The helpers have been in the news a lot lately: the people who ran towards the bomb blasts in Boston, the neighbor with McDonald’s. As much as I would want to be the person who runs to help after a bomb goes off, the truth is that I think I might have run the other way looking for safety. To follow this train of thought is disconcerting. Would I have helped get those women out of that house in Cleveland, or would I have held back and not wanted to get involved? What would I do if my students and I were actually in danger? Am I content to report to my superior or will I be the person who calls the police? In retrospect it is easy to say of course I would have done the right thing, that I would even have known definitively what the right action had been. The truth is that I probably see smaller-scale tragedies every day and let them slide. I fear I would be out of practice if I encountered something greater.

My unwillingness to dive in could probably be attributed in some ways to my introverted nature, but as I have thought about it the past few weeks, I wonder if there isn’t something else going on as well. I was raised in a church that taught certain things about men and women. Women’s lives should center around the home. They are to submit to their fathers or husbands or their church leadership simply because of their gender. Men have certain roles and women have certain roles and neither the two shall meet.

This was a damaging message for me to learn as a young girl. When we teach–whether implicitly or explicitly–that women are weak and passive then we are directly creating an environment where young women don’t learn how to stand up for themselves or to stand up for others. When we teach girls and women that they are the weaker sex, that men are the leaders, that they have to submit, then we are teaching them that they are less than. I believe this is why I am not the first to jump to help others: I was taught to to think of myself as someone who needs help, not as a helper. I see myself as vulnerable while others are strong.

Even Mike was surprised when I brought this up. I don’t present myself to the world or consciously think of myself as someone who needs to be rescued. I knew even as a teenager that those princess in the tower books were not for me. But I absorbed those messages just the same, took in the idea that I should wait for directions.

This is also a damaging message for boys to learn. There is a lot of talk in churches about depending on God alone, but the truth is that we are teaching both men and women to depend on men. When women must rely on men to make decisions it is surely no surprise that they learn to need help rather than being helpers themselves. It’s also no surprise that these same men learn to treat women as inferior instead of as equals.

As I listened to this week’s sermon that focused on courage, I thought about how Biblical heroes like Daniel and Esther were brave and flawed. I have no idea what I would have done if I found myself in those stories. My husband is someone who advocates for me by encouraging me to stick up for myself, and the support I have gotten from him and from my church has helped me to realize the importance of being an active helper. At the same time, I know that not everyone has such a wonderful partner who will walk beside them and shine a light when things are dark.

When I ask myself whether Jesus would have wanted me to hold back from helping others because of my gender, I have to answer that question with a resounding no. As I try to learn a new way, I see that we as a culture still have a lot to learn.

But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands
gloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old finger
on your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back.
You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful look
of the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would bite
every sorrow until it fled, and when it is August,
you can have it August and abundantly so. You can have love,
though often it will be mysterious, like the white foam
that bubbles up at the top of the bean pot over the red kidneys
until you realize foam’s twin is blood.
You can have the skin at the center between a man’s legs,
so solid, so doll-like. You can have the life of the mind,
glowing occasionally in priestly vestments, never admitting pettiness,
never stooping to bribe the sullen guard who’ll tell you
all roads narrow at the border.
You can speak a foreign language, sometimes,
and it can mean something. You can visit the marker on the grave
where your father wept openly. You can’t bring back the dead,
but you can have the words forgive and forget hold hands
as if they meant to spend a lifetime together. And you can be grateful
for makeup, the way it kisses your face, half spice, half amnesia, grateful
for Mozart, his many notes racing one another towards joy, for towels
sucking up the drops on your clean skin, and for deeper thirsts,
for passion fruit, for saliva. You can have the dream,
the dream of Egypt, the horses of Egypt and you riding in the hot sand.
You can have your grandfather sitting on the side of your bed,
at least for a while, you can have clouds and letters, the leaping
of distances, and Indian food with yellow sauce like sunrise.
You can’t count on grace to pick you out of a crowd
but here is your friend to teach you how to high jump,
how to throw yourself over the bar, backwards,
until you learn about love, about sweet surrender,
and here are periwinkles, buses that kneel, farms in the mind
as real as Africa. And when adulthood fails you,
you can still summon the memory of the black swan on the pond
of your childhood, the rye bread with peanut butter and bananas
your grandmother gave you while the rest of the family slept.
There is the voice you can still summon at will, like your mother’s,
it will always whisper, you can’t have it all,
but there is this.

I was less frightened this time, knew better what to expect. He snuggled into me on the surgical bed, and I laughed at him as the medicine started taking effect and he went from normal to WOAH to MUNCHIES in about 30 minutes. The only time I got worried was while I was waiting for him to wake up, when I heard other kids crying. After they released us, I stopped to get him a milkshake and then we had a low point when he threw up on the way home.

The truth is that I like taking care of him when he’s sick. I made him comfortable on the couch, got him whatever food and drink he wanted, and set him up with the iPad. I have less patience for that in-between stage, the cranky time before he is actually well again. That in-between stage lingered for about a week, so my Mother’s Day started at about 4:30 in the morning, when I forced Atticus to take a pain reliever and then settled into his (too small for me) sleeping bag on the floor of his room. As I listened to him sleep, I felt sorry for myself and thought up facebook statuses about how breakfast-in-(sleeping)bags should totally be a thing. Also mimosas.

And then I spent a fair amount of time staring up at the ceiling and wondered if I had made a wrong turn somewhere. He’s being awful to me, is this because I am a terrible mother? Am I a terrible mother because I want him to go away so I can get some sleep? And how terrible am I for feeling these things on Mother’s Day of all days?

In the give and take, ebb and flow of daily life it is easy to forget that what we are building is a relationship. Not a one-way system of parenting where I funnel my (questionable) wisdom into his brain and he does what I say. We are playing the long game, where we learn from each other, get mad at each other, forgive one another, love one another. A relationship is a long conversation. Thankfully our conversation has resumed and no longer consists of one person yelling NOOOOOOO a lot.

The crazy monster beast levels of stubbornness and orneriness (his and mine) have receded to normal toddler/parent levels and it is so nice to have my boy back. That is what is saving my life this week. What is saving your life this week?

As our students’ use of technology changes our schools, the ways they use the library have shifted. This spring, as I did my inventory, I focused on moving books and furniture around to make things more inviting for my students. At one point it looked like this:

But now it looks more like this:

Things are a little bit tidier and I am happy with how the space is being reinvented, but a few weeks ago I realized that my students don’t like for things to be too organized. When the books look too nice on the shelves, they are hesitant to mess with anything. All of us are afraid of what it looks like in that first picture, but my students don’t really like the second one, either. I have higher circulation and more students making connections with books when I keep the library somewhere in between. Not too cluttered but not too organized. Lived in.

“Lived-in” was also the phrase I used to describe the feeling of inhabiting my own body a little bit more. I needed the reminder that the goal is not perfection but being welcoming and comfortable while allowing for change and progress. I will take my loud and slightly messy library any day over a perfect, quiet one. Thankfully, it seems like my students feel the same way.

“The Lanyard” by Billy Collins

The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly—
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light

and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift—not the worn truth

that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

Where are we going, Mama?
Where ARE we going, Atticus?
To the library!
That’s right!

Atticus is in a phase where he asks questions that he already knows the answers to. Here’s a random sampling: What are you doing, Mama? What’s in your mouth? What’s that noise? Where’s Daddy? Librarians patiently answer the same questions over and over, so I am particularly well-suited for this part of the job. (Random sampling: Where’s the bathroom? Why isn’t my projector working? Do you have any Diary of a Wimpy Kid books? Answers: The door by the exit. It’s not plugged up. They are all checked out.)

He has questions about Big Bunny, too. Where’s Big Bunny? When I turn it back on him, he knows: She’s under a rock. Back there. I buried Big Bunny before Atticus got home that day so he didn’t see her body (or the box). He looked for her cage and confusion crossed his face. We were careful to say things like, “She died,” and, “She won’t be here anymore,” because we like to use real words for things. His little hand held mine trustingly as we walked to the back of the yard, his bright eyes searching our faces for answers about what he should do next. When Mike knelt down next to the grave, Atticus imitated him. He’s proud of the rock he put on her grave and he likes to visit it every few days.

I assume these questions are a security thing, that he wants to be sure that nothing has changed, or he likes asking when he already knows the answers (me too, kid). Maybe it’s like hiding when you know you are going to be found or reading the end of the book first. He has faith that we will answer him, over and over and over. We hold him when he cries, we pick him up when he falls, and we say the same things time and time again. He trusts recklessly, inspiring us to respond without holding back.

“On Turning Ten” by Billy Collins

The whole idea of it makes me feel
like I’m coming down with something,
something worse than any stomach ache
or the headaches I get from reading in bad light–
a kind of measles of the spirit,
a mumps of the psyche,
a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul.

You tell me it is too early to be looking back,
but that is because you have forgotten
the perfect simplicity of being one
and the beautiful complexity introduced by two.
But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit.
At four I was an Arabian wizard.
I could make myself invisible
by drinking a glass of milk a certain way.
At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince.

But now I am mostly at the window
watching the late afternoon light.
Back then it never fell so solemnly
against the side of my tree house,
and my bicycle never leaned against the garage
as it does today,
all the dark blue speed drained out of it.

This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself,
as I walk through the universe in my sneakers.
It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends,
time to turn the first big number.

It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I could shine.
But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,
I skin my knees. I bleed.

We head home: through the gloss of rain or weight
of snow, or the plum blush of dusk, but always, always — home,
always under one sky, our sky. And always one moon
like a silent drum tapping on every rooftop
and every window, of one country — all of us –
facing the stars
hope — a new constellation
waiting for us to map it,
waiting for us to name it — together.

From “One Today” by Richard Blanco

This is the last stanza of the poem that Richard Blanco wrote for President Obama’s second inauguration. I kept trying to figure out when I should post it, kept putting it off as not quite right, not yet. And now it’s the end of National Poetry Month so I guess we will conclude the month with it. If you used the inaugural poem as a chance to take a break and maybe go to the bathroom instead of listening to someone read poetry, I encourage you to read it now. To me, it is a powerful reflection on the things that unite us as Americans (and, really as citizens of the world). We have varied experiences and yet our hearts are moved by the same bravery, the same tragedy. Despite our differences, some things connect us all.

A long time ago, on this very blog, I posted that I was not really a person who liked poetry very much. And it was the truth. I had no use for telling the truth slant, I wanted it straight. But as the world and my heart have grown more crooked, I better understand this circuitous path. If you are interested in discovering more poetry for yourself, my number one tip is to ask the people around you what poems they like. Not only will you learn something about them, you will also have an entryway into that particular poem, through the person you already know.

There are so many more poems that I want to share that I will probably post them on Sundays for a while. Thank you for indulging me for a solid month (minus a few days here and there). I hope one of these poems connected with you in some way.

We have been trying this new thing where we take Atticus into church with us. It’s been successful as far as church services with a two-year-old go. He is suddenly able to sit with us and play quietly for part of the time, and he likes the music. Plus, he gets to take communion and I am super into that.

But, you know, having him there means that we are distracted in the permanent way of parents, ears attuned to his noises. This is troublesome if you think, like I used to, that worship is more about stillness than about motion. This is a season of our lives that is about exploring the outside world rather than examining ourselves, and parenthood has been about motion almost from the very beginning. I had twinges in my belly at 16 weeks and the predictions that he was going to be an active boy came true. We rocked him to sleep (and became those people who rock themselves without knowing it). He preferred to run from his very first steps, which, of course, means that we are still running after him. He plows his grocery cart into the wall and smashes his trucks into one another. I stuff diapers and Mike makes dinner and we wipe Atticus’s nose. There is less stillness in our lives than there used to be.

One of the things that resonated with me from the very beginning of motherhood, before I could even feel those first kicks, was part of the preface of Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman.

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.

I am not totally present in church when I am there with Atticus, but I think the act of being there is enough for now. We are making space for our church community to be a priority; even if I don’t hear every word of the sermon, I am learning from the people around me how to make my very flesh a great poem. Yesterday I watched another parent make all those familiar movements – soothing and wiping and caressing. You could never mistake that for inattention.

“Happiness” by Jane Kenyon

There’s just no accounting for happiness,
or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away.

And how can you not forgive?
You make a feast in honor of what
was lost, and take from its place the finest
garment, which you saved for an occasion
you could not imagine, and you weep night and day
to know that you were not abandoned,
that happiness saved its most extreme form
for you alone.

No, happiness is the uncle you never
knew about, who flies a single-engine plane
onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes
into town, and inquires at every door
until he finds you asleep midafternoon
as you so often are during the unmerciful
hours of your despair.

It comes to the monk in his cell.
It comes to the woman sweeping the street
with a birch broom, to the child
whose mother has passed out from drink.
It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing
a sock, to the pusher, to the basket maker,
and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots
in the night.
It even comes to the boulder
in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,
to rain falling on the open sea,
to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.