A parent's first Easter

Sorry for the dearth in posts, folks. Katie, Eleanor, and I spent a lovely Spring Break with my wife’s family in Charleston. We had a great time, but traveling with a 9-1/2 month old is an exhausting process, which, combined with the great food and great company, meant that I had little time for writing.

Also, in an attempt to supplement our income (to pay for the coming-soon music lessons, swim lessons, etc.), I have begun putting out feelers for freelance writing/editing work. That means I’m putting together resumes, writing sample passages for prospective companies, and generally trying to pull my professional self together. More posts are coming soon.

In the meantime: Churchgoing with infants? Discuss.

Eleanor’s first Easter was hard. Our beloved daughter looked gorgeous in her first Easter dress, and I wore a suit for the first time in six months. Katie looked beautiful in a blue dress of her own. We even brought a camera to church so we could take some fancy Easter family pictures.

Eleanor didn’t last five minutes into the service before she started crying/whining. I still don’t know what happened, but we didn’t even bother socializing with friends after the service was over. We scooped the kid into our arms, threw her into her car seat and drove home, during which time she promptly fell asleep for an hour and a half. We guess she was tired?

Going to church with a baby seems to get harder the older she gets. She can’t sit still. She wants to stand, sit, creep, crawl, walk, cry, be carried, socialize -- all at once. Sometimes, the music is too loud for her, or she can’t keep quiet during the Pastor’s sermon. And it’s not like we can silence her. She’s pretty advanced socially (she even has a social laugh, which she pulls out when other people are laughing but she doesn’t know what they’re laughing about -- it’s incredible), but she doesn’t really understand social graces and proper church behavior. So, Katie and I take turns leaving the sanctuary to change a diaper or to let her run around in the lobby and investigate the plants scattered around the church.

I’m hoping this gets easier again, soon, but I have my doubts. I love our church, and I love going to the service, but sometimes it feels like it’s really hard to get something out of the experience.

My wife had a great conversation with her mom on the phone after our difficult morning:

“Mom, I honestly have no idea what the Easter sermon was about,” my wife said. “Something about hope?”

“Umm...maybe it was about, ‘Christ is risen?’” joked my mother-in-law.

Kidding aside, the point is well taken. We don’t always get everything we want to out of the “church experience.” Sometimes we’re distracted. Or we have to leave because our kids are having meltdowns. But we still go, and sometimes, that’s enough.

Why?

We go because it doesn’t matter if we’re always paying attention to every detail about the sermon. We are in the Lord’s house, and that’s what matters. We go because this is our community. We go because we are surrounded by people who love us and love our daughter, even when she’s going crazy. We go because we follow Jesus. We go because there’s always a part of the service we can cling to, whether it’s a hymn or the Lord’s Prayer or the bits and pieces of the sermon we can focus on.

I want my daughter to grow up in this church community. An interesting point: Katie took Eleanor up for the Children’s Message, which featured a clever take on The Very Hungry Caterpillar. She was rapt with attention. She might have gotten more out of that message than we did for the whole service.

By the way, we did get those fancy Easter family photos. I took them. In our house. With the timer on the camera. After Eleanor’s nap.

And you know what? They turned out pretty good.

Lessons relearned, or It really does take a village (and other cliches that are true)

Everyone sucks in a vacuum. (Enjoy the pun -- it didn’t occur to me until I actually wrote that sentence that it even was a pun...For what it’s worth, I think parent brain must be worse than pregnancy brain).

I mean it, by the way. I have always been my biggest critic, in everything I have ever done. And despite everyone who tells me that I have the happiest, smiliest baby they have ever seen (and I am not exaggerating), I constantly engage in epic battle with myself -- we’re talking World of Warcraft levels of Sturm und Drang waged in my head -- about how I am doing as a father.

It should be noted: We spend a lot of time together, as I am a stay-at-home dad.*

(*Explanation: This is by choice. I did not lose my job or get sick or anything dramatic. My wife and I always agreed that if we could make it work financially, one of us would stay home when we had a baby. I used to be a teacher, and my wife makes more than twice what I made in that profession. So I’m the lucky one. It really was a no-brainer :)

The hand-wringing and head-banging usually happens when it’s just me and my daughter, hanging out. Or while my daughter entertains herself while I do laundry. Or while I prepare her food. Or while I install cloth diaper sprayers that connect to my toilet. Or while I steal away to reorganize the garage, hoping that the baby monitor stays in range where I can hear when she inevitably wakes from her nap in the middle of my attempt to accomplish the most menial task that is impossible when she is awake.

During the first six months of my daughter’s life, I spent way too much time defining myself as a crappy parent for everything I was doing wrong. I wasn’t holding her enough. I wasn’t giving her enough tummy time. I wasn’t talking to her enough. I wasn’t paying enough attention to her. I wasn’t helping her develop good enough sleep habits. She’s crying because I’m not mommy and she hates me and I’m not meeting her needs -- I can tell by the way she looks at me! And I suck. I’m the worst father in the world.

Then I realized that everyone sucks. When they’re on their own. When there’s no other feedback than the echo chamber inside your own head, you can do a lot of damage to yourself. It took me too long to realize that when other people tell you that your baby looks happy and healthy, you should take that, accept it, and realize that you’re doing the best you can.

I love my daughter. And I know that she knows that I love her (as much as her seven-month-old brain is capable of understanding that). I know because of the smiles she gives me when I pick her up out of her crib in the mornings. I know because she calls me Da-Da-Da. I know because of the joy she brings to other people, and the joy they bring to her. My mom tries to come up and visit from Colorado Springs once a week, and my daughter is ecstatic. She laughs and smiles, and she waves her arms around in happiness whenever Grandma comes over. I know she loves me because she smiles at strangers and she plays with our friends from church. She feels safe because my wife and I meet her needs and love her with all our hearts, even when we screw up.

I’m so thankful for the opportunity to stay at home with my daughter, but it is far harder than I could have imagined. I didn’t expect to have sleep issues and experience the level of anxiety that I do about pretty much everything related to my daughter. But I have realized that other people -- friends, family, church members -- are happy to help. It gives them joy to be a part of my daughter’s life. She learns from everyone who interacts with her. Everyone makes different kinds of googly eyes at her. They play with her differently. They say different things and say things differently than I do. Me? I constantly ask her questions that she never answers. I’m sure she gets tired of that.

It does take a village. A note to expectant parents: This cliche matters. Every child -- EVERY CHILD -- should grow up in a community that surrounds them with love and engages them with joy. I am so thankful that my daughter has that, through our family, friends and church.

So it may not be Thanksgiving, but I am giving thanks right now. My family couldn’t do this without you. My daughter doesn’t know how to say it yet, but I know she would say it if she could:

Thank you.

Two weeks later

It's been more than two weeks since the Newtown shootings, and the shock of senselessness continues to unsettle me, even as I spend the holidays surrounded by family. I think about all the firsts that my daughter has experienced in the last two weeks -- first Christmas Eve candelight service, first Christmas, first present unwrapped, first fire in the fireplace.

Because of this tragedy, those experiences have been taken away from so many families, and when I focus in on that fact, I have a hard time coping with a sadness that starts to spiral out of control.

There may not be an obvious connection here, writing about this event on a parenthood blog that mostly focuses on the struggles of trying to become a parent or being one. But despite all the ink spilled and bytes consumed and punditry blathered on television stations, I believe there's something missing from the national conversation: the role of community and shared responsibility. As any group of people living in community, we need each other and we have a responsibility to care for each other. Part of the reason we started this blog is because we felt like too many people suffer alone. Women (and their partners) suffer miscarriages without telling anyone. Or others find they can't have children and quietly go through the process of adoption (or they decide not to have children at all). But no one talks about it. Communication that might generate conflict and awkwardness and pain is avoided. Is that the kind of world we should live in? Where we suffer alone and assume no one else can (or is willing) to share our burdens? As my family and I have been through our own struggles with a miscarriage, a traumatic birth and subsequent mental health battles, we decided to stop suffering alone.

For me, that's what connects this blog to what happened in Newtown.

I have a hard time believing I live in a world where someone bursts into an elementary school and systematically shoots and kills children.

As a new dad, I don't know how to process this. As a human being, I don't know how to process this. I am grateful that my daughter is only six months old, and I don't have to figure out how to tell her about this kind of evil in the world just yet. Not yet...that qualifier terrifies me. I never want her to know that kind of evil and pain, but I know it's inevitable.

It feels like there are no sacred, safe spaces left in this country. Schools, temples, malls and movie theaters. Why have these communal spaces become arenas for shooting tragedies? What does it say about how we build and sustain communities? Have we as a country lost our willingness to engage in meaningful community building? Are there safe community spaces? Where do people come together in meaningful ways to share their lives, experiences and responsibilities?

I will leave the political debates, specifically about gun control and mental health care, for another time, for others to argue about in another space. But I wonder: Would it make a difference if our communities were stronger? Would things like this happen on such a scale and with such frequency if we lived more intentionally communal lives -- where we had responsibilities to others that extend beyond our families? Where we know our neighbors, where villages really do raise children? I don't know much about Newtown, other than at least portions (especially where the killer lived) seem like a classic bedroom community. There is plenty of urban violence in this country -- awful shootings that also often involve children, for example -- but I wonder about the impact on our society of communities where we don't know our neighbors. Suburbs and subdivisions seem to experience a disproportionate amount of these mass killings.

As we sift through the horror of Newtown, there will be plenty of conversation about mental health services and gun control -- and rightly so -- but I wonder if the real question is the loss of dense, community-driven connection in this country. As far as I can tell from media reports, no one really knew Adam Lanza very well, nor his mother, who owned several guns. Their house was on a huge plot of land, and their neighbors didn't really know much about them. Their subdivision (what a depressing word, by the way) clearly does not structurally lend itself to communal, shared responsibility. This is a (broken) family that lived in functional isolation.

(Quick aside: though I do not own a gun, I have no issue, generally speaking, with guns or others' choice to own them. I grew up around guns, took a hunter safety course as a teen and even participated in target shooting competitions as a kid. I was taught how to handle and respect the weapons in my home, and I respect the rights of people who choose to own guns.)

In truth, I live in a city that has ten times the density of Newtown, Conn., but I don't know my neighbors very well, either. In this country, we no longer seek out the company of people who live in proximity to us. We drive out of our way to connect with people who agree with us -- who share our predetermined, demographically assigned values. Or we just shut out everyone else entirely.

My wife and I joined Park Hill United Methodist Church partially out of a sense of lost community. We'd had several friends who'd moved away and we had encountered some personal loss that we were struggling to make sense of. We needed a community, and, thank God, we found it through a church that's only two miles from our house. Every week, we invite members of the church into our home.  They come, they hold my daughter, play with her, they engage in fellowship with us, and we feel connected in a way that we haven't ever really experienced before in our nine years in this city.

Why is that? It shouldn't be this hard to connect and engage with your neighbors and build community.

Was Adam Lanza part of a community that cared about him? That shared his struggles? That felt a responsibility to take care of him as a neighbor or friend? This young man didn't have access to (or at least didn't take advantage of) mental health services he needed -- that's clear -- but did he even have a community of people who cared about him at all?

Have we lost our sense of community in this country? Have we lost our sense of shared responsibility?

There will always be tragedies, but I have to believe this particular kind of tragedy doesn't have to be. This isn't a natural disaster or an act of political terrorism. This is a shooting. In an elementary school. A sacred space. What fixes this? I don't want my daughter to grow up in a world where tragedies like this happen. I don't want her to grow up in a world I have a hard time believing even exists.

Can we rebuild a sense of community, shared responsibility, service, compromise and dialogue in this country? That's what has always made our country great. How do we repair the parts of this great society, this American Dream, that have been broken?

What fixes this?