Writing Isaiah Entry #7

Writing Isaiah

Entry #7

May 25th 2013

Megan Marie Vannelli 

Thank you for including me in this.  I, of course, want you to write to me about connection. I'm finding it super difficult to put words to my actual question, because it's all so unfathomable to me.  But, there are humans (one out in the world and one in your womb) that are/were made of/in in you and have your blood running through them.  And, before that you were made of your mom's parts and blood.  And, sometimes all of those shared parts and blood are all in a room together. Can you, like, compare and contrast what that's like vs.being in a room with other people you love that you're not related to? I don't know how helpful this question is to your writing, because it's giant and desperate and fails a little at being specific to *this* pregnancy. But, fuck, man, it's all I wanna know. If this were on paper it would be tear soaked and writing it made me need a nap.

Love.

Emily Joye McGaughy-Reynolds

Yesterday when we were hiking, as I was listening to you talk (about catholicism and family, I think), I kept questioning myself: is there anyone on this Earth who gets the absurdity and beauty of life like Megan? You asking this question/these questions is the ultimate response to that question. Nope. There's just no one like you. No one who gets it all like you do. Not for/with me anyways. There's a place where I connect with you that feels, well, I don't know, singular. A field of its own frequency. Or something. 

I want to start (again) with a rather lengthy quote from Helene Cixous because it's true and right and relevant (here). 

"That is what living is: the search for love. And its substitutes. Because we also discover how few possibilities there are to exercise love. The scarceness, incidentally, is related to the scaredness: the fear everyone has of losing. Of losing oneself. I also ought to say, counseled by human prudence: we cannot not be tempted to love. Most people flee the temptation. Some do not flee, knowing, as does everyone, that love is dreadful. As dreadful and desirable as God. But no one chooses: the two possibilities--to flee, to succumb--carry us off. It is stronger than we are. We are all subjects of a fortune called grace." 

This quote feels like it ties together all the things I feel emanating from you in the form of this question. So many things emanating: fear, loss, fleeing--your own mother (and father?). Dreadful. And desirable (still, I imagine?). Also: being tempted, succumbing to love, and the exercise of desire in it all--your own existence, particularly how you show up for others, taking the side of grace, making it a subject, lived, among the subjects fortunate enough to receive your care. I wonder about the tears soaking the virtual paper of this thread: what they are in the form of grief poured out in the mere contemplation of these co-existing realities. How we are a part of each other, yet how we can abandon each other (including the parts of each other in ourselves), how we continue to exist and love (even) in the face of all that loss, what connects us despite the absence and/or presence of our bodies in time and space, and the ways pregnancy holds that in a completely unique way. 

There is something unique about being in the presence of the bloodline. No doubt. There's power and recognition in a class of its own. But I believe that power and recognition are pretty dependent on a certain level of togetherness and ritual exposure to each other over time. For instance: when I'm in the room with my mother and daughter, 3 generations in one place, I cannot help but feel a continuum of shared stuff. Them in me and me in them. Them in each other. Something Big in and through all of us. And having said that: the one time I've been in the room with my brother and sister (we share the same father, not mother) who I had never seen or interacted with in 30 years, there was very little sense of that power and recognition for me. It felt like being reattached to something that had been missing for a long long time, something I didn't even know I'd been missing until I got in its presence, but it wasn't the kind of gut-zinging resonance or radical kind of shit that I feel with my mom and daughter who I communicate with, and look at, and touch/feel (almost) every day. What I'm saying is that sustained shared experience appears to either hone or diminish the power between blood-related family members. That's my sense anyways. 

That's not to say, however, that a relative lost doesn't impact the level of connectivity one experiences in one's body, family, world, etc. I think about the fact that I have the DNA of a man/father in my body that I barely got to know. That he chose to flee. That I never got to experience being in the room with him and my children at the same time, in order to explore the intergenerational bonds that can illuminate the truth of who we are and what we pass on. Actually, I think all the time about what it means to bring a child into the world and to never experience them. Like, to never watch them take a step, or take a bite, or to have them fall asleep on your chest, or call for you in the middle of the night. I wonder, way too much, how anyone chooses that ever. I remember bringing Aurora home from the hospital, staring at her little body, resting peacefully in my arms, and thinking to myself "how could my father have chosen not to do this?" I sobbed for a long time in that particular contemplation. And now, now that I'm having a boy child (who knows if Isaiah will identify as a boy or be a boy long term), I keep feeling a sense of panic about the fact that men have been so absent in my life. It's not a chosen ignorance on my part. I didn't chose to have my father abandon me or my step-father die on me. Those are the cards I was dealt so to speak. But how, how not, to fuck up vis-a-vis the masculine in my marriage and in my son/daughter--sometimes the ignorance scares me. That loss and grief and fear are constantly with me. I don't think they'll ever not be with me. 

And having said all that, let me be clear that parenting, bringing Aurora and Isaiah to life (consciously) has healed some of those dimensions in ways I never thought possible. When you can fill up with love (now) the empty spaces created in you by (previous) loss, there are miracles. More than anything, I've just been relishing that all the loss I experienced earlier in life didn't stop me. That the pain didn't deaden me into believing I wasn't worthy of family. Because there was a long long time that I believed that. I believed I was beyond repair. That I couldn't raise a child or children well because my father/loss fucked me up too much. That I was doomed to be alone and hard and hollow forever, incapable of commitment and long-term intimacy. Scripts like that aren't easily undone. I think so much of that, that self-doubt, self-inhibited shit is conditioned. And, fortunately, conditional. 

The conditions of creating life, creating family, creating bonds of love (whether biological or adoptive or foster or whatever) give rise to new incarnations. One discovers new dimensions of the self. A new story unravels. I'm not sure this is true for everyone, but I imagine it's mostly true for folks who take a chance on their capacity to love beyond the limits of their past. The rewards have been ten-fold for me. But I didn't get there alone. Which is what I want to scribe about next. 

When you've lost a lot and don't really trust yourself all that much (because those around you and those you love tend to abandon you or die, which inevitably leads you to conclude that there's something very very wrong with you), it's hard to break out and follow your inner-teacher. Or to consider yourself worthy of the thing calling you to new life. I always knew I wanted to be a mom more than anything. More than pastoring. More than romantic partnership. Being a mother always has and still does feel like calling number one for me. But I didn't have the 'lifestyle' or the confidence to just do it. This was a conundrum. I felt the desire/call so loudly and yet couldn't envision it. 

There were four people in my life who essentially coached me into pregnancy. Each of them went about it in a different way. My mom and friend Mandy Mitchell cautioned me about internalized single-mother phobia that's so rampant in our culture, citing all the evidence there was/is that mother's with husbands/spouses often feel burdened by having to take care of another adult and children. They both reminded me that being a single mother has its perks and that I was raised by a single mom (for the most part) and didn't I turn out okay? And then two of my mentors, who I won't name for confidentiality purposes, also chimed in. Neither of them had had children during the times in their lives when that would have been a possibility. And both of them live with a tremendous amount of regret about it. They both cautioned me about waiting too long, letting other things takes precedent. They didn't want me to look back and say "I shoulda..." Because of those four people I decided to trust my maternal vocation, to trust that G-d would meet me in the process of creating family, and I took the plunge. 

You asked the question about what it's like being in the room with biological relations versus being in the room with people I love who I'm not related to. The people I'm not related to that I love, people I very honestly refer to as "family," are the very people who have enabled me to find the biological relations that work for me. I think there's synchronicity and redemption in that. Our culture tends to prioritize biological family over everything. I find that bizarre given how fucked up many of our families have been or are. And yet, having lost a biological parent, I don't want to down-play the significance of blood relations either. We need supportive friends/lovers/companions to help us discover the families that works for us. Sometimes that's biological. Sometimes not. Regardless, I think it all matters. 

I want to close (again) with Cixous (again).

"I have always known that my foresight was born of my blindness; that my passionate desire to think further came from the desperate effort of my eyes to pierce the darkness. And also: my myopia is like my writing: these are fertile congenital disabilities." 

What can I say my friend who swims in loss and love everyday of her absurd and beautiful life? I hope all things missing, all things broken and despairing, lead you, lead me, lead us to fertilities of grace, whether congenital or chosen. That's the subject you're always leading me back to. You. 

I love you Megan.