Neither here nor there

At the tail end of a long day of traveling from Scotland to my parents' house in the States, my four-year-old started to lose it. My mom distracted him by giving him his first taste of a GPS system. He has recently become fascinated by the idea of maps, so an animated talking map that noted our destination with a happy checkered flag was a clear winner.

Soon, every time we hopped into their minivan (a "huge car with magic doors," according to my son), we'd hear him, buckled into his seat in the corner of the back row, making sure we hadn't forgotten that he wanted to hold the GPS.

When we drove on various errands around the hills and farmlands of Pennsylvania, my mom showed my son another way by which we could locate ourselves: the small mountain range on which they live. Otherwise known as "Gran's mountain" (um, within our family only), it could be spotted above the trees and fields, a sure marker toward home.

On our airplane ride back to Scotland, my son sat next to the window, his head bobbing as he looked around intently. Finally, he confessed, "I can't see Gran's mountain anywhere." At this moment he knew for sure that Gran and Gpa were far away.

What I think he was feeling is akin to something I feel often. Looking for home.

When I was in the States, I felt for a couple weeks what it would be like to be at my nieces' and nephews' birthday parties, and for my son to have a birthday party with aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents in attendance. For my kids to have play dates with their cousins, while I chatted with my sisters. It seemed like such a luxury to me, those moments. And the time together strengthens those family bonds, though I feel the pain of it even more when it is time to leave.

And so a part of me wants to be home, thinks of "home" as where our families are, in the States. But another part of me wants to be home, thinks of "home" as Aberdeen--where I have watched my son grow from babyhood into boyhood. Where my daughter was born. It's where we have become a family ourselves and created a horde of memories. It's the only place my son knows--watching the 17 bus drive past our house, riding his bike around the park, running across the stone floor at church toward the chocolate biscuits at the back table. This part of me feels the timer counting down our time here, and I can't imagine being a family anywhere else. As my son's been telling me, "I like Scotland. When I'm big I'm still going to live here."

Some days, I feel like I don't know where I belong. I can't get my bearings on a particular "home," because home in recent years always seems to mean a place where our roots can never firmly take hold; home also means time with family in locations scattered around the States in which we have few personal ties or memories. Something inside me as a person feels very strongly that I should be able to plot "home" on a map and settle down there. But maybe that comes from an idea of a kind of life that very few people have anymore: a place where you nurture friendships and memories for decades, where your families are and continue to be, a place where you might also stick around for your older years.

Other days, I can celebrate that moving has taught me an important truth: I never knew what I could do until it was just my husband and me in a strange new place. Stuff college-aged me could never have imagined, like gaining the legal right to drive on the wrong side of the road. Forcing myself to poke holes in my own terrible shyness and instead discover that new people have all sorts of fascinating stories and information tucked inside of them. Seeing God provide for me as I could never have known if I hadn't needed so much.

When I was in the States, and wrestling with these kinds of thoughts, I happened to read an old Daily Bread sitting around my parents' house. In the February 5 entry, a couple of sentences jumped out at me: "The following were words on a sign outside a church in England: 'It doesn't matter where you live as long as you live where you are.' If God is your dwelling place, you are living where you are. If you're not content where you are, put your trust in God and thank Him for all He's given you."

I think at least one element in my struggling has been the struggle to trust God, thinking my own unmet desires for my family are what we most need, rather than trusting God's own purposes for us. Perhaps I need to grab a permanent marker and write Isaiah 49 every place I look during the day:

¹⁴ But Zion said, “The LORD has forsaken me, the Lord has forgotten me.”
¹⁵ “Can a mother forget the baby at her breast
and have no compassion on the child she has borne?
Though she may forget,
I will not forget you!
¹⁶ See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands;
your walls are ever before me.

Are we limiting our little girls?

There is perhaps an education inherent in having first a male child and then a female. From the earliest days, I wondered whether I subconsciously treated my daughter differently from my son. Did I handle her more gently? Treat her tears with more sympathy? Encourage her with the same zest to test her physical limitations on the playground?

A fascinating aspect of this has emerged as my daughter heads toward her second birthday, and the three of us spend more time playing together. Because my son is the oldest, most of the toys we have are his, and he also tends to determine the direction of our play. At the moment we most often pretend-play with Thomas the Tank Engine, Imaginext's outer space toys, and Octonauts (a team of cartoon characters who have underwater adventures).

As my daughter plays along with my son, she obviously does not have the gender self-consciousness yet to note that of the many, many Thomas trains he has, only a couple are "girl" trains. Of the eight Octonauts, two are female, and these two don't seem to participate in the action like the primary three (male) Octonauts do (though, I suppose, a shout-out is in order to the girl bunny who is an engineer). Of the eight Imaginext figures my son has accumulated, who drive the various airplanes, vehicles, and space shuttle, none is female. When I checked the Imaginext website, just thinking maybe I could find my daughter some kind of Imaginext figure of her own for her birthday, I discovered that there are no females in the world of Imaginext--not even among the Cars and Toy Story Imaginext toys. It just means that when she gets older, and realizes that she is a girl, she will also realize that Imaginext adventures are for boys, and she will have to pretend to be a boy if she wants to continue to play along with her brother.

If you scroll down the list of preschooler toys on the Fisher Price website, it's clear that toys are strongly segregated, even though preschoolers themselves don't seem to segregate themselves yet in their play--"boy" toys are often about imagining adventures and building things, while "girl" toys seem limited to role play about cooking and taking care of babies. Why would we push such young kids to imagine in only one direction like that? Why not play house one day, and then imagine space missions the next day?

Last spring I read a book called Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing our Daughters from Marketers' Schemes. In six chapters, the authors evaluate the ways in which marketing messages target girls' ideas of themselves (from toddlerhood through adolescence) in the areas of clothing, television and movies, music, books, and toys/recreational activities in order to sell them products. They conclude by offering suggestions for age-appropriate conversations to help our daughters learn from an early age to consider critically the marketing messages they will consume throughout their lives.

The authors noted the strong dichotomy between girls' and boys' toys as well, in much greater detail. For example, in their review of board game covers, twice as many boys as girls are shown in action playing the game (girls usually shown "watching, waiting, reacting, catching, or poised to act"), and only boys or male characters were ever shown winning the game (p. 222).

Even though the book is five years old and a little dated, I recommend it for the sake of parents building up some critical thinking skills in this area, and for realizing that it's not so much about undertaking the Herculean task of keeping our daughters away from these things, but teaching them to approach them wisely, as appropriate, and with critical eyes.

The book made me turn a critical eye even on my own childhood play, the shows I watched, and the inherent messages. My 80s cartoon fare, from Superfriends to GI Joe to Smurfs, often revolved around a team of boys with one or two token girls, who served as love interests for good guys and objects of attraction for bad guys. I never stopped to think about whether in my own mind I had developed a way of thinking that implies that I need to be attractive to men in order to be of value or included in life's adventures.

Well, I'm about to descend into a rant that might be regrettable, so I'll end it by saying that as a Christian woman the true source of my value (my daughter's value!) has everything to do with the love of God, who values us at the cost of his Son's life. As for Imaginext, I can't force them to make female pilots, but I can let my daughter play along, and, when she's old enough, give her this earful directly.

A theologian's memoir

This week I finished reading Hannah's Child: A Theologian's Memoir. I have never read anything by Stanley Hauerwas and am unfamiliar with him generally, other than a couple anecdotes my husband had shared about the theologian's pacifism and propensity to use four-letter words.

I read the book because my husband told me that the day it came in the mail he started reading it when he got to school and couldn't put it down until he'd finished it that night. In curiosity I started reading it myself the next day and also felt similarly compelled to finish it.

Hauerwas unwinds the story of his life in a narrative prose that reads in parts like good fiction--his blue-collar upbringing and work as a bricklayer, his decades of marriage to a woman with severe bipolar disorder, and his journey into Christianity. What I understood (as a nontheologian) of the development of his thought was compelling enough that I would like to read more of him. I always really like people who are able to critique the status quo in a way that helps me reconsider what it means to be a Christian and where I might have spiritual blind spots.

Here's one gem from the book (on theodicies/the problem of evil in a world governed by an all-powerful, loving God):

People assume I am supposed to be able to answer that question. I have no idea how to answer that question. If anything, what I have learned over the years as a Christian theologian is that none of us should try to answer such questions. Our humanity demands that we ask them, but if we are wise we should then remain silent. ... When Christianity is assumed to be an "answer" that makes the world intelligible, it reflects an accommodated church committed to assuring Christians that the way things are is the way things have to be.

Such "answers" cannot help but turn Christianity into an explanation. For me, learning to be a Christian has meant learning to live without answers. Indeed, to learn to live in this way is what makes being a Christian so wonderful. Faith is but a name for learning how to go on without knowing the answers. (pp 207-8)

I think what I most appreciated was his honesty. And also that because this is the story of the life of a theologian, it provides plenty of fodder for thought and discussion between my husband and I, at a time in our lives when there's often no intersection between the kinds of stuff he reads (theology, philosophy, stuff in German) and the kinds of stuff I read (parenting books and fiction).

Thinking about North Korea

Months ago, I saw an interview with Mike Kim on The Daily Show. A Korean American, Kim left a financial planning business to move to the Chinese-Korean border and assist in the undercover work of helping North Koreans flee their homeland. Since that time he founded the organization Crossing Borders to provide them with further assistance.

Kim has written a book, Escaping North Korea: Defiance and Hope in the World's Most Repressive Country. Based primarily on his conversations with the refugees and those who work to help them, Kim paints a picture of what life is like inside North Korea today. He shares stories of what refugees must risk and undergo in order to attempt an escape, as well as some of his own harrowing experiences trying to help them.

As a Christian, Kim additionally describes the dangerous work of the house churches in China trying to provide an "underground railroad" system for North Koreans who successfully cross the border.

While it's not the best edited book of all time, and not a scholarly treatment of the subject matter (which might not interest you anyway), if you think of the book as a compilation of his own experiences and those of the many others he encountered in his work, it's fascinating.

The first half of this book is pretty bleak--a picture of poverty, starvation, oppression, exploitation of women and children, among other things. But in the second half, Kim focuses on reasons for hope--those working to help the refugees, reasons to think the North Korean regime's stranglehold on its people might be slipping. It was at times a difficult book to consider, but worth knowing as a Christian what some of our brothers and sisters are facing on the other side of the world.

Overwhelmed by the bad

In too short a period of time, I saw, felt, and heard about too many bad things. Someone's near-fatal, crippling accident. A friend's parent's death. A friend's child's death. My dad's cancer, resuming unabated. Watching Hotel Rwanda for the second time. Reading a book about the Holocaust through a child's eyes. A miscarriage--the experience of death from within my own body.

I felt overwhelmed by the fragility of life, the ease with which horrendous disasters happen. As I drove with my one-year-old to the supermarket on a dark, wet road, watching a bicyclist's reflector blink red in front of us like a heartbeat, I felt certain that even a simple twist of the road could send all three of us hurtling through the fence into the river down below.

It is so hard to reconcile these dark moments with other moments--my son runs through the park, chomping the grass under his feet with squeals of delight for every dog, bird, and plane he sees. Somehow the earth gives birth to both. A free preview of both heaven and hell. The Life-with-God and Life-without-God.

All I know to do when these moments overwhelm, and it is too terrible to look ahead, is to imagine myself instead burying my face into the fabric of God's chest. When I know what I can ask for on behalf of someone else, I ask. When I don't know what to say, I imagine myself like those friends who wordlessly lowered their crippled friend through the roof.

And I pray for myself, that God would help me never, in the face of whatever, never to loose my grip on him. He is my only hope for what's to come. I think of my college Old Testament professor, summing up the book of Revelation, its words written for a church coughing up the blood of its martyrs: We know who wins in the end.

In the end, there is a new earth. A new order birthed by Christ. With only the heaven. The God-with-us. And none of the hell.