2) “Some visitors came searching, mostly for fat chick, fat chicks, mini quiche, fat girl, and sleep study.” Fabulous.

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 2,900 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 48 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

I recently started taking a “how not to be a loser” career development course. (Sadly, I must have missed the session where they informed us that the first step is to not refer to yourself as a loser!)

I can tell already that a big part of the course’s appeal is in the sharing of experiences, of celebrating the small victories and providing support and encouragement when things don’t go well. For some reason, though, tonight I was struck by the fact that my career failures/delays/missteps are painful to me on a level beyond that of the usual disappointment and discouragement of not succeeding. Of course, those elements are there as well, but there is something more going on here. When I don’t get a job, when I have those times when I am so, so certain that something is going to happen–and then it doesn’t–it’s not just my own disappointment in myself that I am dealing with. And when I face my fear of being stuck in my current job indefinitely, it is not just because I don’t think I will find something else. No, all of this is couched in terms of a relationship . . . there is Someone who is calling the shots, Someone who I feel has let me down, again.

I’m sure it’s bad theology to say that God would truly let me down. But disappoint me? Yes, He has, and not just a few times. I am quick to attribute this to my disobedience–surely I am doing something “wrong”, and if I would only start tithing/wake up at 5am to do devotions/go to church three times a week, He would immediately remedy my life circumstances and bring about all that I have hoped for.

But at least some small part of me knows that this isn’t how God works. He is not malicious, nor does He act out of spite or treat us as our sins deserve. No, when He closes door after door after door, I have to acknowledge the truth that I know, which is that He has me where He wants me and His plans for me are better than any plans I could come up with for myself. He knows what He is doing; He is God, and I most certainly am not.

It still hurts, though. It hurts because, for whatever reason, I have repeatedly been convinced that this was really it–that God was telling me that _______ was going to happen. Everything within me felt that certainty, once even to the point that I received confirmation from one of the most godly women I know. Every time, it’s been the same thing. “This is it”, I would think. “This is what I’m meant to be doing. This is where my life will start. This is what I was born to do.” And time after time, I’ve been devastated by the closing of a door that seemed destined to open.

There is a disappointment in this. Disappointment because I feel that Someone has betrayed me. And it’s not like the God of the universe has to answer to me; even expressing my disappointment displays an arrogance that falls just short of blasphemy. But the disappointment and the discouragement and the ceaseless hunger for something more remain. And perhaps I am disappointed precisely because I know that He has my best interests at heart. He loves me, and He created me for a purpose, but the waiting is sometimes intolerable.

I am loved more than I can fathom, and His ways are higher than mine . . . I know all of this, and yet it hurts. It hurts because I know that He could change things–and I suppose someday He will–but today there are no answers, and I wait.

My job search, and my larger career angst, is not just an inanimate set of circumstances. It’s a sign of a relationship that I am less than satisfied, a reminder that this God who loves me so, so much has nonetheless not chosen to deliver me from my current situation in any of the ways I would have liked. Worse, I have hoped for these things, have prayed about them, have been certain they would come to pass. Am I not hearing Him correctly? Or is there some lesson I’m missing as I wait?

Having a different set of rules means that it’s inevitable that some of what I tell him to be true will not be true in his “other” world. To be fair, some of the things I say are not really true in my world either, but they are things that I wish to be true. Case in point: “If someone loves you, they won’t hurt you”. Simple enough, right?

When a child is three, it is difficult to discern how much truth there is in anything he says. “My brother called me a punk”–well, that I believe, but I know that the brother in question would have said this in a joking way. I also know that this little boy knows that he has his Auntie’s heart, and that I will pour out compassion and sympathy on him at the least hint of a wrong being done to him–and this despite the fact that I also know him to have a self-righteous/”poor me” mentality much of the time. In his world, even accidental slights can be cause for dramatics, and one’s motives are often questioned. (“You DID do that on purpose!”)

I believe with all my heart, though, that although children’s words may not always be truthful, nonetheless they have ways of telling that come through loud and clear and that are the Gospel truth. We recently had one of those moments. Through a combination of what he said, what he acted out, and the surrounding facts that I was aware of, I knew that someone who loves him (or claims to love him) had hurt him. And because he is three, because our society does not believe children, because I cannot “prove” anything, there is very little I can do about it. Direct confrontation would be met with outright denial or worse, with me being cut off and therefore even less able to try to shelter him.

(I had a therapist once who said of abuse that “children think they tell”. I think that’s somewhat of a cop-out. Are they really not telling, or are we just not listening?)

Ever since this incident, I have spent a lot of time trying to reassure him with this lie–”people who love you are not going to hurt you”. The night he disclosed to me, he had a lot of questions for me. Well, really the same question, asked in a myriad of ways–”Snoopy (stuffed animal) is not going to hurt me? Max and Ruby are not going to hurt me?” and so on. I had told him that love and the infliction of physical pain were incompatible, and this was very much at odds with what he knew to be true.

His brothers adore him, but yes, they are boys, and so they play rough with him . . . but they do love him, and they are not usually cruel. It was not one of his brothers who did this to him. But he has often reported to me that his brothers did this or called him that, and that is when I tell him another lie: “They’d better not hurt you or call you names! If they do, you tell me and I’ll stop them.” It’s another variation of the same lie I tell him when he is clinging desperately to me because there is a dog nearby, or he is convinced that Chuck E Cheese is hiding somewhere. “I won’t let anybody hurt you . . . I won’t let anything bad happen to you.” How do I explain to him that what I mean is that in this moment, and when I can control it, I will keep him safe, but that I cannot promise to keep him safe every moment of every day, because the world doesn’t work that way?

“If someone hurts you, you tell me, and I will do something about it.” Lovey,  I so want this to be true, and yet I know that this statement must confuse you. Because you did tell me, and I know in my heart of hearts that you are telling the truth, and yet I have lied to you–there is nothing I can do, or at least nothing that will not make things worse for you.

I can’t “prove” that it happened, and I am too much of a coward to confront either the perpetrator or his enabler. All I can really do is to try to teach this child that this is not how things should be. In the meantime, I continue to speak these words that he must surely take in with bewilderment and a sense of despair: “You deserve to be safe. If someone hurts you, tell me and I will protect you.”

I will find a way, Lovey. You deserve to be safe. You deserve to live your life unafraid. And if I really love you like I say I do, then I need to push past my own cowardice and fight for you until all of the lies I am telling you become truth.

With that said . . .

I so, so desperately need for something to change. I have been at the end of my rope in the work arena for going on three years now. Blah, blah, blah, be grateful you have a job . . . I know. But my dissatisfaction is growing up in me like a tidal wave, and I am desperate to be able to catch my breath, to break out from under the smothering force of this restlessness. I have been wrestling with this for far too long . . . I am so, so tired of these hopes deferred. I am tired of not being able to decide which direction I want to take, but more than that, I am weary at the doors that keep on closing at every turn. I just. want. SOMETHING. to. change.

There’s a song that I keep hearing on the radio that I don’t know what to do with, but the lyrics keep echoing in my mind nonetheless.

God gave me
A dream that would not die*

And that’s just it. So many of my dreams have died, or at least have faded away as I have lost interest, moved on to the next shiny object left in my path to distract me. And as doors continue to close, it is an uphill battle to convince myself that I’m not doomed to a life of career failure and dissatisfaction, that something better might yet be ahead for me. For now, I am doing everything I can to move forward, but every small setback brings back that fear that I am doomed to a lifetime of purposeless wandering. I am just not okay with that, and so I continue to press on, even when the destination is entirely unclear.

I pray that God will help me to see the next step, and that I will be faithful in this desert while I wait.

(*Shirley Murdock, The Dream that Would Not Die)

To begin the change with this post, though, strikes me as being a big old cop-out, the intention of which would be to separate myself from the “racist” label. And with what I need to muddle through right now, I’m afraid that I need to keep that label as close to me as I possibly can.)

So now I have seen the film, and have a renewed energy for finishing the book. Not because I’ve fallen in love with the story, but because I need to wade through layer upon layer of confusion. I don’t even know where to begin to process this, although I do know enough to know that my gut instinct, wanting to talk through it to (and at the expense of) my blak friends, is the wrong way to go. I am sure I will still do it, but at least I will feel guilty about it. :-/

There has been so much talk about the film, and I have read all kinds of commentary about its message. Even if I hadn’t, though, I have been in this anti-racism work for too long to be able to go into it expecting to be able to see it as a “nice story”. I am accustomed to questioning everything, and in particular, I am increasingly hypersensitive to movies about black folks that prominently feature a white hero.

Now here’s the weird part. I don’t think that this movie had anything to do with black women.

Yes, I know, the premise of the book was that this white woman wanted to tell the black women’s stories, to give them a voice. And I know that the storyline was intended to bring out many of the nuances of 1950′s American apartheid, so yes, I get it that race was prominent here. But what I really saw in the film (we’ll see how different the book is) was the way that people can live in the midst of something that is so morally reprehensible and yet not be willing to stand up for what is right. The real story here is not the two or three “good” white people who dared to stand up for these women, but the dozens upon dozens (and historically, thousands upon thousands) who stood by and let such pure evil continue, and for such trite and morally bankrupt reasons. It is a story of betrayal of the worst kind . . . of women turning their backs on the most real relationship they have in order to save face in front of a heartless bunch of shallow wenches.

The question that came through the loudest for me, the thing I am wrestling with, is this: In which areas of my own life am I complicit in evil and doing everything in my power to justify my refusal to do what is right? Katrina Browne, the writer and producer of Traces Of the Trade, has asked this question in her own context, but it’s the piece of this that is most troubling to me. What am I lying to myself about?

The “easy” answers include things like buying clothing made in sweatshops, or eating fruits and vegetables that I have paid impossibly low prices for because the people who labor to bring these foods to me are not paid a living wage. And I can engage in all sorts of self-deception. I have to eat, right? I have to wear clothes. And anyway, the problem is too big for me to address . . . it’s just how things are . . . the extent to which we can justify our complicity in the face of so much injustice is beyond what I can fathom.

I want to believe that i am a Skeeter; it helps sustain my frenzied denial of what I know in the deepest recesses of my heart to be true, that I have the heart of a Hilly. Feel-good movie? Not for me, and not for anybody who wants to be honest with herself.

Here’s what I’ve said about this day in recent years.

This year I didn’t do Project 2996, either . . . maybe next year. There are so many stories yet to be told. For now, though, I will engage in a wordless tribute.

or maybe they’re not?

But I love my car . . . sooooooooo much better than the invisible one!

Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.
Sydney J. Harris

In the iconic television game show The Price is Right Let’s Make a Deal, one of the popular games requires the contestant to select from among three doors. If I am remembering this correctly, the prize behind Door #1 is revealed, and the contestant then needs to decide whether they are going to keep that prize, or risk asking to see what is behind Door #2 or Door #3. What’s behind those other doors could be much better than what is in front of the contestant, or it could be much worse.

I have been thinking about doors quite a bit lately as I have been reevaluating my life, because I have seen what’s behind Door #2 and Door #3 (or at least, I have seen a glimpse of each of them), and yet I stand here, hesitating, almost paralyzed by the crushing weight of inertia.

I am not happy with my life as it is. I am sure that this is no surprise to anybody who knows me. And for years, I have vacillated, unsure which direction to take. I am annoyingly fickle; it seems like I follow a given passion for a while before discarding it for the next whim or fad that comes along. A few things have remained constant, however, at least on the macro level. I have not outgrown my love for children, or my passion for fighting racism. The desire to have someone to mother is another longing that I have not been able to shake.

Over the last few years, desperate for something to change, I have felt a pull to two different doors, each related to these underlying passions. I have taken halting steps towards each of those doors; however, I have yet to make a choice, and I am hyper-aware of the fact that time is passing me by, and that every day of non-decision is a day that brings me closer to being stuck with the crappy-living-room-furniture set that is my current “Door #1”.

Behind Door #2 is the “mommy” prize. I have glimpsed into this door, even going so far as to take a few initial foster care licensing classes. My experiences with Elijah have convinced me that I would be able to do the hard work of fostering without any promise of permanency, and I am awestruck at the thought of what a gift and a privilege it would be to be in a hurting child’s life for a season. Am I certain that I could do it? Not at all. But I know that the need is huge, and I do not want to avoid doing something merely because it is difficult.

Door #3 holds the “teacher” prize. Having pursued (repeatedly, and unsuccessfully) a particular alternative teacher certification program has been a roller coaster. Certainty that it was going to happen, followed by crushing disappointment. Trying again . . . and again. Still not succeeding, and yet, unable to shake the almost visceral sense that this is what I am meant to do. That feeling ebbs and flows . . . working a temp job grading standardized tests recently, I felt the pull again, “seeing” these students and their need through their essay answers. Who is going to speak for those who have no one to advocate for them? Again, the need is huge, so why not me?

I have begun to identify steps that would bring me closer to being able to walk through one or the other of these doors, but I have a long way to go. I am paralyzed by indecision, however, and my greatest fear is that I will continue NOT to act, that I will indeed waste my life. Tomorrow isn’t promised, and my body reminds me daily that I am getting older. If I don’t do something now, I am certain that I will wake up one day an old lady, sitting on that outdated piece of furniture that will daily serve as a reminder of the way that I chose the default option, the “safe” choice that is no choice at all.

I believe I was created to live a life that matters. That I am not moving in that direction is a travesty of the worst sort. I need to fling open one of these doors; there is work to be done. I say that I want to live the way my heroes did, but those words ring hollow in the shadow of my inaction. I need to work around the pile of excuses that have held me back for so long. I need to move forward, because life will not wait for me. And the one thing I am certain of is that what is beyond those other doors will enrich my life in ways that I cannot yet fathom.

I just pray that I don’t miss it.

The elderly lady smiled at Elijah and asked him this seemingly innocuous question. I am certain that she had no idea how complicated this question actually was. I watched him, wondering what he would say. Most of the time lately, he will say, “I’m Moo-Moo” (TiTi Lena’s nickname for him from the start). When I call him “Elijah”, the name I’ve been calling him since before he was born, he answers to that name. But on this day, he turned to the woman and said, “Cecil*”.

And my heart sunk. Because yes, his name is Cecil. Cecil Elijah Davis (“Jr. III”, but that’s a story for another day).

Before he was born, Sara and I had managed to talk Mona into reversing the order of his names. Instead of Cecil Elijah, we had her convinced to call him Elijah, with Cecil as his middle name. “All of your other boys have names from the Bible”, we told her. And then there was what we didn’t say – that the Cecil he was to be named after was nowhere to be found. It was Elijah’s aunties who brought Mona to and from her doctor’s appointments in those long two and a half months between the time she found out she was pregnant and the time Elijah arrived. We were the ones who took her to her weekly non-stress tests. We were the ones who encouraged her to eat correctly when her diabetes was raging out of control. When the doctor told Mona, “We have to keep an eye on things because we don’t want your baby to be stillborn”, I was the one who had to ask her, “Mona, do you know what ‘stillborn’ means?” I almost came to blows with a friend of Mona’s who was goading her into mocking my assertion that hers had been a high-risk pregnancy, because I knew. I knew, because I was there.

A few days before the baby was born, Cecil Senior (who himself is also Cecil Junior; there’s a whole lotta “unclear on the concept” going on here) strode back onto the scene, with that toothpick dangling from his mouth and that creepy, controlling demeanor. When we wanted to visit Elijah in the step-up NICU,  we were not permitted to enter without him (or Mona) accompanying us. Nothing we had been through together mattered at that point. We were out, and he was in, and so was the new name. Baby Elijah was now Baby Cecil. (This was also the point at which I started calling the father “FOTY”, for “Father of the Year”, because he swaggered in acting like he was in charge and feigning great interest in the baby’s health issues while he was in the step-up NICU).

It’s been almost three years, and I’ve gone on calling him Elijah without giving it a second thought, until recently. By the time the above conversation occurred, this had already been nagging at me for a while. Part of the issue is that FOTY is in the picture to a much greater extent these days, and although I still feel like I need to wash myself in bleach every time I interact with the man, I have to begrudgingly admit that Elijah seems to do well with him. And although he’s never said a word about it, I am almost to the point where I feel like I’m being disrespectful by not calling the child by his given name in the presence of his namesake.

I think the hardest thing for me, though, is hearing my beloved Elijah refer to himself by this other name. When I ask him, “Who’s Elijah, then?” he points to himself . . . he knows that this is the name that Aunt Sara, Aunt Lorraine, and everybody in our circle calls him. But when he is talking more, and going into more and more situations where people will call him by his “real” name, I am starting to seriously question how I should handle this.

I can’t call him Cecil. I just can’t do it. He is, and always will be, “Elijah” to me. But I don’t know what to do about everybody else. When I signed him up for nursery at church, I listed his name as “Elijah”, and so his name tag does not say “Cecil”. I find myself waiting for the day when FOTY will show his true colors and fly into a rage about this, demanding that the name be corrected, and while I don’t think that avoiding a scene is a good enough reason to give in, I find myself more and more wondering what the “right” thing to do really is in this situation.

I know he’s not my child. But I don’t know what to do. What is the right thing to do in this situation? How can I be fair to his biological father while still acknowledging that I, too, am a part of his life, and that he has never been anybody other than Elijah to me?

What would you do if you were in my situation?

(*pronounced “Sea-sill”, not “Ses-sill” as in B. De Mille)