Author: Bekah McNeel

Thinking about love, pt 10: receiving

Last week I got sick. Really sick. Sicker than I’ve been in a while. Too sick to get out of bed. It’s a situation I fully dread, because it means someone else has to take over my share of the chores, meals, and kid logistics, and in addition to that, bring me water and Advil. And that person is Lewis, and he does it generously, but I still absolutely hate it.

Nothing stirs up more ambivalence in me than being taken care of. On the one hand, it’s such a gift. It’s an expression of love. It’s one of the great, tangible kindnesses offered to us in life. On the other hand, it’s vulnerable, out of control, and it feels like I’m wracking up some kind of debt. (Lewis doesn’t make me feel this way, I do it all by myself.)

First, I have to earn the right to drop the ball. As soon as I feel bad, I start looking for data to justify going to bed. I’ll try to prove that I’m not just complaining to get out of something, that I’m not wussing out, or flaking on life. I’ll offer a fever or a diagnosis or a bucket of vomit to demonstrate that your care isn’t wasted on someone who should have been tougher. And, then, even if I have the goods— like a 102 fever, projectile vomit, or a positive strep test — if you have to take care of me, I still feel like I owe you something. Not a thank you gift. A debt.

I’m not the only person who feels this way. Lots of us were raised to be tough, independent, and never a burden. And we think that’s what makes us lovable. This post sounds like a lot of introspection, and it is. But think of it like jumping off a cliff. I’m going first, so that if I don’t die, you’ll go too.

Being resistant to acts of love might not make us easier to love after all. Might make us a bit of a handful, may be a little exhausting. So why are we like this?

Reason 1: It’s difficult to receive love when you don’t trust what feels good

The famous love passage in I Corinthians 13 (most often read at weddings) describes a love that is patient, kind, humble, longsuffering, a lot of really appealing things. But the description says nothing about intimacy. It’s a description of agape love, the love we share with the world, and as such is a really beautiful and aspirational description. It describes a way of being with the world that is not ego-driven or oppressive, but is good and beneficial and peacemaking. Spiritual development GOALS.

But many of us raised in the fundamentalist church got the message that this love was all we could expect from any relationship. Love meant putting up with people and not sinning against them. Intimacy was just giving someone access to the worst of you and asking them not to leave you. You’re not looking for someone who makes you feel good. You’re looking for someone who won’t bail when you make each other feel bad. Intimate love was about sacrifice, dying to yourself, and being more blessed to give than to receive. I’m from the same branch of fundamentalism that brought you R.C. Sproul’s worm theology, and John MacArthur’s view of women, and Mark Driscoll’s philosophy of blow jobs. The degree to which your marriage was a success would be the degree to which you could just ignore your own needs and desires and give your male spouse the sex he deserves and your female spouse the privilege of staying home and not getting to, sorry having to, work.

So love, as I learned it, was just endurance. It was also the mortification of sin. Really loving someone, we were taught, was doing whatever you had to do to make them “more like Christ” (which is really code for more submissive to whatever the church’s rules are). So it was loving to cut someone off if they wouldn’t stop being gay, or counsel a grieving mother not to be angry with God over her miscarriages, or to withhold kind words from someone who had clearly made an idol of “man’s praise.” Punishment was love. I never thought that much of the song “Love Hurts” because, yeah, no duh.

I don’t think it’s wrong to say that endurance is a major component of love. It is. It’s also loving to care about someone enough to tell them difficult truths. But the picture painted by a lot of churches is little more than that. And at the same time, the church was telling us not to trust our hearts, that hearts were so hopelessly wicked that we could never trust a feeling like joy, pleasure, or desire to lead us to anything but wanton destruction.

Unfortunately receiving love, real love, feels good. It feels good when someone adores you for all the things you’re most proud of, and greets your scars and quirks with curiosity and compassion. It feels good when you can tell someone doesn’t want to leave your presence. Or when they tell you you’re amazing, and you know they’ve seen enough for that to be an honest assessment. It feels good when someone is excited to do things for you and with you. (And to you, sure, but this is a family blog.) Sometimes that good feeling burns a little, like taking in air after you’ve been underwater too long. Sometimes it’s uncomfortable, like stepping into the light. There are painful things we do for love, and difficult things we can do because of love. All that’s true, and still, receiving love, the real thing, feels, ultimately, really, really good.

But when you’re trained that what feels good is probably sin, and what feels bad is probably love, you have a difficult time knowing what you’re supposed to want, and what you’re going to get if you ask. It’s not surprising that independence sounds safer than being known.

Reason 2: It’s difficult to receive love when you don’t know what’s expected of you

If you say something nice to me, I have to say something nice to you. If you do me a favor, I have to do you one. If I collapse onto your shoulder sobbing because I’m at the end of my rope with my kids, my career is stalling, and I’ve realized that I haven’t felt joy in months…then I have to be ready for you to do the same, whenever and however that might be.

On some level, this seems right. There is an element of mutuality in love. If only one of person in a relationship ever shows up for the other in any way, that’s not a loving friendship. However, it’s easy to confuse the mutuality of love with the trading of favors or flattery. For a time in my early 30s, I lost sight of the difference, and it led to a really lonely season in life. Being useful and being loved are so, so, so very different. Being useful isn’t bad. Camaraderie is largely built on usefulness and shared goals, and it’s a really lovely kind of bond. But it’s not, on its own, love. When I realized how few of my relationships transcended a shared goal, I was heartbroken, and for a long time, I assumed that anyone who was nice to me was looking for a teammate or an ally, not a friend.

This bred a certain amount of cynicism, and I started having a hard time recognizing real offers of friendship love, because I was so wary of “what’s in it for you.” I even suspected Lewis — who absolutely loves me — of just trying to keep me happy so he could have a peaceful home life. I’m not proud of these defenses, but they were well earned and hard learned. Talking those protectors down from the castle walls is a real trick these days. It makes it difficult to receive love.

I need the protectors to chill a little, but I also heed their wisdom: It’s important to know what the other person is offering in order to receive it correctly. If they’re offering a little quid pro quo (in the room where it happens), then I want to counteroffer accordingly. If someone is offering help in limited quantities, I don’t expect them to check in later. If an acquaintance is offering a good time, I go to the party and take my tears elsewhere. It took me a long time to spot the difference between those offers and the offer of real love.

It would be great if I could give you three easy signs to sniff out a limited offer as opposed to a love offer. I don’t have that. More than likely we all have to build that instinct the hard way. But, if I were to give it my best effort, I’d say this is the best way to tell if something is offered in love: there’s no correct response. You’re free to say yes or no, and to be happy or sad about it.

Reason 3: It’s difficult to receive love if you don’t believe people like giving it.

This is the trickiest of all my reasons.

No expression or offer of love is ever perfect. Even the most loving offer is usually accompanied by some little bits of selfishness or ego. People cannot read my mind, so they rarely know exactly what to say. Most of all, no single expression of love is ever going to magically heal the wounds. Each offering is like an herb to mix into the salve, but the hand that stirs the pot can only be Divine. I know this.

I know this, and still there is a part of me that believes accepting imperfect love will leave me wounded.

I met this part of myself in my therapist’s office, when I was telling him about my tendency to over-give as a way of proving that the kind of love I want isn’t unrealistic. If I surprise someone with a party, or give a friend the most thoughtful gift, or fly across the country to be at a family member’s event….I’m proving those things are do-able. I’m not asking for them in return, and I really do delight in doing them, but there’s one part of me who goes along with the grand gestures just to demonstrate that the things she wants aren’t unrealistic.

As I outlined my various gestures, my therapist, who knows the full cast of characters on the receiving end, reflected on all the stories and updates and things we’d been working through. “Bekah,” he said gently, “I think you are very loved. It’s there. You just need to accept it for what it is.”

And of course I burst into tears, because I am embarrassed by my own ingratitude. But I’m also afraid. I’m afraid that if I accept the love that’s offered, then that’s it. It doesn’t grow, it doesn’t evolve. The untouched parts of my heart stay remote and isolated. The questions of my own worthiness remain unanswered. I forget that I’m holding the Divine hand making the medicine, and worry that that ingredients alone aren’t enough.

If someone buys me sweater hand knitted by a Scandinavian artisan, in my favorite colors, but it’s the wrong size, there’s a little part that grieves because even though I feel so seen and so known, the little part believes that if she accepts this sweater then she’ll never get a sweater that fits.

This belief is entirely internal, a negotiation between me and God. I think that this scared little part believes that God and everyone who loves her are just trying to shut her up. To satiate her and keep her from litigation. There’s a part of me that believes she has to fight for every good thing. She has to earn it and deserve it, and that to say “yes” to imperfect love is to say “this is all I deserve, and thus all I’ll ever have.” If I cannot earn or deserve the love I want, if I can’t be so amazing that the people around me are inspired to shower me with the affection I want — that’s when I’m tempted to resort to a far more sinister tactic, one engrained in capitalist, colonial cultures. I’m tempted to withhold approval or gratitude. We are trained to believe that it is scarcity that inspires action, and that once a person’s needs are met, they’ll stop putting in effort. The carrot only works if we can’t catch it.

When you don’t believe that people delight in giving you good things, you think you have to elicit good things from them, either by so thoroughly “wowing” them with your performance, or by withholding what they want from you.

The great irony of all of this is that the carrot works better if you get to eat it. Abundance, love, and safety do actually inspire growth. Scarcity doesn’t. Not in nature, not in love. The cycle of love scarcity puts our imperfect offerings in conflict with our unmet needs. The cycle of abundant love allows each love offering to blossom like millions of unique flowers in a sprawling garden, none of them supporting the entire biome on its own, but each making it more wonderous.

The only way to start the cycle of abundance is to be the one who drinks from the bottomless Source. Learning to see love as abundant has led me to yet another new quest in life, one I’m just now beginning. I’m trying to experience the abundance of God’s love. I’ve always known it theologically. But I’m on a little quest to know it, like with my heart and body. More on that next time…

Why Mommy Rides Rollercoasters

Last week, I had a big cry. It’s been a long year of serious things, all demanding that I stay in complete control, and create infinite softness for the people around me to be as intense as they need to be. The weight is not too much—it never is—but I had started having trouble finding the life spark. I’d suppressed my fire for so long that the pilot light went out. The spirit graciously generated patience, help, encouragement, and goodness—but no joy. No energy. I was feeling like a soft, receptive, flexible shell with no guts.

So I decided we needed to go to Six Flags. I needed to ride a rollercoaster.

I’m not a theme park person. At all. I hate crowds, I hate gimmicks, I hate exiting through the gift shop. But I do love rollercoasters. I love them the way I love bungee jumping and cliff jumping and jumping out of trees into rivers and skiing and skating and driving fast. Friends convinced us to go to Six Flags last year, and it turned out to be one of the most restful, happy days we’d all had together, maybe ever, because it turns out we all love rollercoasters. As I am suspended upside down, or plummeting straight toward the ground, I cannot repress my smile. I don’t scream (unless it’s to entertain my offspring seat-mate). I grin, because this is how I like to feel—like I’m on a ride, not in control.

I want to feel big things, and rollercoasters are designed to make you feel big things. They activate the primal parts of your brain that keep you from falling off cliffs. The parts I live to override, because on the other side of “CAUTION” there is ecstasy, a side of life that has to bump shoulders with death. And that’s ultimately what I think I want — I want intensity so big and immersive that my own frenetic brain might as well be lying still.

It’s tempting to see thrill seekers as fun people. But I’m actually not that fun. I’m not the first one on the dance floor. It takes a LOT of alcohol to get me to the karaoke stage. I don’t play video games or beach volleyball. I am not carefree, or laid back, or light hearted, or easy going.

It takes a lot for me to lose myself or to enter a state of flow. To feel as though I am being carried along by something, rather than powering it off my own fuel supply. That’s why I like jumping off things—because I love gravity. I like rollercoasters because they carry me along without effort. I like infatuations that consume me despite my best efforts to concentrate. I like a conversational flow where every participant converges, creating a whole greater than the sum of its parts. I think this is why I’m attracted to things like magic and God and psychedelics. Because I’m longing to set myself down for a moment and feel the pull of something bigger.

Somehow activating my amygdala’s YOU ARE GOING TO DIE response is the only way for me to circumvent my frontal lobe’s KEEP EVERYONE HAPPY goals. What my therapist would call “threat” and “reward” in my parasympathetic nervous system are, for me, permanently entangled. I get anxious when I’m too happy, and euphoric when I’m falling off a cliff.

But my love of big feelings has had to modify a bit to accommodate the big feelings of my children. The needs are bottomless. The emotions are unfiltered. The stakes feel always and eternally high. But all of that intensity seems to require someone who can absorb, not amplify, it. My kids need someone steady, flexible, and at ease so that they can ground their own volatile, rigid, and roiled moments. Kids cannot handle adult levels of intensity, so I am constantly trying to decrease my own volume, pungency, and luminous flux.

Sometimes my instincts get the job done. I was playing yard football with Asa, and he was getting frustrated, because I wasn’t *really* trying to beat him. He wanted me to hit hard, run fast, and not ask him if he was okay when he grabbed his nose and screamed. He really didn’t want me to smile at him or tell him “good job.”

“I want an opponent, not a MOM!” he yelled.

“I’m sorry, love, I can’t do that. I’m your mom always.”

He stormed off and sulked. Finally I agreed to play for real. With utmost intensity. (I gave him about 60 percent, and no smiles.)

The game with his non-mom opponent lasted three minutes before he said, unnerved, “I really want you to smile again.”

My kids are so used to having a soft place to land that they cannot recognize their need for it, and yet become completely disoriented without it. Asa can’t see the connection between the ever-presence of nurture and his desire for bigger, tougher challenges, but I can. I’m not smothering him, I want him to go get the wind knocked out of him. Just not by me. That’s not my role. He’s an intense kid in an intense world, and it’s my job to make room for that. I don’t always do it well, but I’m learning.

I treasure that role, and really value the new skill of learning to be an axis instead of a cosine curve, or the candle instead of the bonfire. It’s required nonstop spiritual growth, because I have to learn how to feel alive without standing on the bow the ship, screaming “come and get me” at the squall. By nature, I want my joy to be euphoric. I want my sadness to gut me. I don’t want to vent, I want to rage. I want work to be fulfilling. I want love to be transcendent ALWAYS. There’s not space for all that when the kids are rioting or whinging or in need of co-regulation. So we have to learn to be moved by more gentle energies.

I fell for the narrative that true maturity meant being content with something more bland, more compromised, more dull, all in the name of stability. But that’s not the only way to grow up. In fact, that narrative often serves the creation of drones to keep the cogs of business- and politics- and power-as-usual turning.

Maturity, as I am learning to understand it, is the ability to see love in its subtleties. To be able to modulate in the service of others, and as part of big, bold, intense goals. Maturity knows when to go big and when to go home—and sees both as success. Yes, sometimes instincts and age make this feel natural. Sometimes the fine tuning of the spirit is so deeply satisfying, I wonder how I ever endured the ticker tape parades of my own big feelings. Sometimes I can bask in flickers I would never have seen. But there are still times that it is a a slow and painful rebirth — less like I’m being involuntarily expelled into a new life, and more like a baby bird growing strong by pecking my way out of the shell. Building muscles as I’m being reborn.

There are moments when my new muscles aren’t enough and I fully just lose my shit at my kids, not because what they are doing is so horrible, but because I cannot absorb anymore. My softness has bumped up against my molten core. I have been the mitigating factor, the peacemaker, the arbitrator, the fulcrum all day long, and at some point the full intensity of my desire for someone to just go a long with the motherfucking plan that I meticulously and painstakingly plotted out…results in a scream. I’ve stopped this for the most part (therapy! muscle building!), but it happens every now and then. It happens when I run out of buckets of water to keep the fire small.

There are other times when the smallness of the fire, the shallowness of the sea, the gentleness of the breeze make me feel empty. Not tender and pliant, but brittle and lethargic. Being soft and gentle requires energy, and those high voltage energy sources are inaccessible.

All thoughts are now interruptible.

Skiing, skating, and traveling with kids is slow and difficult.

Driving kids is about safety and sanity while they play the same song 70 times and bicker and tell you to turn around a look at stuff.

Romance, once you have kids, gets very discrete and discreet. Nobody in this phase of life is going to stay up with you until 2 am and talk about life and God and the yearning of your soul.

You have to find somewhere to stash them if you want to jump off a thing. Because that’s another major shift. Kids change your relationship to risk. They lack the skills and judgment to stay safe much of the time. I love a thrill, but I’m not reckless. I want to know that everyone involved is competent enough to survive, and my kids are, in general, not quiiiiiiiite as competent as they are adventurous and curious, though the gap is closing quickly. But it’s my job to do some of that risk-assessment for them, and I’m famously not great at risk-assessment for myself.

That’s why we love rollercoasters. If I’m going to put my children’s life in anyone’s hands, it’s definitely going to be someone in a STEM field.

After a recent trip to Six Flags, we got home and Lewis realized he’d left his water bottle in a gift shop. I had other errands to run, so I went back for the bottle. It was there, right where he left it, and I was about to walk back to the car when I decided that the lost bottle was God’s way of delivering an extra dose of the medicine I’d self-prescribed. So I went and rode a rollercoaster all by myself. It was one of those where your feet dangle in the air and you hang from the track. It looped and twisted and sped and for about 90 glorious seconds, while I happily surrendered. I could briefly match pitch with the universe, and my intensity felt weightless.

Thinking about love, pt 9: friendship

This Wednesday, my son Asa asked if we could go eat a restaurant owned by the parents of one of the kids at his school. We showed up at Cuba 1918 (if you’re local to San Antonio you must go, it’s a gem) and the whole family happened to be in the restaurant. One brother was a server, a family friend was in the kitchen, mom was seating people, and dad was running open mic night. His school mate was having dinner, a special named after him. Asa thinks this whole family dynamic is fantastic, because it’s just like Bob’s Burgers.

I chatted with the mom while Asa and his schoolmate played, first by the jukebox, then on the back patio. When we left, I said, “Well that was fun! You got to have a playdate on a school night.”

“Yeah, an unexpected one,” he said. Then he said the words I’d been hoping to hear. “He’s my friend.”

Asa has been in that unlucky place lately where your friends keep moving away. I’ve been through the cycle myself a few times, and it’s really painful. But, being 8, he’s got plenty of opportunities to build new friendships, but that’s a vulnerable, difficult process at times. Most 8-year-olds are not as analytical as Asa, so most kids would probably endure this uncomfortable season with less concerning (terrifying) explanation of their loneliness. Asa, however, has skin-dived to the depths of his young soul and come back with emotions most of us cannot articulate until our late 20s, but also with his own philosophy of friendship.

Asa has been unwilling to use the word “friend” for most of his present acquaintances. He will use “companion” or “playmate.” Occasionally he will let me know that there’s a growing percentage of friendship with someone. When he told me that the kid from school was his friend, I knew that this meant something significant.

“Sometimes we argue,” he said. “But that’s just part of friendship.”

“What are the parts of friendship?” I asked.

He listed five things, and I think he got it right.

Grief

It was so striking to me that this was the first thing my 8-year-old listed as part of friendship. But honestly, I think he’s right. The difference between a friend and someone you just have fun with, a playmate, is how they relate to your grief.

It’s so easy to spend time with sunshine people. It’s so easy for us to slip into roles of making each other laugh, or distracting each other from our problems. That’s a critical part of friendship, which we’ll discuss in a moment, but it’s not a standalone. Real friends make room for the unruly, disorderly process of grief, in all its inevitability. They don’t need you to wrap it up in a neat little conclusion to make them feel better. I’m notorious for trying to give my own grief a summary thesis, complete with my three point plan to move past it. My real friends don’t need that.

In every deep friendship I have, I can remember the moment grief entered the relationship, mine and theirs. They are too intimate to tell on a blog. Sometimes it was a big, obvious meltdown. Sometimes it was an undeniable tragedy. Sometimes it was simply learning about the oldest wounds, and bringing the medicine without being asked.

Happiness

Friends do make you happy though. It’s not their job, it’s just a byproduct of the connection. The little zap of glee I feel when I get a text alert from someone tells me a lot about our friendship. I do think that there has to be a certain amount of mutual enjoyment to sustain a friendship, but it doesn’t have to be manufactured. A friend isn’t someone who treats me like a client or guest to be “made happy.” It’s someone whose existence makes me happy, and the luckiness I feel that this existence includes me.

It really helps when you make each other laugh and enjoy playing together, and its even better if that happens in the course of making yourself laugh and playing the way you like to play. And, yes, I guess there are times when I do put in the effort to do things just because I know it will make my friends happy. But not because I have to, but because I like knowing that the sparkling water of their heart just got shaken up and erupted into bubbles.

Arguments

The fact that Asa added this component to friendship made me really proud. But I think the actual credit goes to Bill Watterson, the author and illustrator of the Calvin and Hobbes comics. We’ve been reading through my complete collection of those comics strips, and it’s impossible to miss how much Calvin and Hobbes fight, to the point of the classic swirling brawl with feet and tail sticking out amid a flurry of onomatopoeia, and yet remain best friends. Psychologists point to lion cubs and wolf cubs and other little animals whose play involves some amount of biting. The idea that a relationship can hold even genuine anger is actually really beautiful, and something Asa understands better than I ever have.

One night, when it was time to stop reading Calvin and Hobbes, Asa was mad. He pleaded and scowled and ultimately sulked in his bed. I asked if he wanted me to leave, rather than stay and scratch his back until he fell asleep.

“Do what you want,” he said, bitterly.

“I want to stay with you, but if you’re angry and want me to leave, I want to respect your wishes.”

“Ugh. Mom, of course I want you to stay,” he snapped. “You know I can be angry and love you at the same time.”

So there’s that. But there’s another component to the arguments part of friendship as well. Recently, as I’ve been touring my book, which is all about the stories we tell about divisive political issues, every single Q&A will include this question: How do I convince my (insert family member or friend) that their politics are (insert synonym for evil) without ruining the relationship?”

I don’t have the answer to that question, and for a long time I’ve struggled with my inability to give tips and tricks for navigating those conversations. People really do want help. The first problem is that no one responds well to being told they are wrong, and if your goal is to change their mind to your political opinion, then you’re basically trying to have a rational discussion in an arena completely run by emotions. So good luck.

But the bigger issue, I think, is with the second part of the question, “without ruining the relationship.” And for that, I believe, you have to scrap the debate you WANT to have altogether, and first address the vulnerabilities and wounds in the relationship. Because I will tell you, I love to disagree and work through differences of opinion with my friends. Even “arguing” in the formal sense of the word (not the emotional connotation) can be really fun when there’s security in the relationship. I have been discussing volatile political topics with friends a lot lately. Agreeing is nice — it’s a confirmation that we share values and perspectives. But disagreeing is wonderful too, because it reminds us that our friendship is sturdy and safe.

Companionship

I’m a little mystified by Asa’s distinction between friendship and companionship. Companion seems to connote emotional closeness. But for him, I think it means physical closeness, or just doing things together. Someone to keep you company and ward off the loneliness. Like a pet.

And I think that this willingness to accompany each other is vital. Companionship in friendship is that investment of time and presence. We make sure that our friends are not facing the world, or the funeral, or the medical procedure, or the challenging day, or the coming out, or the break up, or the bad news, or the cross country road trip to move house alone.

Energy

Obviously, I was delighted when Asa added this final element of friendship. By energy, he means someone who can keep up with him, physically. He’s really into feats of strength at the moment and all he wants is someone who will arm wrestle, do push-up contests, box, or sword fight. He want someone to match his energy.

I do too. I don’t want to challenge my friends to an arm wrestle, but I do think that it’s important to be able to match each other’s energy.

How you relate to the world, time, commitment and vocation make a huge difference in friendship. Unlike Asa, I have a hard time with people who want to compete all the time. Or fix me. Or people who are eternally on the warpath. Or flaky. Or casually confrontational. I don’t like to talk shit all the time (just every now and then). While it seems like I’m being excessively picky, let me tell you that I know what’s difficult about my energy, too. I’m not for everyone. It’s easy to enjoy my more entertaining energies, my people pleaser bits. But that’s for the masses. For the chosen few, something exhausting awaits.

I’m introverted, but intense. I can have a sustained conversation about heavy topics for hours. Days even. I want to see your soul, and stay up late talking about it. When I love someone, I tell them explicitly. I travel to see them. I buy them gifts and surprise them and all of that love-bomby stuff. And that energy is really difficult to match, I know that. It’s why I spend a lot of my life wondering I’ve run people off, given them the yucks (can we please thank No One Wants This for bringing back that term), or smothered them. It makes me waaaaay oversensitive. It’s also why I don’t commit to many people, because my commitments are 1) set in stone, and 2) energy intensive.

I’m lucky enough to have a few friends who’ve figured out how to sustain a connection to that much voltage. I’m incredibly thankful for them. And I’m incredibly thankful for Asa, the friends he’s making along the way, and the friend he’s learning to be.

Thinking about love, pt 8: desire

Like any good exvangelical, I have a complicated relationship to desire.

Growing up, believing that my essence was rotting, putrid sinfulness, I grew to assume that if my crooked heart wanted something, that something must be sinful. Be it fatty foods, a boyfriend, or to be acknowledged for my contributions. Even the act of wanting was illicit, in a way. Wanting something was a sign that I was discontent with what God had already given.

Desire also immediately calls up the idea of sexual appetite, which we evangelikids of the 90s were taught to DENY and SUPPRESS. So there’s that. Even the word “desire” sounds like it should be wearing a negligee.

I’ve left the doctrine of total depravity and purity culture behind, but every time I dip back into religion or spirituality of any kind, I run back into this fraught relationship with desire. The Stoics, the Buddhists, the Hindus…for all of religious history, they’ve framed desire as the great hindrance of spiritual enlightenment or virtuous living. It’s led me to believe that there’s something true about this common thread.

But at the same time, the best things I’ve given this world have been fueled by desire, by a deep hunger for something that is not yet fulfilled. I desired to be married, which led to the existence of Moira and Asa. I long, with my biggest emotions, to see justice and spiritual liberation for our world, so I commit work toward it. I crave time and space to write things that mean something to others and give them fuel for their own quests. I’ve told Lewis that I don’t really feel like myself unless I can feel desire.

So what is this potent, mystical force that apparently keeps me alive but unenlightened?

Eros- the life force

The current Yoda of happy monogamy, Esther Perel, recently posted this on social media: “Eroticism is not sex per se, but the qualities of vitality, curiosity, and spontaneity that make us feel alive.” It’s the sense of being guided by something other than our will and reason. It’s the difference between running a marathon and racing to the door to greet the long awaited guest. The difference between climbing a mountain and free falling on a trampoline.

As someone who tends to power through most of life, always weighing and measuring and making sure things are in balance, it’s easy to see why I get such relief from the self-propulsion of the eroticism Perel is describing. To feel momentarily overtaken not by what I’m building, or what needs to be done, but by something that is whole and complete outside of me inviting me to partake of it. It’s like an additional internal person comes to my aid, but her whole existence is to desire. Otherwise she sleeps.

The idea of life-giving desire pairs well with the way Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt’s talk about Eros in their book Getting the Love You Want. It’s a pretty traditionally motivated book. Their goal: Help couples stay together and be happy. You expect to find a lot in there about commitment and work. And you do. But they also acknowledge the role that desire has in our choosing and learning our partners.

They describe Eros as the life force. The urge to be connected to the world (and its inhabitants) around us. To do. To know. To ask. To explore. To experience. To be loved. Not just with our minds, in theory, but with our senses. I would include in “the senses” that magical, intoxicating sense of another person’s attention or affection.

Eroticism, it would seem, is pleasure brought by something outside, independent of the feeler. It is a response, not an achievement. We experience an impulse to bring our whole selves into a connection with the thing that pleases us, but until the point of connection, is only an idea. Erotic desire, maybe all desire, is that conversation between the possibility outside and the reality inside.

Yearning- how to meet the depth of yourself

Until I was married, yearning was my auto-setting. Sometimes for a specific person. Sometimes just for connection in general. Not only for sex (remember, former evangelical here), but I yearned for love, to know and be known, to be wanted in return. I didn’t date after high school. Not in college. Not in grad school. Not after. I didn’t even experience temporary reprieves from the sense of deep, impossible loneliness and the ache to see it end.

I was desperate to end the yearning, but when I did (or rather when Lewis did) I realized that I had traded in a valuable way of experiencing the world and myself in it. Yearning had been, for me, the sense that was sharpened by the limitations of the other senses. It was miserable, but I was fully surrendered to it, and I was used to seeing my own darkest corners with clarity. In love and happiness they were softened by the haze.

There’s a a beautiful, complex cavern in the soul that only opens its passageways for ache. There are colors we can only see when they are splashed across our unmet desires, and the loves that we wish we had. Music sounds different when you can hear the frequency of longing. The hollow in your ribs contains worlds.

Queer writers write a lot about yearning, especially in contexts where their love is considered illicit. I think this perfectly captures the essence of longing, because it’s an unstoppable, even natural desire that doesn’t have the context to manifest. Virtue and reason are no antidote for yearning, because our deepest knowing is that the object of the yearning is irreplaceable, even if forever withheld. My colleague Ezra, in a gorgeous review of the latest Sufjan Stevens album, wrote this: “Queer yearning is a well-documented phenomenon. It’s evident in the music of Frank Ocean and boygenius, in movies like Portrait of a Lady on Fire and Moonlight, in the experience of anyone who has fallen in love at the wrong time, or in the wrong place, or with the wrong person. When love cannot be expressed, it must be felt from across the room. When partnerships are restricted by religion, culture, or law, they must be imagined instead of lived out. It’s no wonder why queer people do so much yearning. For many of us, it’s the only option.”

I’ve never been queer, but I’ve fallen in love at the wrong time, in the wrong place, and with the wrong person(s). I have wanted things I wasn’t allowed to want. I’ve also been held in limbo before, not only waiting, but wondering.

It’s not that I want to go back to yearning, but there are nights when street lamps cast that certain light on the sidewalk, when it’s raining and cold and I’m running anyway, when a Bon Iver song comes on in a public place, and my sense memory for yearning comes back. I remember the shape of the cave, the brilliance of the color, and also the sharpness of the pain. Yearning was being alive in a different way.

And sometimes I still come alive in that way. Sometimes the sense memory shows up and I find that it has a landing place.

Yearning seems to be spiritually productive. Some mystical traditions—those more steeped in dualism that puts a separation between God and humans—use erotic language to describe the desire for God. They describe the not-yet of union with God in a fragmented world as a state of passionate desire. It’s awkward, frankly, but also stunning and arousing. It’s beyond metaphorical. It is the same process of becoming one that gives intimacy its sanctity. The act of coming together, of unifying, is itself sacred whether between people or with the Divine.

I was struggling with the Buddhist (non-dualist) idea of desire being the root of suffering, and a friend, who is a devout Buddhist, pointed out that it’s not the wanting, it’s the grasping of the thing, allowing possession or satiation of the desire to triumph over virtue, connectedness, and peace. Forcing something instead of letting it happen. For me, yearning is the experience of that desire without possession. It allows for stillness, waiting for the desired to arrive of its own agency. The work that it does, as it waits, is to expose more and more of ourselves to consciousness, opening more of us to ourselves and universal connection. The cavern comes to life, and we see that God is in there too.

Hunger- make the masters tremble

When I think of the conflicted relationship between religion, even nondualistic spirituality, and desire, it really comes down to control. The problem with desire is its strength. We use “want” in such weak ways in English, in fact we juxtapose it with “need” almost as a way of diminishing it. But when you change the word to hunger, it gives you a better glimpse at what the sages were worried about. Hunger isn’t something you can scold your way out of, like a parent asking their child whether they “need” a Nintendo Switch or whether they “want” a Nintendo Switch.

Our appetites, our hungers, are linked to our survival, and it is very difficult to tell where the needing ends and the wanting begins. It’s not always as clean as a handheld gaming device. Because we can’t not want food or sex, even if we can keep those wants within certain boundaries. Further, the ability to satiate our hunger is power. More power means that meeting needs and meeting wants become equally do-able, and thus, harder to differentiate. We’ve seen this unfold in places of extreme wealth and extreme poverty. Unmet needs are stronger than rules, virtue, and altruism every time. Even when those “needs” are essentially the hunger of the ego.

When you think about it, eating and sex, our two strongest appetites, are the primary voluntary actions that contribute to the continuance of our lives as individuals and as a species. Of course they are strong urges. Of course they pose a threat to the boundaries placed by religion and spiritual practice. But I do wonder, and always have, if it isn’t about wanting things less—less food, less sex, less life—and instead wanting something else more. What if the check on our appetites isn’t renunciation, but love? What if the journey is about harnessing all that intensity into the service of love?

Energy- your warp and weft

It’s nice not to have to war within yourself between serenity and desire—so I see the appeal of living totally in that internal connection to source. But part of our spiritual work in the world is to be just that, in the world. How do we propel that work when the world is too big for one person to do it all? A well-attuned experience of desire has to be part of what guides us to the work we need to do. Not the only thing, obviously, or we’d all think it was our role to be a wealthy benefactor.

Theologian Frederick Buechner said, “The place God calls you to is where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” We discern God’s call by letting ourselves feel both desire and compassion. Be wounded by the needs of the world, and energized for healing by the craft, practice, and work that lights us up. We are all fibers in the tapestry, and the hunger of the world is the warp, the vertical thread that doesn’t move on the loom except to rise and fall with the heddle (the thing that moves up and down and keeps the warp organized). Our gladness is the weft that weaves in and out of the warp at different intervals to determine the design. That’s us. The weft, and our desires move us through the warp of life.

Ultimately, that’s why I can’t fully get on board with full relinquishing of all desire. It’s obviously nuanced and multi-faceted as I cultivate Eros, remember yearning, manage hunger, and direct my energy. And I think it’s good to be able to step into the all-fulfilling Self, into communion with God. As I kick off my next decade, I’m trying to find a little space where I can actually get a spiritual reprieve from my own intensity. Just to go deep into my soul, get a little breather, and then come back out to the world for more of the loving I need to do, and the desire that fuels it.

Thinking about love, part 7: nurture

Last Wednesday night, I noticed that Sir Fluffy Meatball, our six-month-old guinea pig, was looking a little listless. Nicknamed “Zoomer” the little guy was looking a lot less…zoomy… than usual.

By Thursday morning he was barely moving. Last night’s carrots sat untouched. He drooped over my hand as I lifted him out of the cage.

The kids had been back in school for one day. After two weeks off and endless holiday disruption before that, I had so much work to do. But instead I was going to spend the day finding a guinea pig vet (harder than you think), and then sitting with Sir Fluffy Meatball while they examined him, rectal thermometer and all. Then coming back two hours later to pick him up and sitting through the lengthy tutorial on how to syringe feed a 10-day course of antibiotics, pain meds, and liquid diet; how to bathe him while he was too sick to clean himself; how to keep him separate from his buddy, Snuggles; and what exactly I would be monitoring for in his scat. I am now an expert on guinea pig feces.

And then they brought me the bill. $300 on a $50 guinea pig. Not to mention the host of new supplies we will be buying now that we know Sir Fluffy Meatball is prone to bladder infections.

For a moment, my rational brain, the brain I have depended on to keep me safe and well-respected for so long, was enraged. The money! The time! Why does this crap fall on the mom?!?

But I looked at Sir Fluffy Meatball, our Zoomer, and saw the living, grunting manifestation of everything I’ve been learning for the last three months. So I write this with a little bit of liquid meal replacement smeared on my sleeve.

Not a Nurturer

I never thought of myself as a nurturer. Before I got married, I wouldn’t even get plants, because I didn’t want anything dependent on me. Part of this was internalized misogyny. I didn’t want to get sucked into the caring roles. I wanted to do things. Things that I’d been told women could not do…like think and communicate Important Thoughts. Argue. Get paid.

But more than that, as bell hooks has noted, care, strictly speaking is not the fullness of love. You can put food on a table, bandage a wound, or even donate blood to someone without being deeply invested in their thriving. You can do that stuff because it’s your job or your obligation. I didn’t want to be a caregiver, but even more I was loathe to give anyone access to my emotional and mental resources. To have my well-being linked to anyone else’s wellbeing was simply too vulnerable. But this is what the nurturing aspect of love requires, that link of life forces.

Thus, nurturing is inefficient and messy. It creates space for other people to not-yet-be-fully-healed and to take the time they need. It requires an unspecified amount of energy and an indeterminate number of resources. As someone with a very weird relationship to physical and emotional resources (living in constant fear that they will not be there, but also not doing anything to stockpile them because it also feels outside my control), giving someone access to me as nurturer felt very scary.

To me, good relationships meant independence. Two beings who didn’t need each other, deciding to gift one another with discrete acts of love and friendship. The Japanese proverb “there are formalities between the closest of friends” was for me, the ultimate ideal.

Wait, Maybe a Nurturer in Spite of Myself

Then I met a series of people and animals who taught me what it actually means to nurture, and how different it is from what I’d been avoiding.

I met a spitfire child who needed a special adult to walk a long and bumpy road to adulthood.

I met a man who felt like no one would ever understand him or love him, and who simply could not imagine a safe place to be known.

I met a dog at death’s doorstep who literally chased me home one morning in a last-ditch effort to live.

I met a friend resigned to a life of loneliness.

None were projects or tasks. I adored them all from the first moment I met them. My soul loved them, but I also just liked them. Even the terrifying Rottweiler sprinting toward me at 7 a.m. with no one around to hear me scream. So it wasn’t altruism, and I didn’t “save” them. But neither was it simple affinity. Because there were definitely moments when walking away from each of these relationships would have been much easier and left more room for my Important Thoughts. And none of these relationships would have been the same if I had maintained my stance as a committed non-nurturer.

The more I spent time with the child, simply showing up and holding space, the more joy I found in their growth. They are still a special part of our family.

The more I met resistance and isolation with persistence and connection, the more the man began to delight in others, including me. We got married.

The more ailments we addressed with the dog, the more devoted and protective the dog became.

The more I reached behind the austere demeanor of my friend, the more I was invited into their warm and attentive company. A place of mutuality that I still treasure.

None of these relationships were, or are, all about one person’s needs. None of these four beings were invited to take endless advantage. I stood up for myself and set boundaries. Each of them has, at this point, given me as much life and joy and safety as I have given them (maybe more in some cases). But none of them were, in the beginning, equally independent and emotionally resourced. The child was a child. The man and the friend were, frankly, as bad off as the dog. Loving each of them was like walking out onto a tightrope suspended between skyscrapers. My Self, with her confidence in the Spirit, would charge out onto the tightrope, absolutely knowing that this Creature (human or canine) was so incredibly beautiful and necessary in the world, but also so desperately in need of a certain kind of, in the words of Sally Lloyd-Jones, “never stopping, never giving up love.” I knew how to connect to that love.

But out on the tightrope I would occasionally pause and look down. I would see the long drop of resources I don’t have, the time this might require, and wounds I might be opening myself up to. My pre-existing wounds would scream about being unappreciated. My fears would list the number of things that I could be doing with this energy and time. My deeper fears about what these beings could to do to me.

And now I have children, which has only widened the chasm to the size of the Grand Canyon. The need for nurture is as huge as I had feared, and my resources never feel matched. I live almost every day on a tightrope, and on the good days I don’t look down, but there have been long stretches where I’ve stared down into the canyon as though I were searching for a single pebble somewhere at the bottom. Caregiving is still difficult for me, but, thankfully, in the last year, I’ve been able to merge some of the Spirit-driven energy with my conscious experience of nurture, and pull my eyes back up.

Instagram Self-Care as the Enemy of Nurture

Before I get to the mystical experience that pulled my eyes back up most recently, I want to say a word about therapy-via-meme. I really enjoy funny and insightful memes. They make us feel like other people are as weird and wounded as we are, which is nice. But too often people end their grand unified theory of wellbeing with what is, essentially, a quote they read on Instagram. These pithy things that get shared the most because they resonate the most, meaning they make us feel the best, meaning they aren’t actually pushing us into greater consciousness as much as they are affirming that our woundedness is actually the preferred state of the world and we have no reason to change.

It’s well intended. In our protector-driven attempts to repair the ravages of patriarchy, we often advise women to be extra protective of themselves. To cut out anyone who needs more than we want to give. And for sure, most women and people socialized in femininity need better boundaries. But I do think Instagram and self-care culture often cheers for those boundaries without the subsequent opportunity to grow.

Not every discomfort is life-draining. Not every uneven relationship is toxic. The setting of boundaries and negotiation of needs and expectations is how we stay connected, and there are times where it requires you to expand your window of tolerance—the range of emotions you can hold without going into overwhelm or numbness. You cannot nurture someone beyond what your window of tolerance will hold, because the first thing you give when you nurture is safety—the assurance that they are loved for who they are, not who we want them to be. But I can’t hold real people if I cut out every opportunity to expand my own window of tolerance.

No one can make you expand your window. That’s part of the problem that breeds more memes. The millennials are all sharing: “you have to cut out your toxic parents or you’ll never be healthy!” And their boomer parents are sharing: “forgive your parents, because they did the best they could.” Friend One posts “cut out anyone who isn’t as committed to your peace as you are,” and Friend Two posts “your real friends will let you be an absolute nightmare and still love you.” I have paid so many thousands of dollars in therapy to learn that all of that can be true and none of it is helpful without a lot of context. It makes love sound like a constant balancing of scales, a constant war over resources. Like…commerce.

We’re just horrible at encouraging each other’s spiritual growth without using bald marketing tactics (shame, fear, and authority). We are so bad at offering resources instead of selling them. Growing your window of tolerance and your ability to nurture has to be something you do through your own healing, your own agency, and your own connection to the internal resources that were always there. And it’s work. No one can demand it, but beware the people telling you not to do it.

Giving Life

Here’s the mystical experience that has totally changed the way I think about myself as a nurturer, and radically expanded my window of tolerance.

At the end of September, I was struggling with some work-related stuff. All those Important Thoughts and things that I would rather do than nurture were being frustrated, and I was feeling unimportant and left out. Naturally, I blamed it on the fact that I give so much of my time to caregiving and have tailored my work life around wife/motherhood. Easy target.

I set an intention to change my relationship to nurturing and my growing feeling that I was hauling people behind me on the tightrope, exhausted and depleted.

Sitting with the full moon, trying to release some of this bitterness, I felt invited to visualize the professional affirmation I’d been wanting. I saw a huge dining hall, and long table piled with food and all around it were the various gatekeepers I’d sought approval from, laughing and discussing Important Thoughts. As I watched, the table transformed into a rotting pile of garbage, and the gatekeepers withered into skeletons. It looked like something from a fantasy novel or a pirate story. Clear as day, the question came, “Why do you want a seat at the table of death, when you were born to give life?”

A few weeks later, unrelated, we got the guinea pigs as a way for our kids to practice nurturing and as a way to co-regulate emotions, because animals are good at that. And it began working immediately. Our children have blossomed under the care of the rodents.

That week I went to see Paige, the energy healer, and in a meditative state, I could clearly hear guinea pigs squealing so loudly that I asked, “Does someone have a pet in this office?” There were no animals in the building. The day after that, I went to a friend’s house and her incredibly well-behaved dog somehow broke out of her enclosure, fought her way through a closed door and several other barriers, and ran to me, placing her paws on my arms in a sort of hug. We sat like that for a while while my friend watched, gobsmacked at the dog’s uncharacteristic behavior.

Two days later our 12-year-old family dog died very suddenly, and the guinea pigs were there to comfort the kids, and I understood my friend’s dog’s intuition.

A few days after that, I drove out to East Texas to report on a death row inmate about to be executed. The friend who gave up a whole work day to drive with me spent the entire time tending to my nerves and occasional overwhelm, a steady infusion of grounding and safety. It created space for me to give myself to the intensity of the emotions involved in the story, to breath life into it, and to write possibly one of the best pieces I’ve ever written. A week after that, the inmate received a stay of execution, and a source close to the case told me they were pretty sure the story played a small role.

I’m not telling you any of this to proclaim that I am saving lives or rescuing people. I’m not at all. Not the four lives I mentioned earlier (child, man, dog, friend). Not the inmate on death row (I genuinely credit his tireless legal team who made a compelling argument about unconsidered evidence). Not even the guinea pigs or my own kids.

I’m relaying this wild series of living and dying and loving because it radically changed the way I view nurture. I am not saving lives; WE are giving life. This connection we have to each other, to Spirit, to God, to Earth, to Creature, this is the life-giving connection and it’s what we are made for. Nurture is being that connection for someone. Not carrying them across a tightrope, but grafting them into a root system of constant nourishment and growth. The nurturer is also part of the system, but not its Source. I look at my friends, my family, the animals who both nurture me and are nurtured by me and I realize that the full moon was right, this is what it means to give life, and this is what I was born to do. We all were. When the work comes from this, the work too, is life-giving, not ego-seeking. This is where work and love come together.

And so, with that, I’m going to go feed Sir Fluffy Meatball another syringe full of liquid meal replacement, because that’s what I was born to do.

Thinking about love, pt 6: expression

In 2018, I submitted my childhood journals to a show called Mortified and a group of professional comedians picked their favorite entries for me to read aloud on stage in Austin. What made them laugh, they said, was the vocabulary. In the vocabulary of a 19th century war widow, I expressed the desires of a 10-year-old, whose imagination for how to fulfill those desires was shaped by the writing of middle aged women. It is wildly funny.

I am really lucky to have a highly verbal brain. I started talking early, which reduced the conflict between my parents and me, as I was able to tell them “I want a cookie” instead of standing by the pantry and screaming incoherently. So, naturally, they thought of me as extra compliant (in addition to my actually being very compliant).

In school, being verbal made me sound smart, so I was treated as though I was smart, and thus I was challenged and grew smarter.

I was able to articulate my wants and needs, convince people to do what I wanted, argue my case with teachers and parents, and deliver withering insults when the time was right. I was the class president type…so I was the class president.

In middle age, I can come across as highly evolved and self aware, because I can describe every feeling, instinct, and intuition in my body. This is partially a trick, of course, because I have yet to fully learn the difference between identifying things and integrating them, but I can dazzle you with accurate descriptions. And so they let me write books.

The world was built by verbal people for verbal people, so it looks like I’m a lot better at life than I really am. Nowhere does this show up more than in loving. I talk a big game about love, I’m really good at exploring its contours and commitments, and I say loving things to my people that do genuniely help them thrive and grow. I’m good at the verbal part of the clear communication a good relationship requires. But like everything else, I’m learning that there’s more to it.

Love Languages

We’re all familiar with the idea of love languages. Whether you buy into Gary Chapman’s categories— quality time, words of affirmation, acts of service, touch, and gifts—or you see it more as a moment by moment “what does my person need right now?” sort of equation, the idea of a love language has to do with expressing love in a way that others can receive it, communicating it. My post about the elemental energies in love had a lot to do with how we show and receive love.

From the same root network of love, various flowers of expression spring up, guided by our unique situations and resources. There’s freedom and creativity and so much goodness that comes from the variety of expressions. We love the gilded lilies of words, but there’s so much beauty in a fragrant patch of jasmine, or a sturdy and stalwart thistle.

The important part is that love is expressed somehow. Love cannot just be felt in my own little private heart. I can’t assume that others know how I feel if all I do is think about how great they are. And it has to be expressed in a way that the beloved can receive. That’s the bitch about communication: it’s not just about one of us, it’s about both what I need to say and what you need to hear. Good communication, in itself is such a gorgeous conduit for love because it requires the desire to connect and it is enhanced by all the same things that enhance love: honesty, attention, care, and openness. Sometimes clear communication requires more than words, and actually may not always require words, but it always requires intentional, agreed upon signals. You can hug another person tightly, and feel them squeeze back. That’s a form of agreement. You can show up at someone’s door step with soup, and they can say “how did you know this is what I needed?” And that’s agreement. It’s a lot harder to have the tougher conversations without words. It’s really difficult to explain how someone hurt you, or ask how you can make amends without using words. I think I’m always going to speak up in defense of words.

But no expression of love can cover up for a lack of love. You really can’t fake it. We know the hollowness of saying, “You’re my favorite person” while actively neglecting their needs, or the slow death of relationships where someone does their duty but never expresses kindness or affection. We know that a single expression of love, in any language, cannot make up for explicit signals of unlovedness.

When communication feels off, I think we find ourselves looking for the expressions of love that live underneath the classic “languages.” Deeper expressions that work through the mechanics of things like words, time, gifts, service, and touch.

Priority

This is probably my number one non-verbal expression of love. In fact, this is the thing, to me, that turns the language of time into an expression of sacrificial love.

Before I got married, I didn’t have a “number one.” I swam in an ocean of communal needs and desires, working in ministry with no hierarchy of whose broken heart, broken car, or broken promises I needed to address. Knowing that I was “free” of husband and children, the people in my life called up on me indiscriminately.

When I became engaged to Lewis, we were out to coffee one day and he was sharing something deep and painful that had happened in his day. My phone started ringing and it was someone who needed something. I felt torn. These folks were used to me picking up the phone and being at their side, and I felt the impulse to do as was expected of me.

Then Lewis said, “Do they have someone else they could ask? Because you’re the only person I can really talk to about this.”

I suddenly had a number one, and I had to begin a whole new negotiation. Now I have three number ones and it’s really complicated, because half the time they all need different things, AND they would collectively absorb my entire body and soul if I let them. Being devoted to the transpersonal goal of human thriving and justice, I do sometimes have to balance their needs with the other things I’m called to do, as well as with my own survival. Having other people in my life I care about, I do sometimes have to ask whether being the field trip chaperone is the right call, or whether I should use that day to be with a friend who will be observing a tough anniversary. It’s not simple calculus, but the outcome of that calculus has to be orderly priorities.

Lewis and my kids do not get every second of my time, or my undivided attention every second that they are alive. But I am the only wife and mother they have, and so when there are things that only a wife and mother can provide, I’m there, letting them know that being their wife and mother is something I take really seriously, and delight in. What’s important to them is important to me. And I’m committed to helping us all align our priorities with love for the world, and pursuing the good of our neighbors.

My friends, though they do not get to be number ones, also get priority status. When planning our annual girls’ trip, the four busy participants realized early on that the perfect day wasn’t going to appear. We were going to have to prioritize being together, and say no to some other things. Some of the deepest love I have felt from friends is when they have communicated to me, “I’m incredibly busy, but I want to make sure I see you, so lets put something on the calendar.” OR “It was difficult to clear this day to help you, but it was really important to me to do it.” Some friends will show me a crowded calendar and say “see anything on there that would work for you?” I don’t need them to say “oh it’s nothing! No problem at all!” That might make me feel less insecure about asking for help or time, but when we’ve been honest about the effort it’s taken to prioritize our time together, the quality time has been amplified. Prioritizing others is inherently sacrificial, and it expresses love.

Interest

Lewis and I were recently discussing what makes a good gift (it being Christmas and all, this is on our minds). I love gift-giving. I love it so much, but only when I’ve done my homework. I only like giving gifts that I know will be useful, delightful, or honoring to the recipient. Which means that when I’m giving you a gift, I’m really telling you how interested I am in you. I’m showing you how much time I’ve spent learning you, noticing what lights you up, what you wish you had, or where your life has earned an upgrade. The gift’s intention is to communicate: I am interested in what makes you, you, and I’d like to contribute to you being more you.

That’s not the only way to communicate interest though. Not every person’s essence translates easily into tangible things, and not every person is good at connecting “what makes you, you” and tangible goods.

Some of the most loving people I know express interest by learning about what their loved ones like so that they can talk about it together. They watch movies they wouldn’t usually, either because they want to share the experience, or so they can learn more about the beloved. What we like says a lot about us.

Interest in our communities and strangers is also how we love them. It makes our acts of service acts of solidarity, because we’ve aligned ourselves. It takes listening, it takes work. But you cannot be a disinterested ally, co-conspirator, or comrade. You must invest in the learning.

As someone who creates a lot of content in the world, I am also genuinely touched and feel almost overwhelmingly loved when my friends and family read or listen to my work. It’s different from strangers with mutual interests—that’s my audience. When people who already know me well take time to just listen to me talk or read my work, I feel honored. It’s an expression of love that encompasses time, effort, and value.

Vulnerability

Really, vulnerability is the core of the core of expression, the giving of love. Prioritizing someone is vulnerable, because you’re admitting they are more important to you than other things. Showing interest is vulnerable because you are placing yourself in the position of the learner. You want to know more, connect more, and to want without demand is inherently humble, because it admits that you don’t already have. It’s vulnerable to make time for someone, to open up a hole in your day that, if they chose not to fill it, will simply be empty.

Touch requires vulnerability too. To take the first step toward offering a hand or a hug. To lean in for a kiss. Whether asking for consent in that very 2023 way, or a tentative half-way gesture waiting for someone to cross the other half…those seconds between offering and being taken up on the offer are the most vulnerable known to man.

But the vulnerability that gets me the most—and it is my most potent medicine—is speaking my intimate feelings. The hard part about being as verbal as I am is that I can build fortresses of nuance and double speak. I can construct escape hatches of sarcasm and irony. I can choose my words to ensure plausible deniability and a laid back detachment that belies the utter chaos in my chest as I await a friend’s reply about a simple lunch plan. I can protect me at the expense of you ever knowing how deeply, deeply loved and wanted you are. Saying “I want to see you.” Or “I miss you.” Or “If you weren’t in my life I would be sad.” Or “I’ve been thinking about you, are you free for coffee?” is terrifying, because it shows you where desire has opened up a soft place, and gives you the power to decide whether or not love will be withheld.

In my best moments, I speak honestly from a place of love. I tell my people I love them, how amazing they are. I say yes to mentoring and supporting and holding space. I put my best effort into anonymous projects. When I am in Divine connection, I can do this without the need to receive anything in return, because whatever love I give is the love I have. I am Self-sourced. But there is a little wounded part in me, the wound I mentioned in part one, that feels the twist of the knife every time I do that. She panics, wondering if the intensity of that truth will push the beloved ones away, or the willingness to give freely will become an emotional Black Friday sale at Walmart. She screams to me “you’ve exposed me!” Her protector part says, “they’ll take advantage” if they are colleagues, or “they’ll take you for granted” if they are intimates.

But the secret strength of love is this: that little wounded part is the one who has truly sacrificed for love. She has felt every ounce of love I’ve expressed, and cried because she feels so exposed. I have asked her to be strong, to trust Self, to look away, so that I could love my people, love strangers, love the world. And the truth is, with all the priority, interest, and vulnerability I’ve received, in all the varied expressions, it’s time to ask her, the wounded part, to sit and look through them with the eyes of God, like presents on Christmas morning, and consider how loved she really is.

Thinking about love, pt 5: fidelity

The summer before my junior year in high school I worked at a Christian summer camp. It was the best summer of my life, and I am pretty sure it’s the summer I first “fell in love” in that very coming-of-age way that you do when you have a new driver’s license and spend half your life in a bathing suit. Love was very much on everyone’s mind, because my boss, one of the women’s directors, had gotten engaged to one of the men’s directors and it was all just sunshine and roses. They got married in the fall and throughout the next year, we’d get coffee and check in. I noticed almost immediately that the sunshine was growing dim. When she filed for divorce the next year, the storm clouds were undeniable.

Her needs were not being met, she said. That didn’t shock me—I knew the guy, and I knew divorced people. Not every marriage is good, I reasoned, gotta choose better. But then, a frustrated mutual friend and mentor to us both, delivered what would be, for me, a stunning blow: “It’s marriage. Nobody’s needs get met.”

And that’s when, I think, the seed was planted for 1) my own premarital panic attack, and 2) everything that I’m about to say.

Before you go thinking I’m in an unhappy marriage…

Listen, I love being in a committed partnership. I love predictability, connection, and closeness. Also, Lewis is easy to champion, because he’s funny, and humble, and sweet, and he likes me. So committed am I to our vows that I am going to recite them to you, reader, throughout this loooong long post. Because even though we got married knowing each other less than a year, we wrote some killer vows, not the usual hot mess of “we wrote our own vows.”

It’s uncanny though, because I will tell you that my imagination of marriage—panic attack notwithstanding—was completely unrealistic. The vows really did outsmart me.

Lewis and I are happy because we’ve allowed our commitment to grow and evolve. We have acknowledged that it was desire that brought us together, not just desire for togetherness, but desire for a certain kind of life. We share a desire for meaning in our work, quiet contemplation, and community. Lewis also needs and desires things I cannot provide—like professional goals, certain kinds of space, and deeper appreciation of some subjects than I can share—and vice versa. So it’s been important to figure out what it means to love each other in those desires, and what it means to be faithful when our desires extend beyond what we had previously imagined marriage to be.

“I, Bekah, take you, Lewis, to be my husband”

Just like the vows suggest, the question of “why get married?” or “why commit to a partner?” is actually really personal and contextual. It has to do with our personal purposes and the gifts we have to offer. In the context of sacrament, marriage’s importance is derived from the Divine love it is supposed to embody. In the context of survival of the species, partnership is a commitment to giving kids what they need. In the context of the American legal system, marriage is taking responsibility for one another’s property. All of these are important things, but if you said that the union was only that, you’d have a mob after you.

We, the 21st century mob, want all of those things to flow out of what the union is at its essence. We want our sacraments, childbearing, and laws to reflect the ideal of what marriage IS.

The bummer is, I don’t think we know what marriage is, essentially. I think marriage has always been constructed around the purpose that it served, the container that it gave to love. The legal classifications are more negotiable now, we’re asking more questions about what kinds of adult relationships best serve children. And I think that’s a good thing.

Churches (where many of us get our imaginations of marriage) have a terrible habit of taking what’s available to us today, casting morals around it, and then claiming that these are the morals that have always been in place, always should be in place, and are somehow etched in the mind of God. I don’t want to debate the biblical absolutes of 21st century marriage, because I really think it’s a misuse of the Bible. And religion has a weird history with desire. I spent too long associating desire with sin, and not just questioning my own desires, but unquestioningly assuming they flowed from my evil, selfish, heart. That said: true faith informs our ethics of marriage and partnership, and guides us in the very deep sense of what it means to love in any context, including the context of desire. I’m interested in marriage or committed partnership as a context for Divine love, because I think it affords a surprising amount of latitude for the particulars, if we’re willing to consider them. In whatever arrangement you find yourself, love. Seek their best.

As sociologists have pointed out, marriage has evolved over time. It has served different purposes in different contexts: financial security, political alliance, social status, romantic ideal, family foundation, and, as Eli J. Finkel pointed out in his book The All or Nothing Marriage, it’s now a means of self-fulfillment. We typically only add purposes, we rarely subtract. So we’re putting a tremendous amount of pressure onto one person. At the same time, as therapist Esther Perel famously pointed out, at least two of those purposes—Eros and security—are mutually exclusive in the same moment. In order to get them both from the same person for all of time, we have to be relational shapeshifters who know how to cultivate both distance and closeness. We must support but also destabilize, open up but also hide, share but also withhold. We create a budget, trade off who gets to take the new job, help balance each other’s family obligations, and then also place obstacles between us so that the sexual desire stays alive.

We know that we believe in the all-or-nothing ideal, because we cry equally for the woman whose husband no longer expresses sexual desire and for the woman whose husband does not allow her to share her deepest fears. We think it’s romantic to “marry your best friend” but we have to remind our spouses that being treated like we are their parent is the opposite of an aphrodisiac. We can’t agree on what desire in marriage is supposed to feel like or what commitment requires of us, so we just went with “everything I could ever want and nothing that I don’t.”

“To delight in your happiness, and rejoice in your growth. To be sad when you are sad, and to help and comfort you“

This is where I could take the evangelical turn and, with my former mentor, say “marriage isn’t about your needs!” And certainly not your wants! Grow up!

But that’s not the route I want to go. Just because something cannot fulfill your every need or desire doesn’t mean you should pursue it only as a form of martyrdom. First of all, you don’t have to pursue it at all. There are plenty of ways to love and serve people without the lifelong vows, without being propositioned for sex right after changing a diaper, without the in-laws. I do not think marriage is more noble than any other life lived in love. If marriage sounds awful to you, don’t do it.

I also think that we do, many of us, have a desire for some kind of safe place to be known and accepted for who we are. Our souls and our survival instincts agree on the idea of committing to someone else’s highest good, and receiving that support in return. It’s possible that many of us realize that in order to grow, we will need to let another person see us as we are, and feel that exposing ourselves in that way without the commitment to stay connected is too terrifying.

The happiest our marriage has been was not when it was “about our needs” But our happiest times have been when we cultivated a love that inherently considers and desires to meet those needs—and thus is willing to let our ego step aside when we cannot meet the needs. He is air, not earth. I am earth, not air. He craves harmony, and I crave progress. He dreams, I do. His “what ifs” are utopian. Mine are plans already half in motion. My delight is not in being all to Lewis, it is in being the one who affirms and delights in his happiness and growth, and helps whenever I can. He does the same for me. We have the all-or-nothing marriage, but it’s not about what we can be for each other as much as it’s about what we desire for each other.

“In difficulty I will run toward you. In strife I will forgive you. I will trust you and tell you the truth.”

Marriage or committed partnership cannot be everything, but neither is it nothing. Commitments like this are a unique opportunity to love someone, giving them the kind of acceptance and security that will allow them to accept themselves more deeply, and extend out toward others. Love of any kind expands the Divine in us. Whether it’s economic security that allows you to be generous, emotional security that allows you to be bold, or a partner who marches alongside you so that you’ll never be alone in the mission. (Notice I said “or” not “and.” Your marriage doesn’t have to provide all that.) Ideally you receive whatever kind of love you give in return, and everyone is feeling safe and held and expansive. If that sounds like the kind of core commitment you want to make, marriage is what our society offers you.

Would I love to see that offer extended to other constellations of partnership that did not have any interest in whose genitals go where? I do. I would love to see community surround and celebrate more ways for people to intimately commit their lives to each other. Whether they are sharing every secret, sharing a bank account, making medical decisions, raising children together, or having sex, I want us to expand our visions of what intimacy and commitment mean. But for now, if you want people to know what you mean when you describe your partnership, you’ve got limited options, and marriage comes with the most legal benefits.

But loving someone enough to commit to their highest good and take the inevitable challenges that brings can look a lot of different ways. I think that we should be able to say what our marriage is about, and what its core commitments are.

I think that you should be able to get married to have and raise children. Or for a green card. Or to increase your financial security. Or for status in your patriarchal community. Or for companionship. I think those are all legitimate reasons—if clearly communicated and agreed upon—for two people to get married. But they need to outline what they are and aren’t committing to, and what faithfulness looks like in their context.

“And while I promise to choose you over anything else in this world, I will not look to you to provide what only Jesus can.”

Before I get to the “over anything else” I am first just going to say that the “I will not look to you to provide what only Jesus can” part of the vows has outlived my evangelical intent in writing it that way. I would still say that the Divine Creator is the Source of all love, both permeating and transcending what we give to each other. Which is actually what makes the rest of this conversation possible. Onward.

We really, really want to get absolute on this “over anything else” bit. I feel it. We want to say that faithfulness is not circumstantial. That it is given by an authority outside us. We want to say that the imagination we have is God’s imagination, and the boundaries inherent to it are God’s inherent boundaries. But we actually only really believe that about sex.

Allow me to explain. This is going to be a bit of a ride, so hang on.

Fidelity is, in some ways, unique to each marriage.

I have a personal bank account. I happily contribute to family expenses, but I also do not have to tell Lewis how I spend that money. He does not know how much my Pilates classes are. We generally don’t spend tons of money without telling each other, because we value each other’s input, but our threshold for unilateral purchases is very high. Our spending has, for our entire marriage, been our own business.

If we had committed to making all financial decisions together, as many couples wisely do, or had set a limit on the dollar amount that could be spent unilaterally, then abiding by that agreement would be a matter of fidelity. If, in that context, he found out I’d spent $3,000 on accommodations for a girls’ trip and then hidden it, he’d be right to say I’d broke my promise.

If Lewis were a video gamer or if I was an avid golfer we would have to set boundaries around how those time-consuming interests intersect with our vows to choose each other over all else. I have friends who are not bothered to be golf widows, and couple friends for whom video games are a togetherness activity. We all get to choose how we relate to time and attention in our marriages. It’s a mark of how much we’ve let capitalism weigh in on this that even the most marriage-centric purists don’t consider it abandonment when a partner works 50, 60 hours per week. If a wife delights to reap the financial benefits of her workaholic husband, or vice versa, no one is going to tell them they are in an open marriage with their careers.

Sometimes fidelity is a matter of degrees.

For me to demand that my husband share all of my weird-ass interests, talk deeply with me about all of my wild-ass feelings, or allow me to complain about him, to him, at any moment…we’d agree this is irrational. If my husband was too busy to watch a movie with me, or didn’t have the bandwidth for me to talk about the difference between ennui and lassitude, or if he maybe walked out of the room while I was mid-rant…would we call that unfaithfulness? He promised to run toward me in difficulty. He promised to delight in my happiness. Sure, but obviously this interpretation is unreasonable, and probably not even healthy.

But if I brought him my favorite movie, and said “it would mean the world to me if you’d watch this.” If I needed to share a feeling that was weighing on me so heavily I felt I could not breathe. If I needed to tell him the small thing he’d done that hurt me. Then, it might be fair to say that he would be living into his vow to love me by making time.

Conversely if he were to belittle and disdain my interests, refuse to acknowledge my feelings, and insisted on continuing harmful behavior, we might consider that a betrayal. If he continued to emotionally neglect me, I would say he was being unfaithful. (Lewis McNeel would never, by the way. This is where he shines brightest.)

What is important to me, in our marriage, is not that I know his every move and expenditure, it’s not that he spend more time with me than anywhere else (though that had to be negotiated early on), it’s not that I’m the only woman who ever catches his eye. What matters to me—how I apply our vows—is that he will support me as I think, feel, and grow. He will make time, take the kids, stay awake, and steel his heart in order to let me know that I am accepted and safe. He will not reject me because of something I believe, feel, or desire (or when I talk about theoretical open relationships on the internet).

Lewis maintains that all he wants is for me to like him. I like to think I can give that a little pizzazz. In addition to making sure he gets time with his friends, exercises, and sees his therapist, I also surprise him for his birthday, and sometimes just for fun. Lewis is a subject I study, and have become expert in, for the purpose of knowing exactly what would make him feel special and seen. I’ve stuck by him through difficult seasons and given him two children that he wanted very, very much. That’s what I was agreeing to when I married someone who said he didn’t think he’d feel fully fulfilled unless he was a dad.

So each marriage, maybe even each partner, has unique priorities and degrees of fidelity. Should exclusivity be a measure of fidelity?

A few of years ago some friends from church started a group text that has grown into a full blown best-friendship as we supported each other through the hardest and most transformative years of our lives. It was the first place I felt I could truly and fully share ALL my feelings without judgment. Even my feelings about Lewis, when I was furious or feeling unseen. The intimacy in that group text (which also includes as much face time and in-person time as we can possibly afford, being now scattered across the country) is pretty deep. I tell them things I don’t tell my husband.

But it was never a threat to Lewis. He values that friendship very much. Our friendly intimacy has never been what he might consider unfaithfulness—even though I do sometimes go to them for things I might have otherwise gone to him about. Why? Well, first, Lewis needed a break. I am a lot. I mean, I’m like this all the time. He’s happy for me to disperse the intensity. Second, and more to the point: I’m like a 1 on the Kinsey scale. Maybe a 2 if you put a LOT of stock in Tig Notaro. He was okay with those female friendships because there was very low probability of sexual connection.

By contrast, I went on a trip out of state a couple of years ago, and asked Lewis if he’d think it was weird if I went on a hike with a male friend who lived in that state. This friend and I were very close when we were single, but never romantically involved. Lewis balked. Just the idea of sexual compatibility made him feel territorial over the kinds of experiences I had with this man.

We had to talk about that. The intimacy I shared with my groups of girls is way more potent than a hike. Women have left their husbands for intimate girlfriends, and sexuality is dynamic, so it’s not even really about the threat to the marriage. Lewis, to his credit, has done the hard work, with me, of asking whether our boundaries are based on our own insecurities, or the actual strengthening of our marriage. He’s opened himself to the ways some male friends can nurture and care for me in ways that he can’t—based on their unique gifts and desires and, in some cases, his own exhaustion. Watching him evolve has been, frankly, quite a turn on.

He’s even acknowledged that what the Greeks called ludus—flirtatious love—is a potent source of energy for me, and that, similar to full-heat Eros, ludus requires a pretty unique mix of familiarity and uncertainty. Banter. Innuendo. I live for that shit. Lewis and I enjoy our fair share of ludus, but it’s not as potent when you already know you’re going home together to fold laundry. Or when you’ve just collapsed onto his shoulder cried your eyes out about how mean one of your kids is being.

There’s risk of sexual desire developing in sexually compatible, ludus-heavy relationships, sure. But that risk exists just by being a person out in the world though. We’ve all seen the ridiculousness that ensues when “avoid attraction altogether” is how we maintain sexual exclusivity. But desire also doesn’t mean that you cross that boundary. We did promise sexual exclusivity when we got married. Fidelity, for us, requires that our marriage to be the container where sexual desire can serve the purposes of love, until we decide otherwise.

And I think we get to decide. Lewis absolutely HATES these hypotheticals, but I subject him to them all the time: If something happened and I was no longer physically or emotionally able to have sex, I wouldn’t want Lewis to live the rest of his life without it. I wouldn’t want him to only have casual sex, or tear through half the state, either. I’d want there to be some way for him to give and receive love in that way. To experience that particular bond, even if it’s no longer with me. I would hope that he would not abandon me, like we’d still have our home and kids and love and serve each other in all other ways. I would ask that anyone who was bonded to him in that way to refrain from trying to steal him. I would hope that their shared imagination for their relationship would not be tied to sexual exclusivity as the basis for all other exclusivity. Even as they became inevitably close, I’d hope that it would be an expansive bond that included me. I would want to know and love that person. Other people (most people) feel differently about all of this. That is fair.

I, personally, think the meaning and specialness of sex does not come from exclusivity. It comes from the way we love and serve each other through it. Sex is special because it is generative (it literally gives life) and pleasing. It creates a bond—though not the eternal, unbreakable bond the church told us. There are other ethics besides exclusivity. Like mutuality, generosity, responsibility, even commitment—it doesn’t have to be monogamy to be a commitment. Non-monogamy and boundless promiscuity aren’t the same.

Exclusivity certainly strengthens my bond with Lewis. But it’s definitely not the foundation or even the core of our bond. The core of our bond is the commitment to be for each other. So that’s the big question: could having sex with someone other than your partner be, in any way, a benefit to your partner? Only you and your partner can answer.

Until death parts us, with all my spirit and body, I am for you.

So I guess this is my argument: In a world where marriages are expected to be ev-er-y-thing, most of us already have open marriages. We have emotionally open, socially open, spiritually open, and financially open marriages. We have boundaries around that openness—we don’t want them to undermine our commitment to our spouse. But that is just as much an invitation to look at the demands we have placed on our spouse as it is a reminder to make sure we are fulfilling our duty.

I promised to always be “for” my husband. To align myself with his best interests. My intimate friends—and sometimes my therapist— will validate my complaints about Lewis, but they also support reconciliation ALWAYS. The day they start cheering against my marriage, that’s the day this friendship violates my vow to be “for” Lewis. I used to imagine that to utter any complaint about him was a violation, but then I had to ask if the mountain of resentment was serving him any better.

I know that like 90 percent of people reading this will think I’m entirely wrong about monogamy. There will be some argument for the objectivity of marriage or the duties of partnership. And most of us have had our imaginations formed by particular visions of sexual exclusivity, and if we are in relationships that match that vision, we’ll want to keep it that way.

But we also have really high divorce rates. Lots of people have harmful affairs. Many languish in their marriages, and love struggles to extend past their own day to day survival of each other. My friend wasn’t all wrong when she said “It’s marriage! Nobody’s needs get met!” But I think she was definitely looking at the problem, not the solution. For those whose marriage is either in need of air, based on legitimate earthy needs, desperate to move like water, or consuming them like fire, I think we need to have a discussion about what we imagine a good marriage to be, and what other human connections might sustain it.

Thinking about love, pt 4: authority

I’ve been asked lately, for a book club, to find my guiding principle. What is the goal that shapes my life? For me, that’s the easy part. It’s love. It’s always been love. Love God, love others. Not like emotional affection, but active, seek-your-best, establish harmony, shalom-seeking love. But that quest, per the book we’re reading, Life Worth Living, begins with a question: who do you answer to? For me, then, who gets to say whether what I’m doing is loving? Who gets to say what love requires? And that, dear reader, is where it gets messy.

Authority demanded Obedience

In my first career—a short lived and ill advised foray into Christian ministry— “loving” meant pointing people toward the moral and ethical structures of Christianity as interpreted by current discourse among pastors and preachers. Those pastors would say their authority is “the Bible,” but I didn’t tell a single damn college student to marry pairs of sisters, pillage Jericho, or wear a head covering. The real authority was the discourse about the Bible, and it included a love that was often painful and even cold at times, in pursuit of “alignment with God’s purposes ” or, for short, “God’s will.” I owe about a million apologies for my participation in the discourse, but I was also being eaten alive by it.

I was bad for others, and I was bad for me. Those purposes of God (for women) as defined by the heavily capitalistic, patriarchal cabal of leadership were pretty simplistic: “Deny your desires for anything that feels good until what feels good is volunteering at church, pleasing your husband, and raising babies at home.” In that awkward time when I was not married, that meant no sex and using my free time to support women who were volunteering and having babies, or in some other way get more people to go to church. Any love, attachment, or desire that did not further these ends this was temptation. If was lust of the eye, lust of the flesh, or the pride of life: the temptations resisted by Jesus after his time in the wilderness.

In this season, I took my name-brand advanced degree and spent it raising my $16,000 per year salary, and regularly having my writing and work dismissed, diminished, and demeaned. I treasure the lives of the college kids I mentored, but professionally I was constantly, and egregiously disrespected. But, I told myself, this was what love required, that I starve out the idol of ambition. The idol of respect.

Idealism demanded Perfect Selflessness

My ministry imploded, and I gave myself to ambition. I worked two jobs, hustled, networked, and traveled. I met people who re-awakened my soul and my imagination. I rekindled a love for not just the world, but aspects of the world I’d been told to ignore or run away from. The purpose and desire and delight of that season was so heady.

And then I had children.

My imagination of motherhood was one of deep nurture, in which I would delight in the intimate knowledge of their needs and my unique ability to meet them. I would feel the glow of that life-giving bond cascading onto my marriage, and onto grandparents, aunts, and neighbors. The reality of motherhood was near constant conflict between their needs and mine. They needed to nurse while my nipples were bleeding. They needed to be held while I desperately needed to sleep. Lewis, who is now the most amazing partner in the whole keeping-the-children-alive project, was not fully *there* yet. I had gone from the wife who believed that my purpose was fulfilling his every dream (at the occasional expense of my own), to the mom who believed that my purpose was fulfilling my children’s every need (at the constant expense of my own). Lewis was not yet adjusted, and because he was used to depending on me to shine like the sun, he did have some legitimately unmet emotional needs.

When my children cried, it felt like an indictment. I literally said, about Moira, “She wouldn’t cry if I hadn’t somehow failed to meet her needs.”

Friends, she was two months old. There’s nothing a two month old is better at than crying.

I struggled every time I left the house, even though I quickly learned the truth of the third-wave feminist axiom: working makes me a better mom. It was good to take some of the intensity off of them, to go get my complete thoughts and achievement-oriented energy out somewhere else. But I also felt rotten for having that need. I felt like it was selfish, not my selfless ideal, to need anything that was more than simply “to see my children thrive.”

Love, in this version of family life, required me to have no needs outside what was fulfilled by meeting the needs of my husband and children. It required me to be superhuman—not a thread in the tapestry of our life, but the loom on which is was woven.

All I can Be is Faithful

When my youngest was two years old, I took a career risk that ended with me unemployed and freelancing while stuck in San Antonio, one of the most difficult places in the country to build a freelance career (or a journalism career at all, for that matter). Meanwhile I was being mom to two toddlers. The scope of all I would not be able to do, the ambitions that would not be fulfilled, the impact unmade, would often overwhelm me. I’d feel the need to strategize and create contingencies. To somehow prove that I had not thrown my career away, and stolen time from my children all for nothing.

And then, miraculously sometimes, I would feel a calm connection with God, and I would think: just do what’s in front of you with integrity. Do the best you can, and trust that the next thing will come.

It became my mantra to this day: Just be faithful.

My career has grown more slowly than I’ve wanted it to, but with great joy. I have pursued not only projects that were “good” in the noble and moral sense, but ones that brought me pleasure. I have found the place where my delight and the shalom of the world intersect, and in that found the small part I am to play as a single instrument, limited but unique, in the symphony. My role is small, but it is not demeaning or subservient the way my ministry was. It is guided by both desire and Spirit, and a constant commitment and practice to bring those two things more and more in line. The more I cultivate connection to Source/Spirit/God, the more these tiny notes are imbued with the significance of the song of the universe.

Faithfulness is also all I can do at home.

What faithfulness requires with my children is an ongoing revelation. They need me to keep them alive, and to affirm the deep value of their lives. They need me to do my duty and feed their bodies, but to prioritize the connection between us that will feed their souls. Moms are all different, and we manifest our love and care in different ways. The same actions can come from striving perfectionism in one mom and from exuberant love in another. My friend loves making these ridiculously adorable lunch creations for her kids—to their mutual delight. She’s not trying to prove anything. She also travels for work a lot, and goes out for drinks with friends. She does other spiritual and emotional things with and for her kids as well, obviously. All in freedom.

My mutual delights are 1) adventures based on the kids most obscure interests, and 2) talking about “stuff that matters.” I enjoy talking to them about God, sex, and universal basic income. Whatever they want to ask about, they know they can ask. Openness is our jam. Gourmet dinners are not. We watch too much television. I lose my temper more than I want to. Sometimes I sit in the car in the grocery store parking lot and listen to podcasts because I’m not ready to go home and interact with anyone yet.

A lot of times 1) what my kids want, 2) what I enjoy giving, and 3) what is best for them are ALL at odds. They want to watch f-ing Mr. Beast on the Roku channel, I enjoy letting them binge Bob’s Burgers with me, and really they should have been off screens an hour ago. This is the normal dilemma every parent knows. We all do our best to prioritize long term goals, but fall back on short term sanity when we need to. We are faithful to the project of giving our kids the best we can, and that is going to mean easing up on the ideals sometimes. It certainly means rejecting those authorities whose interest in your core relationships is financial or political. Or really even those who don’t share your goals.

I have a very hard time really believing that I, with all of my shortcomings and not-enoughness, am the right mom for my kids. They need me to be present, but also to step back when I’ve become a destabilizing presence. They need me to tend my own shit, so that I can help them grow into adults who can tend theirs. Would it be ideal if I were never myself an emotional typhoon? Yes. But refusing to acknowledge the typhoon (because taking time to care for myself might rob them of some nugget of constant maternal nurture) is the recipe for disaster.

I get the concern, which I’ve mostly heard grumbled by unhealed people, that a mom doesn’t have the luxury of tending to her every wound. Sometimes we have to just grit our teeth and do what our kids need. I mean sure, if they are crying and we want to cry too, maybe we tend to their tears first. But also there’s this fear that if we allow ourselves to say “I’m doing this because I need to” then we will say that about everything, and before you know it, we’ll get all pedicures and piña coladas in the name of self-care.

But might I suggest that all that obedience training in our youth…and the imagination of selflessness in our families…is actually what leads us to think that we cannot trust ourselves to know the difference between needs and wants? That we don’t know where faithfulness ends and martyrdom begins? Or subservience? I think we need to talk about reclaiming goodness of desire in the context of faithfulness.

Speaking of that: you may have noticed that discussion of marriage was conspicuously absent from this post. Marriage was nibbling around the edges, but I didn’t really GO there. That’s because it’s about to get its own post. Because that’s where the big test of desire and faithfulness happens.

Remember that pleasing my husband was ingrained in me as a core purpose. Remember I was told that marriage was about duty to God, and my desires couldn’t be trusted. In the ideal of family life, I felt like any need Lewis could not meet was a need that I should not have. ANY NEED. Conversation, companionship, intellectual stimulation, excitement, desire, adventure, laughter, logistical assistance, help around the house, emotional support. I’m going to devote a whole other blog to that list, honestly, because I truly think that we, culturally, have been evolving the wrong way on this for a long time. We’re heaping more expectations on to one person, making marriage some kind of one-stop shop for every form of human connection AND AT THE SAME TIME reducing the goal of marriage to sexual monogamy. I have a whoooole thing about this and I’m going to write about it as soon as I have dress picked out for being burned at the stake.

Thinking about love, pt 3: weights and measures

Sometimes my son and I play a little word game. I will start with “I love you as high as the sky” and he will say “I love you as far as outer space.” That’s fairly standard mom-child fare, but then we see how weird we can get.

I love you as deep as the Mariana Trench.

I love you as loud as a rock band.

I love you as green as grass.

I love you as slimy as a banana slug.

I love you as quiet as silence.

I love you, inevitably, as smelly as a fart.

Our little game is about adjectives and nouns, of course. But it’s also about the ineffability of love. We measure EVERYTHING (thanks enlightenment). Why not love? How much. How big. How deep. The volume or area or mass of love of course cannot be measured. But what can we measure? How do we describe the experience of something we can give, receive, or long for in different ways, in varying degrees and textures?

Generativity: measuring love by our mutual thriving

What my little game with my son reveals is that love is measured by how close it is to our essence. The height of the sky, the greenness of grass, the quietness of silence—without those attributes, the entities would not be what they are. What I’m trying to tell my son is this: my love for you has made me me, and everything my being adds to this world is saturated in love for you.

To be made of love, at our core, is to have a place where the line disappears between giving and receiving, desire and sacrifice, you and me. It is participating in the unity of all things where loving you feeds me, heals me, nurtures me, because I am made of this stuff, and to fill you fills me. To touch you touches me. I am grass getting greener. I am a rock band rocking. There has to be a Source, of course, I cannot generate this kind of love from nowhere, but Source is inherent. It is freely given, and sometimes it flows back to you through others as well. Sometimes.

Like my love for my son defines me as a mother, our commitment to the next generation, our willingness to sacrifice and grow and rise to the occasion for them defines us as a species. Our love is measured by how our children thrive. Not just my children. Their classmates. The children of drought and famine. The children of Gaza. This love is intimate, because there’s a thriving unique to my, Bekah’s, place in the lives of my people, particularly my children. But it is global, because that love can blow you open to the role you play as part of humanity.

The wounds and scarcities of life might limit the ways I can show my love to my flesh and blood people in this oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen world. As bell hooks famously pointed out, love and care are not exactly the same. Care is how we show love, it can be fueled by love. It can put a measurement on love. You could say I love my children thousands of meals’ worth. But that’s not the essence of my love for them. The obligations and duties I take on as a mother wear me out. My insecurities make me draw back from friends when I should reach out. We all experience compassion fatigue. I get tired and cranky because energy, unlike love, is exhaustible. But love expands how far I can go, how many snacks I can make, how many nights I can stay awake. The love is that deep commitment to their thriving, to the eternal generative question: how can I nurture you best?

Growth: measuring love by its pervasiveness

My daughter recently asked me if I loved her more every day. “Of course!” I said.

“Does that mean you loved me less when I was a newborn?” she asked, like the tiny lawyer she is.

“I loved you minutes, then I loved you hours, then I loved you days, and now I love you years,” I said. “I’ve always loved you the most I could in that moment and as I’ve had more time, as you’ve gotten bigger, as we’ve both learned more, the love has grown with it.”

We’ve always used this logic to explain God’s love as well. God loves us totally, and since God’s totality is larger than our totality, God love us “more” than we could possibly love each other. But we grow in our connection to that infinite love, and that makes the love for each other bigger too. It makes us more patient, kinder, more confident, more content. It increases the number of things we can bear, believe, hope and endure. But even when those things are less in number or intensity, it’s still love taking us to the end of our capacity. This is why, when looking at our flawed loved ones, many times, we say “they’re doing the best they can.” The choice is up to us how to accept the love or put a boundary around the pain of a love so severely limited by unhealed wounds.

This whole equation depends, of course, on not withholding. It means not thinking of love primarily as a set of obligations to be met or desires to be fulfilled, checking boxes and going home. I think so much of our wobbly understanding of love comes from our desire to define the container we put love in (friend, parents, sibling, partner) rather than letting the love grow and leak into new dimensions. When we believe that nurture must come from biological parents, or intimacy only from a spouse. When we think that everything a person is to you has been settled by the label on the relationship. We end up casting a play wherein everyone must say their lines and hit their marks. We fire those who drop their lines, and limit what we will say and do for those who have not been cast for more.

But love that overflows those roles does so when all this unruly growth carries the love into and equally expanding spread of canopy and root. The love below expands to fuel the growth and blossoming above. The nutrients of companionship, admiration, camaraderie, desire, enlivenment, challenge, forgiveness, shelter, safety, affirmation, celebration, of seeing and being seen nurture different people in different ways, but the growth is undeniable. It could be a parent who we support as a friend. It could be the spouse who we let off the hook from being our most intimate confidant, without resentment. The question becomes: How should I expand to fuel your expansion?

Generosity: measuring love by its abundance

It was really tempting to use the word sacrifice here. Because in a world of scarcity, where there aren’t enough minutes or resources to meet every desire (sometimes even every need), someone is usually having to sacrifice for the good of someone else. But I think that when we frame it this way, we tend to think of what I lost as more significant than what you gained.

I might be wrong about this. How much it cost me to give you what you needed may be a better measure of the love I carry for you. But when I find myself in the philosophers quandary over “is there any truly selfless act” I wonder if I have missed the point. When I find myself thinking that love is only pure if it costs everything and gains nothing…I wonder why it’s so puny. Surely love, or Love in its godhood, has woven all our needs, desires, gifts together with more creativity than that. Can’t erotic love be a gift to the desired as well? Do my children feel the glow from the sense of pride I have in seeing them healthy and thriving? Do my friends feel nurtured by my delight in them? Biologically we know there’s a purpose to those good feelings that accompany the relationships necessary for the continuance of the species. What if our ethical, spiritual connections are just as mutual, but for the all too regular interruption of scarcity, the great opposer of Love?

I want that to be the case. I want to believe that our willingness to sacrifice is but one aspect of a love that is actually driven by mutual flourishing, and that rather than simply choosing to sacrifice because that’s what we’ve been told life is all about, we can get creative and find a way to let flourishing break through. Probably not all the time. I’ve got an entire book coming out about the cross-bearing this world requires. But in the places where we are not so far gone (that book is about our most intractable conflicts), I wonder if there’s a place to model the kind of love that, from its very strength generates life, healing, and shalom. Not because of its asceticism or its dutifulness, but because of its potency in asking: what can we delight to do for each other?

Thinking about love pt 2: the elements

Of all the gifts this past year has given me, perhaps the most helpful has been the relational language of elements: earth, fire, air, and water. I came to it via astrology, but I’ve found these fundamental life forces to be incredibly helpful all on their own when describing not just the energy we carry in life, but in love. In particular, what we are able to give to each other, why we need each other so, and why no relationship is an island.

In addition to the fact that we are made of the same stuff the rest of the universe it made up, most of us are a mix of elements, astrologically speaking. As above, so below. For whatever reason, most of us manifest certain elemental energy—even if they aren’t the most dominant in their birth charts—in a palpable way. My therapist exudes an earthy, practical, helpfulness that can handle all sorts of weird stuff that comes out of my mouth. Paige, the energy healer, is pure air that expands the space inside and around you in a way that feels both dizzying and peaceful.

I hadn’t put a lot of stock in the elements until I was trying to describe the way I felt after spending time with intimate friends, family, and, naturally, my partner.

The elements are described in astrology this way: earth is our material self, our bodies, our shelters. Water is our emotions, our ability to be feel with others. Air is our intellect, our big connection to humanity or community. Fire is our drive, our desire, our instincts. Different interpretations will push harder on one aspect or the other of this, but that’s the general understanding.

As I think about the elements in relationship, I think about my loved ones who embody that energy most potently, and how it feels to love them and let them love me.

I’m just going to give you a heads up. This post waxes REAL poetic. I don’t indulge this kind of writing as often as I do the more wry, ironic voice or intense, persuasive, intellectual voice. But we all know what that’s about. To be poetic is to be vulnerable, to show that you feel, to risk bumping up against the armor of those unready to be soft. Today I feel soft.

I think about my airy Lewis, the night sky of my life whose constellations are both mystery and guide. When I put too much on him, too much expectation, too many timelines, too specific goals, he begins to deflate. He once believed he needed to be unchanging, but nothing else moves quite like air, and I knew that to love him was to make room for him to think less about “the plan” and more about the possibility in our life. To applaud the dreams and creations, affirming that this is the process that will carry humanity forward. And then the stars began to twinkle and the breeze blew through. Loving air means helping it circulate, letting it carry the scents and shivers it gathers without demanding they be put to use, and give it space to flow in and out of “maybe” without having to say “yes” or “no” right this second.

And to be loved by air is to be inspired. To have breath in your lungs. To stay up late sharing ideas and dreams and walking to the edge of what is possible. It is contemplating the mysteries and being dazzled by the unorthodox. Air subtly surrounds with love.

I think about my fiery children. The blazes of urgent merry-making and indomitable mischief. There is no warmer heart than my son’s hand on my cheek as he sleeps. No more valiant friend and brother. There is no more ambitious plan for shared adventures or ways to possibly break ones leg. My daughter’s fire is a the bonfire of invitation, the magnanimous dominance that says “I can make room for you.” It is her crackling mind that never, ever, ever, stops because it is not fueled by ideas but by her need to share her passion with us. It’s tempting to be afraid of the fire, and yes, in a child it needs to be trained. But when we try to stamp it out, their brightness and warmth go too. Fire it is what keeps our family from growing cool and complacent. It is demanding more of us, making us better. To love fire, you simply have to dance around it. Your loving feet will beat a burn line to keep it from consuming itself, and your joy will let it know that it is never too much.

To be loved by fire is to be desired. To be always sought, always and pursued. Fire loves to spread. Fire love will lend you a candle when your match is lit so that whatever purpose your own fire serves, it can serve longer and brighter. Fire enlivens with love.

I think about my water friends. The ones who can carry any emotion from its depth of ineffability to the shores of growth. I think about how they move effortlessly between the inscrutable trenches to the sustainable surface, delighting in both, sometimes with no demarcation to say where one stopped and the other started. I think water feels the most shame, because it does not stay orderly or invisible. It is present and, sometimes, messy. To love water is to be sometimes a container and sometimes a surfer—but never to cower away for the sake of staying dry. Sometimes offering to dive into the waves, and sometimes being the shore where the waves can crash—but never avoiding a little sea spray. Water loves for love to be spoken. You have to tell your water people that you love them, and let them tell you wild and wonderful feelings, even if it makes you feel weird.

Water washes away the boundaries of who we are allowed to be, and tells us that we are all “the ocean in a drop.” It loosens our own emotions so that they don’t get stuck. It meets us where we are, and carries us to where we need to be. Water moves with love.

And finally earth. I am mostly earth, and so learning how earth loves has helped me know how to ask for love, how to receive it, and what not to shun. I thought I was shallow and vain for loving gifts. Thought I was needy for wanting time. But both of those are just a longing for something that feels real. Loving my earthy loved ones is about presence. It’s about being as there as there can be. Hugging. Feasting. Making the effort. Earth loves meaningful rituals and to know what’s next, not because it’s anxious (okay maybe a little), but because it needs to know you’re willing to manifest, prioritize, and stay long enough to absorb the gifts they try so hard to give, but gifts that soak in slowly. While it seem like they value the instant gratification of a gift, or a touch, or a shared meal, earth wants to hold that tangible thing until they can feel you moving through it and into their soul. They want you to do the same with the gifts and time they give you.

Earth lends you roots to absorb all the blessings of the soil through their shades and cradles. Earth takes all feelings and the longings and the pain and says, “how do we grow from this?” It can feel like being weighed down, but really earth just wants to make it real so that you can be nourished by it. It knows eventually we all need shelter. Earth holds in love.

While we all have dominant elements, we also all have days when the other elements come forward. I have friends who can say “it’s a water day” to explain that the emotions are flowing in unruly ways. We honor it. I can say to others “I need a little earth” when I need somewhere to gather my scattered energy, to help me make a plan. We can carry the fire for friends whose anger grows unbearable in loneliness. We can lift each others faces to the sky when we are stuck.

The elements themselves, in nature, also give us this love. Leaning into the tree. Floating in the water. Breathing deeply. Sitting by a fire. All of that is available to us when the people aren’t available. And, I’ve come to believe, that while nothing can be as potent as the human connection, if we are quiet and still enough, the presence we are longing for is there in the natural elements themselves. It’s more subtle, but some who have lost loved ones know what I mean. We are made of this stuff.

And God is in all of these elements, loving us completely in the oneness at the center of them all, the totality that they compose. God’s presence in each of our unique compositions is potent, and so is God’s presence in the love between our elements, how we nurture each other.