and smells disinfecting, somewhat reassuring.  Nothing hurts.

"Now you will meet the doctor!" they tell you cheerfully, and in he comes to the sight of your orange breast lolling above your head in pitiful anticipation.  He has dark hair, slightly rumpled, and dark eyes, slightly owl-like.  You don't remember his name but that's ok because he surely doesn't remember yours.

They go to work on you, and you are glad that you cannot see their instruments.  Needles are the theme.  As I gather, there are needles to inject lidocaine to numb you, and then a hollow needle that goes in, with the ultrasound guiding it, to rest snug against the lump inside your breast.  When that needle is placed perfectly, they say, "Now you will hear a snap, but you should not feel anything uncomfortable." I don't know what they do then, but my impression is that they pull some sort of trigger that shoots some sort of sample-gathering needle down through the hollow needle and smack into the lump where it obtains the necessary cell sample.

During all the sticking and imaging and prodding, I closed my eyes and prayed and thought about God.  I recited Psalm 23, lingering on, "He restores my soul," and, "Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil."

I quoted Joshua 1:9 to myself, "Be strong and of a good courage.  Be ye not afraid, neither be thou dismayed.  For the Lord thy God is with thee, withersoever thou goest."  I like it in King James.

I remembered 1 Peter 5:7, "Casting all your cares upon Him, for He cares for you."  I reminded myself of Psalm 145, and even though I couldn't remember the exact verse, I knew that it says God is good and full of lovingkindness and He has compassion on all He has made.  I thought about the caring, compassionate, faithful nature of God.  I couldn't think of any more specifically comforting verses, so I just started searching my memory banks for any random verses.

I thought of Genesis 1:1, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth."  I thought of God as the Almighty Creator who cares for me, and, my eyes still shut, I smiled.  Then I realized that all these people could see my face, and I wondered how weird they must think me, smiling away silently with my eyes closed.  I decided I didn't care.

They got ready for the first snap.  "In just a moment, you will hear the first snap," they told me, pulling me out of my spiritual reverie.

Snap went the equipment.  I felt it.  My body convulsed involuntarily, and an explosion of pain spread all the way to the sternum side of my breast, then began to grow and expand.  I had not been prepared for such intense pain.  By the grace of God, I responded calmly.  "That hurt,"  I told them. "It hurts, actually, quite a lot."  I lay still and tried to breathe, but the memory of being 13 and walking across Sorenson Park in exploding breast pain came flooding back to me, too real and close.

They scrambled to stick me full of more lidocaine.  I did not complain.  The second snap, in the same lump, was much less painful, and the three snaps in the other lump were painless.

They injected metal markers into the lumps, cleaned me up and sent me for a baseline mammogram.

Since the lumps had never before appeared on a mammogram, it was interesting trying to get a mammogram to pick them up now with their shiny new markers.  The professionals had promised a gentle mammo, but I really had to contort in order for the technician to get the images she needed from my armpit.

Finally it was over, and they bandaged me up and sent me off with an ice-pack in my bra.

They have asked numerous times if I have questions.  What question is there to have before the results come in?  Percentages?  I figure the percentages are meaningless.  I am me, and either I am clean, or I am cancerous.  It makes no difference what happens to other people... I mean, what?  Would you expect them to say, "The chances are about 10% that you will have cancer.  We did 14 people today, and we already found 2, so you are probably good to go."  I just don't think that's the way it works.

I'm a little concerned about the pain.  I don't think that was "normal."  Also, my sister just had breast cancer, so there may be a genetic predisposition.  And I have lupus, and 30-33% of people with lupus develop cancer, so I could scare myself silly thinking about this.

On the other hand, this lump is very different from my sister's.  They never even biopsied hers; they did immediate surgery to take hers out because it was something they knew they needed to take out.   I am pretty sure that I've had mine for years and years, that it is not new, and that it has merely gone undetected for decades... undetected and not growing.  Also, a number of women have shared with me that they had similar biopsies done and that theirs turned out to be nothing.

It is in God's hands.  We will find out tomorrow.

Ten reasons why I do not like cleaning

(1) No matter how hard I try to sweep or vacuum before I apply moisture to the situation, I always end up chasing nasty wet dustballs around, those ones that are virtually impossible to wipe up.

(2) There is no end to hairs in the bathrooms. No end. Often, I feel as though I could keep trying to pick up "that last hair" until eternity. And if, by some miracle I actually get all the hairs removed at some point, another hair is sure to drop from my head before I exit the room.

(3) The cleaning product that cleans my showers gives me a wicked headache.

(4) If I use a different, less toxic cleaner on my shower, my neck goes out from the scrubbing action.

(5) There is almost always a hole in my rubber gloves.

(6) Even when there is not a hole in my rubber gloves, I get water and cleaning solution inside my gloves. It runs in the back end. Because I am inept.

(7) I always hurt myself. Usually this involves the vacuum and my shins, but it can take many forms. I also lose a lot of fingernails (mind you, these are not manicured fingernails).

(8) I damage things because I am clumsy. Usually this involves the canister vacuum and walls that the canister runs into and dents while I am working at the other end of the hose. However, yesterday I had an entirely new damage experience. I was trying to wipe down the baseboards in the tiny (2'x5' I figure) half-bath downstairs, and as I ran the sponge along the woodwork, my finger caught on the wallpaper and pulled it loose. R-i-i-i-i-p went the wallpaper and the hope in my heart.

(9) My buckets spill, my vacuum cord comes unplugged, my back hurts, I sneeze or gag or get headaches from the different smells, my hands get chapped, I bump my head (mostly around low cupboards), and no matter how many times I run the vacuum over this carpet, there are spots that never look clean.

(10) And pretty much as soon as I am finished, it all needs to be done over again.

Social cues

There is a sickly sweet way that women have of talking to each other when they strongly dislike each other but, for instance, pass each other in the grocery store and a greeting is unavoidable. This is exceedingly odd to me, but I find that I even do it myself. You smile hard with your smile muscles, gritting your teeth gently, and look a little past the other person. "Hi-ee," you say with a long saccharine drawl. This is to prevent further conversation from developing.

She sings, "Hi-ee," back at you and follows with an obligatory, "How are you?" whilst pushing her cart quickly past.

"Great," you gush, "and you?" as the distance increases and you have your backs to one another. Neither of you turns to look back.

"Fantastic," she lies eloquently, "it's great to see you." And then the separation is complete, each of you is now well behind the other, the dance has been danced. You head off towards the organic peanut butter, she peruses brand name breakfast cereal, and you both hope not to meet again soon.

At least I understand this now. About ten years ago, I didn't. I was out in the front yard with Jonathan, who was little then and playing on his scooter. A couple of neighborhood ladies came by, on a walk. I think one of them had a son in a stroller, about a four-year-old, I'd guess. Jonathan was about six. They smiled and waved and asked if Jonathan and I would like to go along with them on their walk.

Thrilled at the prospect of company and exercise, I accepted the invitation and we stepped out into the road to join them.

Then began the exchanged looks (these looks were not exchanged with me, in case you were wondering), the fast pace, the backs turned toward me and the conversation in low tones about things I knew nothing of (nor was there any offer of filling me in). I loped along behind them, calling to Jonathan to ride his scooter safely and to keep up, feeling as though I was back in junior high and the popular girls were leaving me out. I began to feel angry; why would they invite me to go on a walk with them if they didn't want me to go on a walk with them? First I was angry at them, and then I was angry at myself for being dumb, for not understanding the social cues, for not knowing that when they said, "Why don't you come for a walk with us?" they did not mean that I should really go for a walk with them, any more than people care about the answer to, "How are you?"

I was humiliated. When I finally got home, I ducked into the house and hid my burning face, reliving my shame for days and trying not to cry. One of these women has since moved out of the neighborhood, and I have not exchanged a single word with the other one since that day.

I did not understand then, but I do now. And that is why, in the grocery store, when I pass a woman of that ilk, I am prepared to smile my sweetest smile and get the heck out of there.

It is pretty sad that life is like this, but at least it helps you recognize and value your true friends.

It is important to use these kinds of lessons for good in your life. My take-away is this: be kind to people. Go out of your way to make people feel comfortable when they are on your turf, and you have the power to set the tone. Be inclusive. Of course, there will be times when you are simply in a hurry in the grocery store, and you would not have time even to stop and chat with your best friend. But a cheerful, honest, friendly, "Hey! Great to see you! Gotta run!" is pretty easy to distinguish from the catty, hair-raising, sickly-sweet fake politeness of virtual enemies.

And what about forgiveness? Have I not forgiven that woman, the one with whom I have not exchanged a word in nearly ten years? I do not wish her any harm. I do not want to get back at her. I want to protect myself from being hurt again, and I do not want to offend her by my presence or my conversation (since she was obviously offended by them that day so many years ago). I think I have forgiven her, because if she approached me, I would be willing (even happy) to speak with her. I have not needed to go out of my way to avoid speaking to her; she has pretty much taken care of that herself... she's probably afraid that if she offers a simple pleasantry, I might jump into an all-out conversation. Little does she know how much she taught me.

Overwhelmed

Being overwhelmed is nothing new to me. A friend once told me, "You are the most overwhelmed person I know." That was probably fifteen or sixteen years ago, when the overwhelmedness mostly centered on small children who kept me up at night and smeared various substances all over my walls and floors during the day.

Now the small children have all grown to be bigger than I. And so have their issues.

Let me backtrack. I believe that I have some of the greatest kids on earth. They bring me joy beyond what I had dreamed possible. However, when you love deeply, you also hurt deeply when things go wrong. And you feel deeply when things are uncertain. And you just tend to worry more, even though you aren't supposed to worry, you are supposed to trust God.

There is a verse in 1 John that says, "Perfect love drives out fear." I am not exactly sure what this means. It seems like, as a mom, the more I love, the more I fear... I fear that they will experience pain and disappointment. I fear for my own potential losses. I doubt that this is what the verse is about. It probably has more to do with the love of God, although the book itself (1 John) is about how we need to exhibit God's love in our own lives. It's just something I've never understood, and something that makes me feel overwhelmed, guilty and inadequate when I worry about my kids.

And my husband. I worry about him, too. These days it seems like everybody close to me has a big need of prayer. The other night I was trying to pray and sleep, all through the night. I couldn't sleep, so I would pray. Then I would fall asleep, and wake up a bit later feeling guilty that I had not prayed through everyone's issues. That spurred me on to pray some more, which led me to fall asleep again, but by the end of the night I am pretty sure I had gotten to each one of them. I woke up in the morning and I actually felt a certain sense of peace, until I started thinking about it all again.

God is in control. God IS in control. This is the truth and besides that, He has a plan and a purpose for each one of us. It has just been hard for me to rest in that truth lately.

There was an old song that went, "It's me, it's me, Oh Lord, standing in the need of prayer..." I am the one without a specific issue right now (except that I need a paying job, and don't really want one). But I think I might be needing as much prayer as any of us.

Middle age

When you are little, each birthday is a grand celebration. "What will it feel like to be eight?" you wonder on the eve of your eighth birthday. You are thrilled to hit the double digits at age ten, and full of wondrous anticipation when you turn sixteen: "Will I fall in love this year?"

When you are old, each birthday is a grateful celebration for continued life. If you aren't dead, you are thankful and filled with joy at the opportunity to live each ensuing day. Anyway, some old people say they feel this way, and they are the ones I want to be like.

However, between youth and old age, there is a time when we do not embrace our birthdays. We are not near enough to death's natural portal that we think to be thankful for the gift of life, but we have a dark and heavy feeling that our best years are over.

That is middle age.

And the best years aren't over. I'm going to list 20 good things about middle age.

1. You have learned how to roast a turkey.
2. You are an experienced driver.
3. You are not a slave to peer pressure.
4. You are past the pregnancy days.
5. You are past the getting-up-many-times-in-the-middle-of-the-night days.
6. You have some life experience under your belt.
7. You can afford to do some of the things you've always hoped to do.
8. You don't have to go to school.
9. You know what you are good at.
10. Your kids can tie their own shoes.
11. Your kids don't need any help with bodily functions.
12. Your kids sleep longer than you do.
13. Your kids can drive and sometimes even pick things up for you at the store.(!!!)
14. You can have intelligent conversations with your kids.
15. People sometimes say, "Ma'am" to you and mean it.
16. You understand Dickens.
17. You can go out with your spouse and not hire a babysitter.
18. Your tastes are defined.
19. People judge you on things other than your appearance.
20. Rather than thinking you are wiser than you really are, you are probably wiser than you realize.

Surgery

Yes. I did it. I got my varicose veins fished out. After an epic fail three years ago, where I visited the doctor, heard about the procedure, got woozy and chickened out, I actually went through with it this past Friday.

They (those blasted veins) had been hurting more and more. While limping home from a walk with Shawn earlier this summer, I thought, "I really need to do something about these." But I was scared. Also, I am tight, and with a high deductible insurance plan, I had no desire to pay out of pocket for the procedure. Then I remembered that Laura's concussion had met our high deductible, and that it would be fully covered, that everything from now until the end of the year is fully covered (not gas or parking, though, so I still don't go to the doctor on a whim). I figured it was now or never, and I'd better get going so we could schedule it before the end of the year.

They got me in faster than I had imagined possible. At the initial doctor visit, he entered the examining room with my chart in hand and said, "So, you were here three years ago and never came back. Would you care to explain what happened?" Rather than cringing, I explained, "I got woozy after you described the procedure, and I chickened out. But they are hurting more and more, so I need to get it done, and please, let's not talk about it or draw any pictures this time around."

My surgery went well. I was terrified beyond all reason of being put to sleep. This is because (I finally realized) when I was a kid, I had a bad anesthesia experience with a tooth extraction. I was drugged into a strange state of unconsciousness, but within it I remember experiencing excruciating pain. In that particular instance, as I faded out, my view of the doctors fragmented into squares like puzzle pieces, which morphed into patches of color separated by black lines. I was a small, black dot, traversing the universe of these patchwork colors. Every time I crossed the black border from one color to the next, my being was racked with intense, all-encompassing, delocalized pain.

The only explanation I could imagine was that they gassed me but forgot to give me Novocain. That was the last time (until this past Friday) I ever let anyone put me to sleep, because I have wanted to be good and sure I was numb before anyone ever took a knife to me again. I had only Novocain for my tonsillectomy and my wisdom tooth extractions, and a wee bit of Novocain for the births of my last two children. I was so scared of the anesthesia this time around, tears started running down my face as I was being admitted, which was mortifyingly embarrassing.

However, knowing what I knew (and was trying not to remember) about how this particular procedure was performed, there was no way, no way on earth, that I was going through it with nothing but Novocain.

In the end, the anesthesia was gentle and easy, and I did not feel a thing. They didn't come after my face with a gas mask, but merely inserted an IV, and added the appropriate concoctions at the appropriate times. Right before I drifted away, they asked me if I would like to listen to music. "Do you have any Mozart?" I asked. They said, "No, you have to tell us the number on the radio." I must have been getting woozy, because I asked them, "Do you have XM?" They said no, which relieved me, because I was not sure of the number of a classical XM station, so I happily told them, "91," and then peacefully drifted away listening to something which, if not Mozart, was suitably close to it.

The surgery was a breeze. It was the back of my right thigh, pretty high up. They wrapped my leg all up in three layers of bandages for compression, so when I woke up, I found it to be like a very snug sausage that did not bend.

Upon arriving home, I tried to rest on the sectional in the family room, but we could not keep the dogs off me, so I decided to go upstairs to my bed. Shawn had stepped out to the store to pick up some juice and things, but Laura and Jon were home. Once I got up to my bedroom, I decided to go to the bathroom since I was up, and since it would be easier then than getting out of bed again later.

When I pulled down my pants, my finger hit the top of my bandage and came away wet with blood, which frightened me, but I really needed to use the toilet, so I did, and when I was done, I looked down and there on the floor was a HUGE puddle of black blood. It was spurting out of the top of my bandage. I am not good with those kinds of things, so I started crying out, “Oh! I’m bleeding! Oh! I don’t know what to do!” I got my underwear up over the spurting blood (soaking it with blood in the process), but did not pull my pants up over it, because of the mess. I grabbed an old sleep shirt of Shawn’s off a hook in the bathroom and ran to my bed, trying apply direct pressure behind me while lying on my stomach. Laura by this time was practically weeping. She is not good with these types of things, either. I continued to cry, “Oh! I’m bleeding! Oh! I don’t know what to do!” and then added, “Should we call 911? I don’t know what to do!” Laura was trying to call Shawn. Jon was trying to help with the direct pressure to stop the flow of blood. Poor Jon had to do most everything because Laura turned white and blotchy and shook and looked ready to faint. He got towels for me, then went downstairs at Laura’s bidding to get paper towels to sop up the blood on the bathroom floor, after which he returned to apply direct pressure for me while Laura scrubbed the remaining blood stains out of the grout with a scrub brush.

Shawn arrived home and called the surgery center which connected him with the surgeon, who told him to redress the wound. Ugh. In the end we came out all right, but it was not what we were hoping. The surgeon said that since the veins were simply removed, the blood that is used to flowing through them sometimes pools and then bursts, spurting out like that.

I’m doing better now. So other than the trauma that it caused the kids to see their mother in her underwear all covered with spurting blood, we are none the worse for wear.

Another weird memory

I'm trying to get memories down. Why? I don't know. You just never know when something is going to pop into your head ever again, so sometimes it is good to write things down on the spot, or as close to it as possible.

When I was pregnant with Shannon I was awfully sick. I didn't know a person could have an upset stomach for that long and not die. At the time, I was working for a department store, writing their ads. However, they ran one ad a week in the Sunday paper, so there really wasn't much to do over a forty hour week. Maybe that's why they went out of business. When the store closed, one of the vice presidents very kindly approached me and said, "And I want to be sure that you know I don't hold you responsible for the fact that we have gone under." Given that I was a 23 year old who had just graduated from college and was working outside my major, and that I had been employed by them for all of six months, the thought that I was responsible for their failure had never crossed my mind, honestly, but I guess it was nice of him to try to put me at ease.

But near the end of my employment with them, I was pregnant and sick. I spent days at home in my bed, watching the room spin in a haze of green nausea. One day I finally thought I might be able to drag myself to work, so I got up, showered, dressed, and Shawn did my hair because holding my hands over my head was beyond my abilities just then.

In those days we had but one car, the maroon Chevy Cavalier. Shawn dropped me off at the bus stop and continued on to work. He was in a master's degree program through his office, and he had class that day. As I rode the bus into downtown Syracuse, I got woozier and woozier. Suddenly I realized that I was not going to make it, so I pulled the cord, ran to the front of the bus and jumped off as soon as the driver screeched to a halt.

I had no idea where I was, but there was a hardware store in front of me, and it appeared to be open. I ducked in and gasped, "Do you have a bathroom?" The man quickly escorted me to a small bathroom where I closed the door and promptly lost the grapefruit I had somehow managed to choke down for breakfast.

I came out weaving and looking for a place to sit down. Somebody pulled up a large bucket of joint compound and offered it to me for a chair. "My daughter always gets motion sickness when she rides them buses," said a man, trying to put me at ease. I explained that, actually, I was expecting, and asked to borrow a phone (this was before cell phones) to call my husband.

Shawn left class, and somehow he found the place. To this day I do not know where I was. He drove me home and put me back to bed. I'm glad I have not been pregnant for a long time. I feel for people who are pregnant and sick... some of us are not at our best while we gestate.

Dysfunctionality

While going through my old MSWord files this afternoon, I came across an essay I started about nine years ago, and I decided to try to finish it up and "publish" it here.

"Dysfunctionality" is such a buzzword these days, it surprises me that conservatives have not capitalized on it in the war on abortion. Well, maybe not, since so-called conservatives no longer seem to take a stand on abortion. But for the grassroots conservatives who do...

While the battle rages on, abortion is compared to murder and aborted babies are compared to slaves before civil rights came to pass. From the conservative point of view, this is well and good and logical. But it is an approach that continually fails to have any effect whatsoever on the right-to-choose psyche. It seems that it might be time to attempt a new approach and a new terminology.

Abortion is a symptom of a sexually dysfunctional society. The problem is an unrestrained and overindulgent national appetite for sex. But how can this be proven to people whose belief system approves of sex at any time, for any reason and in any way?

Perhaps we can try by comparing the basic drive for sex to the basic drive for food. People have a natural inner drive to eat. We have to eat, or we would die. However, it does not follow that eating everything we might like to eat (and doing so more often than a few times a day) is good for us. We know that we must put limits on our eating in order to remain healthy. Therefore, the United States government has gone so far as to create lists and guidelines to try to help people make healthy eating decisions: Eat more fruit and vegetables, lots of whole grains and a proper amount of lean meat. Limit fats, sugars and refined white flour. Do not over-indulge in huge portions. Drink a lot of water, an appropriate amount of milk and limit sodas and sugary juices. We all know these things. It is simple math, really. People know what they should do: if they do it, they are healthy but if they struggle to control their drive for food, they tend to get fat.

It isn’t so different with sex, except that nobody in the secular world seems to face the fact that there are guidelines that can govern our sexuality and keep us healthy. Guidelines for “safe sex” according to the Powers That Be (whomever they are—but they seem to have a real foothold in the public schools, libraries and clinics) consist of merely one rule, “Wear a condom.” Well, that’s kind of like saying, “Use Nutra-sweet instead of sugar.” It could be of mild benefit in some cases, but mostly it leads to a false sense of security, and in some ways it can cause more problems than it solves.

I’m not going to get into one of my anti-aspartame tirades right now, because that is a topic for a whole different day. Let me just say that the diet product industry is akin to the birth control industry. It’s all about trying to abet people in believing that they can have their pleasure for free—enjoy their indulgences with no cost. It leads to a twisted perspective on the meaning of eating and the meaning of sex. The pleasurable acts are taken as something separate from the function that they are intended to perform—the continuation of life, whether individually by nourishment or socially by procreation. God never intended for these things to be separated in this way. In His mercy, He made the acts pleasurable so that we would be motivated to continue life, but they were given to us for a purpose, a purpose that we often want to limit and escape.

Just as we need to eat or we will die, so we need to procreate, or humanity will die out. However, we can easily see that too much eating is ultimately unhealthy, and the parallel holds true for too much sex. Too much sex is disastrous for society. Too much unbridled sex leads to ghettos full of unwed mothers and illegitimate children, which leads to poverty which leads to crime and substance abuse. Um, bingo. The downfall of American society as we see it today. But nobody wants to admit it. Freedom of sexual expression has practically been written into the Bill of Rights. Sexual disorder? The only sexual disorder people seem willing to acknowledge is the inability to perform a sexual act. This is a frighteningly inaccurate way to view the issue.

Although deviant sexual behavior is rarely identified, it is generally agreed that there are such things as eating disorders. One of the most famous of these is Bulimia, where an individual, usually a young girl, binges on vast quantities of food and then proceeds to plunge her fingers down her throat and regurgitate the vile contents of her stomach. This is her way of purging her body and escaping the consequences of her previously overindulged appetite. There is a direct and obvious parallel to abortion here. When the sexual urge is overindulged in inappropriate ways, an unwanted pregnancy often occurs. To escape the consequences of this unwanted pregnancy, a girl (woman if you will) has an abortion, purging her body of the byproduct of her sexually promiscuous behavior.

Nearly everyone agrees that Bulimia constitutes dysfunctional behavior. Indeed, psychologists and psychiatrists are hired and paid handsomely to treat it. Its detrimental effects are widely publicized to young women. Health classes in public schools repeatedly warn young people about the dangers of eating disorders. Who hasn't heard that Bulimia can burn out one's esophagus and rot one's teeth? No credible health practitioner would ever prescribe Bulimia as a method for treating obesity. However, doctors in professional settings routinely perform abortions to treat the consequences of overly sexualized behavior, while minimizing the health risks. This seems illogical, since hemorrhaging, infertility, and breast cancer would seem to be greater threats to one's long term well being than rotten teeth and esophageal ulcers.

Rather than identifying abortion as an unhealthy escape from the consequences of dysfunctional behavior, “education” systems present it as a viable option for dealing with an unwanted pregnancy. The root of the problem stems from the rampant acceptance that our society at large holds for dysfunctional sexual indulgence. Young people are actually encouraged to do such things as, “Discover your sexual orientation,” and, “Express your sexuality.” From movies and television programs to commercials that people don’t even make a conscious decision to watch, pervasive bumping, grinding, groaning, back-arching, panting and disrobing combine to convince the empty-minded public that orgasm is the ultimate raison-d’être, and that You have both the right and the responsibility to obtain as much of it as possible.

So while the high school health teachers hand out photocopies of the FDA approved dietary standards and encourage young people with eating problems to seek help immediately, they lay out no real standards for healthy sexuality. This is incomprehensible when you realize that they do teach about AIDS, herpes and the plethora of other sexually transmitted diseases. Healthy sex should be recommended to take place between two people, preferably both over 18 years of age, only within the context of a heterosexual, single-partner, committed relationship (marriage), always with the understanding that sex is connected to procreation and should not take place outside of a loving family environment. These recommendations are based on what science shows us is healthy for our bodies.

We must somehow find a way to educate the public that abortion is a dysfunctional response to a dysfunctional sexual behavior. Women who have abortions need therapy, not "choice." (And doctors who perform abortions should lose their licenses to practice—whatever happened to “First do no harm…”?)

Birth Control and the QuiverFull movement

When I first got married, in college, I was under strict orders from my mother not to have a baby for a long time.

In the eighteen months of my marriage before I became pregnant with my first child, I often thought about the wicked state of the world, and wondered how a person could ever, in good conscience, go ahead and bring a tiny life into it.

Then we had three unplanned pregnancies in three years.

At some point I began to wonder about birth control and the sovereignty of God.

I remember that when I was a girl living at home with my parents, people with large families were always Catholic. The evangelical protestants I knew and loved seemed to consider it a legalistic mindset not to use birth control; it was a rule devout Catholics followed to please the pope. In those days, and perhaps still today, protestants, especially the Baptist type, saw Catholics as some sort of quasi-cult, and did not consider that a Catholic could ever be saved. The prevailing attitude about Catholics was that they were just bound up in legalistic rule following, dead rituals, and weird prayers to Mary and the saints.

Sometimes I wondered about that. I think the Catholics have it right on a certain level, at least where birth control and the pro-choice movement are concerned. It seems to me that the advent of birth control ushered in our age of sexual promiscuity. With birth control, sex is reduced to a form of pleasurable entertainment, a fun recreation. Before birth control, sex was much more serious business. It was an act of love and trust between two people who had covenanted to build a life and family together.

Shortly after being married, I learned that the pill was potentially an abortifacient, so I stopped using it. This is probably why we had three unplanned pregnancies.

After that, however, life became too much for me. I do not feel that it would be appropriate to go into all the details of the problems or the details of what we tried as solutions. But I will say that I prayed and prayed and prayed. I read through the Bible. I sought the face of God.

I had never heard of the Quiverfull movement. I think it was the Providence of God that I had not, because I was weak and desperate, and I probably would have thought that it was what I had to do. Even now, the Quiverfull movement can fill me will guilt and shame for... for what? For honoring my husband's desire that we limit the size of our family and, as a couple, taking medical measures to do so.

This is not to make my husband the bad guy. I was not against limiting the size of our family. There have been times when I have wanted another baby, but I have never wanted an unlimited number of more children.

However, it is to say that, had I discovered the Quiverfull movement at that time, it would have seriously tempted me to disrespect my husband and to question whether I ought to submit to his leadership. The Bible is very clear that wives are to respect their husbands and submit to them. The Bible is not clear at all that limiting family size is a sin. That is a position that can be deduced, but it is not clearly stated. Better, I think, to obey the clear directives than to pre-empt them because of someone's cobbled together position on a different issue.

I don't know if what we did was right or wrong. We prayed about it. We tried to do what made sense. We had no desire to sin in this. I was sinning every day in my inability to exercise self-control, to be patient, and otherwise to live out a display of the fruits of the Spirit. What I really wanted was to stop sinning and start enjoying the blessing of the children I had. Prayer and reading the Word had not fixed me. Maybe God wanted to work through medical technology. Is that beyond imagining?

I think about it, you know... how we live these days with all our medical technology. Babies hardly ever die any more. Back in colonial days, you had to have about twelve children to ensure that at least three or four would live to adulthood. These days the vast majority of our children survive. Women who would have died in childbirth in an earlier era survive by having cesarean sections these days, which produces a whole new crop of children who are genetically wired to require cesareans when they grow up. The same goes for heart conditions, blood conditions, lung conditions. It makes me wonder, "Were all these people meant to be? Should they have died and cleansed the gene pool? Are we thwarting the will of God with our medical technology?" And then I remember that we can never thwart the will of God. It is His will when a medical discovery is made, and it is His will when it is used to save a life that comes into being after its invention. If He wanted the baby with the hole in its heart not to live, He could have easily had it born in 1810 instead of 2008.

We can't thwart the will of God. We do not have that much power. In fact, I believe in a God who is so sovereign, so in control of the affairs of men, that if He wanted me to have a baby, it wouldn't matter what medical procedures had taken place. He can make a baby grow whenever and wherever He pleases. Remember the birth of Jesus?

I am not all for birth control. I think it is very murky water. I am not totally at peace with where I am in all this, except that I know God's promise in Romans 8:28--"And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love Him, who have been called according to His purpose." God will use all things (even my mistakes) for good. So I don't have to worry, I just have to trust. The question isn't so much whether I am trying to stop the will of God, as that I am trying to do what makes sense. If God over-rides my actions with a miracle, my heart will be glad and welcome the child. What is more important, the action, or the heart? What is more pleasing to God, a woman who suffers dutifully but miserably in the Quiverfull movement and mourns at her tenth, eleventh and twelfth pregnancies, or a woman whose husband has a vasectomy, but she later finds herself expecting a baby and responds with thanksgiving and joy?

People who join a camp--quiverfullers, homeschoolers, what have you--tend to need to validate their decision. This can come across as pride and judgment toward those who have made a different choice. Although scripture can be used to support many decisions, this support is not always clear cut. That 's where 1 Corinthians 13 comes in. We need to love one another, and give each other credit for searching the heart of God. When people are clearly in sin, it is scriptural to lead them back to the living water. But is a judgmental quiverfull mother ready to be confronted for her pride and self-righteousness, or is she only willing to condemn someone who has chosen to take steps to limit her family size?

This is not to say that all quiverfull mothers are legalistic and judgmental. I have no doubt that some women are called to have huge families and equipped with the grace to manage. The problem comes when some of them start telling everybody else that, "God will give you exactly the same grace that He gave me if you'll go out on a limb and have a plethora of children. You only have to TRUST!"

If that were the meaning of trust, we would all have to be Christian Scientists, refusing to take antibiotics for our pneumonia and refusing chemotherapy for our cancer. If God can work through those avenues to make people healthy and whole, He might sometimes choose to work through birth control for the good of one of His children as well. You can trust God and still use medical interventions.

One of the Quiverfull's benchmark arguments is that children are a blessing from the Lord (Psalm 127:3-5). They say that you wouldn't turn away any of God's other blessings, like a big house or more money, so why would you turn away the blessing of children? That dog don't hunt, as the saying goes. I know of a number of people who have turned down a bigger house, opting for a smaller one because it was all they needed and they didn't want the headache of a huge home to clean, maintain and pay taxes on, in a neighborhood where they felt a lot of pressure to "keep up with the Jones's." I know of people who have opted for a job that net less money because it was less stressful and required less travel than the truly "big bucks" job that was available. There are people who turn down incredibly lucrative job opportunities in order to stay closer to their extended families. It's all about lifestyle choices and sometimes less is more--in all areas.

If you have too big a house, you can invite people in to share it, to live with you and help with the chores and the bills. If you have too much money, you can give it away. If you have too many children, would you ever give them away? Would that ever be God's will? Should a fertile woman continue bearing children that she and her husband can't afford to support, and hand them out to her infertile Christian friends like we do when too many zucchini grow in our gardens?

The hard thing about the truly holy Christian life is that you can never find a position and go hog wild over it. Everything needs to be in balance. We need to read the Bible. We need to pray. We need to walk by faith, trusting God, and we need to wisely discern how to properly and sensibly use the resources He puts in our way. And, while we're doing all that, we need to be loving, covering everything over with a layer of Godly love.

Guilt

I'm in a rut. I just can't shake the Mother's Day guilt this year.

The thing that really gets me is when I read on a card (or whatever): "Mom. She was always the last one to bed at night and the first one up in the morning."

Well, I can safely say that I will never receive THAT card from any of my children. Unless it is in jest. Sleep deprivation was the worst thing about having three babies in less than three years. Sleep deprivation, were it not for the grace of God, could have easily driven me to suicide. When I am sleep deprived, I get sick, I cry, and I have zero capacity for dealing with stress or trauma. I never did like slumber parties as a kid. I never pulled an all-nighter in college. I just get to a point of fatigue and I shut down, physically and mentally. This was not good when I was the mother of a just-turned-three-year-old, an eighteen-month-old, and an eight-week-old and we all (yes, me too) got chickenpox.

I'm not sure I ever really pulled completely out of that. People talk about "returning to normal." I think when certain things happen to you, you never get back to the way you were, you just have to find a new way to function and adapt to it.

Anyway, I was sleep deprived for years, and for all the prayers and pleading I threw up to heaven, I never grew into a person who could graciously function on less than eight hours of sleep a night.

When my kids finally became teenagers and started sleeping, I slept right along with them. Hey, I had a lot of lost sleep to make up for. During the week, my kids often stay up late studying and doing homework. I go to bed. I don't get good rest until they all go to bed (this is due, in part, to the fact that certain ones of them often come in to my room and wake me up to ask for something). But I try to be in bed by 11:00 p.m., and they regularly stay up past midnight. I am definitely not the last one up at night.

I do not get up with my kids in the morning before school. I do set my alarm and make sure that they are up, but I do not get up and start my day until most of them are gone. It takes all my energy, mental and physical, to get Jonno out of bed in the morning, so I do get up for that, and I make his breakfast and his lunch. But the older kids are on their own after I have made sure that somebody is awake and working on the morning routine. So you see, I am certainly not the first one up in the morning. Perhaps I am the first one awake, but I am not the first one UP. And, depending on how bad a night I've had, I sometimes go back to bed after Jonno is on the bus, too.

I am the first one up on weekends, sometimes, kind of. Well, let's not even go there.

Aagh. The guilt is killing me. But if I try to push myself and sleep less and be up more, the result is... more guilt. Because then I ache and I get crabby and miserable and I whine and complain and grumble and lose my temper.

It is very hard to discern where the will of God is in all this. Does He look at me with a sort of tolerant grace, knowing that He made me a certain way? Or does He look at me in disappointment, because I am not trying hard enough, not trusting fully enough?

I don't want to be lazy. And I don't want to be mean. But sometimes it seems like I am forced to choose one or the other. When I really push myself, I get mean. When I am nice, I am lazy.

What to do? What to do?

I am so glad that I won't be tired in Heaven. Or mean. Or... guilty. Hallelujah!

The worst thing about Mother's Day

The worst thing about Mother's Day is how everybody gets so hyper-sentimental about how wonderful a mother is--how she was ALWAYS there and NEVER complained, worked TIRELESSLY to keep her home IMMACULATE while always maintaining a GENTLE and LOVING attitude with her children and her husband... while holding down three part time jobs and serving delicious, nutritious homemade cookies to all the children in the neighborhood.

It just makes me feel like a pea.

I would like to enjoy breakfast in bed, smiling faces, homemade cards, you know...

But I feel so all-fired guilty about all the things I'm NOT.

If I get one more mushy email about how wonderful mothers are, I think I'm going to... I'm going to... well, I WILL delete it. Yep. That's what I'll do.

Because I complain. I nag. I threaten. And I get PMS. I don't like to share our homemade cookies with the neighbor children, and anyway, I don't make the cookies anyway, Shannon and Laura do. I eat the cookies and cakes and muffins that my daughters make. I do this on a regular basis.

So you see, I don't even DESERVE Mother's Day.

But I do love breakfast in bed. If I didn't have all this GUILT, Mother's Day would be my favorite day of the year.

Stress and stress

My kids are in high school and college now, at least three of the four of them are.

That means this time of year is testing time--AP tests, finals, New York regents tests (well, those are still about six weeks out).  Tests mean stress.  It brings up a lot of memories for me, memories of my own test-taking days.

I remember going in to calculus tests with my heart pounding, dry mouthed, stomach lurching, hands shaking.  I remember trying to breathe as they handed me a test.  Then I'd open up my calculator, and out would slip a tiny note card on which I had penciled, "Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice!  Let your gentleness be evident to all. The Lord is near. Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus."

I am sure that the only reason I got A's was because God was gracious.  I don't know why I got A's--I majored in English and I don't remember anything about calculus.  I have an old scratch notebook that holds some of my favorite recipes from the olden days--I use it every time I make brownies or sloppy joes.  It also has some old calculus exercises written in it, and some Russian conjugations and declentions.  They are meaningless to me now, a faded memory of what my brain used to be capable of doing.

School was stressful.  Deadlines are stressful, and tests.  Job interviews are stressful, and client meetings and, well, lots of things.

Then I had three babies in less than three years and "dropped out."  My sister-in-law, who is a high-powered CFO for an insurance company (talk about stressful) once made a comment to me about how stressful it must be to have all those kids.

It's funny, but stressful was not a word that had occurred to me to describe those days.  Hard, yes.  Exhausting, yes.  Lonely, yes.  But I didn't feel scared, my heart didn't race, I didn't lose my breath and think I was going to throw up (except when there was a major injusry with copious blood, which, by the grace of God, actually didn't happen particularly often).

Can this be true?  Were the most difficult days of my life less stressful than other periods I've lived through?  How can this be?

I think, in me, stress comes from imagining a worst case scenario.  Some days, when my kids were sick, and I was sick, and we were going on nights of 6-8 interuptions in sleep [that would be MY sleep], I guess I was IN the worst case scenario.  And guess what--we survived it!  We are basically happy, healthy, and continuing on, by the grace of God, and it's OK.

SOME truth about sex

We have taken a lot of flack from people because Shannon did not choose to go away to school. She lives at home. It is nice for her, nice for us, and very affordable. We are blessed to live within 30 minutes of a state university school with an excellent chemistry program. Shannon can sleep and shower at home, sometimes study and eat at home, and at the same time get an excellent education. Oh, and her tuition is covered by a scholarship. Where is the downside in this?

But it seems that many people feel the need to tell us that she should be getting away. That she needs to grow up. That she needs to have “the college experience.”

I so appreciated our pediatrician, who was supportive of our decision in every way, and who said, “Who needs to live in a dorm and get drunk and have sex and throw up in order to experience all of life?” At least, I think she said that. I might have been the one who said it, but we were of one mind in that conversation. Whichever of us did not make that statement made this statement: “There are definitely certain experiences that people don’t need to have in order to become well rounded.”

We had a remarkable conversation that day. It was about the pitfalls of youth and how they can damage, and how they can best be avoided. For instance, our doctor said that there are many mothers who want their daughters on birth control from an early age… “in case they get raped.” What a mindset. How about you keep your daughters away from situations where they are likely to be raped? How about karate lessons? This precious doctor told us that she doesn’t advocate anything that might make it easier for a girl to make the decision to go ahead and have sex. For instance, birth control pills can be of great help in controlling acne, but she would never prescribe them for that, because she says it just removes one more barrier from people's making a bad decision some day in the heat of a moment.

I was stunned when she said that the biggest risk of early sex is not sexually transmitted diseases, because there is only a high likelihood that you might get one of those. The real danger, she said, is the psychological damage that occurs, and it always, always occurs. She said we would not believe the repercussions that are in and out of doctors’ offices all the time because of early sexual activity. A girl gives away her heart and her virginity to an immature 15 year old boy and he chews it up and spits it out in the trash. He doesn’t appreciate it. He has no concept of love. He is years behind the girl in emotional development. He moves off to his next interest, whether it is another girl, a football game or a new version of a video game, and she is left behind, vulnerable and broken.

So there are depressed girls, girls on all manner of medications to try to help them cope with the fact that they gave the ultimate thing that they could give, and they were rejected. They fall into mental illnesses and ultimately some even commit suicide. Just Sunday there was an article in the paper about a stunningly beautiful 16 year old girl who had committed suicide five months after a bad break up with a boyfriend. I’m not saying she had sex with him. The paper sure didn’t say. But if that is what it was about, the paper should have said so. They make all this fuss about suicide prevention. If they were really serious about preventing suicide, they would help teenagers protect their psyches from sexual trauma. They would show the connection between teen sex and suicide, and they would warn kids away from teen sex.

The girls who don’t commit suicide take another path. They learn to build walls. They learn not to trust anybody, especially men. They learn to exploit sex themselves and use it as a tool to gain power. The worst thing about this is that they become relationally handicapped. They can’t trust, can’t love, can’t commit. These are the girls who are growing up to be the mamas of the next generation, so you can maybe do the math and see where this takes us... divorce, child abuse, basically a myriad of unstable and broken homes poised to multiply themselves.

And the liberals still think the answer is just to put more condom vending machines in the bathrooms.

Here’s a pitiful thing. My daughter says they replaced the menstrual supply vending machines with condom vending machines in the women’s bathrooms on her campus. She says it is irritating and inconvenient. I said it was an abomination. I didn’t know how to say what I wanted to say, because I almost said, “If any guy wants to have sex with you and expects you to supply the condom…” but then I realized that we were already too many steps from decency before this particular issue even arose.

Here’s some straight talk about sex: it hurts the first time. In the Bible they assumed that the girl would bleed the first time she had sex, and the parents saved the bloody sheets from the wedding night to be able to prove their daughter was a virgin, in case a question ever arose. These days a girl maybe doesn’t always bleed the first time—things like tampons and doing the splits in ballet and gymnastics and jumping off high diving boards while not quite keeping one’s legs together can make it possible for a virgin not to bleed on her wedding night.  But blood or no blood, the ending of virginity comes with a certain amount of pain.

I don’t think anybody ever tells anybody that sex hurts. When I was in college, I became engaged in my junior year. Of course, wearing a diamond and talking about having a fiancée made me look like an experienced woman of the world. Even in the eighties, it was normal to live together and sleep together and just get married when you were ready to have kids. People on campus simply assumed that Shawn and I were sleeping together. One day a classmate approached me and asked about my ring and then just burst out, “It isn’t anything like what you’d think, is it? I mean, I was just laying there trying to breathe and all I could think was, this is not what it’s like in books.” I didn’t have a clue, at the time. I was speechless. But now I know. Nobody told her that it hurts.

It hurts for awhile. That’s why it is so devastatingly traumatic for young girls who think they are entering into something wonderful, giving something away to some incredible person they imagine this adolescent boy to be, and they are left torn and rejected. (hint: no adolescent boy who wants to sleep with you is incredible. period.)

You have to be able to totally trust the person you have sex with. It is a process, sometimes a long one, to discover how it works best. It takes time and patience, communication and faith that the two of you are committed to each other. When you open yourself to someone in such an extremely vulnerable way, you have to know that he will be there to catch you when you let yourself fall. Sex is not “fun.” Sex is a “big deal.” The person you have sex with must be able to love you more than he loves the sex. Sex by itself is a powerful destructive force. When it is tamed by love and subjected to moral self-discipline, it becomes beautiful, a unifying, bonding experience that is unparalleled. Consider the contrasting differences: one girl gives away her virginity in pain and vulnerability to a cad who only wants to be able to boast in the locker-room about what he has done; another young woman opens herself vulnerably to a man who has declared his love to her before witnesses and before God in a wedding ceremony, who has made a significant financial investment in her with the best ring he can afford, and who now takes her in love to himself. As she lets him experience with her that intimacy of mingled pleasure and pain, his own heart pangs with awareness of what she feels, what she has given him, and he is overwhelmed not only by physical pleasure but by the trust he knows she has placed in him. She is his cherished treasure.

Sex hurts the first time, and usually the second and third. If it didn’t, why do you think there is such a market for “personal lubricant”? A honeymoon can be exhausting and stressful for a virgin. Beginning sex hurts more than getting a shot in your arm and less than breaking your toe. It is not a sudden-impact hurt followed by pain, like hitting your funny bone; it’s more like trying to tear a Band-Aid off, little by little. The thing that keeps you going is the emotional connection which grows deeper and more mysterious each time. That is, if you have a committed relationship, which is why you need a committed relationship (and when I say "committed relationship" I mean "marriage").

Like any other pursuit—golf, cooking, music—sex improves with practice. Still, even after years, there are times when it all comes together by some miraculous aligning of the stars, and some times when it isn’t all that. It’s kind of like going on vacation—sometimes you get great weather, and sometimes… you don’t. That is why it is so important to be with someone who is committed to working through the bad times and the mediocre times as well as enjoying the great times, someone who has promised always to be there the next morning, someone who will keep that promise.

Or, I suppose you could get drunk and try to drown out the pain—the initial physical pain, the lasting emotional pain. Have another drink. I am being sarcastic, but that process seems to be the norm. In fact, it seems to be the experience that a lot of people think our daughter has to have in order to grow up.

There are some pains that you need let your kids experience, but I don’t agree that premarital sex is one of them.

Nerves and Hormones

Life would be pretty great if it weren't for nerves and hormones.

Some Christian people say you should just be good, do the right thing, act graciously, no matter what happens with your nerves and hormones.

Obviously, they have never been afflicted with abnormal nerves and hormones.

You pray, you cry, you condemn yourself, you wonder what is WRONG with you. You get up in the morning determined to be nice to everyone, to hold it together, to rest in the Lord. But on those days, it just doesn't matter. You WILL find yourself crying over what the kids said or the mess on the kitchen counter or the overwhelming pile of mail... unless you take to your bed, in which case you will find yourself crying for being lazy and worthless.

And somebody will say, "If you would just exercise more," or "If you would just take Paxil," or "If you would just calm yourself down." And that just isn't helpful.

Sometimes you feel like God has abandoned you. You know that He is supposedly your strength, and you can't figure out why it isn't working. You read the Psalms and resonate with the one that says, "How long, O Lord?"

You understand why your mother did some of the crazy things she did, and you feel sorry for her.

Life would be just about perfect without nerves and hormones. I think there will be no nerves or hormones in Heaven.