amy loves books

jesus loves lesbians

This is a song written by a local college student/friend of my husband. It's quite lovely, and you should buy it. Click the iTunes button to listen:



jesus loves lesbians
and terrorists
and pat robertson
jesus loves soccer moms
and immigrants
and hillary clinton

and if you don't love them too
then the love of God is not in you

jesus loves the homeless man
and he loves the fire and brimstone preachers that will never understand
jesus loves the liar, the cynic, the doubter, the hypocrite
and jesus loves me too

and if you don't love them too
then the love of God is not in you

jesus loves lesbians
and athiests
and republicans
jesus loves everyone
even southern baptists
even jesse jackson

and if you don't love them too
then the love of God is not in you

transparency

The posts that increased the traffic, and the exposure, on my old blog were the series I wrote about the year I spent sick and insane after the birth of my son. When I realized how closely linked that blog was to my real life name, I kept the old blog up, but removed these posts.

I'm re-posting them here, but they'll only be on the front page for as long as I can stand having them there - which I can't promise will be long.

I don't think I'd recommend reading them if you are pregnant.

always,
amy

the tale i do not tell

When Lily was a newborn, I eased her into a feeding schedule that had her nursing every afternoon during A Baby Story . In thirty minutes, Lily would fall asleep in my arms, and I would watch a nice couple talk about finding out they were pregnant. I'd see sonogram pictures and prenatal visits, watch the mom-to-be's family or friends host a backyard cookout in her honor or surprise her with a baby shower. Then, after the second commercial break, the mother would start experiencing contractions and, in the next seven or eight minutes, she would deliver a beautiful, healthy baby. Inevitably, I would start crying.

One time, they started showing the labor after the first commercial break, when the mother should have been sponge painting the nursery wall or getting a pregnancy massage. The labor was going badly. The mother was having a homebirth. She had a history of difficult labors and had been rushed to the hospital during her last birth. The midwife examined the mother and felt a prolapsed cord. Calls were made to arrange an emergency transport and surgical delivery. I started to freak out. A prolapsed cord is bad - really, really bad. They cut to a commercial and I tried to convince myself that they would not be airing the episode if the baby died. But I was worried. This was not the Baby Story I knew and loved. This was scary.

When the show came on again, the mom was being rushed into an operating room. She was crying hysterically. A few minutes later, the obstetrician announced that the baby was healthy and mom was recovering. I began to breathe again. One more commercial break and mom doing something normal like giving the baby a bath. Her surgical scars were hidden under her dress. The happy, lullaby-like soundtrack was back on. The crisis was over.

The one thing I have not written about, that I don't really talk about, is the year after my son was born: the year I went crazy. I've been trying to find a way to tell this story, and I think that in order to have it make sense, I need to start at the beginning. My son's birth day.

part one: birth

When I was pregnant with my son, I had a dream that I could not wake up. In my dream, I had just given birth, the baby was tucked in at my side, and I was so tired that I could not lift my head. From that place between asleep and awake, I sensed that the baby was hungry and needed me to take care of it. I fought as hard as I could to wake myself up despite the sensation of having a thickening soup of concrete mush rather than blood flowing through my veins. At some point, I was dimly aware that the baby had gotten away from me. I would get right to the brink of consciousness, and then slip back under the dark cover of sleep. Finally, I managed to open my eyes. I scanned the room frantically for the baby. Then, I saw him on the floor, eating mashed potatoes from a tupperware bowl. I had failed him. I knew he needed me, but I had not been able to do what I needed to do.

I woke up from this dream sobbing.

Writing about going crazy is difficult, because there is no answer that can explain what happened. People who love me have said it was Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. I've had it pointed out that the extreme version of Postpartum psychosis has wreaked its genetic damage on an unspoken branch of my family tree. I know that, aside from a few periods of depression in my late teens and early twenties, I considered myself emotionally strong. Now, I visualize that, somewhere inside of me, there is a bite from a poisoned apple. I don't know how it got there, and I don't think it will ever really go away. I have the potential to get very sick. I can never be sure it won't happen again.

This is the beginning.

I wanted to get pregnant. I wanted to have children. More than anything. My son was planned for and longed for. I was ecstatic when I found out I was expecting. Then, less than a week into the pregnancy, I started bleeding. The doctor did an ultrasound and found no sign of a gestational sac. Nothing. He sent me for blood work, and the results came back showing that I was, indeed pregnant. The numbers suggested that I was viably pregnant. So, I spent the next three weeks getting blood drawn and ultrasounds done. We saw a small round sack with a smudge inside that the doctor said was a fetus - or at least, the beginnings of a fetus. Two weeks later, the smudge looked more like a jellybean, and there was a flutter of movement in the center of the sac. A beating heart. And the doctor said "Congratulations." for the first time. We were out of the proverbial woods. Everything was going to be all right.

Except that I was spooked. I had an almost overpowering sensation that I was doomed. No matter how hard I tried, I could not shake the feeling. I seemed healthy enough to the people around me, but I carried with me a secret conviction that things were not going to be all right. I was scared to shop for baby clothes. I was scared to pick out a name. I found that praying for twelve hours of safety at a time was the only way I could pray. I pretended like everything was normal, but I was already starting to panic. I had lots of bad dreams. One thing I have learned, is that when you first start to go crazy, you are sane enough to hide your hysteria/paranoia/delusions. In fact, saying "You know, I think I might be going crazy", is probably a sign of mental health. So, as I began to become more and more paranoid, I knew enough to keep it a secret.

As the pregnancy progressed, I began to feel a little bit safer. When I reached the point that the baby could be born premature and still survive, I finally started to relax. I had my heart set on a natural birth. I had wanted a home birth, but we were living far from home and I did not have any friends to recommend a good midwife. I trusted my doctor, he had the lowest c-section rate in the entire state. I read all the natural childbirth books I could find and hired a doula. I made a birth plan. I finally took the tags off the baby clothes I had been given. I began to think that I might give birth to a healthy baby after all.

Then, almost two months before my due date, I went into labor.

I was put on bedrest and this hideous medicine that made my hands tremble and my heart beat fast. I kept having contractions. The doctor kept upping the dosage of shaky meds. At thirty four weeks, I went to the hospital. My doctor was out of town and the doctor on call decided to take me off the medicine and let me deliver. A few hours later, my doctor came back in town and phoned in an order to give me a shot to stop labor and a shot of morphine. I reacted to the morphine and was violently ill all night. It was almost exactly a month before my due date. The next morning, I refused to take any more labor-stopping drugs.

Instead of quickly delivering, I hovered in early labor for the next three days. I could not sleep. I had contractions every five minutes. My doctor had me come in to get checked every day. At one point, he asked me if I still wanted a natural childbirth. I remember telling him that, at that point, he could offer to hit me over the head with a brick to knock me out and I would accept.

The night before my son was born, my husband I went to see a movie. I wanted to get my mind off of the contractions. The movie we saw was based on John Grisham's novel A Time to Kill. It was a horrible movie that graphically showed just how violent and cruel humans could be to one another. I came home and sat in the bathtub and cried hysterically. The feeling of being doomed had come back. I knew that I was doomed. The next morning, my water broke.

I had a long, difficult labor. About fifteen hours in, I started running a fever. You are supposed to deliver within twenty-four hours after your water breaks or the risk of infection becomes too great. My son was delivered twenty-three hours after my water broke, one month before his due date. He was breathing and doing fine. My fears seemed to have been totally unfounded. The pregnancy was over. I had a son. He was fine.

But I was not.

The mood in the delivery room changed from congratulations to fear. My doctor stopped smiling. I had not delivered the baby's placenta. To me, this seemed like a silly thing to worry about. I mean - the baby was fine. He was in my arms and was breathing and had dark brown hair and he was just fine. The nurse took the baby out of my arms. I was confused. The doula tried to explain. The placenta was not coming out. So, I thought. My mother, who had been there for the entire birth, who, throughout my childhood had been unfazed by blood and vomit, who killed cockroaches with bare hands, was paler than I have ever seen her. The dim post-birth lights were forgotten as surgical carts were rushed in an the huge dome lights were turned on. Lab-coated and green scrubbed people started to fill the room. My mother could not watch, and stood outside.

Later, it was explained that in a one in a million freak occurrence, my placenta had actually attached itself and grown into my abdominal wall. This quickly causes massive hemorrhaging and almost always results in an emergency hysterectomy. When I give new doctors or nurses my medical history the shake their heads. "You have no idea how lucky you were", they say. My doctor, who had the lowest c-section rate in the state, hated to operate unless it was a last resort. Because I had an epidural, he did not have to put me under general anesthesia and he quickly began to cut the placenta out in little pieces. I remember being in pain. I remember it being worse than labor or birth. I remember not understanding what was happening. When it was over, my doctor said that, at the end, he had been less than five minutes away from operating.

I remember thinking how much that would have sucked. All that labor. Delivery. And then a c-section. I still did not understand that by "operation" he meant "hysterectomy". I remember being glad it was over. I fell asleep.

When I woke up, things got worse, not better.

part two: all we need to know of hell

I came home from the hospital unable to sit or walk without pain. I was taking two Percocet pills every four hours. My memories of those first days are, at best, fuzzy. I know that we took my son to the pediatrician for his check-up and found out that he had moderately severe jaundice. The doctor prescribed an at-home contraption called a "Biliblanket", it was like an ultraviolet heating pad that we wrapped the baby in. I hated it. It scared me.

Less than twenty-four hours after he was first wrapped in the electric thing, I changed my son's diaper. It was full of blood. Wait, not blood. Surely not blood. It just looked like blood. Maybe. I called the doctor. He assured me everything was fine, that babies just look like they are peeing blood sometimes because there are some sort of crystals in their urine. I was slightly hysterical. The doctor agreed to see us late that afternoon.

He looked my son over and said the baby was fine. I was unconvinced. He assured me that I probably only saw those crystals, or there was some bleeding from the circumcision - external bleeding if anything. I asked him to please check and see. They attached a little plastic baggie thing to my son's penis and I nursed him in the office and waited for him to pee. The bag was full of blood. The doctor took one look. "Oh my God", he said. "That's blood".

We were sent directly to the hospital. I was told not to go home, not even for a bag of clothes. They had no idea why my baby was peeing blood. He was obviously bleeding internally, but nobody knew why or where. They sent us downstairs to run tests. I rode in a wheelchair, with my son in my arms. In the nuclear medicine room, they covered me in an iron apron and laid my six pound son, naked, on the table. The technician was kind enough to tell me to close my eyes. When I opened them, my son had a needle and I.V sticking out of his forehead. The nurse explained that this was the easiest vein to tap into on a newborn, but it was brutal to watch a needle be inserted into a baby's face.

Through this I.V. they pumped some sort of radioactive dye into my son. On the monitor, we watched his insides start glowing as the medicine circulated through his system.

When the results came in, he was placed in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit. He had Renal Vein Thrombosis, a blood clot blocking the vein leading to one of his kidneys. That kidney was getting no blood flow at all. It was dying. The clot was on the outside of the vein, which meant that it could break off at any time and travel to my son's heart, brain, or lungs. If this happened, Arden would die.

Renal Vein Thrombosis is extremely rare in infants. The pediatric specialists had never treated a child with my son's condition. Only a few doctors in the nation had any experience with a blood clot like my son's. As a result, there was no real consensus as to how to treat it. Surgery was way too risky. The best therapy seemed to be to administer the same blood thinner that adult's get when they have heart attacks. This therapy came with a huge risk, it could make the blood too thin. My son's brain could begin to hemorrage. Still, it was the best they could do. They would be very conservative, and give him the smallest possible doses. They needed my permission. Okay, I said. Yes.

For five days, they slowly increased the dosage, but there was no change in the size of the clot. The doctors me with me. They wanted to put an I.V into my son's thigh, so that the medicine was going straight to the clot. They wanted permission to jump from a conservative dosage to the highest dosage that had ever been given to a child my son's size. This would either heal him or kill him. It was the last resort. They sat down in the PICU waiting room and told me that I had to give them permission to increase the dosage.

I wanted to scream that they did not have my permission. I wanted them just to cut the clot out or something. I wanted everything to be okay. I wanted to go home. I wanted to wake up. I wanted to disappear. I wanted be the one with needles in my arms and legs and forehead. I wanted to fall asleep forever.

I gave them permission.

The next day, the blood clot had dissolved. A week later, we took Arden home.

Those are the facts about what happened.

In the beginning, I was aware that there was a schism between what I was thinking and feeling and what I was supposed to be thinking and feeling. For example, when the chaplain would come by to visit and pray with us, I thought that I hated her. I wanted her to go away. I wanted to tell her not to ever come back again. Unfortunately, my husband and father were both ministers (or ministers-to-be) and they seemed very appreciative of the chaplain visits. The minister from our church and people from my husband's seminary would visit. They always wanted to pray too.

I had an overpowering desire to tell them to fuck off. Or hit them. Instead, I stood in little circles and held hands and while everybody prayed, I felt my insides fill with rage like poison. I imagined that if you had placed me on the cold table in the nuclear medicine room and turned the x-ray on me, you could have seem it, glowing and greenish in my veins.

During the weeks I had been on bed rest, I spent time reading parenting magazines and books. Confined to the couch, I fulfilled my primal pre-birth "nesting" instinct by pre-ordering baby announcements. I had picked an announcement with a pastel illustration of Noah's ark, post-flood. The animals were happily disembarking, the sun was glowing, and a rainbow filled the sky. "God's Perfect Gift of Love", they said. I thought they were sweet. While my son was in PICU, the announcements arrived and my mother delivered them to me in the hospital. I could address them. It would give me something to do. I looked at the announcements and wanted to vomit. They were too sweet. They were all warm and cuddly and soft. I thought, if I mailed them, my son might be dead before they even arrived. "God's Perfect Gift Of Love" - a dead baby. What would I do then? Send a follow-up death announcement. "Oops. God Lied With That "Gift of Love Crap'. (And by the way, don't say you're praying for us because it makes me want to kill you)".

I knew that I ought to be praying for my son. I ought to be weeping and crying. I should fast or gnash my teeth. I should get on my knees and beg God for a miracle. I also ought to be spending every minute by my baby's side. If I were given a quiz about being a good mother, and there was a question that asked what a good mother would do if her baby was in intensive care - I would answer either a) never leave his side or b) never stop praying for his healing. I did c) nothing. I did not want to sit near my son. I did not want to be in the intensive care room with its cloud painted walls and quiet. I really did not want to pray. I knew I should, but, after all, David spent all his time begging God to heal his baby and it didn't do any good. If there even was a God, and I was not so sure anymore that there was, I honestly had nothing to say to Him.

At one point, I remember going home to get a change of clothes. Everyone else was at the hospital. I walked into my son's empty room, sat in the rocking chair, and started screaming at God. I was scared. I was scared of losing my son, but I was also scared of losing God. I had never felt the complete absence of God that I felt at that moment. I remember having a very clear thought that I was standing on the edge of Hell. "I'm looking at the inside of Hell", I thought. I know what it looks like now.

This is the point when I dared God to speak. I opened my Bible and gave him one chance to be real. The page I opened to was Isaiah 66 11-13. I knew then, that I had not lost God.

In the days and weeks that followed, I would not lose my son. But that year, I almost lost myself. The paranoia that began with pregnancy deepened and was combined with a frightening detachment during the weeks we spent in the hospital. I began to split in half. I kept the dark part as hidden as I could.

Weeks after we came home, I still had not sent out the birth announcements. It literally turned my stomach to look at them. They were hateful, lying little things, with their happy elephants and giraffes disembarking a toy-like ark in the sunshine. Now, I knew the truth. After forty days and nights in the storm, the animals would not have come off the boat all watercolor soft and sweet. They would have looked like hell.

the end: monster

I've been writing this story down. My husband has been reading. Over the weekend he said, "I wish I had known then how sick you were. I just thought you were a bitch."

There is a part of me that recoils from this assessment. It feels like a slap. But I know that as much as I want to seem sympathetic, as much as I believe people that are mentally ill deserve compassion and sensitivity - the truth is still there. Mental illness is ugly. I was ugly. People that are mentally ill do hurtful things. They can be unkind. Or worse.

When everything had settled down medically, I tried to adjust to motherhood. This was difficult because I was frightened of my son. I was afraid he was going to stop breathing, or start bleeding again. I felt like a failure as a mother. I knew, logically, that nothing that had happened was my fault, but I could not shake the feeling that I was to blame.

The weeks Arden spent in intensive care took their toll on him. For the first three months of his life, he would not make eye contact with people. I have since learned that this is a syndrome that newborns that experience medical trauma sometimes get, they learn to associate care givers with pain. At the time, I did not know that this syndrome existed. I doubt I would have believed it if someone told me about it. I would hold my son, and he would look away. Just above my eyes, or beyond the side of my face. I believed that he was doing this because he hated me.

They say that mothers share an almost psychic bond with their child; they can tell if the baby is hungry or wet or cold as if by magic. I believed that I was getting messages from my son. I believed that he was telling me that he wanted me to go away, that he hated me, that he blamed me, that he wanted a better mother. The best thing I could do for him would be to leave him. He deserved a better mother. He knew it, and I knew it.

I knew that if I told anyone about the messages, they would not believe me, so I kept our communication a secret. I would sit at home alone, feeding Arden, hearing him speaking inside of my brain: I hate you. You're a terrible mother. Go away.

I would start to panic inside. When my husband would get home from class or work, I'd wordlessly hand him the baby and walk out the door. I'd stay out for hours. I drove in circles.

I had a bag packed and hidden in the trunk of my car. I would drive to the airport and sit and watch the planes take off. I made plans to go to Mexico. I figured I could take a few hundred dollars out of the bank and just disappear. I spoke enough Spanish to get by. I thought that I could just get a job and disappear in another country. My Mexico plan helped calm me down when I was really upset. Watching the planes helped. I could stay in the parking lot for hours.

Of course, I did not tell anyone what I was doing. I was ashamed to admit that I was such an awful person.

I have a vivid memory of being home one day, and holding my son who would not look at me, and realizing that I totally understood how a woman could leave their baby in a dumpster. If I had not wanted a baby to begin with, if I had no husband to help take care of the baby. If. If. If.....

Yeah. I could totally see how it could get to that point.

I stopped as the truth hit me. The kind of mothers I was identifying with were not the happy mommies on the Pampers commercials or in the pages of Parenting magazine. I was identifying with America's Most Wanted. The monsters. The types of people I had considered vile and almost inhuman. I saw myself in their desperation and panic. I was like the monsters.

I was getting physically ill almost daily. I could not sleep. I barely ate. I became convinced that the reason for my physical problems was that my husband was slowly poisoning me. I know that sounds crazy.

At the time, I figured that:
1) I was a horrible mother and human being.
2) Both my husband and son wanted me gone so that they could start over with a nice new wife/mother.
3) Because my husband was in seminary, he could not really divorce me. This would ruin his chances of getting a pastoral position.
4) My husband was not stupid. Straight out murder might attract an investigation. They always question the spouse first you know.

His best option was to poison me slowly. It would just look like I was getting sick. Everyone would be so sympathetic. It might actually help out in the getting a church job/new wife department.

As you can see, even when I was crazy, I was logical.

My husband did not react well to accusations that he was trying to kill me. I took that as proof of his guilt.

At some point, I went to my doctor and tried to tell him what was going on. I told him that I thought something was wrong with me. I had heard of postpartum depression. Maybe I had that?

The doctor asked me two questions: Do you want to hurt your baby? Do you want to hurt yourself?

My honest answer to both questions was "No". I had not really thought about killing Arden or myself. I did not offer details about the psychic "I hate you" messages my son was sending me, the suitcase and plans to disappear to Mexico, or my husband's plot to poison me. Those were my little secrets.

"You probably have the Baby Blues", the doctor told me. "Call if you start wanting to hurt the baby."

Baby Blues. What the hell was that? It sounded like a song, or like Paul Newman's eyes. It's just the Baby Blues. Nothing really. Just nothing at all.

I went home and locked myself in the closet for the rest of the day.

Luckily, I had no desire to hurt the baby or myself.

It seems strange that nobody realized how sick I was, but I kept a whole lot of thoughts secret. The only thing observable was my external behavior. Often, I just looked difficult. Selfish. Hysterical.

A bitch.

A monster.

We were living far away from family and friends. I was not around people who had known me before. My husband thought maybe all women became crazy when they gave birth. And he was busy and stressed with his last semesters of seminary.

Slowly, I got better. When Chip graduated, we moved back to Athens, GA - the place that has always felt the most like my home. Arden was smiling more. I was in a church I loved and my mentor-friend was back in my life. I was still depressed, but I was no longer delusional.

When I got pregnant with my daughter, my hormones somehow fluctuated themselves back into something like balance. The fog cleared. I was me again.

Looking back, I can talk about how sick I was with some degree of understanding. I've read about postpartum psychosis. I know now that I have a family history of extreme postpartum depression and psychosis. Of course, before, nobody in the family ever talked about that. It was a secret.

One thing that writing this story has helped me realize is the powerful need that I felt to keep my mental illness a secret. When I started becoming paranoid and delusional, the feelings of panic and fear were accompanied by an equally overpowering conviction that I should not tell anyone. No matter what. I needed to appear normal.

In writing these entries, I've struggled with a desire to try to justify myself, or make excuses, or not really own up to how dark and delusional I was. But that is not fair. Not fair and not true.

If you have ever been inside of any of these dark rooms.
If you have a wife or a sister or a friend or a mother that wanted to hurt you to save you from the beast inside of her.

I'll whisper my secret in your ear.

shh. it's okay. i was a monster too.

a wedding story

From the time I was old enough to question, I have had questions about the church. I have been a denomonation-hopper. I have been a Lutheran, an Episcopalian, and a charismatic. I have also been a nothing - rejecting the church completely. It was never about God, it was never about Jesus, it was the fucked up church. You have seen the bumper sticker:God save me from your followers. My father did his best to reassure me. Jesus called himself the great physician - meaning the church was a hospital full of sick people. Whatever. It was a small comfort because what I saw was hypocrites and phonies. Agendas. Selfishness.

Eventually, I made a hesitant peace with the church, but it still makes me angry. I am like the churchgoer in The Screwtape Letters; I am always focusing on the out-of-tune singing. When I happen across a televised church service from one of the big, prestigious downtown churches, I have found myself literally yelling at the television. The people are singing their hymns and they look dead. Nobody smiles. They sing: “Praise to whom all blessings flow” and they look like they are bored to death. I start to yell at them. “How much did your watch cost? How much was your Lexus?” I actually do this. I yell at the TV. I am pissed off. Standing in church, looking dead. “Where are you going and why are you in that hand basket?”, I ask the television. And I want to dump ashes on my head and stand in their midst. They are the church. And I am repulsed by them.

Which is why I do not have such a big problem with the whole Biblical concept that wives should submit to and respect their husbands. After fifteen years of marriage, I have learned the wisdom of this. Respect. I am called to respect my husband and to submit to him. Women complain about this all the time. I can not even count the women’s Bible studies and banquets and retreats I have been to that tried to deal with this command in a way that made it palatable. But while it is not easy, the command itself is not that problematic for me. What I have a hard time with is that the Bible goes on to say that I am like the church. I am like the church and my husband has to love me the way Christ loved the church. Strange that men never complain about this considering the way that women get so upset over submission. It seems so unfair. I have to submit to and respect him and in return he has to love me like Christ loved the church. The really, really fucked up church. The selfish, agenda driven, worshipping-everything-but-Jesus-lets-just-be-slappy-happy-clappy people and Shine Jesus Shine! church. The church I don’t even want to be associated with alot of the time. The church with its tendency to turn people off of genuine faith and love. That is what I am. In marriage, my husband is like Christ and I am the like the dysfunctional church.

I don’t want to admit this. I do not want this to be true. But then, I remember my wedding.

On the day of my wedding, nobody told me not to lock my knees. I had never heard that locking your knees could make you pass out. Evidently, they explain this to soldiers in basic training; they instruct them to stand with their knees slightly open so that they do not fall over in the heat and dust of duty. But I, not being a soldier of any kind, had never heard of such a thing. This is why, in the middle of my wedding, when I noticed that my knees were hurting from standing so still for the photographs and witnesses, my thought was not that I needed to unlock my knees. My thought was that I had better not fidget. So I stood even straighter, even taller. And slowly, I began to pass out.

I had never passed out before. It always seemed to me that fainting happened quickly. One minute you were standing there feeling fine - and the next you were waking up with smelling salts waved under your nose.

This is not how it happens.

The first thing I noticed was that everything started to get sparkly looking. The lights were sparkly - like streetlights through the car window in the rain. Then, the edges began to fade. Everything did not go dark at once, it faded in from the edges. My vision narrowed until I could only see a tiny pinpoint, a perfect circle. Then, everything went black.

And I, in the middle of my wedding, was not yet unconscious. I was still able to process this and wonder what was happening. What I thought, was that I had been struck blind. Incomprehensibly, in the middle of my wedding, I had gone blind. I wondered what I should do. I wondered if I should tell someone about going blind. I wondered if I should stop the wedding.

But then I had another thought. I would like to say that this was not really “me”, but was the lack of oxygen in my brain, that I was just disoriented and woozy. But I am afraid that the truth is that this moment is one that defines me as a wife. What I thought was that if I told everyone that I had gone blind that they would stop the wedding. If they stopped the wedding, my future-husband might rethink his willingness to marry a blind girl. On the other hand, if I just faked it till the end and kept my blindness a secret - he would be stuck married to me. In sickness and in health. That was what he was about to promise.

My decision to fake it is caught on film. I turn to hand my bouquet to the flower girl and you can see me sort of grope the air to find her. Trying to play it cool. Trying to impersonate a girl that can see. Shortly after that moment, I actually hit the floor and was laid out on a church pew until I regained consciousness.

I am not proud of this about myself. I am not proud of the fact that I was willing to force my husband unknowingly into marriage with a blind girl. That I considered my options and made a premeditated choice to deceive him. I am even less proud of the fact that, in many ways, my husband did unknowingly marry a blind girl. My literal sight returned after a few moments of unconsciousness, but the spiritual blindness that would cause me to make such a selfish decision and try to fake my way through the wedding stays with me.

I know that I am like the church. That he is like Christ. That I demand to be taken care of, to be tended to. My husband calls me “Princess”. It humbles me. I tell him that I do not understand why he gives so much when all I give in return is just the “glory of my wondrous presence”. He tells me that that is enough. I think back on all the years he worked so I could stay home and be with the children. I think of all the nights that he woke up and took care of the baby even though he was the one who would get up and go to work in the morning. I think of all the times he came home and found me still in my pajamas and how I was always sure that my life was the hard life.

I think of the Bible. I think of me being the church. I think of every moment that I am selfish and think of myself instead of thinking of Jesus. I think of my blindness. And I think that He still loves me. He still loves us. Ugly as we are, He still loves us.

After the wedding was over, I confessed to my husband that I had thought I was going blind. I expected him to be angry. He just laughed and said he only wished I had held on until after he kissed me to faint. That fainting after he kissed me would have been great.

And I think of myself, as the Bride of Christ. As I think of us as the Bride of Christ. Of the fact that He still loves us.

Knowing our selfishness. Knowing we are faking. Knowing our hearts.

He still loves us.

As we sing our psalms like dead people, as we let the collection plate pass us by.

He still loves us.

And He is waiting. He is hoping that we will hold on until His kiss.

No Country For Old Men

Warning: This Post Contains Book And Movie Spoilers

Okay - SERIOUSLY - BOOK AND MOVIE SPOILERS ARE BELOW!!!!!!

John 1: 1, 4-5 1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 4 In him was life; and the life was the light of men. 5 And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.

I did not like Child of God, the first Cormac McCarthy novel that I read, while I was reading it. It was too dark for me. Not too violent, but too bleak - two adjectives that are being used quite a bit in the discussion of Joel and Ethan Coen's film adaptation of McCarthy's No Country for Old Men.

I believe now that I was wrong to classify McCarthy as bleak. I also think that to call the film bleak or to focus on it as a meditation on violence/evil/loss of morality is to deny one of the most interesting questions of both the film and the novel: not of the nature of evil - but of the nature of God.

McCarthy's narrative follows three main characters: Llewelyn Moss, a Vietnam veteran who happens across the aftermath of a failed drug deal and decides to steal millions of dollars; Anton Chigurh, a complex killer who is pursuing Llewelyn; and Sherriff Bell, a man trying to make sense of what he percieves as an evil he is unprepared to deal with.

Chigurh is a man that appears to operate almost outside human boundaries, as an agent or representation of a wrathful and vengeful God who has randomly predestined those he encounters to life or death. His first murder, the only that he is shown committing with his hands, results in an expression of rapture on his otherwise largely stoic face. His weapon of choice is a cattle gun, and the murders with this weapon visually suggest a religious annointing of the foreheads of his victims. He flips a coin to decide whether or not people are killed, asking one man, "What's the most you ever saw lost in a coin toss?" For Cirgurh, salvation and death are preordained and he is merely an agent of the inevitable. There is no choice, no free will; there is only fate.

Chigurh's motive for the violent pursuit of Llewelyn is ambiguous because Chigurh never seems to be fueled by greed or interested in the money for his own personal use - but neither does he seem to be working for hire. All you really know is that Llewelyn stole it, and for whatever reason, Chigurh is attempting to recover it. (In the novel, Chigurh is a free agent who returns the money to its rightful (albeit drug dealing) owner and claims that he went after the money to show that he is "someone completely reliable and completely honest") He is not an amoral killer; on the contrary, he operates with the calculated confidence of someone motivated by vengeful righteousness.

Throughout the film, Anton Chigurh seems to be omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent. Visually, he is filmed as a towering figure. His violence is astonishing, and regardless of how Chigurh views himself, it's very easy for those that view the aftermath of such shocking and prolific violence to label him as the personification of evil.

Sherrif Bell is struggling to comprehend the force that could be to blame for the violent aftermath he encounters and investigates. Where Chigurh is omipotent, Bell is impotent. The idea that some people could have no possibility of redemption is deeply haunting, and Bell is hesitant to confront a reality that might lead him to conclude that the universe is in the hands of an uninvolved (or even worse, an angry and destructive) God. In spite of his earnest intentions, Sherriff Bell unwittingly finds himself buying into the mythology of Chigurh as a physical manifestation of a God of judgement and vengance.

At the beginning of both film and novel, Bell recalls the only criminal that he ever sent to the gas chamber: a boy who claimed to be predestined to kill. "He'd killed a fourteen year old girl...The papers said it was a crime of passion and he told me there wasnt no passion to it. He'd been datin this girl, young as she was. He was nineteen. And he told me he had been plannin to kill somebody for about as long as he could remember. Said if they turned him out he'd do it again. Said he was goin to hell. Told me it right out of his own mouth. I don't know what to make of that. I surely dont."

Although Bell is faced with what he percieves to be a increasingly violent world, where killers torture people for their social security checks, drug dealers massacre each other, and mothers put babies in garbage disposals; he can't reconcile this with his worldview that there is a possibility for putting mistakes behind you, starting over, and finding redemption. He wants to believe that his own mistakes are not beyond redeption. He wants to believe that God is the kind of sherriff that he idealizes - the sort of sherriff that did not carry a gun. He wants to believe that Llewelyn is just a "good boy" that got mixed up, and that there is a chance he'll be saved.

To Bell, Chigurh exists as a "ghost" - undeniable proof that unredeemable evil exists or proof that the world is at the merciless hands of a vengeful God of destruction. In the novel, Bell says "It has brought me to a place in my life I would not of thought I'd come to. Somewhere out there is a true and living prophet of destruction and I dont want to confront him. I know he's real. I have seen his work." He explains his decision to not confront Bell as a decision "not to put his soul at hazard".

The irony in both film and novel is that both Chigurh and Bell are given an opportunity to accept or receive Grace, and both fail to comprehend it. After building up a mythology of Chigurh as a "living prophet of destruction" - a view that Bell, Chigurh, and, I believe, the audience come to accept, the final three scenes deconstruct this mythology and, as a result, are emotionally devastating.

Believing that he is acting as an agent of fate, Chigurh waits in the dark to kill Llewelyn's widow. As she sits in the light (with a cross reflected in the mirror behind her) he instructs her to choose a side before he flips a coin - thus reaffirming his role as an agent of predestination. Carla Jean refuses to call the coin, forcing Chigurh to accept culpability for her murder. "You dont have to do this", she tells him. (In the novel, she does call the coin, but not before asserting that she rejects Chigurh as an agent of God. Chigurh apologizes before killing her.)

Immediately after the murder of Carla Jean (the first one that Chigurh commits with an awareness of his free will), and in a moment like a shocking Deus Ex Machina, Chigurh's car is broadsided by another car at a crossroads. He emerges from the car broken and bloodied - a far cry from the intimidating, towering figure that dominated previous scenes. Two young boys look down at him from their bicycles. Chigurh asks one of the boys to sell him his shirt so that he can make a sling for the exposed bone that juts from his broken arm. "I'll give you my shirt", the boy says - but Chigurh refuses the possibility of Grace. He hands the boy a bloodied hundred-dollar bill, and wanders away broken and alone.

Anton Chigurh was not doomed to remain in the dark - but he could not comprend the light. It is a man - not a monster, not a prophet, and not an angel of destruction that limps away. If Sherriff Bell had not given up, he would have found simply a wounded human being when he found Chigurh - but in the end, Bell failed. Because of his fear and doubt, he was unable to claim the assurance of Grace - and could only frame the hope of light in terms of a "dream" he had but lost.

The final scene of the film is of a defeated Sherriff Bell telling his wife about two dreams he had about his father. "I dont remember the first one all that well but it was about meetin him in town somewheres and he give me some money and I think I lost it. But the second one it was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin through the mountains of a night. Goin through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin. Never said nothin. He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped around him and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somehwere out there in all that dark and in all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up."

No Country For Old Men is an unsettling film, but it is not nihilistic or void of all hope. I don't believe that either McCarthy or the Coens attempt to portray a world (or a people) fatally doomed to remain in darkness. While the Coens excise most of the overt theological dialogue from the novel, this theme is narratively and visually explored in the film. In one poignant scene, Bell and Chigurh appear to be on both sides of a door. Light shines through a hole in the lock. Neither man, however, walks into that light: Chigurh dissappears into the shadows and Bell in unable to confront Chigurh. But there was light in the darkness, even though the darkness did not comprehend it and could not claim it. The final words of Sherrif Bell allude to the prophecy Zecharias made before the birth of Christ. It offers a glimpse of a merciful God that offers salvation and peace to those that walk in darkness. No Country for Old Men illustrates the moral and emotional devastation of not comprehending this light.

Luke 1: 68, 77-79

68 Blessed be the Lord God of Israel; for he hath visited and redeemed his people,

69 And hath raised up an horn of salvation for us in the house of his servant David;

77 To give knowledge of salvation unto his people by the remission of their sins,

78 Through the tender mercy of our God; whereby the dayspring from on high hath visited us,

79 To give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.

my favorite things 2007

When I worked at Barnes and Noble, I got used to having hundreds of people call and buy and order things moments after Oprah told them what they wanted. I can say, without a doubt, that there is nothing on Oprah's annual list of expensive crap you supposedly can't live without that looks even slightly tempting to me.

If you want actual nice things to buy for a girl you know, I offer (once again) my annual list of nifty things. I can promise that anything here will be greatly appreciated by whatever sister/wife/girlfriend/daughter-type person you have on your list. Plus nothing here even comes close to the price of Oprah's favorite cupcakes.

Actually Good and Affordable Gifts That Are Not From Mall-Wart

Necklaces with nifty literary quotes like this and this. (the latter was a gift I recieved last year, and I wear it every single day).

Maggie's organic cotton mantra socks and tights. Best. Thing. Ever. Girls like socks and big girl tights are generally icky.

Under the Canopy makes really pretty, comfortable, 100% organic pajamas/nightgowns that are also reasonably priced. I think just about any girl on your list would like these. Girls like pajamas.

Wonderfalls on DVD. The best television series you probably never saw because it got cancelled after a few episodes.

Dark chocolate with poetry.

Leaf Nightlight (I'll admit that I probably would not have bought this full-price, but I got one at Anthropolgie on clearance. It actually has turned out to be one of my favorite things, and now that I know how much I like it, I think it would be worth full price.)

You may think cleaning supplies are a crappy gift. You are so wrong.

For a child:
Me, my cape, and i . I admit - it's a wee bit expensive (although it's still cheaper than those darn cupcakes Oprah likes so much) - but does it get any better? (nope)
(also for boys)

travels

I grew up in a home with very little money and a slightly agoraphobic mother. Other than annual trips to visit my grandparents (St. Petersburg, (the drive from Tallahassee an endless stretch of flat Florida nothingness) and Portsmouth, Ohio, respectively), we did not travel. Ever.

I have only been in the states of Florida, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Ohio. I have flown in an airplane a total of three times. One of those trips was a one-way ticket back from my grandfather's funeral. I don't think that one should even count.

When I was sixteen, a church flew our entire family to Chicago for a weekend so that my parents could lead a marriage enrichment retreat. As a result of that trip, I can claim to have seen the interior of a Helmsley hotel. I have seen snow outside of windows, but that is all I have seen of the windy city.

It makes me sad that I have never travelled. I feel like I have missed something along the way.

Now, I live just minutes from Hartsfield International Airport. At my favorite thrift store, I buy books that have not been read. It's easy to tell when a book has been discarded without being read. It feels different in your hands. To be honest, I prefer to read books like this - perhaps because the act of reading is inherently intimate. A book in the process of being read is carried into the restroom, taken to bed, packed in a purse or bag, and read over coffee. It sits in the front seat of the car, it goes along for the ride. In all these places that the book is taken out, there are moments when the reader slips silently inside of it. The mattress, and the pillow, the cat curled at their feet, the spouse sleeping beside them - all these things fade away. Although the reader may be physically present, they are elsewhere. And so, books that have been read carry an imprint of the reader that came before.

I become attached to the books I have read. For awhile, I checked out books to read. I found that, afterwards, I usually felt compelled to purchase a copy - not because I wanted to re-read the book later, but because it felt wrong not to have it. I buy double copies of books I like, so that I don't have to give the copy I read away.

Oftentimes, I purchase unread books at the thrift store, read halfway through, and then, find tucked between the pages an airline boarding pass. It shocks me back into the present as I realize that my book was once a plane ride book. It has been in the sky. It has gone places. My book was purchased to pass the time in unfamiliar lobbies, or as insurance for the ride to come: an invisible barrier to prop between the reader and the unknown stranger that might end up in the seat next to them. Some books were probably purchased with the ulterior motive that the title would be literary, or trendy, or obscure enough to attract the conversation of just the right sort of person.

I attributed the last motive to Dana-whose-last-name-starts-with-a-"B", and whom I have never met. I only know that she used an electronic ticket to take Delta flight DL1287 from New York City to Atlanta and left the boarding pass in the unread, hardback copy of Jonathan Safran Foer's novel, Everything Is Illuminated, that I purchased at Value Village for a dollar and fifty cents. She sat in seat 29F, and flew coach. She had three bags.

I found Dana's pass two-thirds of the way through the novel, and I was jealous. Normally, when I find tickets in books, they are simply a novelty. They are most frequently in books with movie tie-in photographs on the cover. It makes perfect sense to me that someone would choose those sorts of books for a plane ride. I do not question their choices.

This time, I was slightly angry. I disliked Dana B immediately.

Why would she have purchased a hardcover copy of Everything is Illuminated and then, when she arrived in Atlanta, discarded it? I imagined her sitting in LaGuardia, and reading the first few pages of the book, and deciding that she did not like it -judging it too strange, or difficult to read. I decided that she lacked imagination and intelligence. I pulled out her ticket again and again, and wondered why she choose this book to take along for her flight. As I read, I kept wondering. At what moment did she quietly slip her ticket between the pages, and close the book, and decide to get rid of it? It had to have happened early, because even the dust jacket of the book felt new.

As I carried her book that is now mine around, my jealousy of Dana-who-was-in-New-York-City-long-enough-to-need-three-bags stayed with me. I've never been to New York, but I would guess that it would be a perfect backdrop for reading Foer's book. I'd love to have been the one with a chance read it as I was travelled through the sky, to pause after a passage and look out the window, seeing nothing but blue or stars.

As I neared the end, I lost the book for a day. I looked to see if I had accidentaly concealed it when I made the bed, or if it had fallen by the headboard. I checked in the kitchen, and on top of the china cabinet. I finally found it wedged between the window and my favorite chair.

When I finished the book, I took Dana's ticket out from between the pages one last time. I was still a little jealous of the places she has been. The beautiful black and white book that had been hers, and now belonged to me, sat in my lap. With something like satisfaction, I thought to myself: "Well, she has never been here".