Monthly Archives: March 2017

The Dead Groundhog

Posted on by

So. This morning, my dumb dogs deposited a dead groundhog in my garage sometime between Eric’s departure and our frantic get-in-the-van-or-we-will-miss-the-bus hoopla.

I saw them wandering around the back yard with Pip, my BIL’s dog, about 6:30 a.m., and figure they had dropped off the dead thing IN my garage, you know, for safe-keeping, lest some other animal find their treasure and steal away with it.

So on this Thursday morning, we had created THREE, count them THREE, quick costumes in honor of Dr. Seuss’s birthday. We had done the speech homework since we have speech on Thursdays and we didn’t think of it until 7:30 on Thursday morning. I got the lunches made. We did the normal chores. I remembered to write in all three agendas that we would do after-school differently because of the PTO meeting today. I mean, I was ON TOP OF IT.

And then Alex skips outside (because he’s always ready first) at like 8:15 and hollers back in the open garage door (because we don’t close garage doors), “Hey MOM, the dogs left a whistlepig in the garage, and I think it’s dead.”

SO if you don’t know, a whistle pig is what Curious George called a groundhog, and what my son was, with great excitement, telling me is that THERE WAS A DEAD THING IN MY GARAGE!!!

Which is a problem, y’all. Because dead things creep me out. CREEP.ME.OUT. As in, make my skin crawl and make me squeal and make my insides all twist up. And my husband is gone, and there’s no one to dispose of the dumb thing except me. So I pull on my big-girl panties and go into the garage.

And EWWWWWWW. It’s all curled up and its two pointy buck teeth are all sticking out at me, and its fur is all sticking out like the dogs rubbed some Bed Head hair putty into it after they killed it.

Even worse, the only implement for removal is a rake with very short metal tines. And I really need a shovel, too. But I can’t find one because at some point all the garden tools got moved back to the other garage so they’re nowhere to be found. AND Eric now keeps that garage locked and I have NO idea where the key is.

So now I’m left with a sadly insufficient tool and a heavy gross dead thing in my garage. The dogs are nowhere to be seen (I called for them but they ignored me), and my son is giggling like a little boy who’s all excited about a dead thing in the garage. OH and then out comes Megan to see the dumb, dead thing WITH HER TOAST still IN her hand.

GAH!!!

So finally, I decide I’m just going to have to DO this thing. I can DO this, people. So I try to get my short-tined rake under it, and it just flops off. Ack! Ack! Ack! I walked ALL the way AROUND the van (because I’m certainly not getting close to the gross thing), and try to get it that way.

And in one final attempt to deal with the situation without being late for school, I use the rake to literally pull the little carcass out of the garage and onto the gravel where it flops over and stares at me, with its paws all curled up and its teeth just sticking out at me.

My children are in the garage all excited, and I’m so glad they’re laughing about it because I’m trying to not let my creeped out, nearly-in-tears self fall apart RIGHT in front of their eyes. And that was as good as I could do. I went BACK around the van so I didn’t have to walk by its dead glassy eyeballs and pointy teeth, and I went back inside.

LESS than five minutes later, the dogs returned and hauled their precious prize somewhere farther away from my van. Which made getting out of the house for the bus that much easier.

But in consequence of doing something as GROSS as leaving a DEAD thing in my garage, when we left for the morning, I closed both garage doors, thus banishing them to the outside for the day. Dumb dogs.

And that is the story of the dead groundhog and my sad, creeped-out self. The end.

Just Stop Right There

Posted on by

So I typically behave as if pain is to be avoided at all costs. You know, get comfortable, stay comfortable. Repeat. And for pretty much all my life, anything that interrupted this cycle was bad. Capital BAD.

But I’m finding, surprisingly, that it’s really not. The last year (and more) has been an interesting study in trying to open up doors instead of slamming them shut. Like the day I thought “Maybe [that experience] wasn’t about me, as much as it was about them.” The day I wondered if, just possibly, I wasn’t the broken one.

I’ve read (and cannot recommend highly enough) Brene Brown’s books. Her dream was to start a national dialogue on shame and whole-heartedness. And y’all. Those books hit me right where I hurt. Really hurt. Pain I hadn’t realized I was carrying around. Burdens I thought made me unloveable. Experiences that had left me thinking, truly believing, that there was something just wrong with me.

It was shame. All of it. And cracking open the door onto those places in my heart was both excruciating and freeing. And all of that is a fun story for another day. But as a result of all of that, I’m learning to pay attention to pain in an entirely new way.

Pain is not something we’re supposed to sit on, hide, cover up with make-up and the latest fashions, or brush off like we’re all good. When we run up against pain, we’re supposed to STOP. Our pain is there to tell us something. Something important about who we are and what we need to deal with. But we often don’t recognize it as pain. It shows up in disguises that we have to begin to recognize so that we can begin to move past them in positive ways. I can think of two, in particular…

Stop #1: Defensiveness.

Defensiveness is that panic that grips your heart when someone challenges you, your lifestyle, your choices in music or movies, or whatever else you hold dear. A comment is made, and your first response is to clamp down and DEFEND yourself. Get out the big guns and blow away anything that seems to threaten that whatever you’re sure you need to survive.

Can I suggest, please, that defensiveness is really a pain-marker? It’s not a declaration of war; it’s a warning signal. A sign that something deep and real, inside your heart, feels at risk. It signals pain. So the next time you feel defensiveness rise up in your heart and your breathing starts to get hard and you start to type that pushy, unkind comment on social media. STOP. Just stop. Take 3 big breaths. And ask yourself: “Why is this so important to me? What am I really afraid of losing? Is it this? Or is it something bigger? And will fighting with this person really protect what feels threatened?”

My guess is that it’s something bigger. Mine usually is. Defensiveness is often just fear, wrapped up in anger, that my life, my personhood isn’t really important. And my response is, too often, to shut down the person whom I feel is threatening me. Except that doesn’t really help. Defensiveness shuts down. It feels like protection, maybe, but it’s really not. And the only real way to ensure the protection of what’s important to me is to open up, not shut down.

Stop #2: Contempt

This is a huge issue for me. My internal monologue is filled with contempt, unkind thoughts and judgments about everyone and everything around me. But contempt, too, is a marker. It’s not really about whomever I’m holding in contempt. It’s really about me.

And the only way to deal with this issue is to accept that my contempt is an attempt to mask my own pain and fear by blaming and degrading and dehumanizing someone else.

So I have to STOP. I have to catch myself. I have to challenge my contemptuous thoughts with ones that say “He is a person and he matters” or “She is valuable” and “She matters to God.” Even though they still disagree with me. Even thought they’ve been unkind. Even though they are filled with contempt for me. I have to STOP. And when I do that, I find that, instead of spewing out on them a waterfall of contempt, I open up to the fact that maybe they might be hurting themselves. Maybe they just need me to hold their story, their pain instead of adding to it. And maybe I can be patient with them for one more day.

The only way we are going to stem the flood of hatred going on right now. The only way that I can think of to help heal the hurt I see and feel in the posts my friends are sharing. The only way we can be part of the solution…is to STOP.

Pause. Call your responses by their true name. Defensiveness, not patriotism. Contempt, not justice. Bring them out in the open and make them answer for themselves. Our responses say much more about our own pain than about anything else.

Let’s find ways to open our doors, our hearts, our minds, our lives. Share our pain and our stories. Be part of the path forward. I believe this is what Jesus does for us. And I believe this is what He calls us to do for others. Together, we can stop right here.