An Old Hat

This is not the best picture of my daughter. I took it last month. She was playing outside when I arrived home from running an errand. She approached me asking for help with the hat, which had slid down over her eyes. I adjusted it and then snapped this picture before she ran off to resume playing with her brothers. It’s blurry. Her hair is a mess. Still, I love it. She’s my daughter, and I willingly admit that I have a soft spot for my little girl. Check your knee-jerk impulse to leave the usual comments about how she has me wrapped around her little finger. If you knew how many times she folds her arms across her chest and stomps away complaining, “I don’t like that, daddy!” or “I’m mad at you!” then you’d know how much she doesn’t get away with. When I saw her wearing this hat I immediately thought about the day I received it. I was issued that hat by the US Navy in September of 1986 a week prior to departing the US for my one year tour in Antarctica. It never occurred to me that 25 years later my daughter would wear that same hat, or make it look far cuter than I ever could.

Early tomorrow morning we will make our annual trip to the cardiologist. The check-up is fairly routine. After recording her height, weight, temperature, and blood pressure, she’ll have an EKG and an echo cardiogram. We’ll sit in a small room while the cardiologist crunches numbers and then enjoy a conversation with him that more closely resembles a visit with an old friend rather than a doctor’s examination. I am expecting the same news that we received last year. All will be well. For now. That will be great. Captain Chaos will remain blissfully oblivious about her heart and her future. That’s how it should be. She needs to be allowed to live life to its fullest without thought or care for something over which she has no control. There will be a visit when the news won’t be so good, but we know that it should be a little farther off in the future. When it comes it will not be a surprise (unless, of course, it comes tomorrow morning) and there is a plan of action for addressing it.

Living with a child who has survived health challenges like my daughter’s is a constant reminder of God’s providence. Up until the moment her health failed I knew God existed and I knew He intervened in our lives, but there is an enormous difference between knowing something intellectually and living through the heart pounding experience of life on the precipice, and a parent’s feeling of utter helplessness when their child is sick and there is nothing that they can do about it except pray. Ironically, prayer is the best thing that a parent can do in those moments. And we did pray!

Walt Whitman once wrote, “I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.” My barbaric yawp is “God is good! Look at what he has done for us. For all of us!” Look at what He did for this little girl. If you seek Him, He will make Himself available to you. There’s a pretty good book on the subject available at most bookstores. If you pray, He will answer. I know that He listens. I know that He responds. Just look at that smile up above.

What WereYou Doing on Monday, November 22, 2004?

Some of my long time readers know that my daughter Ada, aka “Captain Chaos,” was born with a congenital heart defect that almost claimed her life when she was four months old.

Ada - September 7, 2004

2 1/2 weeks prior to her diagnosis

Two days after the condition was diagnosed she suffered a heart attack and a stroke and was placed on life support. Three days later she underwent successful open heart surgery to repair the defect. That began the long, challenging road to recovery. It is a road we still travel and a journey well chronicled.

Ada - October 2004

Six years ago today, we brought our daughter home from the hospital. That was no simple task. We still did not know whether or not her heart would recover enough function to sustain her life, let alone allow her to live anything close to a normal life (or if you prefer, an average life). We were thrilled to have our daughter back home. She had a nasty bedsore on the back of her head that required careful treatment. We had a challenging feeding and medicine schedule that kept us busy from early in the morning to late at night, but I was fairly confident that we could handle it as I spent the previous weekend at the hospital training to do it under the supervision of the nursing staff. Ada “ate” all of her food and took all of her medicine through a feeding tube hanging out of her abdomen.

Ada - Late November 2004

Looking back, the hardest part of that first night was the fact that a few of her meds had to be mixed by a compounding pharmacist. A compounding pharmacist is a pharmacist who can mix medicine from a recipe rather than dispense premade drugs from a container. I did not understand this completely when we arrived home and I called St. Joseph’s lone compounding pharmacist to see if we could get her prescriptions filled, only to discover that they were scheduled to close ten minutes later. I had assumed the prescriptions were like any standard prescription, and could be filled 24/7. In a panic, I jumped in the car and promptly drove to the wrong pharmacy. I remember thinking, "What will I do if they close before I get the prescriptions filled? She can’t make it through the night without her medication!" When I finally arrived at the correct pharmacy I discovered that most of the meds had already been prepared because the hospital had called earlier in the day. The pharmacists were more than happy to remain open a little late and fill our order. Our co-pay looked like a car payment.

Ada remained awake until six a.m. that first night home. I wrote in an e-mail that “She is fascinated by the red bedroom walls. She seems to enjoy her old spot on our bed. She stared at and played with the toys that attach to her bouncy chair (she can see up close - real close - better than the doctors think she can). She also gave her mother a couple of big smiles. Mom and Dad think that Ada is going to thrive here at home.”

Today, it feels like another life in a distant time.

It’s kind of standard at this time of year to write something about being grateful and giving thanks for our blessings. Then we kill a large bird and eat it. Most years I by-pass this tradition and head straight to the killing and the eating and the food coma; however, this entire fall I’ve kept one eye on the calendar while asking myself, “What was I doing six years ago today?” This year each date falls on the same day of the week as they did six years ago.

Last week I sat at my kitchen table and worked with Ada on learning how to add single digits. It was a long, laborious process that she did not fully understand, but willingly worked at. Of all my children, teaching Ada is the biggest challenge, but it is a challenge that I willingly take. She’s here to teach. That’s all that matters.

I don’t know why God chose to bless our lives as He did six years ago, but I am grateful that He did. I could write a thousand words and never come close to expressing what I feel, so I only write a simple “Thank you," and publicly share what He did for us. All glory and honor belong to God.

Daddy, What's God Doing?

Have you ever met someone who was so happy, so optimistic, so there’s-always-a-bright-side-to-life that you wanted to kick their happy ass down the street? When you’re having a bad day, the last thing you need is some cheerful putz telling you to buck up, little camper, ‘cause life ain’t that bad. If you’re a dedicated curmudgeon then you’ve met at least one. I have one of those people stuck in my head. Yes, it’s a little voice in the back of my mind that reminds me that no matter how difficult or troublesome or annoying my day might be, I am blessed far beyond what I deserve. Today, I was looking for a club to beat that voice into silence. A little blunt force trauma to the head was preferable to the day I had.

Tonight, the girl and I had a double karate class. She was very good through one 45 minute class. She was not very patient during the first 44 minutes of the 45 minute second class. I received some excellent practice during the second class. The girl talked loudly about how much she wanted to be anywhere except the second karate class. It was the perfect end to a long day.

Then, in the car on the way home, princess Chatsnonstop asked, “Dad, what’s God doing right now?”

I laughed. “I don’t know, honey. I really don’t know what God is doing right now.”

I thought about telling her that God was watching over us, protecting us on the ride home, but I did not feel like trying to explain to her how I knew that. I was tired.

“I know what He’s doing,” she replied.

“You do?”

“Yep!”

“Okay. What is God doing right now?” I asked.

“Bowling!” she exclaimed.

I looked out the window. There was no rain. There was no thunder. There was just a happy, chatty, imaginative little girl passing the time in the back seat of the van while her father drove them both home.

And that made my day a whole lot better.

It's Good To Celebrate When Prayers Are Answered

Two weeks ago many prayers were answered when I received a phone call from my friend Mike. Mike has been seriously ill since last May when he was found unconscious on his kitchen floor. I have been praying steadily for Mike, my angry agnostic friend. For months, I sent him e-mail messages and phone messages every couple of days, simply telling him that I hoped he was well and I would continue praying for his well being. I asked him to drop me a line when he could. Mike sounded exhausted when he called. He was obviously very weak. He explained that on most days he did not have the energy to talk on the phone or write e-mails because he has been suffering from liver failure. He has spent the last year waiting for a new liver to arrive. He assured me that he received my messages and appreciated the support, although he stumbled over the word "prayers," and eventually settled on "good thoughts."   He also explained that he has had a long year to contemplate his life and went to great lengths to assure me that facing his mortality had not provided him with a “Come to Jesus” moment.  I assured him that I completely understood, but that I would continue to pray for him anyway.  If he didn’t like it, he could get well, fly to Kansas, and kick my ass. This is pretty much what our mutual friend Andy said to him, as well.

Andy called me last night. It was the first time Andy has called with good news in years. Mike received his new liver on Easter Sunday. God has a tremendous sense of irony.  Unfortunately, someone somewhere lost their life on the day before Easter. Fortunately, that person was an organ donor and their liver was a match for Mike. Mike is alert, healing well, showing no signs of rejection, and has resumed rehabilitating a left arm that was seriously damaged after being trapped underneath his body for those three days last Spring when he lay unconscious on the floor. I guarantee that the timing of his new lease on life has not been lost on Mike.

All glory and Honor belong to God.

Always.

My Mask

I have taken off my mask.

For just over two years, on two different blogs, I have shared a little bit of who I am. I am a follower of Christ. I am my wife’s friend as well as her husband. I am a father to three children. One of them is a cardiac kid who gave us quite the scare a few years ago. I am a homeschooler. Along the way, I have dropped hints of my familiarity with Alcoholics Anonymous. I am familiar with that program not because I am an alcoholic but because I am the adult child of an alcoholic. Most of all, I am grateful. I am happy to be alive and grateful to God for His protection and guidance along the way. I couldn’t have made it this far with Him.

All this time, I have blogged from behind a mask. Oh, I told myself that I was blogging from behind a mask because of the need for internet safety. I blogged from behind a mask to protect my children from the bad guys who might seek to find where I live, and harm them. The truth is that I blogged from behind a mask because I was not comfortable with letting anyone see who I really am. So, I chose a very good looking mask, Cary Grant, and wore it in the blog world. Everyone enjoyed it.

Yesterday, that mask came off.

For the time being I am going to honor my wife’s request and use the black and white navy photo that ended yesterday’s blog. I won’t use it for long. I’m not a 23 year old kid standing on the battleship Missouri (yes, that is where that picture was taken) posing for an award photo. There’s an amusing story behind that photo that I will have to write one day. Major Havoc has been Jonsing me for a chance to take my picture for weeks. He wants his own camera. I am going to let him take my picture. One of the pictures that he takes should be good enough to accurately show the face of the 44-year-old man who writes this blog.

I learned an enormous lesson last month. It wasn’t an abstract lesson or a theoretical lesson. It was a concrete, real world lesson, one that I started to understand when my daughter was in the hospital and I felt like one of the apostles on the boat in the middle of the storm, staring at the sleeping Jesus in disbelief. The lesson is simple.

I learned to trust God.

I took off a mask that I wore for 35 years and revealed one of the most damaging events of my life. I decided to finally trust that God would protect me from harm and go ahead and tell people who I am. I took that leap of faith and God did not let me down. I cannot describe how refreshing the air is when you take off the mask. Freedom is incredible.

The Bible is filled with stories of people who were told by God to do something. Some did as they were told. Some didn’t. There were rewards and consequences for each choice. I trusted that God would protect me and I was rewarded with an outpouring of love and support from readers of this blog that has been nothing short of astounding. For that I am grateful to each and every one of you for the manner in which you responded to three October blogs that were probably very difficult to read. They were difficult to write, too.

You were amazing.

Along the way I’ve learned something that truly surprised me. I’ve learned the enormity of, “Me, too.” I will not tell you how many people contacted me privately to tell me that they have an event in their past that is similar to mine. A few are regular readers and many of them are not. The number is quite large. Most of them do not have the court story to go with it. Justice, at least here on earth, was not served. In my community, I have met people who saw a book that I was reading, asked, “What’s that?” and entered a conversation where they exhibited genuine Grace and understanding from personal experience.

This experience has helped me to clearly see how widespread the problem of physical and sexual abuse is, and how many people are looking for help. I found mine through a long and painful process of meeting God and understanding what He can do for me. It was an active effort over the course of many years. It challenged me to re-evaluate who I am, what I believe in, and how I behave. It gave me practical scriptural knowledge (it still does!) and a sense of direction. He’s been waiting for me to get to this point in my life for a long time. I finally caught up.

For weeks now I have needed to write this post and say one thing to each and every one of you who reads this blog.

Thank you.

With God On Our Side

So, ladies…

You walk into a weight loss center and meet a friendly, helpful man who assists you as you start a weight loss plan. He teaches you everything that you need to know to understand the weight loss program and begin the process of losing weight. One week later you return to the weight loss center 8 pounds lighter. The friendly, helpful man congratulates you. “Congratulations on your weight loss. Of course, you women have it easier than we men do. The program works better for you than for us. But, good work.”

Tell me, would you feel like you found success during the first week of the program because you faithfully followed the new diet plan or because you have breasts?

The next week you return to the weight loss center five pounds lighter than the previous week. You’ve lost 13 pounds in two weeks and you’re feeling good. You’re hopeful and optimistic. The friendly, helpful man records your new weight, shakes his head, and says, “You women…well, good work.” During the meeting that follows weighing-in, he congratulates you on your weight loss by saying, “It’s disgusting how well this program works for women.”

Did you find success during the second week of weight loss because you diligently learned to change your eating habits, or did your ovaries work some estrogenic magic and melt the fat off of your body?

As you return week after week, steadily losing weight, you notice that when men lose weight they are congratulated, but when you lose weight the congratulations are back handed shots at the ease at which the program works for women. No mention is made of the other women attending the meetings, those who are not steadily losing weight. The meeting leader talks openly about his wife, the “saboteur,” who brings sweets and high fat treats into the house that tempt him into falling off of his diet plan. He endures.

So do you.

Tell me, how welcome would you feel attending this program? Would you feel like you are receiving the help and support that is promised in the brochures? Would you feel like you are getting a good value for your dollar? Or, would it feel like a hostile environment? Law suits have been filed over less. And if it were a man treating a woman in the manner I described above, he would be open to mandatory “harassment counseling,” possibly losing his job, and the threat of legal action. In this case, it hasn’t been a man treating a woman in this manner. It has been a woman treating a man in this manner. It has been happening at my Weight Watchers meeting, and I have been on the receiving end this treatment. Just reverse genders in the description above and you’ll see what I mean. If you believed the meeting leader of my Weight Watchers meeting, my weight loss is less the result of my working the Weight Watchers program and more the product of some over-blown testosterone production melting away my excess weight that makes my testicles more responsible for my weight loss than anything that I’ve done.

On Saturday I called Weight Watchers and lodged a complaint. This morning I received a phone call from a very apologetic regional manager who fumbled for words as she tried to comprehend the story that I shared with her. Saturday morning I weighed-in and discovered that I neither gained nor lost weight last week. That wasn’t necessarily bad. I knew that it would happen sooner or later. And I suspected, as I found out later in the day, that I had not only badly miscalculated the points value of one food item that I indulged in during the week, but I ate too much of it, too. It was ice cream. Edy’s Slow Churn Carmel Delight. That’s good eatin’. Anyway, my meeting leader’s response to my weigh-in was, “Now you know what it is like for us women.” As I walked out the door to the meeting room, I heard her exclaim, “Na,na, na-na, na. I don’t have to talk about Arby today!” I couldn’t believe it. At a meeting designed to help people lose weight, my meeting leader was not only celebrating the fact that I failed to lose weight last week, but she was publicly mocking me. Everyone in the meeting room heard what she said. And she made no move to help me figure out how or why I failed to lose weight.

There are a million and one things racing through my mind about this incident. I was raised in the feminist 70’s by a working mom and an on-again-off-again working dad. I was raised listening to the demands for equal treatment of women by men in all areas of life. It is one of the reasons why I rile so easily when faced with the anti-stay-at-home-dad, anti-homeschooling father attitudes that I encounter in the right-wing of the Christian community. I learned my lessons from the 70’s very well. I learned those lessons so well that I didn’t have to think very hard when the Boss and I determined that her earning potential was greater than mine, resulting in her working and my raising our children. It wasn’t necessarily a no-brainer decision, but my ego wasn’t tied up in my being the “bread winner.”

Of all the things that I have thought about in relation to the conduct of my Weight Watchers meeting leader and the treatment I have received from her, one lesson that I learned on my own earlier this year stands out as the most important concept. It is a lesson that Teachermommy recently wrote about so poignantly in her post Naught But Moving Shadows . I have learned that my value, my worth, does not come from my position in life, from my spouse, or from my children. It does not come from any praise that I might get from a friend who comments on my blog. My value and worth come from God. I was valuable in God’s eyes 28 pounds ago (28.6, to be exact). I will be valuable in God’s eyes 34 pounds from now when I reach my goal. Value and worth come from God, and looking to have my value or worth fulfilled by anything or anyone else is an exercise doomed for failure. That is why I am happy no matter how much I lose or do not lose. That is why I cheerfully and confidently sit in my meeting each week. I look at the expressions of misery and defeat on the faces of the other people in the meeting and wonder, “Do you know God? Do you know what Jesus did for you? Do you know how wonderfully freeing it is to know that no matter what happens here on earth, that there is One who knows you and loves you in spite of your failings?”

I long for the opportunity to gently tell them. I will look for the opportunity to do so. And regardless of my meeting leader’s attitude, I will continue on my goal of living a healthier life style. 214 pounds feels good. 180 will feel even better. But I will not forget that downsizing to a size 36 waist or hearing the Boss complain that my ass is disappearing is nowhere near as important as knowing that I have a Father in Heaven who loves me. That makes it a whole lot easier to ignore the chocolate frosted cake on the kitchen counter, or the fact that the freckle face left it there. With God on my side, who can defeat me?