If I Knew Then What I Know Now

I will record a podcast interview tomorrow to discuss my book, Letters to My Unborn Children, and more broadly the role of the miscarriages in my life.  Part of the show asks this question: what advice would your older self give your younger self? In the context of miscarriage, I can talk around broad themes from the book (loving with an open hand, facing dreams in the midst of disappointment, maybe or maybe not what facing personal grief taught me about new product development). 

I'm grappling with whether or not I wish that someone had told me just how fragile this gift of parenthood is when we (okay, mostly Kristine) were bearing the brunt of the office "When are you going to have kids" banter. I actually started thinking about this a few weeks ago when discussion amongst my younger colleagues in the office turned to the "when are you going to have kids" discussion. The radio interview just adds a little more pull.

I can think of all sorts of worthless advice. You've got at least a 25% chance your child will die before birth. If that happens, don't blame yourself (right, naturally). Don't assume you'll get pregnant right away. Don't assume you'll stay pregnant if you get pregnant.  Don't buy into the social norm which makes parenthood solely the mother's responsibility.  Be present as a father.  All this is true, but I would not have wanted to hear it.  At best I would have dismissed the comments as fear mongering (the equivalent to when people now tell me to "just wait until they become teenagers").  At worst, those comments could have discouraged the secret hope I carried about becoming a parent.  I had enough things to be scared of without adding paranoid fear of everything that could go wrong.

Worthless advice aside, I wonder if there is something I wish I could have heard. Something that I can say now to others. There are some broad themes that Kristine and I have discussed many times, and which we are trying to work out in our family.  That parenthood is a gift, and not to take it for granted. That it's a dream which takes shape in many different ways. That it's important to love each other through the ups and downs of pursuing that dream. That anyone who tries to shove you into an idealized experience of pregnancy (or childbirth, or parenthood, for that matter) is selling you a load of rubbish. Yes, really, don't blame yourself.

Family painting by Kyle Ragsdale, commissioned in 2010 and completed in 2011.  The three crocuses are for our unborn children, whose fragile beauty we are still trying to weave into our family.

All this is true, but doesn't boil down to much that's concise. And truthfully, I'm not sure how much it would have stuck if I'd heard it 10 years ago.  These themes resonate with me now, in part because I have the gift of hindsight.  What could I say that would "stick" with a younger self at the various transitions and decision points I faced?  I realized while pondering this question that those points in my life involved similar themes, even though the actual transitions were very different.  Here's what I wrote for the podcast interview.  The words are to my younger self at the beginning of a major transition.  They are also words to my older self with hope that I'll look back one day and see that I took some of them to heart.

Shawn, you are 17.  You are preparing to leave Kenya and go to the US for university.  You've decided to train in engineering, even though part of you deeply loves music and liberal arts.  You're not sure if you made the right decision.  It's okay to wonder.  To be honest, you will face many times in your life when your decision isn't between right and wrong.  It's between multiple options that are all plausible.  In those moments you will feel the same tension that you feel now as you question your decision to study engineering.  Give yourself grace in those moments.  And if you can, learn to live with that tension.  Because with time you will learn to harness it, and it will begin to become a creative force in your life.

As you harness that creative force, you will find experiences and skills that make you unique.  They will be important parts of who you are, but they will never be the only thing that you are.  You may wonder, especially when it's hard to find external affirmation that your uniqueness is worth much, whether it would be easier to shut down that part of life altogether.  It's okay to wonder.  Life's ebbs and flows mean that different facets of your experience will be more or less prominent at different times.  Don't give up on those experiences, though. Keep at the hard work of  integrating them with the next steps on your life's journey.  Let them feed your dreams - the ones that take shape as you thought they would, and the ones that take shape in unexpected positive or painful ways.

Finally, it's natural to look for friendship from people who are "like you" because they share your experiences in some way.  There will be times when this is true.  There will also be times when it isn't.  Because appearances are frequently deceiving, and people experience life, even shared life, very differently.  Give yourself grace when you feel alone.  Give grace to the people who you wanted support from because they were "like you."  And give grace to the friendships that crop up from unexpected places.  Because you never know when putting your uniqueness together with someone else's uniqueness could create something special.

Thanksgiving: Journey of the Pies

I've already written a serious reflection about Thanksgiving.  This post chronicles a less serious, but no less important issue.  Kristine and Carol agreed that our contribution to the Thanksgiving meal would be the dessert: a cheesecake, a pumpkin pie, and an apple pie.  This gave Kristine a chance to bake the cheesecake, which she's been wanting to do.  It also allowed her to contribute food without transporting tons of fixings that require preparation in someone else's kitchen.

In the back of both of our minds, and in the forefront of our discussion Thursday night before our trip was an important question.  How exactly are we going to transport these desserts?  Transporting them for a 3 hour trip would require some creativity if we were in the US with access to our various kitchen gadgets.   The stakes get raised since we're in the UK with limited gadgets.  Fortunately, Kristine's ingenuity was up to the task.

Step 1 involved repurposing a couple of Cheerio boxes for the pies, and a pair of raggedy old tights and a couple of pans from the oven for the cheesecake.

Step 2 involved careful placement in the cargo bay of the Golf.

Step 3 involved making the trip from Melbourne to Swindon without damage to our valuable cargo.  This shouldn't have been a problem, except we had an adventure with a bridge on a country road while driving well after dark.  Said adventure involved a bump that nearly sent us airborne and invoked different responses from my passengers.  Clare exclaimed "That was fun!" while Kristine remarked "I hope the pies are okay."

Turns out there was no need for concern.  The desserts survived the trip with no ill effects.  The cheesecake emerged from its tightly-bound pan to receive its topping of black currents.

The pies, despite being unceremoniously stuffed into empty Cheerio boxes, emerged with fully appetizing surfaces in tact.

  

Thanksgiving: Finding A New Story

I’ve had a tenuous relationship with Thanksgiving for many years now.  As a college student whose family was overseas, I resented a festival that hammered home the fact that I didn’t have a home to go to.  Several families welcomed me into their homes, but I internalized a message that I was an outsider at their celebrations.  I hadn’t yet learned how to think about accepting the gift of hospitality that these families offered me.  As a young professional who was trying out different lines of liberal thinking, I resented the conspicuous consumption of large quantities of food.  When our first child died in 2004, my resentment turned even stronger.  We should have been celebrating a new baby in our home during Thanksgiving.  Instead we were grieving two dead children and wondering if parenthood was a lost dream.

Kristine has been part of my life through much of this tenuous relationship.  She has born the brunt of many of my critical ponderings about Thanksgiving.  She has allowed me to vent, but also gently tried to help me see Thanksgiving in a more positive light.  For some people it is tied, however incompletely through varied storytelling through the centuries, to a strong sense of national identity.  As one who struggles to call any single place home, I can appreciate that sense of rootedness.  It is a time when people who rarely see each other during the year can get together.  This can be contentious.  But it can also be great fun.  I’ve witnessed how much her extended family truly enjoys each other’s company.  When your language of giving love is to care for your family, preparing a special meal is less about conspicuous consumption then it is showing your children and grandchildren that you care for them.  I am learning to receive those acts of love, even if I wonder why you would ruin a perfectly good apple by putting it into a pie.

The memories of loneliness and pains of grief return every year, but Kristine’s patient encouragement through the years has helped me reach a point of being at peace during Thanksgiving.

2014 has given me a chance to consider Thanksgiving in a different light.  Since we’re in the UK, the girls are in school and I’m at work on Thanksgiving Day.  We’ll spend the weekend in Swindon with the Oldfields, who graciously invited us to help them celebrate a festival that gets very little attention in the UK.  Our Thanksgiving story this year has an awful lot to do with friends like the Oldfields who have opened their lives to a small family that is learning how to live in a foreign land.  Beneath the battles of revisionist historians across the opinionated spectrum, there is a story of giving thanks for people in a foreign land who received help.  That's a story worth celebrating, a story worth telling, and a story worth embodying.  Indeed, it rings out through the Old Testament prophetic tradition: Remember that you were strangers and aliens.  Care for the stranger and the alien among you.

I was a stranger and an alien in the US for many years.  For most of those years, I resented a Thanksgiving festival that reminded me how much I didn't belong.  My family and I are strangers and aliens in the UK this year.  Part of the story is familiar to me: we are celebrating Thanksgiving in a home that is not my own.  But this year the story is different.  I am celebrating Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving 2014 around the table in the Oldfield home

2014 Remembrance Day Parade

Well, the blog has been dormant for many weeks now.  All sorts of reasons for that.  Most of them excuses.  At any rate, in an attempt to get myself back into a writing routine, here's a short post about the recent Remembrance Day festival in Melbourne.

Remembrance Day commemorates the end of hostilities in World War I.  Technically it's on November 11, since hostilities ended at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.  The US designates November 11 as Veterans Day to acknowledge a broader scope than WWI, but the associated festivities are typically done on Memorial Day in May.

Remembrance Day had special significance this year because it marks 100 years since the beginning of WWI.  I got involved with the festival in Melbourne through Melbourne Town Band, for which I play trombone.  The band has strong ties with the local chapter of the Royal British Legion.  They lead the parade, several of the members have other roles (parade master, standard bearer), and they play a concert at the local British Legion Club afterwards.

Melbourne is not a large community.  Although it's technically a town because it has a charter, folks who live here refer to it as a village.  The parade had 500 participants and observers along the street.  Here's a photo of the band leading the parade down the main street in the village.

We marched through the town to the Parish Church (I took this photo of the war memorial and all the wreaths that were laid about a week later when Kristine and I were out for a walk).  Along the way we encountered a bus approaching the parade on the same street from the opposite direction.  The quick-thinking police officer who was walking up front with the band motioned it to the bus-stop on the street.  Fortunately there was time for the bus to pull in before the parade needed to pass.

The actual ceremony for laying wreaths was relatively short.  We started with the traditional cornet solo piece, The Last Post.  The band played a handful of songs while wreaths were laid by different organizations from in and around Melbourne.  We finished with My Country 'Tis of Thee God Save Our Gracious Queen.  This photo below gives an idea of what the area around the memorial looked like.  It was packed.

Once the ceremony was done, the parade re-assembled in front of the monument and marched back to its starting point at the Royal British Legion.

We took a different route on the way back.  It included playing while marching up hill, which I found to be more than a little bit tiring.  Fortunately we didn't have to do it much.  In the photo below, the band director is raising his baton to signal the drummer to give the band the short rolls that cue'd us to start playing again.

Here's the whole route for the parade, along with the locations I had to plug in to force Google to create it.  I haven't participated in equivalent memorial activities like this one before, although I know they exist.  It was a privilege to see how the small community of Melbourne came together for it.

Family Trip: Turkey (Ephesus)

Ephesus was the reason we made our trip to Turkey.  It got a scant half day out of our week-long stay on a day-long tour that covered Ephesus, the home of the Virgin Mary, the Basilica of St. John, and the Temple of Artemis.  Somehow the theory of taking young children on an educational trip to ruins (evidently some of the most well preserved in Europe, for that matter) of a famous city that they've learned about didn't quite connect with the reality of taking young children on an educational trip to ruins of a famous city that they've not studied for over six months.  All that is to say that this blog post will be even lower on the text to photo ratio than my typical posts.

Here's my best guess at reconstructing the route for our tour.  We started at the bottom left of the photo, made our way through the ruins, and finished about top center where all the buses are.

Despite being in ruins, Ephesus does have inhabitants who are not tourists.

I hadn't appreciated just how ruined the city of Ephesus is.  Evidently there's quite a lot of the city still buried under the hillside.

One of the things we quickly realized on this tour was that we weren't going to do much standing around and reading about the historical significance of the city.  We were, however, going to do lots of climbing on the rocks.  This is at the beginning of the tour in the Odeon (around the Basilica on the map), which is where the city council met.

Ali, our guide, did a good job with our group.  We would meet at a point, which he would explain.  Then he would tell us where we would meet again, usually after 10 or 15 minutes.  The next point would get us further through the city.  He kept this up for the tour's duration.  I think this stop was at the town hall right next to the Odeon.

I mentioned climbing on rocks?

Ephesus wasn't uncomfortably crowded during our tour, but it there were lots of people (and tour guides).  The tour guide solution for being seen by their group was to carry umbrellas.  Ali's was yellow.

Some of the streets have been restored quite well.

Others not so much.

Photo next to statue of famous person from Greek mythology.

There's clearly been a great deal of work put into restoring the ruins at Ephesus.  I didn't appreciate until we got there just how much of the city has not been restored.  Here is one example of the city literally emerging from the hillside.

In other places, the structures are being restored but need a little extra help to stand upright.

Toilets.  Where slaves had to sit for up to a half hour to warm the marble for their masters.  And where men would discuss business while they sat.  Hmm.

Here are a few photos that I took because I thought they were interesting, but for the life of me I can't remember why anymore.

Temple of Domitian.  This was a hit for the kids (our three girls and a friend they made on the Fun and Sun trip who was also on this tour).  Rocks to climb, caves to explore, what's not to like?

Domitian's Well or Heracles' Gate.  I'm not sure.

Clare and friend taking a break to sit on one of the many available stones.

Library of Celsus.  The front of the library has received the most intentional rebuilding effort.  Unlike many of the other ruins, it's more or less intact and rebuilt from ruins of the actual library (as opposed to being rebuilt from bits and pieces of ruins within the site).

View from the porch of the library, looking up the street toward where we started our tour.

Our final stop in Ephesus was the Amphitheater (Amphitheatre for my UK blog readers).  It seats 25,000 people, and continues to be used for live performances because its acoustics are so good.  The first seat is high enough off the ground to protect spectators from the wild beasts who fought gladiators.

Looking back from the Amphitheater along what's left of the marble road to the library.

Kristine in the Amphitheater.

This was pretty much the edge of the city.  We were through the Amphitheater and ready to walk down the path to our bus.  Recalcitrant three year old who refused to pose clearly wanted a change of pace.

We had a brief stop at a local pottery shop before lunch.  They gave us a demonstration of pottery making, and offered discounts on their finished goods.  We settled for a photo.



Our first stop after lunch was at the shrine for the home of the Virgin Mary.  Tradition has it that she moved to Ephesus around 40 AD with the Apostle John, and lived at this location for the remaining years of her life.

Passing through the shrine itself was pretty quick.  We joined a line that wasn't allowed to stop moving.  This meant we were in the shrine itself for about a minute.

We added three candles here after leaving the shrine.

And stopped briefly to look at all the prayers that have been tied to the nearby wall.  I was impressed by the variety of languages, and also by the creativity of the people who figured out how to tie their paper onto the existing collection.

View from the window of the bus as we left the shrine.  We drove up that road.  In a large bus.  With large buses going the opposite direction.  Yes, it involved a little bit of bus drivers playing chicken.  And yes, I breathed easier once we were off the mountain.

Selcuk, the modern city where Efes (Ephesus) used to be, has a population of 35,000.  Efes had a population of 250,000 at its peak.  That means this valley would have been full of houses and streets. Wow.

Our next stop was the Basilica of St John.  The basilica was built from 536 to 565 AD at the order of the Emperor Justinian, who also ordered the destruction of a small church on the site that had been built in honor of the alleged burial place of the Apostle John.  Like Ephesus, the basilica was in ruins.

Unlike Ephesus (possibly because it's a much smaller site), there's a full scale model of what the basilica could have looked like.

Clare was much more cheerful at this stop, for two reasons.  First, we spent considerably less time (about an hour) than we did at Ephesus (about three hours).  Second, we let her sit down and eat snacks.

Continuing the "Elise on a pedestal" photos.

View from the basilica looking at the grand fortress of Selcuk.  The flags were in honor of Turkish Independence Day, which was celebrated on the previous day.

Our last stop was the temple of Artemis.  Here's what's left of it.  Ali politely told us that if we wanted to see the rest of the temple, we'd have to visit the British and German museums where the pieces had been hauled off to at the beginning of the 20th century.