Eat Dessert First !

Yesterday, I ate dessert first. 

Actually, that's all I ate for lunch. Dessert. I was seated at Valentini's, a locally owned, family restaurant which creates its desserts from scratch. Their cream puffs are huge, stuffed with fluffy, vanilla cream, and drizzled thickly with dark chocolate. Eating it was a blatant act of love towards... myself.

It had been a rough week: part of it was spent metaphorically circling Dante's 7th level of Inferno, interacting with the infamous Rusticucci. While on that little journey, the stomach flu visited my household for 48 hours in a manner that shall not be discussed in any public forum.  

However, back to lunch. At table were five, middle-aged women, all mothers of trans-racially adopted children. We meet monthly as a support group. Our families number from one to nine adopted and foster children of ethnicities and races that, unlike us, are not white. 

None of us would win a beauty contest. Our eyes and foreheads have lots of creases; our mouths carry deep crevasses, and our hair is mostly, as Procol Harum sang in the '70's, a "whiter shade of pale."  But oh, the inner beauty I see at that table would knock out the red carpet lights on Academy Awards night.

These are women of strength; Moms who love life so deeply they are dedicated to saving and strengthening the abandoned, abused, and throwaways that our society would like to have them believe don't really exist. And what could possibly motivate these people, you might ask? Insanity? Nope, love.

“At the end of life we will not be judged by how many diplomas we have received, how much money we have made, how many great things we have done. 

We will be judged by "I was hungry, and you gave me something to eat, I was naked and you clothed me. I was homeless, and you took me in.” 

― Mother Teresa

As I see it, each family in their own way--whether they know it or not--has taken the words of the late Mother Teresa to heart, "doing small things with great love."  

The table conversations are rarely for the faint of heart. They often leave us laughing or weeping out loud at our attempts to temper appropriate discipline with compassion for those in our care whose brains have been permanently damaged by in-utero drugs, alcohol, or post-birth trauma.

Discussions center around how to prevent children with FASD from impulsive actions that range from smearing feces on bedroom walls to compulsively eating frozen food from the freezer. Conversations flow about freedoms and limits for our older children who, because of infant/toddler sexual abuse, have no personal boundaries that intuitively tell them how to differentiate a predator from a potential friend. 

We exchange contacts of community resources, human service providers, and special programs that might help other's kids. And, we often speak wearily of having to advocate or explain over and over and over again to those who are uninitiated to issues of RAD, FASD, PTSD, ADHD just why our kids' actions--or our parental efforts to protect them--look unusual to those whose experiences are only with "normal" children.  (I smile at the myth that normal exists anywhere except on my washing machine's dial.)

Most importantly, we women are here for each other in this little battle to make a difference in the world. It is our way of making world peace in our community. Our hope is that our actions of love create space for those who, through no fault of their own, are viewed as "less than" by society. There  are few rewards for doing it...but it's a compelling reason to eat dessert first.

Peace be in all, Jane

http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/838305.Mother_Teresa

What's Love Got To Do With It?

In the Eastern mind, the path of the spiritual journey leads to enlightenment; the path of spirituality in the Western traditions seeks personal transformation opening one to salvation. Granting all the differences of rituals, dogmas, practices, and religious texts, the end goal is the same as I see it: a journey that leads one home to one's heart and union with all of humanity. Oneness. Unity. Love.

However,  you might ask as Tina Turner once did, "What's love got to do with it?"  What does being one with all of humanity have to do with unemployment or under employment, a free school lunch, food pantries and white privilege...all of which have been in the headlines in my little corner of the world this past month?

Simply...Everything.  For nearly four decades, I worked from the farm to the corporate board room to educate myself and pull myself up to what has been considered a middle class life style. While remaining involved with my church and community, I was blessed to co-create a family with four beautiful children, educate myself to a post-graduate degree, and help build a comfortable home in a safe neighborhood. When I volunteered hundreds of hours to charitable causes and philanthropic efforts, I did so with gratitude for my health and good fortune wrought from a hard work ethic. I looked forward to retirement and a lifestyle with more choices in a couple of years--just like other baby-boomers my age.

Then a job loss hit in the wave of the recession; then a divorce hit; then a child's health needs hit. And before I knew it, I was standing in line outside a church waiting for my turn at Ruby's Pantry. And, like any writer worth her ink, I began asking questions of others in line to find out what their story was.

Here are thumbnail profiles of those who stood with me:

• Single mothers or fathers in their mid-twenties, employed in service positions that pay slightly more than minimum wage and way less than needed to provide for a young family;
• Home-schooling moms with husbands who had jobs such as postal worker or peace officer; 
• Retirees living on social security and a small pension;
• Professional (you read correctly) divorced, late middle-aged women going home from the office;
• Men dressed in their machinist work jackets or company uniform shirts.

The saying used to go, "We're all just two paychecks away from the bread line."  From what my unscientific sampling showed, "All our paychecks, pensions, or privilege won't guarantee we'll stay out of the food pantry line."

Which brings me back to being one with all humanity.  I made a couple of new acquaintances in that line,  exchanged a few recipes and shared some job networking tips. 

Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk with the Buddhist mind, had his enlightenment on the corner of 4th and Walnut streets in Kentucky. Mine was outside a neighborhood church, standing in line. 

Merton wrote, "My vocation (job or calling) does not really make me different from the rest or put me in a special category except artificially...I am still a member of the human race--and what more glorious destiny is there, since the Word was made flesh and became, too, a member of the Human Race...Thank God, thank God that I am like others, that I am only a [person] among others...It is a glorious destination..." 

                                  Oneness, Unity & Yes,  Love.     Write that on your Valentine's card. 

May Peace be in All,  Jane 

* Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Doubleday, 1966).