99 Balloons

Nine years ago today, our 12-year-old daughter died of renal failure. The way the parents in this video handled their son’s birth, catastrophic diagnosis, and death seems very beautiful to me. I wanted to share it as an expression of how we too feel about our daughter’s short but blessed life.

This is for you, honey. I miss you and love you, carry you in my heart, and always thank God for you.

Cheated

cheat (v.):

1. to defraud; swindle. 2. to deceive; influence by fraud. 3. to elude; deprive of something expected. 

This year I have spent a substantial part of the year experiencing being cheated. In a written agreement with other adults, my husband and I have been defrauded. We kept our end of the deal, which was struck among fellow Christians, witnessed, and came with all the trappings of civic and religious ceremonies. Then, after we had spent years keeping our end of the bargain, our partners in covenant reneged on their end of the deal.

I, in particular, paid a high price to keep my end of the covenant, spending countless hours doing healing work at the expense of my substantially-sized family. The price I paid within myself is one of the highest I can ever recall expending. With my husband I made a choice out of fear and trembling intermingled with great hope, knowing that the rewards for success would be as substantial as the deprivations of failure. In spite of the risk, and true to my often naively hopeful character, I chose the leap of faith. I have always thought that anyone–yes, anyone–can be healed, restored, and redeemed. I’ve been willing to serve as a conduit of grace as God called and enabled me. And He did call. I am as certain of that as I can be certain of anything in my life.

But still I was cheated.

My husband and I made the decision to enter into covenant with these other adults in spite of the fact that several of our most trustworthy, wise, and sane confidantes and adult children advised against it. My parents, too, warned against it and my father stated that he would not participate until the people with whom we had covenanted proved themselves. “You don’t enter into a deal with someone before they’ve proved themselves,” he said. We countered with the evidence of many years’ worth of relationship, but his retort was that it was obvious who was getting the better end of the deal. “When you come out of this deal as happy and well situated as they are,” he said, “then I’ll consider changing my opinion.”

We have come out of the deal and we are not happy or well situated. In this win-lose deal we struck while hoping for win-win, we are the losers. I’ve been waiting for some six months now to see if the loss I see is, in fact, what I see. I’ve talked with our partners and told them that my husband and I not only feel cheated, but according to our five-page written agreement, actually have been cheated, our covenant broken. “You can’t break a covenant,” our partners have glibly replied, citing Biblical teachings on the irrefutable character of God-made covenants and ignoring the obligation of Christians to be people of their word, to go the extra mile, to apologize when they hurt others, or to do a great many other things that Christians are told we should do.

Maybe they felt we let them down first, I thought. So I went to our partners again and asked whether they thought we had kept our end of the deal. “You kept your end of the deal,” they said. “We have no complaints we haven’t voiced.” But still our partners have not budged. Still we are cheated.

Some years ago, my husband’s grandfather died, leaving his heirs land and other property worth millions of dollars. Before his death, my husband and his granddad had walked this land that had been in the family since the Land Run, and his sweet old granddad told him, “this part will all be yours, the home place, your great-granddad’s homestead too, because I know you’ll care for it.” He put his property into a trust and retained his two most trustworthy sons to administer it.

About a year after the trust was established, my husband’s grandfather went into a nursing home. While he was there and still in his right mind, one of his two trustee sons was murdered by vagrants passing through the area. Now only one son was left, the son who later developed Alzheimer’s and could not be relied upon in any way. And then my husband’s granddad died, and the remaining sons took charge and cheated my husband out of his inheritance as we sat by helplessly, in spite of having hired attorneys and gone to court and spent four years trying to litigate our ways out of being cheated.

It was easier to watch my husband go through being cheated out of his inheritance than it has been to be cheated myself. Being cheated has left me with such a bitter taste in my mouth, so much sorrow and humiliation in my heart. As King David said in Psalm 55, it doesn’t bother you as much when it’s an enemy who cheats you, but when it’s someone you trust, someone you’ve gone to church with, someone who has lived under your roof and with whom you’ve been intimate–oh, my. Oh my, oh my. When one you broke bread with cheats you, one who “dips his bread with me” at the table as Judas did with Jesus, then you know you’ve been cheated. Then you know you’re moving into God territory, for who has been more defrauded than God?

Everyone has been cheated. Everyone has had someone else make a promise they later broke. Everyone has been on the switch end of the old bait-and-switch cheat. You marry someone you thought you knew, and six years later you discover he’s had an affair. You raise your children with every value you can muster, and when you finally have an empty nest and can look forward to a comfortable retirement with your spouse, your oldest child is diagnosed with schizophrenia. You have to raise your grandchild. You get cancer. You finally retire and go on the world cruise you both always dreamed of, and your husband dies in Ireland, on the first leg of your journey. Your child is born handicapped and you learn you will always have to take care of her. Or, as actually happened to a friend of ours, the healthy kidney is mistakenly removed and the diseased one left. “You’ll have to be on dialysis unless a donor is found,” they said. At some point or another in life, everyone is cheated.

Even when they haven’t actually been cheated, everyone feels cheated from time to time due to expectations. Psychoanalyst Karen Horney wrote at length about expectations, which she called “claims,” and their use by wounded folks. She said that we often have unspoken expectations and go through life imposing them on others without getting enough reality checks to discover whether or not our claims or dues are, in fact, reasonable. What is owed is the stuff of psychology and religion.

What do you owe me? What do I owe you? What did I give you, and what must you give me in return? How do the laws of reciprocity, of sowing and reaping, apply?  Is an outcome, a hope, a dream, an expectation, a contract, a covenant something I should be attached to? Or does all attachment lead to suffering, as Buddha taught?

Can a person ever be truly free of expectations? Ought we be? Is being free of expectations a worthy goal? What do we do when we’re feeling cheated, or when we have, in fact, been cheated? What can we do with our feelings of sorrow, humiliation, shame, astonishment, and anger?

These are all feelings and ideas I’ve been grappling with for most of this year, and now I’m going to grapple with them in a most public way.

Uninvited

My husband and I were not invited, and it hurt. Half our family was at the function, or invited to it, but we were not invited, we who have invested so much. We who have laid down our lives for them and loved them so dearly. We were not invited.

I found out in a roundabout way, when someone there texted me and asked why aren’t you here? Someone who assumed, as I would have, that we would be invited. Where am I, indeed? I am in bed. I am about to start reading The Solitudes. I have been looking forward to reading it, but haven’t been in a place where I can read anything lately, and finally now I’m in a place. But when I learn that he is at their party, and even his girlfriend was invited to their party, and many other folks besides who they have always criticized behind their backs are all at this party, and we weren’t invited, my heart sinks. I realize with a start that I too must be among those criticized and unloved behind their backs, but I must be far worse in their book because I lack an invitation, and these others do not.

I am at home, in my bed, trying to read The Solitudes. I try to focus on the words on the page, but realize after reading the same paragraph three times straight, without comprehension, that I can’t see the words because my eyes keep filling with tears. I’m hurt. My heart aches and burns and I’m crying, and I am a Grown Woman. I am a Grown Woman with lots of degrees and training who has provided therapy and help for others and won national awards and written books, but all this amounts to nothing as I am denied by the people I love. Because people invite others to their events out of duty or pity, utility or love or liking, but to be uninvited means to be unwanted at all, for any reason. It means one is not a duty. One is not pitied, and one is not useful. And neither is one loved or liked enough to receive an invitation.

To be uninvited is such a deep loss, for the root word and meaning for abandonment is from the Old English verb bannan, meaning “to summon.” To be abandoned means literally “to be uncalled,” uninvited, unsummoned. To be uninvited when others are welcome at the proverbial table is to feel that feeling we felt for much of our adult lives. As our own parents have absented themselves when we have needed them and when we have not, and have been mere figureheads in our lives, titular beings without offering any of the real care, support, or relationship that parents are supposed to offer, so now today, thanks to the absence of a simple party invitation, we have had occasion to feel that deep pain again. And to question ourselves, our worth, and our identities all over again. Much as we habitually did so many years ago as our parents said the right things but did all the wrong things when it really counted.

There was a time in my life when I would have felt the pain and talked about it around the house, and even had a good cry about it, but would not have said anything to the one who had issued the invitations to the event. But not these days. No, these days I ask. I ask so that I can avoid making assumptions, and to find out what their thinking is, for I will understand a lot if I simply get an excuse. Maybe the excuse will be reasonable–if so, so much the better. But if not, ah, well then I am better educated than I was before. And so I text the hostess and I ask directly why we were not invited. Her answer was that the family members who were invited from our side of the family were also friends, and that’s why they were invited. But I already know that someone in our family who isn’t friendly much at all, and doesn’t hang out with anyone there, was also invited. And my husband and I were not. We were out-ranked by other family members who have contributed far less emotionally, materially, and spiritually to this couple, and yet here we were: Uninvited.

One thing I know for sure is that I know what Real Love is. I do know what it is, and it is easy to spot when you finally come to believe that love is action and deeds, not words or niceties, wishes or fantasies. Love is as love does. Love does no wrong to another. Love does unto others as one would be done by. Love is kind. So love does not invite half of the family and ignore the other half. If love invites one person for a particular reason, love lets the uninvited down gently. Love considers everyone’s feelings, not just the feelings of one person or half the people involved. Love tries to help others to save face, to save their self-respect or dignity by giving them something beautiful or worthy to hang on to. Love understands that one human being is a powerful being. My smile may save a person’s life. My letting another person ahead of me in line may restore a person’s faith in humanity. My offer of assistance may be a person’s answer to prayer. An invitation is pregnant with meaning. Being uninvited can hurt almost anyone.

My invitation to a family member I can’t stand and do not trust sends a message: There is room for relationship. You are still welcome at my table. I have hope for you and for us. You are lovable. I respect your place. I love you, even if I don’t like you one little bit. The uninvited person also is handed a message: We don’t want to be around you. Something about you is so bad that we can’t stand having you around. Having you here would be more trouble than you’re worth. You will make things difficult.

An invitation to a party may help wounded people realize that something good has come of their selves, after all; and the lack of one can be a great gift. The emotion that erupts after we see the truth says a lot about who and what we value, what still has the power to break our hearts, how much we want others to value our love. We can see that what we are giving and what others perceive are very different, for if others could see what a sacrifice we have given, being who we are, they could not help but fall down and weep.  We are like the widow Jesus mentioned, who only had a mite or a penny to give, but gave all of it. A rich person standing nearby might scoff, thinking, “Bah! Look at her tiny, inconsequential gift!” But the Spirit looking on says, “She gave everything she had.”

And this is how it is with my husband. With me. We gave everything we had. We continue to give everything we have. And whether we will continue to do it when we are unwanted and uninvited speaks volumes of truth. We are called to empty ourselves and I can see that I am not quite empty, not yet. Not by a long shot. I still want to be loved. I still want to be invited. But these desires, while human, do not deliver on the kind of love Jesus taught about. Jesus, who said, “give without expecting anything in return.”