Can You Smile?

Yesterday I read a story about a young woman named Lois who could no
longer smile. One day she woke up and half of her face was paralyzed.
Instead of reflecting her changing emotions, her lips and eyes were
frozen in an expression of disdain. She could no longer communicate
joy, compassion or contentment through the once effortless language of
the face. Lois can still feel those things, but the message is
undeliverable. Even her ability to say it with words is compromised by
slack lips and cheeks (1.)
I had a friend in high school who it seemed was always smiling. It was
fun to be around her. I later realized that sometimes the smile was
more about nervousness than happiness, but it still felt great to be
with her. What I wished I had had the maturity to learn was that I
could smile more too. I smiled as a natural response when I felt
happy, but I could have smiled as a conscious effort to engender
cheerfulness around me.
I have been surprisingly sluggish in realizing how much my smile means
to my husband. I smiled plenty when we were dating, because, well that
is what you do. Peacocks spread their tail feathers, frogs inflate
their necks, Humpback whales sing and teenage girls smile. But the
need to attract John slipped away, or at least the urgency of it did.
He was here, and for the foreseeable future was staying, so why would
I smile?
Sometimes the smile is a reaction to the feeling of happiness, while
other times it precedes it.
It is like gratitude. People can become numb to the feeling of
thankfulness, even for things that once inspired generous amounts.
When my daughter Mercy first rested in my arms 22 years ago, the
feelings of wonder and indebtedness squeezed out any other possible
emotion. I was oblivious to comments about the weather, or the
political landscape, or my husband's income. ( 2.) Nothing mattered
but this incredibly sweet baby.
She is still wonderful, yet my gratitude can slide behind other more
pressing matters. just like when when I open new windows on my Mac and
they cover up the ones that were there first. My love for Mercy was
here first, yet it can get covered up.
It works that way with marriage too. When John would call me on
Saturday mornings, while we were betrothed and living 1000 miles
apart, the world stood still. The excitement of talking with him for a
whole expensive hour was enough to block out any annoyances or
distractions. I was talking with my sweetheart. So where does that
feeling, once so overpowering, disappear to when he calls me now? I am
not comfortable with the suggestion that it is any less a miracle. Is
a baby splendid only if the people around her think she is? Is a
husband, attentive to his wife's needs, only noble if she is mindful
of it?
Once when I was talking with a friend whose husband of only two years
had died of cancer, she mused that she would welcome the sight of his
socks strewn on the floor. The floor was clean now, but he was gone. I
thought of my own impatience about scattered trousers, or open
cupboards, and realized that they are a reminder that my husband is
alive and present. That is no less of a blessing now than it was when
we went to the Catskills on our honeymoon. Come to think of it, he may
have left his clothes on the floor then too, but I had more eloquent
things to say than "Pick up your socks, dude."
Mother Teresa changed the world she touched. Some of us may wonder if
we too could make a measurable difference. Yet one of the simple
mandates she gave to people asking her what path to take in healing
the pain of humanity was merely this.
"Smile at your husbands. Smile at your wives."

1. Chicken Soup for the Soul- Tough Times, Tough People: Jack
Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen, Amy Newmark: 2009; p. 147
2. $12,000

I am cold.
This is in spite of the fact that I have a quilt on my lap, I am wearing fuzzy slippers and a turtle neck sweater and, I will admit, my coat.
The state of coldness seems permanent.  Yet the status quo comes into question when I look at the photos of our family at the shore last summer. It feels incredulous to see us so skimpily clad... thin beach wraps, tank tops, shorts, bathing suits. I shiver to look. But in the attic of my mind I remember that I once was warm enough to dress this way, thinking little of it. Now it seems like those sweltering days have disappeared for good. I am half a century old, old enough to have watched the seasons take their reliable turns, though they have been known to tickle the edges of their appointed time with unexpected blasts in April, or balmy afternoons in November. Surely my memory is proof enough that days of swimming and ice cream cones are in my future.
But I wonder.
I just got this month's heating bill which is roughly equivalent to the price of our first car. It is thrice the fee we paid the midwife who caught our firstborn son.
Yet even though I keep the thermostat at an unbelievably terrific golf score, it costs to keep our family in an environment that does not induce hypothermia in January.
Once I was in a surly mood while driving when my own cd came on. The song was buoyant with idealism, popping with phrases like "Love opens the way" and "their love never sleeping." It clashed however with the emotions that demanded center stage of my heart right then. Love was not exactly opening the way in the feisty conversation, make that diatribe, that hovered just below the surface in my internal courtroom where my husband was being prosecuted for major transgressions involving trash, dishes and video games. Still the voice was mine, and I could remember, just barely, that I had at one time long ago felt that way. It was whittling away at the attorney's case, somehow.
I have walked into people's homes and seen beautifully framed photographs of them on their wedding day. The smiles are always genuine, the entwined arms a reflection of what was as real as it gets. Yet sometimes those same people are not currently smiling, or touching. Still having the visual reminder that we used to feel warm enough to let our bodies and hearts be vulnerable enough to wear tank tops and silly grins, can help defrost the sentiments that keep us apart.
It can cost to keep our marriages warm in the inevitable winters. Swallowing your clever and two edged words just before you speak them to the person you want to hurt... has a price. Picking up after someone who has again forgotten where you keep the dishwasher can take a toll. But sometimes, when you had stopped believing, the wind changes and you are laughing at a shared joke, hip checking in the kitchen, and noticing that the sun does come back after all.

I am not cold anymore.



The sky is crying today.
There are reasons aplenty for crying. When I walk down and up my street I see the sheltering homes of people dealing with lacks... lack of money, of meaningful work, of bodies that behave, of thriving relationships.
The sound of the rain is a muted one. It is like the exhausted sobbing of all those babies I held as they slipped into sleep, whose reasons for sadness don't fit easily into words, though they tried fiercely to explain it when they got older. I learned without faltering that I love them deeply, whether they are weeping or laughing. I didn't really know that a few years into the game, the kind of knowing that permeates your whole being like a thunderstorm drenches a garden.
Truth be told, I cherish some of the tears as tenderly as the joy. Like when my son cried because he did not have the right book for school, and I did what I needed to to get it for him. I realized that this was a fresh way to express my love for him. What a precious chance it was to serve... a way that would not have appeared if there had been no lack.

Where does all that rain go? Some of it is creeping into my basement where the angry shop vac will slurp it into its belly and my husband will dump it into a black and bubbling hole. But most of it disappears into the ground. The earth looks too solid for the sky's tears. How can there be cracks enough for all this water too?
Lately there have been too many feelings to fit. My heart is already occupied by gratitude, expectation, surprise, relief, to also make room for fear, distrust, sadness, anger. I notice too that they take more than their share of space.
I turned on some music. I love the wavering prayer of a song sent to me by a woman in California. How can her feelings of searching for faith so closely reflect my own? The room I am sitting in was already full before I turned on the ipod. So how is there room for a song too? Did something leave the air when her words came in? As I listen my anxiety seems to melt away like the frost when the sun comes up. Where does the frost go? Perhaps it graduates to being a nimbus cloud.
I suppose it is an illusion that there is no more room. No room for rainwater, no room for emotions, no room for hymns. Those appearances are based on a finite world, one where you need to count, and ration your resources.
God works differently than that. I have witnessed Him whooshing in to transform my scarcity into abundance. Like when I was trying to shush my twins into obedience at the over crowded Christmas eve service, irritated at the lack of time to do all the gnawing tasks between me and sleep. We all stood for the final song, Calm on the Listening Ear of Night, and my girls saw in the vacated pew a perfect runway for a dramatic interpretation of the crescendoing music. They danced, pirouetted and lifted their short arms to heaven, while my family and the one behind us giggled. Somehow, where there was annoyance, now there was enough joy to go around, with lots spilling over the edges.
I thought I was as hard as December sod, but here You are seeping in. I thought the silence could fill up my mind and muffle it, but still You find a way to inflate me with sounds and feelings.
Lack is an invitation. It means we have a hole that begs filling.
Thank you for the holes, Lord. Thank you for the emptiness that soaks You up like the thirsty ground absorbs the rain, and the silent room welcomes a prayerful voice. Thank you for the feelings that leave me wordlessly sobbing in Your arms, like a newborn.
I have room enough for You.

Christmas is a season.
So say the marketers whose motive may spring more from extended shopping opportunities than increased reflection about the Messiah.

A large chunk of Christmas is in the waiting, which throbs like a heartbeat beneath the other myriad tasks that vie for our attention. We wait for packages to arrive, for snow to fall, for guests to come through the door. Children wait for Christmas, though the effort is more audible.
Marriage is a dream we long for. Every night my twins pray "to have a good marriage and shun adultery." They started two years ago when they were five. If they keep this up, after two decades they will have prayed for marriage seven thousand times. I remember planning my wedding as a little girl. I told my sister I wanted the Hallelujah Chorus as a recessional, as it was the happiest song I knew. She laughed at me. (I changed my mind)
Pregnancy is a lab in the art of waiting... for a swelling belly, for a quickening, for the moment when life shifts into a whole new realm and your heart breaks open. You are poised to see this small, precious face for the first and millionth time, and hear the soft breathing that feels like a lullaby. If you try to carry on normal conversation with a pregnant woman, everything she says is colored by the building sense of what is to come. She is expecting.


Imagine, if instead of the budding anticipation of a magical morning through weeks of preparation, Christmas arrived like a surprise 30th birthday party when all your friends throw on the lights and yell "Merry Christmas!". Would you feel gypped of the chance to get ready? Other people offer you brightly wrapped presents, peanut brittle and cocoa, but you are empty handed.
What would happen if that was how a wedding worked... you stroll into church thinking you are going to just another Sunday service and it turns out to be a wedding, and the bride is you? You thought you were coming to hear a sermon and a few prayers and instead you are ushered up the aisle by a man whose acquaintance you have not yet made, and all the faces are smiling at you and a few are crying.
What would it be like if babies plopped into your life, with no preliminary hint? You crawl into bed at eleven after a leisurely evening with another couple, and are abruptly awakened at two am by an infant crying to nurse? Around his wrist is a bracelet that says,"For you, with love. God." He nuzzles in closer and you scramble to know how to care for this fragile newborn you have had no lead time to fall in love with. Pregnancy is a more gradual way to ease into the job. That is handy, as the promotion has a way of ratcheting up our routine.

What happens when a friend gives you something you didn't even know you wanted? Once my husband gave me ox gall. It was part of a collection of other mysteries, and I tried to be polite. Really I did.
"Thank you for the ox gall, honey!"
Alum, combs, and carageenan followed, and finally a book teaching me how to marble fabric and paper.  The new art form has brought me years of fun, and kept me wondering what exquisite pattern would appear on the "size" waiting to be caught up on silk or parchment. I was later more fully impressed to discover that ox gall retails for $160 a liter. (Apparently an ox is not partial to sharing)

Christmas, marriage, and babies for that matter are each a collection of gifts that include things we have been waiting for for a long time, and other surprises we didn't think to request. Ox gall had never made it to my wish list before it appeared under my Christmas tree. Neither did Lost Sleep, or a Partner Who Tends to Lose His Keys. In my early twenties, I never sighed with my chin propped in my palm, wistfully aching for a chance to perform midnight vigil over a fevered child, or the opportunity to stumble through advanced listening skills in marriage group. Yet those stocking stuffers have enriched my experience of parenting and marriage, if only as a reference point for the miracle of robust health and smooth communication. I never asked for them, but I have learned to say thank you anyway.
My husband is smart. He knew, as I did not, that learning how to marble would be nifty. God is ever smarter. He knows that marriage and babies, and His Coming will bless us beyond measure. Some of the accessories are messy, inconvenient, or expensive.
But all of them are worth waiting for.

Sometimes one of my kids will open the cupboards,  rummage through the cans of pintos and pineapple, sigh at the absence of a favorite kind of cereal, and complain to anyone who is listening "There is nothing to eat in this house!"

I find this kind of comment irritating. I hold my tongue about the truly emaciated children whose pictures I occasionally get in the mail asking for donations. I forego the stories told me long ago by my father-in-law who lived on a ship in the South Pacific during World War ll when most of the rations were washed overboard and all they ate for a month was olives, or the stories of my own father who survived life on a rocking ship in the Aleutians before he was old enough to grow a beard and could keep down nothing but soda crackers. I remember my own lean years with four children, depending on government surplus, while John worked as a temp for minimum wage (an amount I might add that cannot lure my own high school student into manual labor).

I concede that my child is hungry, or at least as close to hungry as a child who has never gone more than 16 hours without eating has ever been. I even acquiesce that I have not been to the store in a few days and we are indeed lacking a few of the regular inhabitants of our kitchen.

But the statement "there is nothing to eat in this house" does not hold water.

Our family has gone camping. Because the space constraints are significant when packing for a family of 7 or 8 (funny but we have not gone camping since the arrival of twins) I make all culinary decisions before the ignition starts and there are no choices when we actually sit down to eat around the picnic table.

"No you cannot have those chips, they are part of tomorrow's lunch".

In the absence of choices, we eat what is in front of us, and curiously, it is enough. I may be accused of embellishment by my children, but I think it usually tasted great.

Relationships follow similar trends of lack and abundance.When you are first falling in love, the briefest phone call is enough to savor for days, as any teenage girl who has described that phone call to her friends ad naseum can attest. But somehow a decade later, a conversation ten times as long over the broccoli can feel like table scraps.

In marriage it is good to have cupboards. Tuck away those memories and private exchanges, like granola bars in your back pocket. If you are scarfing down ravioli in an All You Can Eat diner, the granola bar is an insult to your taste buds. But if you have been hiking on switchbacks for a couple of sweaty hours, it can be welcome treat indeed as you sit on a rock watching the landscape below you.

You too may be known to despair that there is no nourishment in your marriage. But check your pockets. Does he go to work every day, and even better, come home every night? Does she still do your laundry, maybe even fold it the way you like it? Is he still faithful, in a world that does not give much support to that silent effort, day after day? Does she still smile at you in that playful way that lightens your heart?

You may not be having the exact kind of conversation or scintillating evenings that the media led you to expect. But even meringue will not sustain you through a January snow the way that plain lentils and rice will. The Children of Israel in the book of Exodus were first enamored of manna when they wandered in the wilderness. It was sweet as honey, and showed up every morning. But after a few years, they grew weary of it, complaining bitterly to God. Yet the manna had not changed. It was their reception of it that had morphed.

Maybe you are moaning about the lack of your favorite  kind of treats in your marriage and feel indignant about it. But what would happen if you opened the cans that are there, and hold ordinary nourishment? Could you be grateful for olives and saltines? Sometimes it is a great contrast for that smorgasbord when you could hardly find room on the table for the pickled relish. And it is kind of fun to tell your children where you have been and survived.