Goodbye

It occurred to me last week that every single day, all around the world, there are women in bathrooms thinking, worrying, crying over babies. Women who want to be pregnant but aren’t; women who are pregnant but wish they weren’t; women who weren’t pregnant for long enough. It was a sad yet strangely comforting thought: For that one second I bonded with thousands of unknown sisters. I wasn’t alone. Although these bathroom moments are intensely private and rarely shared, knowing for that small while that there was at least one other woman somewhere who could relate completely to mine eased my anxiety, if only briefly.

I was pregnant. I am pregnant, though it was confirmed yesterday that the little life ended a few weeks ago. While my body slowly catches up on the news, I’m essentially a walking coffin. Waiting. Dreading. Desperately wanting for this rollercoaster ride to be over, but equally desperately not wanting to face the final fall before it can be. Struggling to find words to paint this painful picture but feeling compelled to try, as if this painting will somehow help me to heal. 

I feel like I’ve unintentionally taken part in something wrong, like lending a precious necklace to a friend and finding out later she used it to strangle her kitten. I’m so sorry, little embryo; if I’d have known what my womb was going to do... I was expecting to respond to the sonographer’s news with a teary acceptance: The pregnancy was a surprise, we’d told few people, it still didn’t seem completely real. I wasn’t expecting to feel crushed, or disbelieving. Maybe it’s just asleep, I thought as I stared at the screen. The rational me spoke up, gently: Even sleeping things have heartbeats, Belle.

Though I understand and respect the natural process my body’s been divinely programmed to perform when things aren't progressing normally in early pregnancy, and though I trust God’s loving sovereignty in this situation; though everything in my head thinks, This must have been right - there’s a heaviness in my heart now, which I assume is what grief feels like. Though 9 weeks ago I knew nothing of this life, I’m mourning its loss as if it was a part of my story for far longer. I feel like I’ve aged 10 years in the last 3 days.

So now I wait. For this to be over, for time to pass and for life to feel normal again. For the day when a doctor will ask me, “Is this your second pregnancy?” and I’ll say, “No, it’s my third” and I won’t want to sob uncontrollably.

My working week

On Monday my son and I headed to my mum’s place, as we do each week. My Grandma was also there; four generations in one room. My son was more interested in playing with lightsabers in the backyard than enduring cuddles and reading books with his great-grandmother (‘GG’, she’s nicknamed herself), but I’m happy that she was able to be around for his first birthday (as she was for his actual birthday last year), even if he doesn’t appreciate the significance of their relationship just yet.

On Tuesday we went to a nearby playground. I lazed in the sunshine like a lizard while my son toddled around, charming other parents by waving at them and patting their children.

On Wednesday an old lady (her name is Maria, it turns out) from the building next door spotted us in the front yard and called, “You come my home!” So we did. She treated us like we were family, feeding us biscuits and fruit and rice pudding, introducing my son to her lorikeets and telling me not to chastise him when he threw his piece of apple to the floor. She sent us home with strawberries, a block of chocolate and another pudding for my husband.

On Thursday a voiceless friend came over because she needed to get out of her house. She got to see a Jekyll-and-Hyde-like afternoon transformation in my son: playful and cheery before his not-long-enough nap; fragile and woeful afterwards. And I got to chat to an adult about non-baby-related things, which just happens to be one of my favourite pastimes.

Today my boy and I enjoyed a rainy car trip to my mum’s place to drop off some sleeping bags for their weekend away. My iPod seemed to sense the weather and played us appropriately mellow tunes; Feeling Oblivion by Turin Brakes and Lucid by Tex Perkins were two particular offerings that fully convinced me that my iPod is a mind- and mood-reading genius who I would marry in a second if a) it was a person rather than a teeny metal music-playing object and b) I was not already hitched (should they be the other way around?). (By the by, listen to these songs on Grooveshark - they’re perfect for rainy days.) So I drove and sang and my son sucked his fingers and we arrived at Mamachi’s all chillaxed.

Then this afternoon my son pulled some books down from a bookcase, and I glanced up at one point to see him flicking through the pages of The Thinking Woman's Guide to a Better Birth by Henci Goer. It made me laugh.

I think the warmth of the spring sunshine has melted just the right parts of my brain and left me feeling richly blessed and thankful for my life right now. I’ve spent a good deal of the last four-or-so months repeatedly telling myself and occasionally telling others how hard full-time mothering can be, and very little time appreciating how much I actually enjoy it; how much I love what our weeks look like because I have the freedom to hang out with my kid all day, every day.

It’s not just my brain thawing; my son’s first birthday was also a surprising and necessary prompt to treasure this time we have together because it’s passing so very quickly. It’s still sinking in that he’s one now – that’s a whole year closer to being two, nine, seventeen. I’ve been slowing down, taking a million mental photographs in an effort to capture and remember this moment in our lives: him babbling sincerely at me as if he’s speaking in a language I understand, him initiating games and taking my hand to lead me to wherever he’d rather be, him offering open-mouthed kisses, him looking worriedly for his hand while I’m dressing him and then grinning, relieved, when it pops out through the other end of his sleeve.

Right now this stay-at-home-mothering thing feels like a pretty sweet deal.

P.S. Our tech-y friend was finally able to return the hard drive onto which he’d saved everything he retrieved from our dead computer, which means I have my photos back! Hurrah!

P.P.S. I know I post a lot of flower pictures but they're just so pirty! I'll find less botanical images for the next few posts, I promise.

Grudem, my inadequacy, and some thoughts

from here

I recently started reading Grudem’s Evangelical Feminism and Biblical Truth (which should really be called Evangelical Feminism Versus Biblical Truth, since that's what he spends 14 long chapters arguing), and was pleased to find that he’s not quite as scary as I’d expected! I was a little nervous before delving in, feeling kind of like I was meeting a grumpy old man for the first time after having heard numerous stories about how awful he can be. Turns out he’s a little un-PC (some may say ‘sexist’), but quite passionate and thorough. I appreciate that, though I disagree with almost all of his conclusions.

It occurred to me as I read/refuted that I was/am in no way qualified to respond to Grudem’s arguments. So far I’ve completed just 3 subjects at Bible college, only one of which touched on the gender issue (for one lecture). Wayne Grudem, au contraire, holds a BA, an MDiv, and a PhD. I’m not saying that he’s right because he's studied a lot, I’m just saying that I’m not the best person to convince you that he’s wrong. Especially when there are women out there who are not only more theologically informed but also much better at writing than I am; women such as Marg Mowczko and Rachel Held Evans, whose blogs I highly recommend to you (Marg’s particularly for more on these gender questions. She’s also Australian – woot!).

I’m not giving up reading and writing about this topic, although I’m feeling more and more comfortable in my position on it as the days go by. I still intend to review the books I mentioned in a much earlier post. I still plan to find out who’s talking about this issue and think out loud through what they’re saying. I just have to let go of my grand dreams of word searches and thorough studies of particular difficult passages and accept that with no Greek whatsoever and very little theological training, my place in this debate is as spectator rather than star; my job is to cheer my team loudly from the sidelines rather than trying to join them on the field.

Having said all of that, below are some of my thoughts on the whole gender topic that have given me pause or started me ranting at some point recently (in no particular order, I’m simply avoiding bullet points for Blogger’s sake):

Firstly, while reading the New Bible Dictionary article on women the other day I was struck by the point that baptism, unlike circumcision, was (and is!) for women as well as men. Isn’t that cool?! I’d never stopped to consider that truth before, but it overwhelmed me momentarily (and has a few times since) with a feeling of excitement and encouragement and acceptance, all rolled up in a giant fuzzy God-loves-me ball. If you know what I mean. (I’m not completely sure that even I do here, but I’m aiming for a vibe rather than a mental image, if that helps...)

Secondly, this seems like an appropriate spot to slip in the following quote from Stanley Gundry’s chapter in How I Changed My Mind about Women in Leadership (edited by Alan Johnson), in which he explains his use of the terms ‘hierarchy’ or ‘patriarchal hierarchy’ to describe those on the opposite side of the gender debate to egalitarians (page 100, emphasis his):

[The term ‘complementarian’] was invented in the mid-1980s allegedly to portray the position as holding that men and women are complementary to one another. The problem is, though, that egalitarians also believe that in the body of Christ all believers, including men and women, are complementary to one another. So the term does not apply uniquely to those who would now claim exclusive ownership of it. It is difficult not to think that the term was invented as a euphemism to avoid calling attention to the real essence of the position – that men are in hierarchical order over women who are to submit to men.

I plan to continue to use the term ‘complementarian’ to save confusion as I keep thinking through this debate, but I think what Gundry says is a valuable clarification.

Thirdly, I think it’s unhelpful to use the word ‘biblical’ to describe a position (‘biblical manhood and womanhood’, for example), because it implies that anyone who disagrees with you is unbibilical, and it seems incredibly arrogant to claim to understand the Bible so well that yours is the only right interpretation, especially when dealing with passages that are obviously difficult to make sense of or else fewer people would be arguing about them. I respect the way John Stackhouse approaches this issue in Finally Feminist (pages 37-38):

I would like to suggest a way to understand gender...that avoids simply ruling out the contentions of either side, since I find valid points in each, and, perhaps more significantly, since exemplary Christians advocate both positions. (Again, the only alternative is to conclude that all those holy and intelligent people who disagree with me are just plain wrong – and that seems unlikely in the extreme.)

Stackhouse's humility is refreshing, particularly so after reading Grudem, and, as I mentioned in my review of Stackhouse's book, it’s something I need to keep working towards.

Lastly, (and this is bordering on me trying to join in the game rather than sticking to the stands, to return to my earlier metaphor), I find it rather frustrating to keep reading terms in the complementarian argument that never appear in the Bible, such as “male leadership” or “equal in value but different in roles”. I think these terms push some to ask questions that the Bible doesn’t seem too concerned with, such as, “What should I do if my husband doesn’t lead me?” or “In what ways could we say that Jesus is equal but different?“ These are unhelpful distractions from questions that actually do matter, and we really don’t need more distractions. The TV’s enough.

I’ll stop here, partly because I want you to have time to click on the links to the blogs I mentioned above (I've chosen some good posts for you, trust me!), but mostly because that’s all I have to say right now (it's bedtime, I'm tired)