Setting the Table for Sincerity

Hello friends, thanks for coming over to my new blog, Natural Heart Bleeding Heart.

It's the same me, new site, and most importantly,  hopefully all of you.

I don't really have an agenda or theme for this blog. I mostly don't even have time to write, let alone write well. I used to dream of having lots of time and space for a big house with lots of guests and we'd all be together with lots of food and hours of conversation. A grand bed and breakfast filled with abundant friends, family, and food.

These days, though, my days are filled to the brim with jobs, kids, and perpetual responsibility. No kidding, my routine often runs from 6:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. I'm not complaining, not at all. Well, maybe a wee bit. To be honest, I hate keeping up this pace. While I'm grateful for jobs and kids, I still want more things: minutes, hours, weeks. I am weary of the constant string of very long days, the poverty of having it all. I am the dishrag.

A few years ago I saw a job coach, seeking ideas for how I could make professional changes. I'd been working for an international aid agency for ten years or so. I was fully puffed up with self righteousness about the fact that my day job entailed changing the global landscape one village at a time. But still, something was missing (apparently saving the world wasn't enough) and therefore I sought advise.

"It's not like you're solving world hunger," the career coach said to me before she knew what I did. "Make a change." She was telling me to move on and get over myself. She just didn't get me, I thought. Yeah, I actually was solving world hunger, I responded stupidly. I really believed it. In hindsight that career coach could probably see right through my delusion of self-importance, yet that dumb bleeding heart act of mine was in full gear and couldn't be stopped even with the full blunt force of insightful professional advise.

I got fired from saving the world, as you may already know. I'm not being metaphorical -- they terminated me, eliminated my position, ended the relationship. World peace broke up with me due to economic recession reasons thus and such etcetera. The weekend following the ax I watched the entire boxed set of "Providence" in my pajamas, shell shocked at the proof of my inability to rescue mankind from self annihilation. (Now you understand why I torture my students and myself with a six-week unit on the post-apocalyptic novel "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy.) My merciful 13-year-old daughter joined me for a weekend of sappy one hour episodes of boyfriends and sisters and love songs and feel good melodrama.

My beautiful family and friends stayed with me throughout the entire season of my job loss grief and beyond.

The name of my previous blog, The Snake Charmers Wife, was a hat tip to girls and women's empowerment the world over. I suppose I made it sound like I was the Snake Charmer's Wife, but even though my husband, Bob, is a charming guy, he's not a snake charmer and I'm not a snake charmer's wife, not even in a symbolic way. Someone else was. However I fully accept that I am a natural born bleeding heart, however useless it can be.

The other day a friend pointed me to this article, "How to Live Without Irony" by Christy Wampole. Did you see it? The article makes the case that sarcasm has taken over sincerity as a way of relating to one another, mostly because we are all too afraid are afraid of rejection and so we pretend we don't care. How to overcome this collective irony? Wampole says we need to say what we mean and mean what we say, despite the risks. She says we need to cultivate sincerity and humility.

If you have a few minutes to read this article, let me know what you think. Part of it is thick and heavy, but even the illustrations are worth a look -- and not lost on me that a truck driver is the subject for one of the drawings. (I find the picture ironic because I've been connected to the industry my whole life, my dad still drives an 18-wheeler coast to coast at age 70.) I'm still trying to understand the definition of a hipster.

Your thoughts?

P.S. Here's link to another article that completely refutes Wampole's points, saying that we are now in the age of sincerity. I would never read either of these articles if it were not for the once-a-year occasion of a Thanksgiving break, so no worries if you don't get to them. I just put them out there because for today, I could.

Yours truly,

The Natural Born Bleeding Heart

Mentors for my kid

This post was written for LutheranLiving.com for November 20, 2012, originally titled "Why I give thanks for mentors." With thanks to my wonderful editor, Jan Rizzo.

He is a 13-year-old white boy who wears baggy jeans and tends not to talk. I am his mother. When he decided to start riding the city bus I worried.

Now three months later, well into his eighth grade year, he gets on the bus almost every day to get home after school.

I realize my fears are perfectly silly, minuscule compared to what other parents could worry about. But here’s the thing. I'm not worried my son will get lost or that he'll get off in a crummy neighborhood. He likes trying out different bus lines and his blood is from Brooklyn, N.Y. Last summer he and I traveled to Chicago together. Our trip basically consisted of getting on and off trains and buses with breaks for lunch and supper. I’m fully confident in his ability to manage urban landscapes.

This is what concerns me: I worry that other people will think he’s a hooligan. My son started riding the city bus on a daily basis about the same time he entered his scrubby teen-boy stage. To this day his long, greasy hair covers much of his baby face. No one can much tell that this kid’s features are so cherubic he could have been a Gerber model. He wears Undead T-shirts and clunky sneakers, belying the fact that he can tame kittens. When someone says hello to him, he responds with kind of a faraway look and a monosyllabic grunt.

I worry that random city bus passengers will label him a reclusive trouble maker and treat him like one. When I consider him getting off the bus and walking six blocks to our house, I imagine people wondering why this suspicious-looking kid is skulking through their neighborhood.

I realize my worries are mostly melodramatic mother’s fears.

When Trayvon Martin was shot and killed in a Florida suburb last February while walking home with a bag of Skittles, I heard my friends-of-color talk about their fears for their own teenage sons, for how they might easily be mistaken for a thug. I’d never considered this fear before my own son grew into a broody teen. As my boy grows older and loses his obvious adorability, as he fumbles to figure out how to chat casually with the people around him, as he tries his hardest to appear bad-to-the-bone, as he desperately seeks to fit into the middle school mold of ultra-conformity — I worry.

Now well into his eighth-grade year, on many days my mysterious son spends more time on public transportation than with us, his own family. With two jobs, I’m a distracted mother at best and an absent mother at worst. Even with working long hours, my husband, Bob, engages however he can — biking, swimming, karate, church youth outings — but his fathering overtures are often met with mediocre levels of interest.

We worry.

But there’s one more layer to this story. Our kid has mentors. The youth program in our church is designed in such a way that boys in confirmation class are matched with men in the congregation, girls are matched with women. All mentors are screened and trained. When I ask my son to name his mentors, the kid who barely talks can list them instantly: Rod, Donavan, Jim, and another Jim. Dentist, teacher, manager, publisher. Presently none of these men has teenagers, but they all volunteer to spend time with my son and the other boys in the confirmation program, thanks to our youth director who orchestrates it all. Bob and I realize that the more our son bewilders us, the more we need the mentor people.

I have visions of hosting dinner parties whereby we invite the mentors and their families. We’d eat spaghetti and take turns telling my son our hopes and dreams for him. My son would feel the love and support of an old-fashioned tight-knit family, like say, the Waltons, ever on his side. We’d eat garlic bread and my son would shed his quiet-boy act and launch into a monologue describing how thankful he is to be alive and for these people. He’d share his passions and dreams of the future. He’d smile and laugh and we would be assured that the protective cover of community would shield him from all the bad stuff.

Obviously, that fantasy chatty meal will not happen. The dinner might, but my son’s confessional won’t. Bob and I understand that we will never know his secrets, just as no one really knows anyone else's inner life. 

We do know he’s not a replica of us, but a new creation altogether. 

We do know he respects his confirmation mentors; so do we, and we pretty much leave it at that.

If you happen to see a kid on the bus — or in the mall or on your street or at your church — ear buds pounding out of the head and death mask images on the T-shirt, don’t worry, the kid is probably harmless. Like most everyone, he just wants to get home. And he likely needs a little guidance on the way.

~ With thanks to the lovely people at LivingLutheran.com especially editor Jan Rizzo for inviting me to write.