Resources for Learning Chinese (with or without a toddler)

Little Pim

Little Pim is a great starting point because, kind of like Rosetta Stone, it starts breaking your brain down to toddler mode. A lot is available online, but I want to buy the whole program!

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMtuxpU4MU-tMyeqQOgG-Ig39Jd_KjwRt

Fun Fun Elmo

Made for Chinese American children, the basic songs and chants, repetition and beginner immersion are wonderful. You WILL learn to count.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLlb9hB6-hpLgpTLfozADav0GJjaPRh-A

Pocoyo

Level up! The kindly narrator is your friend. Vocabulary is basic and repetitious because it's for toddlers, and the stories are CUTE. I recommend this to parents in every language (except Korean, dagnabbit!).

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLf2XKirC9o0kFAQQ8J2-fmOuOPPDhPhST

Baby Bus

Characters dance and sing catchy tunes about stranger danger, safe pooping and the glory of China with surprisingly good music. Want to tell your kid not to play in the curtains? There's a song for that! Want to tell them not to run in the grocery store? Song! Make your mom a cup of tea because she works hard? Song! Almost anything you could want to say, from "clean your room" to "here's how to care for a baby" has a song. Also they sing Edelweiss, and if you think watching your child sing Chinese Edelweiss isn't worth hearing What Does the Fox Say 50 more times, the good news is you're wrong.

https://youtu.be/-Dy08V8X5o8

For you, the parent, Melnyks.com has free audio lessons with an adorable Russian man who sounds like Gru from Despicable Me, and there are a lot of them!

Rosetta Stone is glorious, but if you can't afford $6 a month, the Pimsleur audio program (the CIA's old standard) is available from a lot of libraries, and it's helpful if you're just starting out. Mango is available free through a lot of libraries and the MWR; not my go-to but it might be yours?

Good luck! If I can help with anything, let me know! I'm not fluent...but my children will be.

I wanted to say this to someone. I don't think barely anyone reads this, so maybe here is okay. I don't want to hurt anyone.

I wrote a letter to the guy who told me, when I was maybe seven years old, that it was the right thing to kill myself so I couldn't be sexually abused. The guy who went on to make my life terrifying, a nightmare of trying, so hard, to be worthy to be alive when no one else was on my side and I was evil if I argued, evil if I was scared, evil if I wasn't fast enough, evil always.

Twenty years later, he told me of course now I shouldn't die. Now I had a husband. Now I had a child. Now, I should live. It only applied back then. 

And I...

There is always so much noise when you finally have these conversations. So much pounding, unthinking terror and crushing, pulverizing guilt. But more than that, there is so much of my heart that doesn't want to hurt anyone.

But I want to shout into the void anyway, that I was already worth telling it was okay to live. That no one should ever make a little girl's first introduction to "you're a girl" be "kill yourself."

I already should have been worth enough to someone to be told I could live.

Not This Baby

"You'll wait to have a baby though, right?"

The voices were well-meaning, the faces we loved laced with anxiety. "But of course you'll wait to get pregnant." We were a brand-new married couple, living in a house that had wheels and flooded when it rained, and we tried not to answer these people who cared so much. But we'd made that decision lying on our backs on a concrete slab, staring at the stars.

"Collin? Can I ask you something awkward?"

"Joy. You can ask me anything."

"How do you feel about birth control?"

The night was quiet, and I listened to him breathing. "Wow. When you say awkward, you really go for it."

We were a young couple taking German classes just for an excuse to see each other, stalling outside the college, waiting as long as possible to drive home. I spilled my guts, the experiences of people I loved, questions, worries, heartbreaks, dreams. Finally I told him, "I don't think I could feel at peace about saying no to a baby. Like, sure, we could have another baby, but we'd never have the chance to have that baby again."

He was quiet in the darkness. "I always thought, when I married someone- No. I can't say that anymore." I could actually hear him blush, he almost sounded mad. "When I marry you..." the warmth of those words almost overwhelmed me, but he stayed with them. "When I marry you, I want to be ready. I don't want to say no."

The concrete was cold, and the air was cold, and we pulled my shawl closer around us both. "I don't think birth control is wrong for other people," I said. "But I think it's wrong for me."

His hand held mine, warm in the coldness, the kind of warm you only get when you're choosing the hard thing together.

Three months after our wedding, we were expecting Sam.

None of the people who wanted to make sure we waited were unhappy about our baby boy, born in a bathtub and brought into warm arms, carted with adoration from Army-post to Army-post. But the same statements started again, immediately. "But you'll wait before you have another one, right?"

As the sleepless nights and milk-soaked mornings, tiny fingers and tiny teeth blurred together day to day, and my body decided that it really didn't matter if I was sleeping or nursing or any of the things that were supposed to change a cycle, fear poisoned the edges of long days, and those voices kept on, some of them fearful and some of them almost cruel, warning that another child would scar our precious Sam forever, as if my sister wasn't less than 2 years younger than me, as if Collin wasn't hardly a year younger than his brother, as if the existence of so many of my favorite people was somehow wrong. I cried.

There were no stars in the hotel room that had become our home, but he reached across a bed with a sleeping baby, and he held my hand again.

I'm pregnant.

I'm pregnant. 

This tiny little one is smaller than a bean, shaped like a seed, tiny dark eyes and a heart already beating. And it isn't the Most Convenient Time. We're in the military; we're new parents; we're in transition; he's deploying and I'm moving. Our business isn't built and my books aren't written and there are a dozen things I'm supposed to learn. I can't even play guitar. It's silly, but that scares me most. What kind of mother will I be if I can't even play guitar?

And if we had waited, if we'd put up shields, or stuck pills inside me, lied to my cells and tried our darnedest to close my womb against the hope of yet another little person, we would probably still have another baby someday. But it wouldn't be this one. It wouldn't be this Baby of the Hard Times, this Bundle of Joy in Transition, this life that's come to us in the chaos and bids me to build a hidey-hole for just us four. If we chose to wait, so many things would be easier. But we'd miss this. 

I hope we have another baby. I hope when the dust has settled and the deployments have stopped and the business is built that at just the perfect time, if there ever will be a perfect time, another little squirmy bundle drops into my hands. But I don't need perfect. I don't need easy. I just need this. I just need here.

When this baby is hardly dry in my arms and the new-baby cheese has barely been rubbed into its pink little baby-skin, the questions will start again. Maybe then, I'll be so full of peace and love that I'll answer. Because if we "wait," there might be another baby down the line.

But I hope we'll say yes again. I hope our hearts will be open.

As I cuddle my toddler to sleep, his warmth against my stomach where his little brother or sister is growing, this once-in-a-lifetime boy, every bit of me likes our choices.

The Wild Dichotomy of Loving You (a letter to Sam Manly)

It's the most basic of things about humans, but still too large for me to grasp: you are small, but you're going to be big.

Your hands are tiny and pudgy, but someday you'll have long, strong, browned fingers like your dad's.Your face is round and dimpled, but with our lines mixed someday that chin will become strong and your nose will be cartoonishly large and straight. You are a tiny person who will be a big person. You are a baby who will be a man, a warrior, a leader, a laugher, a sufferer, a hero, a friend. I hold these tiny hands and smile into your grinning baby face and I know I have you now, but I won't have you always. 

What does it mean to be the person holding a baby, and with him the promise of all he'll be? To be the one tasked with never forgetting that he must be strong and wise and good?

What will it mean to be the person who waves goodbye to a man, who follows him in newspaper clippings and long-awaited phone calls, who mourns his sufferings in the face of evil and delights in his success and his strength, but always remembers that he was a baby, that his hands were little in mine and I held him and he's gone?

I don't know. I am new, and young, and the bigness of life and the littleness of you tower over me like an anvil cloud, an unscalable mountain, a pillar of fire.

Today you're little. I'll cuddle you to sleep tonight, wash your dimpled hands tomorrow, kiss your tears away the day after that and after that and after that. I will watch you become, step by step, the hero you were made to be. And I will let you go. 

When you can, please, come back. I will be old, and softer still. Let me hug you again, stand on tip-toe to kiss your stubbled cheek, stare again into your eyes, whatever color they grow to be. Let me hold your hand and remember that you are the one who was little. 

Because I will be holding little you in my heart for the rest of my life.

The Person You Can't Save

Dear Sam,

You're sleeping in the bedroom, a blanket thrown across the bare mattress. You're too little to understand anything that I'm going to say; you just know you have new friends, that you scream when they leave our house and go to find them, first thing, when you wake up in the morning.

Sam, I whisper and hum and sing to you every day that you were made a hero.

"Protector of the weak, champion of virtue, knight of the realm..." I sing-song it to you. I remind you that your strength will make you gentle, that your kindness will make you strong. That you'll find in people what is worth fighting for, even when they don't see it.

Someday, you will tell a friend that God put you in this hard place, you just don't know why yet. Someday someone will tell you, "I think it was for me."

Someday, Sam, you're going to meet the person you cannot save.

No reach of love, no word from you, no touch of your arm will bring them back.

They are worth it, and you will not give up, but you will know to the depths of you that you cannot save them. You can't make them want to live. It is their choice, and you can't take it from them. Someday, my Sam, my warrior, you will stand on a hill you cannot win just so there is someone standing on it. Someday you will love with everything you have and when you come up dry you'll stay there from pure, vicious stubbornness because if Satan takes this one, he doesn't do it without someone of heaven contesting the ground.

You'll find this weird, haunting peace that comes when you are not enough. You'll know you are a representative of Heaven, and Heaven weeps.

We can't win this, Sam. But we will stand here till all the hope is gone. She still might.

Keep crawling to doors and knocking on them. Keep screaming when people leave our house. Keep loving, Sam. You're still a baby warrior, but even still, don't give up. We will hold this hill together.

Your Heart is a Kitchen Floor

If you don't clean a floor for long enough, it looks fine. You just think the darker brown is the color of the floor.

But if someone cleans a little piece of it, even a REALLY little piece of it, suddenly you have a problem-- because you see what the floor is supposed to look like. And that little spot makes the whole floor look bad.

And it isn't fun, and it isn't happy, because once you see the difference, you only have one of two options. You can ignore it and hope the clean bit goes away, or you can stop what you're doing and clean everything else.

Contrast forces us to make choices. Difference shows us that the way it always has been isn't the way it has to be. Maybe you'll get walked on today and sloshed with stuff and griped at, but just maybe, for someone out there you are being the clean bit of floor. Maybe your difference is challenging someone to make a change.

Or maybe, like me, you're facing a choice between elbow grease, and ignoring what you've seen that's good.

Happy scrubbing.

Dungeons and Dragons Became my Ministry

Growing up during the Satanic Panic, I knew three things about Dungeons and Dragons: people played it in the dark, there were demons involved, and kids died.

It turns out people play around brightly lit tables, the only demons involved are the ones we defeat, and friends do die...inside the game. Like in checkers. Christians, of all people, should know that facing death, even in stories, can make you better at life.

Dungeons and Dragons has become my ministry.

A typical first session starts with strangers, usually other women from local Army support group Facebook groups, arriving at my apartment door. I greet them with my baby on my hip, welcome them inside, offer them cookies. They're usually nervous, find their seats around my coffee table while I hand out colorful dice in little tupperware with weapons written on the top. "These are the dice for your short sword, these are the dice for your long bow..." Sheets of paper are examined. One new player's character is good at talking to animals; another can heal wounds by laying on hands.

When everyone is comfortable and I've downed a cup of coffee, I pass around a cloth bag and let each woman choose a bracelet from inside. "Congratulations." The girl with the bangle is the much-contested crown princess they've sworn to protect. The two with matching bracelets are twins. Strangers stare at each other.

And I plunge them into the story.

"You've been tracking a monster through the night as it passed through the border of your tribe's lands moving toward the human settlements. As the sun rises, the tracks disappear into a stream."

Within five minutes, strangers are plunging into danger to help each other, laughing at ridiculous choices and silly moments, gasping as they incur imaginary wounds. Within three hours, they're shouting "FOR MY SISTER!", talking to imaginary people without shame and deciding what kind of heroes they'll be in this little world we've made.

When I finish, I ask, "Do you want to do this again?" No one has ever said no.

I believe in the power of stories to give us practice in being brave, to give us chances to make hard decisions while they're a little bit easier. I believe in the power of stories to let us feel who we want to be.

And I believe in the power of adrenaline, of doing something ostensibly silly but doing it together, to teach people they can trust each other. I've gone to coffee, I've gone to lunch, but a DnD circle will randomly switch from fighting a monster to sharing notes about abuse or difficult events in a way coffee dates never did. Hurting people find a sisterhood of women who care and listen and help them fight monsters. 

Not every game I run is going to be a therapy session. Sometimes it's just a story, just a chance for people to get together and laugh and do something hard. But creating that safe space? Creating that chance for people to get out of themselves and into who they want to be? That's worth every hour.

Dungeons and Dragons is the way I have to love people, and I wouldn't trade it for anything.

Setting Fire to Bridges

My heart was aching. My whole chest hurt. And I seethed with rage and frustration as my mother told me not to burn bridges.

When your heart is broken and a friendship is soaked with gasoline, sending out that spark seems so right. It seems like a conflagration is the thing you need to make you okay. It feels like keeping that connection is keeping an IV drip of pain whether you can see them or not. A "friend" had hurt me, and I wanted her gone.

Have you been here? Have you, like me, seethed in wounded anger and clenched the matches in your fist?

Have you felt like the only way to honor your pain is to set fire to your friendships? Words like my mom's lash like whips, like all the love in the world is just more gasoline. I held back my spark, but I told her she was wrong. I would never want that friend, ever, ever, ever.

Two years later, when I was at my most frightened, I asked that girl to hold my baby. 

I'm not the girl with the matches anymore. I'm the woman who's seen people who called me freak reach out with their hearts. I'm the girl who's seen bullies who broke me become heroes I lean on. I'm the girl who keeps bridges when all the hope seems gone, because with what I've seen, I know I can't make that call.

There are times and places to light the match on a friendship, but they are so much rarer than I thought. And there are people who seemingly drift away forever, but my wizened old-lady 26-year-old self can tell you that many, so many, come back.

So whether you throw the gasoline or disappear without a trace, I hope you know I like you. And when we meet down the road with more adventures and more understanding, I'll be glad to see you again.

I haven't burned our bridges. They're still waiting.

(Except you, creepy jury-duty man. You remain with all the men I've judged unsafe in the "See you in heaven, talk to someone else" zone. Good luck.)

So I was Sexist.

When I was young, I believed men were storms.

They didn’t make decisions; they didn’t commit sins; they happened to you. They swept in and out and left wreckage or not. They were not accountable for what happened to you when you encountered their wrath. You could make things worse, but never better.

I couldn’t bear that the beast changed for Belle, but my child self was not worth changing for. So, instead of deciding the forces that shaped and splintered my world could be wrong when they so obviously had the favor of heaven, I called them unchanging. I called them storms.

Then I married a knight in shining armor. And my world fell apart.

Collin was beautiful and perfect and he’d never hurt me on purpose, but he was terrible at telling me what was happening in our Army-controlled life, and as my panic attacks worsened and life was terrible I could only blame me. I wasn’t prepared enough for the storm. I wasn’t smart or strong or good enough to handle finding everything out at the last minute. I felt worthless because I was, dagnabbit, and poor, poor Collin having to deal with a woman who fell apart when life happened to her! Then my dear husband told me the thing that sent all my careful defenses for him tumbling to the ground, looking not like love but just like barbed wire. “It hurts me that you never think I can change.”

And I blurted out, “Men don’t change!”

*three…slow…claps*

In the middle of my panic and confusion and guilt, Collin took my shoulders and walked me through how to blame him for a mistake. He taught me that my suffering could be his fault, and it didn’t bring on his wrath or make me an unkind creature of horror. It was easy to forgive him. I’d never gotten to before, and it was easy to start.

And then he changed. For me.

Men aren’t storms. They are heroes or monsters. Absolving them of responsibility for their actions isn’t kindness.  It’s just barbed wire.

Meditations on Posterior Birth

My mom in her wisdom always told me, when I'd fret or compete or ask who was her favorite, that she loved each of her children exactly the same.

I don’t know if I'll be able to say that. I imagine myself, looking into Sam's eyes, remembering our wild meeting and the horrible battle to follow, and I feel in my gut that I’d tell him I will never love anyone the way I love him.

Sam. Your name was so foreign. I said it first, looking at your wide, disgruntled eyes in that pointed, Yoda-like face, your little beak-ed mouth. They said it would be love at first sight, but you gave me more. You gave me love through a thousand battles.

In Scandanavia, they call babies like you Star-Gazers. It’s a pretty name to put on the way you fought and rolled to come into the world facing upwards. Your head wasn’t made for that. My Muttermund wasn’t made for it. You can eat and be strong and not tear downwards towards the perineum or upwards towards the pearl, but a star-gazer shatters outwards and makes a new shape, shears off a part of you in a bursting moment. I used to feel broken that my mind broke, in that moment. Wasn’t I supposed to look into your eyes and know you better than myself, pull you to my chest and leave all pain and blood behind? I was supposed to bring you, sleepy and darling, to my breast, and the love of you would expel everything I didn’t need anymore. But that didn’t happen. The world was pain, my mind was pain, and there was no insta-love. I thought it was my fault, that my birth had been like everyone else’s but I wasn’t good enough to feel painless. But that was just what it took to have you. That was the birth of my star-gazer.

It was also the birth of me, as a mother. It was the birth of us. And I grieved the postpartum I thought we were supposed to have, grieved it deep and long, but at the bottom of that grief, I found our joy.

Sam. Will you ask me if you’re my favorite? Will you ask me if I love someone more? I pray I can love the next little someone as much as I love you. You re-made me. You’re a part of me, now.

There are cells from you in my liver, and my brain, growing, replicating, giving me more strength, more life. The story of you is alive in me forever.

You changed my brain structure, too. My amygdala reformed to meet you. The same process that made our early weeks so nightmarish and super-hero-origin-y is what makes me wake up at the whisper of your arm moving at midnight, that makes meeting your need the most intense thing in my world. Other people can laugh, tell me you’re fine, babies cry, but your pain or fear or hunger or desire for touch is as urgent to me as the waves of pain that gave you to me. I heard people say they’d do anything for their child, and it sounded like a statement of determination. It’s not. It’s a primal, raw, savage intensity of being. When something threatens a baby on television, I know immediately as fearless, calm adrenaline roars through my fingertips that I could kill without thought or remorse if something threatened you.

You changed my body. I was not always the curvy bombshell you’ll come to know. Nor was I star-shaped. I can never say anything like angry mothers do on TV, could never shout or whisper the idea that you ruined me. I am the most beautiful I’ve ever been. I am the bravest I’ve ever been. I’d never liked all of me before you. You made me a creature of raw power and fierce delight, and my soul only thanks you, little unthinking one.

When you grew in the deepest part of me, you didn’t know you would re-make the first person you’d ever know. When you twisted inside me, you just wanted out. But your first action coming into the world shaped both of us. And I wouldn’t trade our battles for a sweet entrance, ever.

My Sam, every day, every battle, I love you more. If it’s true what they tell me, and every brother and sister you have I will grow for, perhaps, as my own mother said, I will love you each exactly the same…amount. But, my little wolf, my star-gazer, I will never love anyone the same as I love you.

What Do you Do with Mom-Hazing?

Mom's can be mean.

I learned that before the ink on my mom-card had dried, before I could walk straight or get a cup of water on my own. I reached out with a question and was still exhausted. Of course I was exhausted. I'd just given birth.

Their diagnosis on me was visibly wrong, so I didn't rush to a hospital like they said.

And then I couldn't take every advice- because there was one of EVERY advice. When in doubt, trust your own mom, right?

And then I didn't update fast enough. I didn't realize they wanted an hourly play by play of a life I was just trying to live.

And then suddenly

Ow. Owwwwww.

Caring about a person enough to reach out when you're worried is a kind of caring. Caring enough to be vicious because they couldn't explain something proficiently while recovering from a mild hemorrhage is not caring. You don't get to keep using the "care" card when your care is stabbing them when they're at their weakest and making sure they never ask for help again.

You don't get to say you care when you don't care whether your advice is right, you just want it obeyed when it will hurt everyone.

I wrote down later that week that the only thing I regretted about our birth was asking for advice afterwards. That's not true, though. I regretted letting people far away from me speak into my life and tell me I was too stupid to be a mom, when the people close to me said I was smart enough. I regretted letting people be aware of my weakness and my struggle, when they could use that to shake their heads and say I was inadequate and immature. I regretted trusting people in aggregate instead of holding to the tiny circle of people I knew in person, when in aggregate, people couldn't be satisfied and all I could do was hurt them.

I regretted letting people in.

Now every time someone tells me I should join a group of moms, I shrink. I stop. My smile freezes, and I say, "That sounds great," or"Good for you!" But what I'm thinking is, "I'm not right for them. I'm right for a cave alone."

Because maybe there will always be someone who takes offense instead of holding space, who attacks first instead of reading twice. Maybe the response to, "Do you know anything about this? Because I'm scared and hurting," will always be "Don't come back; you bother people."

I've learned to find my own information. I've learned to trust my own gut and keep my own counsel and be fearless in my decisions. I've learned not to need them.

Maybe I'm ready to make more friends, with the part of my heart that was so hurt cauterized closed. I don't know.

"Are you in love yet?"

My first day holding Sam, when the full difficulty of getting back my strength hadn't been realized, and it was just a daze and I felt like we'd found a free baby in our hotel, a friend asked me, "Aren't you in love?"

I avoided the question, because, no. I wasn't in love. I was dedicated to this little creature with my life. I would die for him, as a matter of course. But I wasn't in love. That bizarre disconnect that hit the moment he tore out of me and the world when numb, when I picked up the little body and he screamed and my brain that had held it together through all the hours quit like a switch, that was still there. I couldn't even connect the angry little creature in my arms with the one who'd bumped around during D&D games and kicked at Collin's voice. Nothing seemed real.

And then everything was hellish.  I was alone and the infant didn't know how to feed.

He shoved me away and screamed. He punched and bit and kicked and I wasn't strong enough to hold back his tiny limbs from hurting me. He glared into my eyes with a desperation I understood and demanded things I didn't know how to give him. The first bonding moment we shared was when I let myself cry like a deserted thing with him, when I clutched him and sobbed for both of us. We were trapped in Hades together.

Then, we learned. We adapted. We fought. I fought for him.

Pain was our life. There were hot needles in my chest, and sitting up was horrible because the world perched on blades. But I fought to get tiny jaws clamping down while I yelled in agony, left him and staggered across the house falling against walls to get a clean eye-dropper and cup to bruise myself till I could make him scream just a little less. And moment by moment, you felt real, Sam. Nothing about you, nothing about us, felt free anymore.

You weren't pushing me away and screaming because you were mad at me. Little arms don't work like that. You pushed and then screamed because I was away, and you didn't understand.

There was that moment, holding you, when I finally understood that you were the one who twisted inside me before you entered the world. There was that moment when you woke yourself up with a scream that immediately cut off when you looked at up me, and your face went calm. And there was that moment, leaning on the couch with you cradled close, your tiny mouth finally eating, when your eyes looked sideways at me, and you finally smiled.

That's when I fell in love. That's when we won us, Sam.

It's somewhat like they said it was. I don't know about my heart being bigger than I imagined, but when you cuddle someone for hours to help them poop and you cheer when they fart, it's a bond you don't get anywhere else. And I bet it's going to be that cliche, where I'm softer on you than other people are and I ask you a million questions when you're out and grown because I still really care. When Collin was avoiding saying he liked me, what seems like a million years ago, he told me he'd invested a lot in me.

All of me is invested in you. So grow strong, Sam. Feel safe. I'll be here.

And I'm so proud of you for farting.

Last Shift

February 9^th, 2017.

I wasn't ready to share this before. And then I wasn't able to type much for a long time. But here.

I just worked my last ever shift as a cashier. I laughed with people, I ran for people, I circled things on receipts for them. When the people were gone, and I wiped down the surfaces again, I kept hearing myself whisper, “Goodbye.”

Goodbye, metal counter. Goodbye, ray-gun. Goodbye, red laser well. Goodbye, ugly phone.

My Collin told me, when I cried quitting our first teaching job, that you can lose a place, but you never lose the person you became for it. I can lose my store, but I can’t lose me.

I was never cut out for this.

I never got “mentally tough.” 

I never learned to read 100% which people wanted me to not be a person that day. I never stopped being a person.

I never got where I didn’t make mistakes. My speed and efficacy were directly dependent on how much caffeine was in my system, and I wondered frequently if I’d handed back a check or a coupon or someone’s $20 and whether I’d have a job in two weeks.

I was never good enough, but that was okay. Because every interaction, every glob of change, I was reaching out for help. I was thanking Him for every chance I had to be here, praying for the things I couldn’t fix, asking for help fixing what I had. It got to be where every moment became worship, and every hour fed my battered soul.

I was never cut out for this job, but I gave my all, and it was good enough.

It matters, because I know what’s next, and I'm not cut out for it either. I get scared. I’ve watched me fall like a house of cards.

The thing is, maybe I'm never going to be enough. And maybe that's okay.

Maybe I can go on without being enough. 

When to Buy Black Lipstick

When I was a teenager, we had a crazy youth pastor. Not “he has green hair” crazy but “he is vilifying that particular, already marginalized kid” crazy. The kind of guy who has one emo kid in his youth group of maybe seven, so he does a presentation to the entire church about the evils of goth…in which he mostly shows pictures of punk bands with no relevant scripture.

I wasn’t the rebellious kid. I was the kid trying so hard it hurt. That’s the thing I’m ashamed of: that I wanted so badly for Crazy Youth Pastor to be right. I wanted him to give me the excuse I needed to believe that I was okay, and that kid- the kid who made trouble, the kid who made people angry, the kid who probably clung for comfort to his black leather and chains the way I compulsively layered and denim-hoarded- to be evil.

We all knew Crazy Pastor was wrong, on pretty much everything. When he left the room, we admitted he was wrong. But we did nothing. We were respectful. And we just sat there.

I’ve sat quietly while someone slandered me out of my job. I’ve held my tongue, terrified, and let things happen that still give me flashbacks and anxiety attacks. But if I could live through my entire, hellish adolescence again, I wouldn’t do it to scream and fight the people who attacked my body or humiliate the people who lied to my face. I would to go back, and buy black lipstick.

It’s one thing to be silent while people hurt you. It’s another thing to let them hurt people you’re supposed to love. Leaders do deserve respect, but they shouldn’t be allowed to hound and attack and vilify the people who need us.

It would have embarrassed my mum. It would have enraged my dad. But maybe it would have made a difference.

Teens? Don’t be younger me, so eager to be good that you miss what good is. Don’t think that the opinion of the people around you is going to matter- you can do your best and get ostracized with no explanation, anyway. (I did- maybe my denim shrouds were too sensual.) But be the kind of person that 25-year-old you can look back on and be glad to have been. 

There’s a time for teenage “rebellion,” for honest resistance. There’s a time for refusing to let the ideals of evil people define you. There’s a time for standing up and telling people they’re wrong when they will only hate you for it.

That’s when to buy black lipstick.

The Surprising Thing about Being in Love

I thought I’d remember your freckles. That’s what I thought love would be like; I’d become a GPS of the little marks of you, a homing pigeon navigating by birthmarks like stars. I thought the warm, brown shapes on your skin would be familiar to me like the tree I’d climbed every day, or the kitten I’d raised.

But I can’t remember them. I shut my eyes when you’re not here, and I can’t find them anymore. So I navigate by scars.

Leaving the airport, I trace that mark on your hand from when you were a baby, touch the score in your dimple from the dog you forgave for biting your face. In the drivers’ seat of your car, I trace the line on your collar bone from when you helped someone move, the web of scarring on your lower back from carrying too much too far.

I find myself at cash registers touching the mark on the back of your heel from that awful pair of boots, or the cut on your shoulder from a box of rifles. I go over your shoulders, your abdomen, the bottom of your foot; like it’s a prayer I go over you. And when your face seems like something I made up, when even my photographs seem blurry and there’s no way you could exist for real and love me, I reach out and find your scars.

When you step off the plane with new white nicks on your knuckles, another mark on your back and the same smile in your eyes, I hold your arm and wait for my heart to come back from apart. And when you’re away again, for a day, for an hour, I close my eyes and trace our journey in your scars.

So You Lost All Your Money- an exercise in self-talk

Okay. So things kind of suck for you right now.

You'd just saved up the money for the thing- the really big thing- and then it happened. It happened and it is taking all the money away. And you are a responsible adult who should be happy to have this money saved so it can fly through your fingers, but you're not. It's not fun to have money fly away. You are not a rapper, and throwing money at car mechanics or medical agencies is not fun. It feels like throwing all the time you spent working away.

This is, what? the fourth time this has happened. The fourth time you got close to The Big Thing. You were kind of wondering if maybe you should spend the money on something other than The Big Thing, something more adult, when something more adult came smashing through the window.

Last time you were angry. Last time you felt like maybe God had it in for you. Now you just feel a little hollow.

It's okay to cry. You worked really hard. You were just working on something different than you thought. You thought it was The Big Thing, and instead it was this needed thing. You feel a little cheated, huh? Maybe if you stopped making plans and hoping and wanting, this couldn't happen anymore. You could just work and pay the disaster, work and pay the disaster. But when you stop dreaming it gets really heavy to work hard.

Maybe you could dream smaller. Maybe you don't need The Big Thing.

Crap, did your heart just break? It just broke a little. Crap, come here. Just...hug and rock for a second. No, it's not permanent; your heart's broken lots of times. It'll heal up, just...eat right, okay? Eat right and rest a second. Breathe.

What's hurting you isn't having to wait again for The Big Thing. You've had that disappointment so many times it's almost a phantom ache, like hope is an amputated limb you don't remember reaching with. What hurts is the feeling that you're not getting anywhere. What hurts is the idea that all the hours and days and weeks you've poured in were...

Whoa, don't break on me. When you veer off course, I- you're right.

What hurts isn't the idea that those hours were wasted. It's not even the idea that you haven't made any progress. You know that's not true. You know you made a difference in people's lives. You know you're learning and getting stronger. You can look down at your body, your soul, and see the difference. You are becoming more the person you want to be, and I'm grateful for you.

What hurts is the idea that somehow wanting was wrong, hoping was wrong, and the punishment for wanting something is having all the money ripped out of your grasp. Have you been evil squirreling money away? Have you been foolish to avoid spending money on sodas, to pick up pennies on the sidewalks and cry out "For the house!" Was God displeased that you wanted something? That you hoped?

Did you somehow get away from God's plan by trying hard?

I don't have the answers. I'm you, and my heart's breaking.

Scratch that; I do have answers.

Trying hard isn't wrong. Killing yourself trying hard is. God said not to chase after wealth, because it just flies away. It feels like that, doesn't it? But wanting to accomplish things isn't bad. Your wanting seemed so small and so right. Good tools to do good. A hidey-hole to make a home. You shouldn't have spent $8 on that shirt. It's that kind of wastefulness that gets us into these situations. ...Joy, we couldn't buy a transmission with $8. You only spent $8. You haven't bought clothes in like a year. You spent $8. You won't do it again. Crap, don't cry, that was supposed to be empowering. You won't do it again, and you'll have $8 instead of a shirt.

Wait, wait, finish that verse. God said not to exhaust yourself trying to get money, because while they slept He provided for those He loves.

You're someone He loves.

Right now it feels like everything is flying apart, but Joy? Your job isn't the money. Your job is serving the King who does supply your needs, even for Big Things, at just the right time.

I still believe in you. Even when you need the same blog post you wrote 7 months ago 7 months later. So perk up, cry when you need to, but start thanking the God who has this under control.

And when it happens again 7 months from now, because dreams are big and life is hard, you can read this blog again. I won't hold it against you.

How to Glare at Young Couples

Young couples occasionally screw up, so let's not encourage commitment. Instead, all young couples shall be cast into the wilderness, so that if they screw up, they won't get any of their failure on us.  

It's also a good idea to glare at anyone youngish if they hold hands in a public place. Premature sex could hurt them, so make sure they feel the full opprobrium of our society for this act if they so much as smile at each other. Ugh. How disgusting to smile at a best friend you want to spend your life with, am I right?

Glaring if they smile will DEFINITELY help them know the correct boundaries and avoid hurting themselves. Keep glaring. I bet you're really, really helping them.

In case they don't properly commit and they break up, discourage them, so when they break up, YOU'RE not responsible. At the same time, if they mention marriage, remind them that they should wait till they're financially sound.

Remember, only 30-year-old people have the right to make life commitments. You have to be rich to have a family. Poor young people have no business reproducing.

People who want a romantic partner and don't yet have one can be made sad by seeing people in healthy relationships. This can be solved by taking anyone who does find a romantic partner and casting them out of society ASAP.

Teaching them to be sensitive and love on their single friends will not work. I tell you, happy couples are poison to single people and we just need to get rid of them.

What if your children see a happy young couple and consider them role models? They might become a couple and want a family and then we'd have to glare at them.

I mean, if they were young. Wait till they're ancient and have put off commitment for ages, THEN bug them to go make a family.

(If they have wrinkles, we'll even let them hold hands after the correct 18 month waiting period.)

By shoving all young or young-looking couples into a wilderness of glaring and isolation, we can best encourage commitment, create strong friendships, and support the strong marriages and myriad grandchildren that we want, even if those grandchildren had to be defrosted from test tubes because we taught people to wait until their eggs had all dried up.

If we just wait to support anyone till we're SURE they're not going to fail, we'll all get everything we wanted and puppies will rain from the sky and yes, this is satire and I am attacking this because, God have mercy on me, until 2 years ago I WAS these people.

Guys. Let's nurture. I thought I'd wait till I was old, but I can't.

And my hair is like, turning white already, so.

The Rental Car

The insurance agency was kind enough to rent me a car of the same make as the one that crumpled into a paper ball on hitting mine.

I climbed in, cried, drove a little- for pity's sake, none of the pedals worked like mine- pulled over, cried more. I shouted, "I hate this, but it doesn't matter. If it mattered, they wouldn't have hit me with a car." I drove home through a 30 mph zone, screaming in horror most of the way. Crap, my brain is broken.

When I got home, I said, "I hate you, but we're going to be friends." I learned all her buttons and dials, and then I saw the odometer on the dashboard, and she only had 30,000 miles on her. I don't think I'd ever seen a car with that little. My voice broke. "Oh. You're only a wee baby. You're just a little baby."

I sat there. "...it's okay. We'll be friends. We'll be friends."

Junkyard Adventure

Need therapy?

Walk past the high junk-yard fence. She's staring at you, still gray and sleek, still friendly. Still looking just like home. You don't notice that the backseat isn't straight, don't see the way she's bent and jammed. From the front she still looks pretty. Tell her so. Say, "Darlin', you still look pretty." It's okay for your voice to crack. Who cares if the paramedic told you not to cry? If you were to do it again, you would cry as much as you wanted.

Talk to the tiny, goblin-like man who hides behind the grate. He'll tell you as the owner of the car, THE car, your only car, you're the only one who can go into the junkyard. You look small. Your mother and the burly man with you say they'll be on the other side of the high fence, the one topped with three strands of barbed wire. The gate is wide open. Anyone could have come in and touched her pretty, silver paint, stolen the hard candies that, in the darkness after the crash, you left under the seats. Your team laugh and smile like it's a joke. You're not alone. You've got back-up. They hand you the screwdrivers, and walk off. Give the little man your papers through the barred window of the fortified hut. Wait while he photocopies them, alone.

Perhaps it's better that you do this alone.

The charred and crumpled shells of cars are so close together, you can hardly open the door of yours. So many of the cars are blackened and blistered. Your crash wasn't so bad. She's still silver. You feel a little surge of pride because, compared to everything else in this lot, in this cemetary of wheels and dreams, she is still a tank. That's why you're still here.

Her license plate- YOUR license plate- is curled under from where the girl hit you so hard that even your tank curled its tail underneath. There are scratches on her spare tire cover. You get down on the ground, examine the one screw holding on your plate, fumble with the screwdrivers too big for your hands. You lean on the ground to leverage yourself down, and pain bites. There's blood; scratches and slices over your palm. Blue-green glass litters the ground, like a snowfall of sapphires. You kneel, hoping your knees and feet won't follow your hands. You wore sandals here. That's what a noob you are.

With your bleeding hands, you unscrew your scratched, bent, shredded license plate, and as you stare at it, there is this little piece of victory, the first piece since the crash seemed to take everything you had. They can take your beautiful car. They can slam into you and make everything hurt. They can force you to stay on the empty road for three hours and speak to bored cop after foul-mouthed cop and tell you not to cry, but this piece of shredding metal? This is yours, because you took this back. It will go on your next space ship, on your next, glorious vehicle that you will keep running against the odds, and they can't take it from you. It's readable.

You use your key- you rescued this, that night, remember? You were a little bit a hero- you fished it from the fabric surrounding your spare tire- you use your key and pry her open. You manage not to dent the green car beside you. That is someone else's baby car. Someone else loves her, and will come for her corpse.

It's okay to tell her she's been a good girl. You know cars don't have souls, that she isn't alive, but your heart doesn't believe it.

Pull every piece of your life from her wreckage.

Rob the peppermints from where they were rocketed under the seats, pull out each trivia card from beneath the carpeting, from where the wreck shoved them into the window-rims. Scavenge your rainy-day ketchup packets from the glove box, and rip up the seats so you can stick that one dime in your pocket. Pull out the radio- it feels like you're cutting out her heart- pull out the radio, and figure out (you've never seen this before) how to disconnect the wires. The last one, you have to break. You're strong enough. When you have every dime and peppermint, every ketchup packet, that crummy blue pen and the one, forgotten silver fork, when there isn't a scrap of homework left and the radio, trailing it's limp heart-strings, is stuffed in your bag with your scavenged license plate, climb over the rocked and crooked seats, and pick up the jack.

Lift it over the fence, and hand it through the barbed wire.

As you walk away, carrying your wiring and your ketchup packets and even the cigarette lighter, because hey, why not keep your cigarette lighter, for a little while you don't feel like a victim trapped on a highway, like a person whose back still aches from the impact of a single thoughtless act that crushed a world and whose key-chain has lost the best key. You feel like a sci-fi heroine who can walk into a junkyard and rip out her own ship's heart.

Everything might still suck, but hey. You're not totally helpless.

You have a license plate.

Foot-Watching

Sometimes when I dance, I stare at my feet. And I'm so worried I'll miss a step, I miss everything.

Yesterday, Passover service, a big circle dancing around the chairs, an old lady holding my hand to drag me through, I looked up. And there were all these people, and they were making mistakes, and they were laughing, and they were trying again. They were okay.

And I'm like, this is my life. I'm so busy staring at my feet, staring at my to-do's and to-don'ts, watching my mistakes and hounding my success, that I don't see I'm dancing with this big, beautiful group. We laugh and we love and we goof up, and it's okay. I feel alone so much. But we're doing this together.

Next time you're watching your feet, look up. You're not dancing with your feet. You're dancing with people.