An apology....... of sorts.

I am feeling kinda sheepish about the melodrama of my last post.

I don't really think I am cursed, or that God hates me. It was obviously a crap week. I would delete the whole thing except that would make something a lie.... this blog I guess.... so for the sake of truth in the personal annals of B I will keep it up there.

I just read a beautiful entry from msfitzia at http://peanutsmom.blogspot.com/ describing her experience on the night of October 15th. A visit, if you will, from her son. A message of love and of peace. A moment of stillness in the darkness and turbulence of greif.

i know those moments. You can't break your way into them. But they are all the more precious for the fact that they cannot be conjured. I know it has made me fall on me knees and weep tears of gratitude.... for the chance to have experienced love. To love the little person that was made in love by me and jake and the grace of God. To know that even in death, there is still love.

I went to church last week which I hardly ever do because sermons really give me the shits. I just can't think of any other time in life where I would subject myself to listening to someone telling me how to live in three alliterating points with a tacky metaphor thrown in for good measure - so why do it at church? But I went last week cause my friend Jo was preaching. As it turned out the passage she was preaching on was from Jeremiah where the Israelites had been taken captive and were living in exile in Babylon. It has the oft quoted passage of "I have plans to make you prosper" but starts with Jeremiah telling the Israelites to make there home in Babylon, to take wives and have children, to plant gardens and eat the crops..... It meant a lot to me that she spoke on this because she too is experiencing infertility (which is a kind of exile) and her husband has been living with depression and had been home from work for a couple of weeks because of this.

The bit about making your home in Babylon..... that is the thing that has been ticking around my head. The Isrealites didn't want to hear this, they wanted to be delivered from their conquerors and returned to Jerusalem. They did not want the permanence of planting crops, building houses, taking wives, having children.... and the command to seek the welfare of Babylon. I have been thinking about the wisdom of making this, where-we-are-now, our home. Of building a home in exile, rather then waiting for deliverance.

I have been reluctant to accept this. For one it is just too sad. To accept my present life. And there also seems a kind of resignation to "building homes" and "planting crops". It is what I think other people mean when they say things like "getting on with life". There seems a lack of hope. Or a feebleness, a refusal to fight for what is right.

And yet, this week I have been reviewing this. I don't know how long our "exile" will be. If I will ever be able to have living children. Maybe it is time to begin to look at this as my new life, rather than a lapse or a pause from the real business. Looking at this passage also made me realise that embracing the present and finding a way to plant and build and harvest in this painful, confusing time is not giving up on hope. Rather, there is a deep level of trust.... of trusting the future to itself, or to God (if you are so inclined), which lends true freedom to the present. I cannot be held ransom by my imagined future...... I must plan to live wholly, fully, now.

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Am back teaching at school. That is a good thing. I held a little kid tight today as he was loosing it. The body wracking sobs and self harming gradually subsided to indignant outbursts (in Shem-speak) and then sorrowful mumurs. He looked me in the eyes and touched the tip of my nose with his pointing finger. He took a shuddering in-breath and crawled out of my lap and onto a bike.