Queen Mab and the Tooth Fairy

Sunday afternoon, Her Highness was getting fidgety in that sort of way that she often does when she needs a nap and therefore won’t stop moving for fear she might accidentally doze off. So we sent her downstairs with strict orders to CHILL OUT AND READ A BOOK OR SOMETHING. David and the boys (who had both already had their afternoon quiet times) went for a walk to enjoy the sunshine, and I made myself some tea.

Or at least, I started to make some tea, but I was interrupted by bloodcurdling screams from downstairs. “MOMMY! MOMMY!!!!!” To be perfectly frank, Mab screams aren’t necessarily a sign of an emergency, so I walked to the top of the stairs and asked what was wrong. She was holding her mouth and crying….and then went back into the bedrooms? Very strange. I went downstairs to her.

“I lost my tooth!” she sobbed, her mouth bloody, and indeed there was no tooth. My stomach backflipped—I hate teeth, especially when there’s blood involved. So I said, “Ok, let’s go to the bathroom,” because if there was going to be blood, the bathroom tiles were the best place for it, and it gave me time to figure out something else responsible and maternal to do about the situation.

But Mab already knew what needed done (thanks to a Fancy Nancy book, I think) and started swishing with cold water. Well that was good. Then she told me she wasn’t sure where the tooth was, but it was probably around *my* bedroom door. She was much happier now.

Um….why was it around my bedroom door?

Well, we got down on our hands and looked, and I pressed her for answers about how and why her tooth was lost next to my door.

“It’s not like I did anything silly like tie my tooth to a string and tie it to the door and shut the door like some people do!” she said, laughing awkwardly.

“Oh?”

She told me that she was just chewing on a string and relaxing and the string just happened to be tied to the door and then her tooth just fell out and then she panicked and hid the string….?

I hadn’t even been aware of her having a tooth that loose. She’d mentioned it to me once, but I’d forgotten because she’s been talking about this or that tooth being loose for months, ever since her friends and cousin started losing teeth over the summer. So I hadn’t thought anything of it.

We put the little tooth in her coin jar.

Then her shiny-stuff-hoarding-dragon-of-a-little-brother got into her money. I rescued the money, but the tooth was lost. She left a note for the tooth fairy,

who understood. I suspect this happens frequently in her line of work.

I felt a little hypocritical about this part, actually—we’ve always been very clear with the kids that Santa is a fun game we play together, and I don’t think we’ve even mentioned the Easter Bunny. But I wasn’t sure what she thought about the tooth fairy.

Mab, as you can maybe tell from her nickname, has had an affinity for fairies ever since her Auntie Kate dubbed her Queen of the Fairies at 6 months old. And as much as I hate tricking my kids into thinking that a red-suited reverse-burglar left them the presents that I purchased for them myself, with things like fairies, I’ve been very non-committal about their existence or lack thereof. I hedge about the impossibility of proving non-existence, but it's probably more to do with secretly hoping fairies do exist.

So I was relieved when one of Mab’s favorite church grownups, Miss Beth, said that Mab had told her that she’d noticed the tooth fairy’s handwriting looked a lot like mine!

I haven’t said anything to her about this. It’s not that I have anything against tooth fairies—it’s that I don’t like the idea of lying to her—playing make-believe *at* her. But playing make-believe *with* her is awesome.

March 15th "sermon"

(preached on March 15^th for Lent Midweek Worship)

Our story connections: Share a story of your spiritual renewal. What is your story from unbelief to belief?

Genesis 12:1-4a
Psalm 121
John 3:1-17

So one year for Lent, I gave up church.

I have always been the kind of person who goes to church almost automatically—it’s probably why I ended up moving across the street from one! I just can’t help myself. Our family had invested almost ten years in this particular congregation, both the kids had been baptized there, and so even though none of us were happy, we kept showing up, with two little kids who were constitutionally incapable of sitting quietly with crayons and board books the way all the other kids at church did. I’m pretty sure the record Queen Mab set for the number of times she thrashed herself off the pew or out of our arms and cracked her forehead on the pew in front of us is still standing. And I disagreed with just about everything anyone said, and I resented them for saying it, and I resented their version of God, who seemed so small and petty compared to the massive, beautiful, and totally messed-up world. I decided that even if that God was real, which seemed unlikely at this point, he wasn’t worth worshiping and certainly wasn’t someone I could count on to take care of me—this God was only interested in his own glory, and everyone else could go to hell—you know, if that was what would bring him the most glory. I passed lots of angry notes to David, and after we got home I would gripe all afternoon.

And my husband kept asking me, “Well, why don’t you talk to the pastor about it?” And I would answer, “Because I would just be telling him why I thought everything they do and believe here is wrong, and that doesn’t seem helpful,” “Well, then we could find another church.” “I mean, we could….but….” And actually, we did try one Sunday, and we visited a different church, and I just couldn’t. I couldn’t. I hated church, especially my church, and God looked like nothing more than a particularly vindictive authoritarian character that some guys had invented to keep uppity over-educated women like me in our places who I wanted nothing to do with, but I couldn’t quit. I just kept dragging myself back, Sunday after Sunday, and coming home feeling worse than ever, snarly and resentful. My problem is that I am pathologically law-abiding. If I think I’m expected to do something, I can hardly stop myself from doing it. Even when I don’t believe in the reason for doing it.

One gray, chilly, damp February day—no snow even—just the worst and ugliest kind of late winter, I decided I wasn’t going back. I was going to take a few weeks off and then try the most different church I could find. I wasn’t ready to quit church altogether, but all I could pray was “I do believe. Help my unbelief.” and sometimes even that felt a little over confident. I had never gone to a church that followed the church calendar beyond maybe Christmas and Easter, so I only discovered later that it had been Ash Wednesday when I decided to quit.

I didn’t tell anyone at church that I wasn’t coming back. I just ghosted them, even our midweek Bible study attended by my favorite people at church, who tolerated and sometimes, I think, even welcomed our pointed questions. That's a thing I regret.

But that first Sunday morning, waking up and neither scrambling to get ready for a church service I didn’t want to go to nor feeling guilty for not going—just laying bed as long as we wanted (or I guess, as long as our kids let us) and having a lazy breakfast—was amazing. I felt weightless. I wasn’t constantly arguing in my head about what God was like—I didn’t even have to bother to worry about whether or not I actually thought there was a God. Something told me that, whatever the truth was, it was going to be ok.

After sleeping in for a few Sundays, we went to the Episcopal church down the street—that was the most different thing I could find to our old church. They were marking Rose Sunday, which is the halfway point in Lent, so everything was “rose,” and by rose I mean magenta—the paraments were magenta, the vestments were magenta—Mab’s eyes were huge!—she and the priests matched. It was the most flamboyant Welcome To Our Annual Contemplation of the Sin and Brokenness of the World that I’ve ever seen.

So there, in the middle of all this high-level churchy stuff—they had everything but incense—which was so totally foreign to me in every way—I wasn’t arguing anymore. Maybe I was just overwhelmed by the color and pageantry. But we went back the next week, when everything was now purple, and the next. And the God they described wasn’t nearly as grouchy and vindictive as the one I had been railing against for way too long, though while I certainly liked this God better, I kind of suspected that he might just be wishful thinking on their part. But now that my brain had sort of quieted itself down and didn’t feel the need to shout “WRONG!” every few minutes (in my head, of course, not out loud!), God started whispering in my ear. Just a little, once in awhile.

Especially right before communion, and I should point out that we almost never took communion at our old church, because they only had it quarterly, on Sunday nights. They were afraid that if you didn’t believe the right things, you would end up eating and drinking judgment on yourself, so the elders always wanted to talk to visitors beforehand, just to be safe, and this was easier to arrange on Sunday nights. But Sunday nights with our children weren’t really conducive to going out to a SECOND church service, so we usually skipped. And then I’d quit believing the right things, so I quit trying. Or rather, I’d stopped feeling guilty about not trying.

But now, every Sunday the priest would welcome the congregation to the table with the same words:

This is the table, not of the Church, but of God.
It is to be made ready for those who love God
and who want to love God more.

So, come, you who have much faith and you who have little,
you who have been here often and you who have not been for a long time,
you who have tried to follow and you who have failed.
Come, not because I invite you: it is God, and it is God’s will
that you who want God should meet God here.

Hearing this welcome every Sunday morning, I wasn’t sure if I believed in God, but I sure did want God. And it was a relief to hear that I didn’t have to have faith to be welcome. But I wouldn’t get in line, because the flip side of being the kind of person who is obsessed with fulfilling obligations and following the rules is being the kind of person who is paralyzed with terror at trying something new and breaking some secret unwritten rule that will doom me forever. I even signed out a book from the little book cart in their fellowship room that was something like, “How to be a convincing Episcopalian” and I memorized the section with the little diagrams about how to take communion.

But I was still terrified that I didn’t really belong, and that it wasn’t for me, and it was easier to just observe from our back corner, instead of gathering up the kids and herding them down the aisle and through the line—because of course no way were we going to leave three year old Mab in the pew by herself! I wasn’t convinced that this thing that might not even really be for me was worth risking the scene of me doing it wrong or a child breaking free and crashing the beautiful altar with all the candles and that super fancy purple tablecloth.

The Maundy Thursday service, though, was a potluck, because Last Supper, held in the fellowship room instead of the sanctuary. Everyone filled plates and sat around big round tables with ordinary, slightly stained white tablecloths, and all the kids, including Her Highness, vanished pretty early on to go play. We were with some friends from grad school, and there was good food, and great conversation, and then a service while we were still at the tables. Though by the time we got to communion, the Golden Boy, who was about the Caeterpie’s age, had gotten squirmy and kind of squawky, so I was pacing around the edge of the room with him in the carrier. It felt like a good place to watch without being conspicuous about not getting in line.

And as people were lining up, I saw, at the front of the line, Queen Mab. Of course I started to panic, like ya do when you suddenly see your kid doing the thing that you’re afraid to do yourself. She must have been watching the priests’ kids she had been tagging along with, and she put out her hand with total faith that this was hers and she belonged there and she took that little gluten-free wafer—

so I got in line too.

Community and etymology

So first off, here is a good song for Advent, when we look towards a promise and a world that seems too good to ever come true.

I didn’t make it to the midweek Advent service this week, because Sleepy (Grouchy) Children. But I did have a wonderful conversation with Pastor Elaina over coffee about building community, which is a way we can see, dimly and imperfectly, a bit of that promised world. Specifically, we talked about eating together.

Remember the story “Stone Soup”? Where everyone was afraid they didn’t have enough, and so they hid and hoarded it, until finally they were persuaded to share, and suddenly there was abundance. In the church newsletter, Pastor Elaina wrote about this contrast between our fear of scarcity and the abundance of God, in which 2+2 doesn’t equal 4, but 100. And when we each bring our little bit and pool them all together, suddenly there’s more than enough. Like loaves and fishes.

In many cultures, the role of the host of a feast is deeply significant--remember the panic at the wedding of Cana, when they ran out of wine? It’s a matter of honor to be able to provide for your guests, and the guests in turn are expected render honor to the host (hence Sir Gawain’s infamous quandary in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight). Our modern English words “lady” and “lord” are derived from Old English “hlaf”--loaf. Lord comes from “hlāford,” which in turn came “hlāf-weard”--bread-keeper. Lady comes from “hlæfdīge”--bread-kneader. Basically, the most prominent members of the community were those who provided food for the others and hosted the feasts.

So what happens when we all feed each other, at a potluck or pitch-in? When we each bring a little something, and lay everything out on long tables--casseroles and chicken wings and salads and the bag of chips we grabbed on the way because we didn’t have the energy to cook--the feast multiplies, and so does the honor we owe to each other.

Later in the day after that coffee conversation, I came across this post--it’s mostly about current political events, but I was struck by the repeated phrase “the kindness of cooks”--this conviction that there is something inherently generous in the act of cooking for someone else, and that this is reflected in the character of those who make a habit of it, that they are the kind of people who won’t support hatred or discrimination. Obviously this isn’t necessarily true, but it tells us something about the power of feeding our neighbors with the best we can provide for them.

There’s a reason that Jesus told so many parables about parties and feasts to describe the Kingdom--wedding feasts, celebrations of finding lost sheep and lost sons. Eating together, feeding each other, sounds like a good place to start when it comes to (re)building communities in a time when we’re fractured and broken.

Afraid of hope

Tomorrow begins the second week of Advent, the season when we wait, peering into the darkness for the quiet, secretive entrance of the light. During the midweek Advent service on Wednesday, the Gospel reading was Luke 1:5-20, about Zechariah’s encounter with Gabriel while he was offering incense in the Temple. Instead of a sermon, we took time to reflect on the story with the help of some questions in the bulletin.

The first question was “What do you think Zechariah was afraid of?” The congregation’s discussion afterwards focused on Zechariah’s very understandable terror when Gabriel first appeared (if it were me, I would have been afraid I had been caught inadvertently offering the incense wrong or something), but my mind immediately went to the next part of the story.

It seemed to me that fear was also the reason that Zechariah doubted the angel--fear of getting his hopes up. Because he and Elizabeth had experienced decades of disappointment already--hoping for a baby, then being crushed. Over and over, with every randomly nauseous morning or late cycle, until they just couldn’t take it one more time. And now that they were old, perhaps it was almost a relief to have put it behind them and know for sure that that particular door had really and truly been locked and sealed shut, and they never had to think about it again. And then God took him by the hand and led him back to that bricked-over door and said, "No really, I'm going to open it." No wonder he didn't welcome the promise. To be disappointed one more time would have destroyed him.

That’s Advent, though. Sitting here in the dark, where we’ve been squinting into the blackness so long, imagining that we see the first glow of dawn when it’s really only in our own eyes, that we can no longer believe that light will actually ever come. Zechariah and Elizabeth were living under an oppressive foreign government, waiting for God to fulfill the promise to free them and restore the true king to the throne, but all they had was a puppet king. Just when we start to hope that maybe love and community and honest efforts to listen to our neighbors really might be more powerful than fear and violence and willful ignorance, we’re crushed to discover that disgust and ignorance are winning out again. We were promised that Jesus would return and bring in the kingdom of God and restore everything that has been broken or lost, but it’s been a couple millennia now.

The darkness is so heavy it can leave you speechless sometimes, because you can’t bring yourself to repeat those promises of hope that have been made to look like lies so many times before. I sometimes think that the silence imposed on Zechariah was a gift, because he couldn’t try to argue about it or make up justifications or excuses. He just had to sit there in the dark and listen.

Thanksgiving Sunday sermon

Preached at Bethany Lutheran Church on Saturday evening, November 19 and Sunday morning, November 20.

Deuteronomy 26:1-11

Psalm 100

Philippians 4:4-9

John 6:25-35

I’ve been doing a little exercise on Facebook this month, coming up with something every day to be thankful for. Pictures are bonus. Because thanksgiving--the holiday--is challenging for me. Instead of basking in the glow of all the things I have to be grateful for, I have to pack up three kids’ worth of stuff, and also the dog, then spend hours in the car driving to Indianapolis and then ricocheting between houses visiting everyone we’re related to, constantly at least a little overstuffed, and then it’s over and I’m exhausted and I just want to go home and crash. The fact that we have that many people who love us and the resources to go and visit them is itself a huge blessing, but I’m usually too overwhelmed to see it. On Thanksgiving Day I don’t really ever get a chance to sit and just be thankful. So this year I decided would be different--I was going to be thankful, darn in! I figured if I started getting warmed up early, I’d be ready by the time Thanksgiving itself rolls around!

Most days I’ve come up with one or two things really easily. Some days I find a whole bunch of them. Some days I struggle to find any. Thankfulness, I’ve been learning, isn’t so much an event as a habit of thought. like a muscle you have to exercise. I hate exercise. It’s boring and repetitive, and it makes me sweat. And when I look around, giving thanks feels so cheap and lazy. There are protests, riots, and hate crimes here, wars and human rights violations overseas (and quite possibly some here too), and  the political climate makes me want to become a hermit. Being thankful for a cup of hot earl gray for my afternoon pick-me-up reminds me that many people, even here in the United States, don’t even have clean water for their children to drink. And then I feel like a jerk.

Being told to “give thanks” or “count your blessings” can feel so useless, even counter-productive. Like a cop-out--hey, instead of actually solving these problems, distract yourself with things that make you happy! Leave things as they are and don’t upset the status quo, because everyone else is fine with it, and if you’re not, you’re clearly just ungrateful. Then I resent the exercise even more, because I feel like I’m just tricking myself into being passive, even when there’s a lot of work to be done.

But that’s exactly what Paul recommends in his letter to the Philippians--“Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.”

In every situation. Not just good situations, or just on special holidays--every situation. That during times when you have a lot of concerns--when things are going badly and you’re praying your heart out--you especially need to be giving thanks. It’s not to distract yourself--you’re still praying about the problems and presenting them before God--but you do give thanks even while keeping your eyes fully open to what’s going wrong. Paul doesn’t say, “Be thankful instead of dealing with your problems,” he says, “Be thankful instead of being anxious about your problems.” The opposite of thankfulness isn’t action, but anxiety, because thankfulness brings the peace of God to guard your heart and mind while you go about your work, carrying out the things you have been taught.

In the prayer group that met over the summer, one of the types of prayer that we explored was the examen. It begins by first asking God to be present with you, and then in the company of God’s presence you review your day, looking for the ways that you were blessed that day and the ways you saw God moving in the events of the day or in other people. And it’s only after you’ve put yourself in a position of gratitude that you move on to addressing your mistakes, your concerns, your plans for tomorrow. And I was really anxious during those weeks. I was very, very pregnant--like, could have a baby any day pregnant--and every morning I woke up wondering if this was the day, and every night I went to bed disappointed that it was not.

And then I started doing the examen in my journal, writing down the things I was thankful for before getting to my frustration about STILL BEING PREGNANT and my worries about birth and bringing a newborn home and how my worries and frustrations were spilling over into impatience with my older kids who didn’t deserve to be snarled at the way I had that evening, but by the time I got to those worries, I felt so much more peace about it--maybe even what you might call “the peace of God that passes all understanding,” and even though my worries were still there, that peace guarded my heart all night long so that I could sleep, and maybe even snarl at the kids a little less the next day.  

Gratitude transforms us, and a habit of seeking out even the smallest and most superficial blessings helps us practice finding deeper, hidden gifts--like a friend who understands our frustration or our grief and supports us while we’re overwhelmed, or the grace to remember to take a moment to breathe before we react, or seeing the people who are already out there, fighting against the injustices that we can’t even begin to imagine how to tackle yet. The problems are still there, but now we can see that the problems are not all that there is, and perhaps we’re being given the grace to push back against them. Paul tells the Philippians that “what you have learned and received and heard and seen in me--practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you.” Gratitude gives us the grace to practice the kingdom work that we’ve been taught, even when we feel overwhelmed by just how much work there is to do, because now we are aware of the presence of the God of peace.

We can see this move from gratitude to grace in the gospel reading, in Jesus’s response to the people who came to him.

This was right after the feeding of the 5000--he had miraculously fed a whole crowd of people, which is a tremendous blessing! and they thought this was pretty great and came back to him for another blessing, another free meal. But this time Jesus doesn’t give them more food--he doesn’t give them another easily-facebooked blessing. Because you know if facebook or instagram had been around everyone would have been posting pictures of their free fish sandwiches tagged with #blessed. But Jesus tells them that they’ve missed the point--it’s not about the loaves and the fishes. The food was just to get their attention. It’s about him, and if they thought that the gift of bread was good, they ain’t seen nothing yet.

Once you start noticing those little gifts--the bread and the fish, or the autumn foliage, or the buy-one-get-one-free at Starbucks--that’s when Jesus can get your attention and point you past the leaves and the coffee, which feed your soul for an afternoon, to the bread from heaven that will feed you forever, the God of peace who will stick with you and give you grace through even your most impossible work.

Anne Lamott wrote a book about what she considers the three essential prayers, “Help, Thanks, Wow” and in the “Thanks” chapter describes the power of gratitude. She says,

“‘Thanks’ is a huge mind-shift, from thinking that God wants our happy chatter and public demonstration and is deeply interested in our opinions of the people we hate, to feeling quiet gratitude, humbly and amazingly, without shame at having been so blessed. You breathe in gratitude, and you breathe it out, too. Once you learn how to do that, then you can bear someone who is unbearable. (...) When we go from rashy and clenched to grateful, we sometimes get to note the experience of grace, in knowing that we could not have gotten ourselves from where we were stuck, in hate or self-righteousness or self-loathing (which are the same thing), to freedom. The movement of grace in our lives toward freedom is the mystery. So we simply say ‘Thanks.’ Something had to open, something had to give, and I don’t have a clue how to get things to do that. But they did, or grace did. Thank you.”

I like how the Message translates the last lines of the passage from Philippians--after Paul says to give thanks and pray with hearts full of gratitude, he says, “Put into practice what you learned from me, what you heard and saw and realized. Do that, and God, who makes everything work together, will work you into his most excellent harmonies.” Practicing thankfulness--breathing it in and out with every little ordinary, everyday gift--leads to practicing even more hard and holy work--bearing the unbearable, loving the unlovable, becoming part of God’s work in the world.

Thanks be to God. 

It was a really disturbing dream

I had a dream early, early Wednesday morning, after I had woken up to nurse the baby and saw who won the election. In my dream there was a toilet overflowing with rotting viscera, all slimy and purple and oozing--someone had tried to flush down a corpse. And I could look through the walls (like you can in a dream) to see that all the pipes were clogged with it, too.

I felt sick when I woke up, and that image has stuck in my mind ever since, as I read about the massive increase in hate crimes, the 81% of white evangelicals who voted for this man, the protestors who are called "peaceful" by one account and "rioting" by another. While Black Lives Matter and Standing Rock are new phenomena, the ugliness that they reveal about how white America treats her non-white citizens is as old as Columbus. And as their voices get louder, more and more people have tried to drown them out by yelling back that All Lives Matter, or that they needed to go through the proper channels before they can be taken seriously, or that it's not that bad after all and they should just be grateful that they're (at least theoretically) allowed to vote now.

And they try to shove the rotten corpse, the racism and violence and corruption, down into the toilet to flush it away and pretend it's done and over with, and the mess has been cleaned up. But it's not. And now we have to rip out the whole wall and replace all the plumbing.

one-handed update

I thought I would have updated a long time ago, but late pregnancy and then the postpartum period have taken all my words and sent me way down into myself. I’ve had brief bouts of guilt over this inability to write anything that isn’t scrawled in my private journal, but it isn’t a problem, really. I remember trying to force some writing out a few weeks after Mr. B’s birth (a looming dissertation seemed like reasonable motivation!) and it was all crap that never went anywhere anyway. Dramatic changes--good and bad--have always required me to do significant internal recalibrations.

Six weeks to get back to normal after giving birth is bull. Six weeks to go for a nice long walk, sure. Six weeks to have the exact functionality as you had before giving birth? Ha! And wtf is “normal” anyway? I’m pretty sure my body has permanently changed shape in ways that it hadn’t after my older two were born, and that’s just fine. It’s not surprising if maybe the part of me that thinks the things has changed shape a little, too. So I’m going to be patient and slow and quiet so I can listen and watch and feel to learn what the new normal is as everything settles out. It may be awhile.


I wanted to have some profound thoughts to share about Baby C’s baptism the weekend before last, but it’s mostly a deep happiness that he has such a loving community to surround him as he grows. It matters--belonging to God and to each other--though at the moment I still can’t quite articulate how, plus I’m typing one handed while the other arm supports this little one while he lounges on my lap. But so far we’re doing well, we’re taking our time, and we’re surrounded by love.