Who's Afraid of Of A Little Bedbug?

This seems to be a bit of a carry-over of theme from the last post: talking is a different thing from doing. The same theme comes up in sermons in churches on Sunday mornings and in scripture itself; it comes up in feminist discussions and writings. In science, a theory is only a hypothesis until it is tested and proven.  We seem to not  always have the same standards in other disciplines....

Living is messy business.  If you're in the pit, you're going to fight and subsequently see, taste, hear, smell, and feel blood; you might even bleed.  Theorizing is sanitized.  Even planning is clean. 

You've heard about Hopeprint 2 posts ago.  I received a communication today from the director that mentioned bedbugs...

You must understand that bedbugs are on my "Top Ten Most Dreaded Non-Lethal Things" list. They almost made the "Top Ten Most Dreaded Things EVER" list, but putting them in the same company as anthrax and ebola seemed melodramatic.  Realistically they probably fit in better with pigeons.  Trust me when I say we should leave that alone.

Anyway, in previous work I did there was high chance of me picking up bedbugs and I took elaborate precautions.  Not only are bedbugs just icky, they are IMPOSSIBLE to get rid of.  Dreadful things usually are ridiculously hardy.  Like, can-live-10-years-on-a-hard-surface-hardy.  Or, hustling-humans-out-of- their-hamburgers-hardy... wait, I said I would leave that alone!

I like to think I have been a safe distance from bedbugs lately. I make my husband help me check for bedbugs every time we enter a hotel. I mean, I'm the one who when the note from the school nurse comes home saying a child in the school has a case of head lice (not nearly as hardy as bedbugs and 10 times easier to get rid of) immediately throws everything my children had on them in sealed plastic bags and check their hair three times a day for the next 4 weeks. This communication I received almost made me pick up the phone and tell Cathy and Nicole and everyone "So sorry -  I forgot I'm busy every Tuesday night for the rest of the year."

And then I felt a Divine whisper: "Hypocrite."

Locking ourselves in, sealing ourselves away is not living.  Living is not safe.  Living in a way that seeks justice for all is most definitely NOT SAFE. But as a child, I was sometimes guilty of hiding really near home base so the distance to safety would be short. As a teenager, I was sometimes guilty of not trying out for something for fear of failure.  As a mom, I am sometimes guilty of making the decision that keeps my daughters out of harm's way instead of the one that will provide an opportunity for growth.  I fight the urge to stay safe more often than I would like to admit, even this many years and lessons into life. 

I deeply believe that being involved in the mission of Hopeprint is a natural extension of my values and beliefs and is something I need to be involved in. People needing hope and love is bigger than sanitation: pretty Un-American and Un-the-family-I-was-reared-in and honestly, Un-me.  I like sanitation.  But if we all gave into our fears all of the time, evils of all kind would prevail.

Who's afraid of a little bedbug?

Me. Totally.

But I'm going anyway.

From Where I Sit

There has been a lot of down time at my place of work lately.  I have been trying to use the opportunity to brush up on reading some of the writings in my field.  I came across a report prepared for a 2011 Anti-Poverty Programs conference held in Berlin.  The author was Ron Haskins of the Brookings Institution.  He seems to be a very knowledgable conservative in an important and often predominantly liberal conversation. "Fighting Poverty the American Way," was its title.  What a great title set in an intriguing frame.

Research galore to back up his opinions and very sound arguing; essentially the conclusion was that policies handicap American programs that try to do away with poverty and need to be revamped.  The forces identified in this report that keep poverty alive and well are low wages, family dissolution, mediocre education, and immigration of poorly educated workers.  You would think 2 of those would come out of a conservative's mouth, one from a liberal's, and one from both (everyone has an opinion on education in America, and usually it's that it could be better...) So I found the article to have a tone I could consider seriously.

I am not a world-class researcher.  I am not nearly as smart as the author and the others at his table. I do not have the background and the experience they do. My own actual position twists and turns so much that a real solution would be hard to come by.  The following are only musings deriving from observations made from where I sit.

Half of all children living in female-headed households live in poverty.  When a child lives in a household with only a mother, they are four times as likely to be poor. Those are facts. There was another statement made that I was not as comfortable backing since I didn't see the hard numbers: that children in female-headed families are more likely to be arrested, become pregnant as teens, have mental health problems, commit suicide, and become divorced when they grow up. 

All of the single mothers (well, I could argue all mothers in general, but that's a different tangent) I know personally live with elephant-size guilt.  Some fully acknowledge it, others try to stuff it under a lot of bravado and it rears its head only in the most vulnerable of moments.  I don't think these statistics do much to encourage these women.  I don't know that keeping the men in their lives would have helped their situation.  I don't know what to do with these statistics. 

The feminist angel -or devil - has a lot to say; men are absolved from a lot of the responsibility of child rearing, men have more earning power and better social standing, etc.  The Christian angel - or devil - says families are supposed to be two-parent headed. If I think through what Jesus would actually have to say I can't help but conjure up images of him writing in the sand in the midst of a mob with stones in their hands. 

We can say a lot, and take a conversation in several different directions.  But what to do - well, the United States of America hasn't figured that out either.  No country has.

I spend a fair amount of time intellectually hanging out on the macro level, planning programs and beyond. At the end of days when I have time to reflect, it is the time I spend hanging out on the individual level that the most gets done, for better or worse.  It's one thing to read numbers and another thing entirely to look into the eyes of someone those numbers represent. At some point we hope the planning and work on the ground inform one another and make headway. 

Hope

There is a house in the heart of the Northside of Syracuse that is inhabited by young women fully committed to amazing work.  The neighborhood, by some, is considered dangerous.  Most would deem it not desirable, anyway.  They live there because that's where the people they've decided to work with live.  The have made it homey and lovely and throw open its doors to everyone who is a refugee or volunteers to have meaningful connections to refugees.  These are not social rejects.  These are hip, smart, cute young women who are doing incredible things.

I squandered my youth and singleness.

But my daughter will not.  Her and her former teen missions teammates have been pleading with Cathy and I to start up the group again.  Most of us do not go to the same church anymore, so we weren't sure how we could pull that off.  In that mysterious magnetic pull that happens when things are supposed to come together, I kept rubbing shoulders with Nicole, the founder and director of Hopeprint, the ministry house described above.  Cathy and I finally figured out that Hopeprint was the perfect fit for the girls and a perfect way to get the group working together again. There was a need working with the kids, and the girls love to work with kids.

Tonight was orientation, and the girls met many of the young women leading things there.  All of them were very kind to the girls, and their enthusiasm hooked up with that of the girls and took off.  Now the girls not only want to run the class for the littlest refugee children, they also want to meet girls their age and be friends.

I feel so fortunate for my daughter to have the opportunity to form relationships with people from all over the world - to minister to them and learn from them. She has a bevvy of new role models. This is one of those times I shake my head in awe at a windfall I have received.
I have been noticing a trend - in Upstate New York, anyway.  Young single women are taking up the reins of real, grinding, amazing work.  Last year, on a teen girls mission trip, the girls met Rev. Sarah, a young United Methodist minister who was leading the charge of helping flood victims pick up the pieces.  On another adventure, they met Rev. Becky, another young United Methodist minister who has taken over a dead, vacant church and is trying to minister to poor and broken people in the neighborhood around her. Our girls are poised to do the same.  My daughter and her friend, on the drive home, were conversing about how cool Hopeprint is. "Maybe we could do that when we're out of college - maybe we could live in a house like that!"

Three cheers for the young ladies of Hopeprint and others like them, not only casting hope for refugees and others in the Northside, but also casting vision for young girls from the suburbs. 

Reader, Forgive Me

"Father, forgive me for I have sinned" is the way I remember starting a Catholic confessional. 

Are you disappointed that I did not kick of the New Year with a resolution post?

I know you're not.  You are totally licking your lips in anticipation of morsels of guilt confessed.

Ok, so I had no big scandals involving adultery or gambling or plastic surgery or such.

This is more of taking a deep breath and admitting something out loud.

So I am a career woman now.  Real deal.  Swallowed the whole gig hook, line, and sinker. 

That's not the confession part.  The confession part is that I miss being at home.

I do.  I miss letting my kids be kids.  I miss having things organized. (Though we all know that is such a relative term, organized). I miss cooking real dinners most nights.  I miss having free time without having to borrow from my already shortened sleep.

I don't want to stop working.  I like it.  It's been good for me.  It's been good for my family.  I just don't want to work so much. Or maybe I just want to be better at balancing.

Whenever my family moves, I feel as if it takes 2 years to really feel at home there.  Maybe after 2 years of working full time I will feel at home in my career mom skin.  I'm the better part of a year shy.  I do want to find more balance.  In retrospect, the happiest period of recent times has been when I was working part time. Can I find balance in an unbalanced schedule?

I responded to a comment made the other day by a reader on an older post ("Everybody Needs a Housewife, Including Me") that I have recently been intrigued by the idea that "taking care of" is an art. It is something learned with care, just as people learn to be engineers or accountants.  What I mean to say is that I feel the need to recapture the honor of being able to take care of my home and my children and *gasp* my husband and even myself.

I have no idea how I will do this.  I am not even really asking for suggestions as I suspect this is something I have to feel my way through. 

This blog, at its heart, has always been about figuring out who we are best meant to be.  I am quite certain I am not meant to be who I was entirely last year.  In some ways, absolutely positively YES I was made for what I was doing.  But there was much left unattended to.

This blog became a little scattered and self-centered last year and the reason is because I was. 

Phew, I am done confessing now. C'est le vie. Let's see what happens this year.