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Marching for Real

1/31/2017

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​​My first daughter is a busy, harried mother of two blonde, blue-eyed angels -- a precocious second grader and a mischievous pre-schooler -- and she is about to give birth to my third Viking grandchild (presumably) . . . any minute . . . Really. Any. Second. But she took the time to send me a series of ecstatic texts last week . . . Not because she was going into labor (she is now) but because she is just on the edge of her first paid writing gig.

Something deep in our genetic coding takes precedence and compels us to put our words, our hearts, our purpose to page . . . as I am doing now as I wait.

She is me but with a more fully developed sanguine heart and with an energy that defies logic and makes the world a better place . . . Always bubbling over with plans and thoughts and words and stories that must go somewhere. She is brilliant and compassionate, wickedly funny and tenacious in her pursuit of all things life. She has a genuine love for the elderly that also manifests in her life's paid work . . . And a love for the hearts of other mommies who have experienced the same struggles that she has -- post-partum depression, grief, deep insecurities, the pain of rejection and overlook, and just plain woman-tired -- she writes to these women, indiscriminately.

She is real, my little girl turned Little Mountain Momma . . . again and again . . . and again . . . who showed up as the biggest surprise of my life over 31 years ago and turned my life right side up . . . when she was barely a thought . . . 

But considered a choice.

She is real . . . and she is good. I could see it from the day she was born . . . too good for me and where I was in life . . . Just barely 19 and broken . . . With walls built of grief, deep insecurities, the pain of rejection and overlook, and just plain woman-tired already. She was too good for me and I wasn't ready for her. I wasn't ready to give up the dream of the life I imagined. I wasn't ready for the financial responsibility. I wasn't ready to look after  someone else -- indefinitely -- when still trying to find myself. I wasn't ready for the battle of wills that ensued from a seven pound human being and extended well into adulthood (hers and mine;). . . 

​I wanted to sleep. She wanted me awake. I wanted to nurse her. She was diametrically opposed, preferring a bottle. I wanted her safe in a private school. She wanted to stay in public and hated me for a while. I said no boys. She found one from Indiana at summer camp when she was thirteen . . . and married him (not that day). She wanted me to get a flu shot and and a Whooping Cough vaccine before I held her new baby. I wanted . . . well . . . not to . . . 

But do you know what? Nobody is ever ready for the complete responsibility . . . the lifelong commitment . . . . of another human being. Babies have a way of making you while they're breaking you. She deserved better. I got better. She demanded it from the beginning. It was a formidable job for a newborn, but from the day she was born -- even before -- she began chipping away at those walls. On the day she was born, she blasted out a whole section . . . The one with the sign that said: It's all about me.

But in a second . . . in the time it takes to quell the flutter of a heartbeat . . . In a second it could have all been obliterated . . . And I would have never been changed . . . by the ocean blue of her newborn eyes . . . by the white-blonde tilt of her three year old head looking upward for Jesus in the clouds . . . by the compassion poured into the world in the wisdom of her words . . . by the Viking grandchildren she chases . . . the joy . . . the miracle of her  -- and them -- in the world . . .

because I had a choice in her.

And women march . . . not for what's real . . . but in righteous anger for fear of losing that choice. I should pray God forgive them for they know not what they do . . . but my own righteous anger flares because I don't really believe that. My human grace doesn't match God's . . . and maybe it shouldn't . . . maybe that's not my job here.  So here is what I want to tell them: 

March for what's real. March for equality. March for equal pay. March for family or freedom or better child care options. March for respect . . . for common sense . . . for choices that honor and protect all human life. March for open borders or stronger walls or healthcare that works. Save the rainforests. Save the whales. Save the dogs and cats to the melancholy beseeching of Sarah McLachlan . . . Shout til your hoarse and you're heard. Or fight in your own quiet way . . . On paper or on your knees in prayer.

But don't fight for your right to kill unborn children. 


To mature, discerning, educated minds, there are very few issues that don't have shades of gray complexities. This is not one of those issues.

For God's sake . . . For all that is decent and holy . . . Stop demanding . . . Stop celebrating . . . Your right to kill unborn babies. They are not a mass of cells. They have beating hearts and functioning brains with nerves that feel the pain of the needle . . . The knife . . . The machines . . . They hear voices from within the womb . . . And recognize and respond to their mother's . . . their father's . . . their big sister's and brother's . . the family dog's bark . . . after they are born. They turn to the light . . . And recoil from harsh sounds or pressure or pain. They move and roll beneath our seeking palms. They get hiccups. They are calmed and soothed by the same music played for them before they are born . . . and after. We can see them in us in ultrasound pictures They suck their thumbs and wiggle their toes . . . they are the same thumbs and toes before and after.

A hundred years ago . . . Or fifty . . . Or even a few decades ago, we didn't know a fraction of what we know now about how a baby develops. Now we have the technology to look into the womb months before they are born and study facial features to determine who they look like . . . To understand unequivocally that there's an actual person tucked safely within protective layers of maternal flesh and membrane . . . a separate and equal human being. It should bring a sense of shame to all complicit that we've actually been killing babies increasingly indiscriminately and in increasing numbers since Roe vs. Wade . . . Just because we can. . . Because someone told us we had a choice. Instead of feeling shame, though, we choose to ignore what we know -- yes, we know we're killing babies . . . It's long past the point of rational, reasonable argument -- we just call it something else . . . argue from a different podium. It's a woman's body. It's a woman's choice. Oppression. Injustice. Unfair! Inconvenient! Not "viable" 

No, it's not. It's a baby. A child. A person. I know it. You know it. We all know it.


February 1, 2017 .  . .
Our Evie
Still our Evelyn Hope
My darling Evie girl . . . you were born into a world on the edge . . . at a time of great turbulence, when things were happening upside down all over and against all odds . . . into a world of terror and a country of opposition . . . where voices were raised and voices were silenced . . . A world where people will riot over a singular injustice, but ignore great collective tragedies . . .You were born into a time when people looked for hope . . . for something old and something new . . , maybe not unlike any other time in history . . .

​And then came you who stopped the world to make us forget for a little while . . . to celebrate a single moment in time when we dared to imagine that a single soul might change everything.
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Waiting on Our DNA

1/17/2017

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"See the light in others  . . . and treat them as if that is all you see." ~ Dr. Wayne Dyer
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The photo on the left was taken of my brother and me last month high on a mountain in Colorado. There's no mistaking we're family. It's there in our cheekbones, the curve of our jaws, in the set of our mouths . . . and there's something in our eyes . . . But knowing who we look like has never stopped us from obsessing over who we are.  Our Southern grandmother was always quick and proud to tell us about our Cherokee Indian great-great grandmother . . . but we've checked all the Ancestry.com census records . . . and we can't find her anywhere. So for his birthday on the mountain, I gave my brother an Ancestry.com DNA test kit. He spit and now we're just waiting. It'll be fun to find out for sure. But while we're waiting to find out just exactly how that spit will define us, we're waiting on something else so much more important . . . something else . . . or someone else who will show us who we are . . . and more importantly, who we've become . . .

Any day now . . . any minute . . . my oldest daughter will give birth to her third child . . . my third grandchild. We don't know exactly who this child will be yet. We're not even sure if it's a boy or a girl. Collectively, we have a lot of conjecture, a lot of hopes, a lot of probablies . . . But the absolute certainty is that this child . . . along with its older sister and brother . . . represents a legacy of love.  He or she will be adored . . . safe . . . allowed the freedom to grow and thrive . . . with all the hopes and dreams of a family hanging on their every smile, every heartsong, every unique and God given gift they bring to this world. Those of us who have fought hardest for these simple things -- the way things should be -- feel the profoundest joy . . . and that is reflected in the words of this memory about a family come full circle . . 

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When I was thirteen years old, I was invited to go along with family on a two week road trip from Michigan to Florida that would profoundly impact my life forever. 

My father's brother, with his wife and a younger cousin, were headed to the ocean at Daytona Beach. Maybe we would hit the mountains in East Tennessee on the way . . . maybe Disney World . . . with visits to various and distant relatives in between. But for sure to the Atlantic Ocean. And this was the hook for me. I had never traveled far outside my little world, and an ocean sounded so BIG. I had cut my teeth on Great Lakes . . . But an ocean called to me. 

Just over the Georgia border and heading into Florida, we took a detour just outside of Jacksonville. My father's cousin lived in a double wide trailer on a little section of land with his wife and children. I did the math . . . He would be my second cousin, and his children, my third . . . I was reticent to meet them -- as is my way -- and impatient for my ocean. But the first ten minutes alone of the spontaneous visit left a lifetime of impression and thoughts of the mythic ocean would recede into the background for a minute.

There were five of them -- my third cousins -- all raven haired and politely lined up to meet us. The oldest was nineteen, a tall, lean boy  with flowing hair that touched is shoulders, and glasses that added to his likability. In a slight Southern drawl, he called me honey without a trace of flirtation, just as he gently addressed all of his younger siblings. Two teenage girls each held the hand of a younger sibling, a stout, rambunctious little girl who was nine  -- I could imagine her someday in the easy grace of her older sisters -- and a seven year old little boy, a more stoic, glass-less version of his older brother who peeked at me suspiciously from behind his sisters. 

Their parents didn't seem phased by our impromptu visit. They immediately set about the business of including us in their dinner plans. I remember they had exactly seven matching dinner plates and had to scramble for a few more mismatched ones to throw in. They did this without a hint of resentment or self-consciousness. While one sister helped with dinner, the littlest girl enthusiastically pulled me out to the side yard -- watching for snakes -- to teach me high school football cheers that she had learned from her sisters. The other teenage sister was dragged along as a consultant and the older brother gently admonished that maybe I "didn't want to learn cheers" before he left for work in his father's pick-up truck. I didn't, but I had already been charmed into complacency.
​
Over the next several days, little tendrils of family ritual began to wrap themselves around my heart. I saw the father hold the mother's hand and call her pretty baby. I watched the mother pray the little ones to sleep in the evenings and absorbed the soft bantering laughter of sibings that insulated against the descending Florida dark. I memorized the way the father looked at his children when he asked about their day in the late afternoons with a shine of pride in his eyes -- like he wanted to memorize their faces. . . their answers . . . their joy. I stood outside of all of this and yet it became me . . . after all, this was a Southern family . . . my family . . . who held pieces of my past from before I was ever born. They asked about my father and I was evasive and non-committal . . . and I winced when they told me I looked just like my beautiful mother. I thought that they couldn't know the damage he left in the wake of his children . . . or the hurt that I carried because she only spoke to me in curt, angry imperatives or recrimination for all that she imagined I was or wasn't. 

My memories of that time with that family are inordinately strong for thirty-seven year memories . . . I remember holding the littlest boy's hand -- our mutual reticence dissolved - as we fiercely laughed down giant water slides together . . . bouncing along shimmering country roads in a pick up truck on an early afternoon with a gentle, handsome boy cousin . . . drinking coffee together before the sun came up on the last day. But mostly I remember the way my father's cousin looked at his children. And I remember that as we pulled down the long drive on our way to the ocean that something sat heavy in my chest, traveled up into my throat, and ripped loose a piece of my soul that I never knew existed. I was embarrassed as I began to weep uncontrollably and inconsolably. My aunt and uncle and cousin stared at me, baffled and helpless. I didn't understand it and I couldn't explain it, but somehow I knew . . . JUST KNEW . . . that I had been born into the wrong family . . . and that I was headed in the wrong direction. It would take a whole ocean to drown the sorrow that I felt that day. 

I never saw him again, but  a few years after that, my heart broke wide open again when I heard that that gentle boy had died in a horrific car accident. . . And again  after that when I heard that the parents had divorced . . . and later that the father had died of cancer.

I was heartbroken and shattered and it took me many more years to understand that ALL families are broken. All families break.  . . and that it wasn't a mistake for me to idealize that family . . . to borrow from their fleeting happiness . . . to adopt their enduring love.  All of my life I've gathered pieces of life as I thought they should be and used them to show me a different way . . . 

Beautiful things can come from broken-ness.


And so last month I gathered with my family on a mountaintop . . . my own imperfectly perfect and growing family . . . the one that I created . . . to celebrate Christmas and that enduring love. And I brought my little brother . . . or he brought me. He would have been five years old on the day I cried to belong to a different family that morning in the Florida heat. And if the family fairy had actually come down to grant me my wish, he's the reason I would have had to turn her down. He was waiting for me back in Michigan . . . and all the love that I could gather from the world was his from the day he was born two weeks before my eighth birthday. 

And we give ourselves away.

One of the strongest lessons I've ever learned -- over and over -- is that we have a choice in who we become. We can cultivate our grandfather's musical talent . . . dress up our mother's eyes . . . celebrate a lineage of perseverance and integrity and love . . . We can easily take the finest things that we've come by and make them our own. But those of us who have fought hardest for these simple things -- the way things should be -- feel the profoundest joy . . . and that is reflected in the words of a memory of a family come full circle . . . 

And so, too, it's reflected in our eyes . . . in the way we see each other.

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Transcendence

1/8/2017

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I will rise above myself . . . my pain and my fear, my indignance and indulgence . . . to love myself and to love you through our fallen world. . . I will leave behind negativity and words that cultivate it . . . It’s not fair, I can’t, Who did this? and Why me?  will not be a part of my vocabulary. . . and I won’t listen if you say them to me. I will undo what happened to you by making something different happen . . . I’ll weigh the facts against your feelings . . . and then I’ll feel every bit of it and hold your hand while you cry. I will forgive you when you hurt me . . . and strive to understand the reasons . . . I promise not to be the reason and I will ask your forgiveness if I break that promise. I will understand if you can’t forgive me. Forgiveness only comes after grieving and some of us never stop. I will always love you. Never and Always are a set-up for failure and disappointment . . . I will add them to my possibility and make adjustments as needed. I apologize in advance . . . I will try, I will listen, I will rage, and I will die daily . . . and then I will give it to God and begin to love again. 
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Down from the Mountain

1/6/2017

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"Tyger, Tyger burning bright . . . in the forests of the night . . ." ~ William Blake
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I was halfway down the mountain and on the very edge of a brand new year when the writer’s panic began to set in. Like a child holding too tight to a handful of sand that is slipping away. . . blowing back to the ocean on a breeze . . . I needed to hold onto the memories.  

But these are not grains of sand that wisp away . . . and not the blue expanse of ocean where waves of grief are carried back to shore over and over. These are bold stars over purple-black peaks with bursts of glory that I want to remember. I want to stay on the mountain this time. And so I write. . .
​
December 29, 2016:
​
Some traversed in quick infinitesimal flashes . . . some fizzled downward like wayward fireworks. . . Some hovered over an arc quickly and just long enough to evoke a sense of wonder. And then . . . there was the one . . .

Not unlike the last one when I wrote,

 “If I never see another one like it, it will be enough” . . .

This one was different, though.  We can never be out-surprised by God. This one hurtled from left to right . . . like words on a page hurtled through the cosmos in a straight line . . . like a declaration.  And there was no arc . . . and there were no resting places.  It hurtled forward . . . burning and glowing and taking my breath . . . and taking me with it.

And I knew this would be another one of those years.  Like 42 years ago to the day . . . and like 31 years ago . . . I would give birth to something beautiful and irrepressible to carry me in this new year . . . Not to a person this time, but to my soul and my destiny.

And I will not rest until -- with all the passion and intention of a divine comet -- I have burned myself out on the pain and the glory of my story . . .

This year.

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    I'm Aerin Leigh.  I'm a once upon a time teacher and a forever reading cheerleader.  I'm a writer, a reading specialist, and a a believer in the power of words.  I've seen a little of the world, but my first love is Michigan.  I live here with my husband and two spoiled Boxer dogs, Merlot and Riesling.  We're happy empty nesters and we spend a lot of time in our hot tub. . . to stay warm.  Winter is my solace, but Summer has been my teacher and my friend.  I'm an occasional runner, and a constant connoisseur of wine and friendship and gel nails.  Anything that lights up is magic to me . . .  like fireflies, the glow of a storybook moon, Christmas lights under the stars, and my Colorado grandbabies' faces when they see me on Skype.  I embrace quirky things like Feng Shui and Acupuncture and prayer . . . because they just might work.  I'm a survivor of much and of many, but I leave my heart wide open.  My children are my role models, my current passion is possibility, and my God is good. 


    Come follow my leap of faith journey . . . There'll probably be a lot of crazy, but you just might get to witness a soft landing.  
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