When I was in middle school I had a friend whose mom was fond of saying, “Sarcasm is the lowest form of comedy.”  To which I was fond of responding, “That’s just because you have never heard it done correctly.”  I considered myself an artist and sarcasm was my favorite medium.  My friend’s mother has been haunting me since yesterday and I am now forced to make a formal apology.

<deep breath>

Dear America, I mishandled sarcasm in a brutal and confusing manner.  I am deeply sorry for the confusion.  Sincerely, Eric’s Wife

See, what had happened was that there was a blog post floating around the internet called, “Dear Mom on Your iPhone.”  I won’t link to it here because I suspect the author of the blog post would like for the heat to die down and I respect that.  In her post, the author wrote a lengthy and guilt heavy letter to some anonymous mother she witnessed at the park.  This mother got caught in the blogger’s crosshair when she was witnessed staring at her iPhone instead of paying attention to her kids as they played.  I must confess that the post made me angry and I responded in kind.

I was not angered at the notion that most smart phone owning parents could stand to practice better smart phone etiquette, but rather, I was angered at the author’s use of guilt to preach to the unaware mother.  Her choice to slap us all around with guilt is nothing  new to the mother sisterhood.  I’ve done it and I’ve had it done to me enough to recognize its bitter taste well before it reaches my palate.

I wrote a heavily sarcastic letter parodying hers and posted it with no explanation as to the source of my screed.  I am sorry if you thought it was meant to seriously attack smart phone using parents and I am especially sorry if you thought it was directed at you.

The fact is that most mothers have their bags packed and ready for a guilt trip at the drop of a hat.  The lightest of touches can send us to the train station with ticket in hand.  I don’t think I am being heavy handed when I say that it is cruel to attempt to use guilt to correct another’s behavior and it is especially cruel to use guilt against a mother who is likely treading water and barely keeping her nose dry.

If your kids are fed and they know they are loved by you, I’ve got nothing on you when it comes to parenting.  You may make different wrong choices than I do, but that is okay and you are allowed those wrong choices.  If you are like me (a growing human), I expect that you will learn from those wrong choices and adapt to better choices.  In the end, I expect that we will both have raised adults who can function in society reasonably well.  If I see you on your smart phone in the park, I can’t judge because right now my kids are eating cold cereal while I blog.

Here’s the funny part of my having to chew on my words for the past 24 hours: I realized that I was guilty of the very same effort that angered me in the first place.  In my own way, I was trying to guilt that mommy blogger into feeling awful for how she tried to make other mothers feel guilty.  Face->Palm

Here’s to a Saturday full of new mercy – new mercy given to us freely from God, which we can then offer to the parents in our midst.

How did I know exactly what kind of phone you have?  Well, I watched you for a very long time to get all the details.  As I sat here on my park bench, shushing my kid with Cheetos and watching you with your smart phone, I couldn’t help but feel that an open letter to the universe was in order.

You see, Mom on the Android Brand Smart Phone, we live in an age when you cannot count on the mercy of strangers and casual acquaintances.  It’s possible that you spent your entire morning eyeball to eyeball with your kids and I have only seen the unraveled bits of the end of the day, but I can’t know that for certain.  All I know about you is the top of your head while you look at your smart phone and all I can conclude is that you are a pretty awful Mom.

Maybe it doesn’t seem fair to you that I am able to make this sweeping judgement of you based on a single snap shot of your day, but that’s the way of the mommy sisterhood, Sister.  Surely you know that the only thing that motivates us Moms to greatness is piles of guilt.  Without the heavy burden of a guilty conscience, no Mom would ever do anything nice for her kids ever.  When you look at it this way, I am doing you a huge favor with this offering.  When your heart moves south and becomes nothing more than a sick feeling in the pit of your stomach, when you are paralyzed by the notion that you have truly screwed up the lives of perfectly innocent people, then you can finally parent with confidence.

Perhaps you had an awful day and you were doing well to get out the door in pants.  My feeling sorry for you won’t help you in any way.  My job as the stranger on the park bench is to call out bad parenting and I saw you from a mile away.  I suppose I should thank you, Mom on the Android Brand Smart Phone.  Without the opportunity to sit in judgement of you, I would have had to find some other way to confirm my awesome parenting and “Super Nanny” doesn’t come on tonight.

In Christian Love,

Eric’s Wife

They walk among us, and yet we hold them in a different place than we hold the “normals” in our midst.  We assume that they live a life that hovers an inch above the reality we know and that they are oblivious to our notice of them.  We stare, comment, talk around them and walk away from them, never stopping to wonder if their day is anything less than smiley.  And worse, we devalue their struggles and slap their diagnosis of “retardation” on our own and others’ minor blunders.

I am guilty of using the word “retarded” in casual conversation to refer to my occasional trip up, or the trip up of someone else.  I have referred to ideas as “retarded” and have without a second thought referred to perfectly healthy people as “retarded.”  I am ashamed of myself for this and I am only confessing this to you now in hopes that you will consider a shift to your vocabulary.

It is easy to argue that “retard” is a word used to refer to stunted thinking and therefore appropriate to use in reference to what appears to be a stunted thought.  I would argue that this is not unlike comparing a stubbed toe to a leg amputation.  When you accidentally put salt in your coffee instead of sugar, you are not “retarded.”  You are “lost in thought”, “otherwise occupied”, “not paying attention”, or any other turn of phrase you can muster.  You are not retarded.

The truly diagnosed retarded people I have known in my life work harder than I would ever dream to go about their day to day.  They live in the moment and are present for each task at hand and they  carry on with a strength many of us will never have to dig deep enough for.  We do them and ourselves an enormous disservice when we blithely toss the word around.

Nobody wants to have their greatest struggle held up for mockery by the common man.  Stop being common with your vocabulary.  Be extraordinary and let your eyes be opened to the truly extraordinary people who walk among us.

“Here I am, LORD!  Send me!”

(crickets)

“Seriously!  I’m right here!  Totally packed and ready to roll.  Send me!”

(crickets)

“Look, here’s the thing, I’m convinced You have a plan for me and I am completely ready to do what ever You say.  I just need a hint.”

(crickets)

“…a nudge, a wink, a nod, a random note on my windshield, ANYthing.”

(crickets)

“I don’t want to pester You, but I wonder if maybe Your plans for me perhaps got a little delayed.  That’s cool.  Stuff happens.  If You could, though, could You give some sort of an ETA on the arrival of Your plans?  I would hate it if I was away from the phone when things start cranking.  Just so I can plan, You understand?”

(crickets)

As much as I dislike the steady chirp of crickets these days, I know that faith walking is more of a loop than a linear journey.  I’ll get back to mountain tops and days on end when Scripture comes alive in my hands and sears my soul.  There is much to be gained when you can rest easy even when the future is a hazy fog of crickets.

God is not sleeping.  He does not rest.   It feels like He is otherwise occupied sometimes, but you can feel that way and still know in your soul that He just as present as ever.   If you’re sitting with crickets right now, know that I am too.   Faith is the evidence of things unseen, and if there were no crickets, we would never exercise faith.

There’s a blog post floating around Facebook that challenges readers to “stop lying on Facebook.”  I read the article so I could discern who the liars on Facebook are – for the purpose of helping them, naturally – and was surprised to see that I might be considered a Facebook liar by this blogger’s standard.

With a bend towards the raunchy, she launched into a true report on her day – the one not reported to Facebook.  She reported to Facebook that she and the children enjoyed lattes, but failed to do a follow up report on the spilled drinks and thrown fits that followed the original post.  As a mother to two perfect children, I was stunned to learn of her facade.  Stunned.

When you post pictures of a clean kitchen, I of course assume that your kitchen is always clean, laundry folded, floors swept, and dinner in the oven.  It is therefore important for you to post the occasional picture of a messy kitchen to “keep it real” so I am not fooled.  When you post updates about your child’s all star day at school, it is crucial that you also tell me about the 9pm grocery store melt down so that we can all take Junior down a peg.   Stop trying to fool me.

Here’s my question: Who’s fooling who?

I don’t often post about my kids, whether it’s good or bad, because I feel like they are at an age when they need to create their own public identities.  Though, if I do say anything, it will be positive because the internet’s records are way more permanent than school records and I don’t want to offer the fodder for locker room teasing.

Does this make me a liar?  If I “fool” anyone into believing that my life does not include melt downs and fits, am I to blame?  I would like to present the idea that the real blame is on the reader, not the reporter.  If you read your friend’s constantly positive updates and start to think that your life is awful in comparison, maybe it is you who is lying and not your friend.  You lie to yourself when you try to believe that anyone has it all together all the time.

You are lying to yourself if you think for one minute that people do not know that your life includes melt downs, dirty words, poor food choices, and even poorer parenting choices.   People know this about your life because it is a part of their life too.  When you know this for certain, then you can read your friend’s steady stream of positive updates and appreciate that your friend has chosen to accentuate the good and leave the bad to the unspoken known.

You do no one a disservice when you make it a policy to not air every gross/sick/sad/disturbing part of your day, but you do yourself a HUGE disservice when you assume you are the only one who has such moments.

My Great Grandma was a West Texas legend for how she worked with cotton seed sacks to make beautiful dresses for her daughters.  People often stopped the girls to comment on their dresses and my Grandma would proudly tell a stunned audience that the expertly dyed fabric was cheap cotton seed sacks that anyone else would have thrown away.  My Great Grandma told her a line that is often quoted in my home, “We don’t have to tell everything we know.”

This is Eric’s Wife, reporting with mascara crusties in my eyes and wearing yoga pants that never do yoga while my children watch a nature program and I pretend that it is educational.

I was chatting via e-mail with a friend of mine about writing.  I was telling her some of the personal benefits I hoped to see after committing myself to four weeks of daily blogging.  We discussed writer’s block and she said that her greatest block is that she self censors.  I started to write back to her, but then decided my thoughts may as well be a blog post.  I’ll just send her a link.

I would wager that I have easily highlighted and deleted hundreds of thousands of words in the eight years that I have blogged and worked on side projects.   My backspace key stands out among the rest because it is extra shiny and now says, “B  ksp  ce.”

Much of my deleting comes from when I write full paragraphs and then start to over think what my most likely reader might think of what I have written.  Too preachy?  Delete.  Not preachy enough?  Delete.  Too shallow, too political, too tacky?  Delete.  Am I maybe writing something that I should be saying to one person, but am instead copping out with a blog post?  Delete.

I’ve enjoyed the exercise of daily writing because it has forced my hand to pause longer over the backspace key.   It has made me think less of who might read it and more about why I want to write it.  Making myself post daily has also taken from me the opportunity to only publish the things I feel are well written and perfectly edited.  I have to enter the dog show with whatever mutt I’ve got on hand and it has helped me to appreciate the unique showmanship of even the mutt breeds.

I have a lot of friends who should be writing.  You may be one of them.  If you know what I am talking about when I say that you can write five hundred words and have only a blank screen and a flashing cursor to show for it, then I would like for this post to encourage you to sit down and write for a bit with no deleting.  Just do it.  Leave me a comment with a link to your blog if you think you’d like to try a four week challenge.  I’d be happy to read along.

I wrote a good deal of this post with Eric staring over my shoulder and I feel you should know that.  Even though he swears he wasn’t reading along, I could feel the stare.  That kind of behavior will block any writer.  AmIright?

Phew.  Sometimes we just get stuck on mad, don’t we?  I wouldn’t be hammering on these things ordinarily, but it seems that my lovely plan to blog daily happened to intersect with my having to deal with a bad attitude on my part.  I’ve been taking critiques too personally and getting too upset when people don’t share my world view to function very well.  I’ll cut it out and get over it, but before I do, here are five things that ruin a good mad mood.

1. Stoopid K-Love radio.  Listen, K-Love, maybe I want to be in a mad mood and you playing songs about God’s mercy, grace, and forgiveness isn’t what I want to hear.   Even worse is when I am mad and one of your happy slappy deejays starts chirping about how funny it is that men leave their socks out and ladies take so long to get ready.  I can’t change the dial fast enough.

2.  Intentional blog writing.  Seriously.  How can you logically maintain a mad mood when you feel obligated to write a blog post which will certainly be read by tens of people!?  Unless you are Ann Coulter, it’s pretty difficult.

3.  Kids with honestly deep questions.  It’s easy enough to brush off the shallow stuff and nurse a mad mood, but when a kid levies a deep question your way, you have no choice other than to set aside the mad mood and deal directly with the kid.  I’m not new here, so when I see a pair of serious eyes with a crinkled forehead coming my way, I run or risk losing all the mad mood momentum I have built up.

4.  When your spouse walks in the door looking worse than you do.  This one makes me crazy.  Here I am, all ready to dump my mad mood all over his head and he seems to already have had his fill.  Now who do I vent to!?

5.  This last one is the worst one and I avoid it all costs when I want to maintain a mad mood:  Prayer and communication with God through His Word.  Usually, the end result of me being mad begins when I feel unfairly stepped on.  When I pray and seek God through His Word, I often find it revealed to me that I’m a stepper too, that I am not the center of the universe, and that being mad (or anxious, worried, critical) takes up too much space in my brain and leaves no room for God to work.   I know this and that is why I try to avoid prayer when I want to feel justified in having my hackles raised and feathers ruffled.  Unless I can manipulate the prayer to make me feel good about justifying my upset, I want nothing of it.

Sometimes being mad (anxious, worried, critical) feels good.  Sure, you run people off and turn yourself unattractively bitter, but it feels good.  Avoid the five things listed above and you too can get your angry swagger on.  Now, if you will pardon me, I’m going to take the kids to the Y and try to get into a yelling match with the teenaged lifeguard about why the slide isn’t open.

You know how sometimes you are just putting the finishing touches on a lovely pity party, and then your esteemed guests start calling and saying they can’t come because they have their own problems and you can’t argue because it turns out that they have bigger problems than you?  Makes a girl crazy, doesn’t it?

I’ve known people in my life who probably never had a pity party, but I can’t say so with certainty.  To save face, I am going to approach the rest of this post as though we’ve all been there, done that, hung the balloons.

I was there recently.  Right in the middle of hanging the streamers for my “I don’t feel well and I need a vacation” pity party, I got a text message from a friend who is facing possible fatal or, at the very least, hugely negative side effects from a surgery which must be done.  So inconsiderate.  I started to take down the decorations, but then it occurred to me that I could simply change the sign and have a “my husband gave me one sugar in my tea when he knows I take two sugars.  rude” party.  My phones rings and it is one of my dearest telling me that her husband not only forgot that she likes sugar in her tea, but he also forgot that marriage is forever and served her with papers.

Undaunted, I decided to throw a “I don’t care if you have bigger problems than me, I’ll still have a party” pity party.  Sadly, I was the only attendee.

There is a difference between honest grief and a pity party.  We are all (mostly) grown ups here and I think you know what I mean.  Sometimes, the best remedy to your own pity party is to visit someone in their grief.

While the secular world might rightly offer this advice because doing so offers perspective, I think the supernatural spiritual side to this advice is more compelling.  When you have a need for compassion and you offer compassion to someone else – even as your need feels great – you get supernaturally restored in your spirit.  It’s a law of the universe just like gravity.

Pity parties happen and there’s no sense in beating yourself up for having one on occasion.  Just remember that, when you are tired of being the only committed attendee, there are other people who could use your company.

Baseball season starts up in a few weeks for Ian and we had our first practice today.  I like baseball just fine on its own, but I love little kid baseball.  Here’s ten reasons why.

1.  Little kid baseball teams are most fun to watch when they are all still green.  This makes the hits and runs something to really scream about and the errors something to crack up about.

2.  People watching is all sorts of fun at little kid baseball games.  There is every possible specie of parent there and on full display.

3.  There’s only one place to enjoy sunflower seeds.  There are no ladies on the sidelines.  We are just a bunch of cackling, cheering mothers and there’s no shame in spitting seed shells out in a pile between us.  (I have a bag in my purse – prepared for opening game.)

4.  When you plop down a sum of money at the beginning of the season, you are really buying family fun for weeks to come.  2-3 practices per week and 1-2 games means that your dance card is full and your crock pot cranking.

5.  There’s a moment when a kid makes real honest connection between bat and ball for the very first time during a game.  No matter if it sales across the fence, or turns foul, the look on that kid’s face is a once in a lifetime and I like seeing it all season.

6.  Getting a herd of ten year old boys to do anything with precision and skill is some kind of magic trick.  I like watching a good coaching team direct a ball from home to first to third and then back to home and it all works like a machine.  There’s no coach like a little kids’ baseball coach.

7.  I grew up with three brothers in a football playing family.  While football players always seemed like renegade gladiators, baseball players seem like gentlemen.  I like seeing all these fresh faced boys in their smart little uniforms with their short cropped hair.  Makes my heart pitter patter.

8.  If you have never had a nine year old blow a kiss at you while he crossed home plate, well then, I don’t think I can explain why a dirty stinky boy can make a Mama’s heart pitter patter.

9.  Watching little kid baseball has also meant that I have had to watch my kid fail, suffer the consequences, and rebound – all without my intervention.  It’ll give a lady a heart attack the first few times, but I have grown to really enjoy sitting back and letting him learn on his own and from good coaches.  Life stinks sometimes and sometimes it doesn’t – little kid baseball offers that life lesson beautifully.

10.  There is not a kid out there who is not having fun.  Most of them are trying their hardest and it is all kinds of fun watching that much effort and sheer pleasure colliding in a cloud of ten year old boys.  I am sure ready for game day.

I was a terrible nail biter when I was a kid.  I tried to quit a million times.  I recall one ghastly episode in my early teens when I tried putting pepper oil on my finger tips to cure myself and ended up with burns, but no cure.  When I was 18, I was introduced to the fantastic world of fake acrylic nails.  Why quit when I could pay a lady twenty bucks to fake it?

My shame at the evidence of my uncontrolled habit was so great that I panicked if there was an upcoming event and I had no means to get my nails done.  Like a junkie, I sometimes paid my manicurist in crumpled singles and socks full of pennies and nickels.

Getting pregnant with Mackenzie ended my habit for the most part.  Perhaps it is because of all the prenatal vitamins and pregnancy hormones – my nails grew so strong and fast that they skipped the ugly stage and went straight to lovely.  Right after Mackenzie, came Ian.  Two plus years of pregnancy meant that I was pretty well cured of the habit.  Maybe you’ve never had an embarrassingly disgusting habit and won’t understand what I mean when I say this, but I was genuinely relieved to have the monkey off my back.

Many years later, I found that I would have the occasional relapse.  It may be a small thing, really, but years of growing as a person changed my feelings about my nails dramatically.  This was about five years ago and Eric and I had a black tie event to attend.  My nails were stress bitten down to nothing.  I did not even think of paying to have them done.  I simply painted them dark red and went as is.

What I learned from the time of great shame to the time of red nail polish is this: Nobody pays nearly as much attention to you as you think.

Don’t we sometimes convince ourselves that people remember what we wore last week, so we better shake it up this week?  Do we remember what anyone wore last week?  I don’t.  I don’t remember what you wore last week, but I do remember seeing you and enjoying the visit.  If your nails were bitten to nubs, or manicured to the hilt, I couldn’t say.

My name is Eric’s Wife and sometimes I lose control of myself and bite my nails.  When this happens, I paint them a deep shade of red until they grow out again.  I’m telling you this because you may have talked to me a million times and never noticed.  I hope knowing that about me helps you to remember that nobody is looking at you with the same critical eye with which you look at yourself.