Trudy J. Morgan-Cole's Blog, page 56

Compulsive Overreader

Book review time again! I’ve been posting my book reviews over at Compulsive Overreader as usual, but you can get a very condensed overview of what I’ve read so far this year by watching the video above. And if you share it with others, I’ll enter your name for a drawing to win one of these books!

As You Were

This week last year was pretty awful. Surprisingly, it was already bad even before my mom died suddenly on the Saturday evening, which obviously made it one of my worst weeks ever. But before that happened, I got the news earlier in the week that an old college friend, Linda, had died of cancer. I had only recently learned that her cancer was terminal, and I didn’t expect the end to come so soon.

I was shocked when I got that call, but I didn’t cry. I’m weird about tears — I cry easily, but not always at the things you’d expect. Not yet guessing how many more tears I’d be crying before that week was over, I felt terrible about my friend’s untimely death but I didn’t immediately burst into tears.

A day or two after Linda’s death, Cape Breton singer Rita MacNeil died, and the radio was filled with her songs and tributes to her. Now, I liked Rita’s music, but I wouldn’t call myself a major fan. I’d never seen her in concert; I admired her as someone who’d made something beautiful out of a tough start to life, and I was sorry she died. That was pretty much it. But then, the day after her death, I saw this cartoon and it brought tears to my eyes:

(in case you don’t recognize them, the other figures in the cartoon are also dead musicians from Eastern Canada. But you probably guessed that from context clues).

A few hours after I saw that cartoon, I was thinking of it while driving when Rita’s signature song “Working Man” came on the radio. I started crying so hard I almost had to pull over. When I did pull in to my own driveway I just sat there bawling uncontrollably for awhile. Fortunately I have a degree in psychology, so I was able to make the not-very-stunning deduction that my tears had more to do with the friend I’d just lost than with a musician I’d sort of admired. Music is a big emotional trigger for me, and I often cry when songs come on the radio or we sing hymns in church that awaken memories. But in this case it was the cartoon that stood out in my mind. Why, out of all the tributes to Rita MacNeil I’d seen, did this one move me to tears — and why did that unlock a deep well of grief for the friend I’d lost but hadn’t yet cried over?

It reminded me of another cartoon honouring another dead celebrity — again, someone I’d thought was talented but had not been a devoted fan of — that also moved me to tears. A week or so earlier, writer and movie critic Roger Ebert died, and this cartoon made me choke up a little:

The whole “recently dead celeb arrives in heaven” theme is very popular in tribute cartoons (regardless of the religious beliefs of the celebrity involved or whether they believed in any kind of afterlife at all). And these two really got to me, especially as I reflected on my own losses during that week.

The existence of cartoons like these is evidence of something I see all the time when people are faced with death — even people who have no religious beliefs and are skeptical about any kind of afterlife. We have a deep-seated need to believe, or at least to pretend, that the life of the person we loved is going on much as it used to, on some other plane of existence, in company with those who’ve already died.

 

When my co-worker Jeff died suddenly, one of the messages a student left on his classroom board read “I hope the coffee’s better up there, buddy.” (Our lunchroom coffee was pretty horrible at the time). Nobody inquired too deeply into where “up there” was and whether good coffee was a feature of eternal bliss. We all understood it as an expression of the desire to believe that our co-worker was still, somehow, himself, and enjoying the things he’d always enjoyed, like a good cup of coffee.

As a Seventh-day Adventist, albeit one with a sometime-shaky faith in eschatological things, I don’t believe our beloved dead are anywhere conscious at the moment, but I do believe in some kind of afterlife beyond the Resurrection Day. I can’t fathom what the life might be life, though, and I think it’s highly unlikely that it’s just an exact copy of this life without all the hassles. The Bible certainly doesn’t promise that — most of our images of heaven are more folk-religion than Biblical. If you read Isaiah 65:19-25 as being about heaven rather than an idealized earthly Israel, then it does seem to promise some of the features of everyday life on this earth — but it’s the only Bible passage that does so.

For the most part, I think, believers and non-believers alike have to put a big question mark over the idea of a heavenly existence after death — even if we’re sure it will happen, we can’t really imagine what it might be like, and surely life in a perfect world would have to be different in some very fundamental ways from the life we know here.

But what we want — what we all express, whether in cartoons or eulogies or sympathy cards, in the days after someone dies — is more of this life. We want everything to be back the way it was, to imagine that for the person we loved, existence continues as it always did, except that we can’t see them.

I thought about this as I was preparing the tribute I gave to my mom at her funeral. Seventh-day Adventists, as I said, don’t imagine our beloved dead continuing to consciously co-exist with us on a heavenly plane, so a whole wealth of popular platitudes was denied me. But I made use of the popular trope anyway. Drawing on my mom’s well-known love of going for a drive to see the sights, I imagined her on Resurrection Morning, glad to see Jesus arrive to take her to heaven but hoping He could go for a little drive around on the way there. I liked that image. It was the right one to end her eulogy on — something that made people smile and kept a little bit of her personality alive in everyone’s memory.

And that, after all, is what we’re all doing with our pictures of heaven — keeping those we love alive for a little longer. Hope in an afterlife is a wonderful thing for those of us who have it, but it does not promise what we want most, which is for things to not change, to go back to the way they used to be.

The truth is, regardless of what we believe or don’t believe about the afterlife, there is only one place where Rita is still singing with the band. Only one place where Siskel and Ebert are still reviewing movies together. There is only one place where my mom is still going for long drives just for the fun of it, where Linda is forever singing into a hairbrush with great dramatic flair. One place where my friend Jamie is still laughing with me as we over-analyze song lyrics, where my co-worker Jeff is still enjoying a cup of coffee. Only one place where my Uncle George is still regaling us with stories about family history and my Aunt Alicia is still doing the same for the other side of the family — and my mom is still skeptically wondering, under her breath, how much of the story was made up and how much was true.

There’s only one place where things remain unchanged, where all these things are still going on. And it’s not heaven.

That place is called Memory. It’s the most precious thing we have.

Actually Loving

In the fall of 1983 I landed on the campus of Andrews University, one of the largest and most diverse Seventh-day Adventist colleges in North America. I felt out of place in many ways: unlike kids who came from large Adventist high schools together, I had no cohort: none of the handful of Adventist kids in my high school class had ended up at AU. I knew exactly one person: my cousin, who was older, cooler, and already had a collection of friends from the previous year. I had a mild  case of what I would not then have labelled social anxiety: I just knew that talking to new people was hard, but it had to be done. And I was out of place in the rah-rah of freshman orientation because I had completed my first year and a half of classes at Memorial University back home, so I wasn’t even actually taking first-year courses.

Despite all that, I got to know people and found friends. One of the first close friends I made that fall semester at Andrews was a guy I’ll call G., primarily because that letter doesn’t appear anywhere in his real name. G and I hit it off immediately: we had the same sense of humour and lots of the same interests, two elements noticably lacking in my relationships with most of the guys I’d met back home. Although I had dreamed for years of going to college and meeting a nice Adventist guy who was smart and sarcastic and hilarious, it was obvious from the beginning that my friendship with G was not going down a romantic path. The attraction just wasn’t there, on either side. We quickly became, and remained throughout those first couple of years in college, good friends.

It was a few months before G confessed his big secret to me: he was attracted to other guys. This quickly became an open secret in our group of friends, and also a subject of much discussion, both with G and behind his back. All the friends I’d made at Andrews were devout Adventists — we went to church, chapel and Bible studies without being reminded or threatened; we sometimes prayed with or for each other; we were all serious about following Jesus and doing what was right. For me, at least, the news that one of my best friends was, um, homosexual (we didn’t even start to use the word “gay” in conversation with and about G til later that year), introduced something entirely new into the equation.

We had been taught to grapple with the big, burning question of whether it was OK for guys and girls to have sex with each other before marriage (it wasn’t, but endless debates were possible about whether there were loopholes to that rule and how far you could go before you violated it). The question of guys with guys, or girls with girls, was entirely outside my realm of thinking at the age of 18. I knew, in a vague general sense, that the Bible said it was a sin, but it wasn’t a sin I’d ever heard addressed or discussed in church or the Adventist high school I’d attended. I didn’t know a single gay person until I met G. Any conversation about the rights and wrongs of homosexuality was as purely theoretical to me as talking about whether it was a sin to play the roulette wheel at a Vegas casino — I knew it probably was, but that particular sin was so far outside my personal experience that it didn’t seem to matter.

And then it wasn’t, because I had a gay friend who wanted to be a good Christian, indeed a good Adventist, and saw no path open to him. Most of the “help” open to young gay Christians on an Adventist campus in 1983 involved counselling and “change ministries,” with the goal of re-orienting yourself to be a bit more straight, if possible. Watching G struggle through this kind of “help” reinforced for me how ineffective it was —  not just ineffective but in some cases actually harmful, making an already unhappy person much unhappier.

I met, and in some cases became friends with, several other gay men during my years at Andrews. I wasn’t actively seeking out gay friends; it was just the same process by which my cohort of friends and acquaintances ended up containing a disproportionate number of Asians and people from Wisconsin (though no gay Asians from Wisconsin). You get to know one person and you meet the friends with whom they share something in common. With G and his gay friends, what they shared was a sense of being a misunderstood and disapproved minority, a secret society about which even they were ambivalent belonging to. There were times when I felt like they enjoyed being “out” among a small group of friends, like the time G and another gay guy and I went to the mall and entertained ourselves by ogling hunky male pop stars on posters in the record shop (yes, children, there was a record shop). And there were times when I was a confidante for their serious attempts to align their lives with what we all perceived as God’s will — that is, to make themselves straight.

Yes, there was a kind of dark humour to some of it — like the guy who was convinced he was going straight because he was dating a girl, when everyone could see he picked her because he had a mad crush on her brother. And sometimes it was enlightening — I’ll never forget the friend who told me that even when he was a small child and pictured growing up to get married and have kids, he always pictured doing it with another guy, long before he had any feelings he could label as “sexual.” But mostly it was just sad — watching people wrestle with something as basic as who they were attracted to and try to change or deny that, watching obviously devout young people who loved God struggle with the fact that without ever touching another human being, they were committing what everyone around them perceived as an unforgivable sin. It’s no surprise that in the years after college most of these young men turned away from our church and some away from God altogether.

Once you know something’s there, it’s hard to understand how you ever missed it. The underground gay subculture at Andrews was apparent as soon as I met someone who showed me it was there; without G., I might have gone through my three years there blissfully unaware that there were any gay students (I never met a lesbian my entire time at Andrews, but I’m sure they existed as well — I just didn’t happen to make a friend who gave me access to that world). That underground life was coming close enough to the surface during my years at Andrews that the university administration felt the need to address it publicly at least once — by bringing in a popular Adventist “ex-gay” speaker who ran a ministry that aimed to help gay people become straight. He gave a popular and well-attended chapel talk at which he got a huge round of laughs for reminding the audience that “God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve” (it was 1984 and the first time most of us had heard this joke). 

That speaker and his “ministry” were, I hardly even need add, later discredited when he was found out to be, well, not so ex-gay after all. But even when he  was still speaking on Adventist campuses and riding the crest of the popularity wave, I could see that the “victory in Jesus” he was offering simply wasn’t working for my gay friends.

I came away from three years at Andrews with many things (including, fortunately, a B.A.), but one thing I took away from those years were questions about our church’s stand (which, at that time, was the stand of almost all churches) on homosexuality. It was many years before I was ready to “come out” as an ally of LGBT people, but the friends I made at Andrews had already taught me two key things: that there was no question of someone “choosing a lifestyle” when it came to orientation, and that all the faith, prayer and desire to change in the world wasn’t enough to make someone’s orientation align with what the church and the Bible said it should be. I didn’t have any answers about the “right” way to deal with gays and lesbians in our midst, but I left my college years convinced that what we, as a church, were doing was not only inadequate and unloving but often actively damaging.

That lengthy preamble (cheers if you read it all!) is all there to explain why my heart lifted when I heard about this issue of the Andrews University paper, The Student Movement, published last week. An issue of the student paper dedicated not to debate about “The Issue” but to telling at least a few of the stories of actual LGBTQ students (even if some of them still feel the need to publish their pieces as “Anonymous”) is something that wouldn’t and couldn’t have happened 30 years ago. And the touching editorial “Love Actually,” by Melodie Roschman, comes from the perspective of a young straight Adventist whose experience was much the same as mine — except that it happened in today’s world rather than in the early 80s, where society’s awareness and discussion of LGBT issues is far more open, and thus far more of an open challenge for the church. 

It’s not like my church is about to change, about to throw open its arms and become an affirming body that embraces all kinds of people. In fact, the same week as the Andrews Student paper published this encouraging and ground-breaking issue, Adventist church leaders voted a motion that strengthens its traditional position denying membership to those with “alternative sexual practices.” As we’ve never been an affirming church, making a point of passing such a motion is pretty clearly being done to send a message to vocal, questioning members (like those behind the Student Movement issue) that no, church policy is not going to change anytime soon. And that is deeply discouraging.

But in spite of the need of leaders to entrench and defend the traditional position and the traditional reading of the Bible that underpins it, change is in the air. And if it’s a change that allows LGBT kids on Adventist campuses to talk openly about their experiences in a way my friend G and his friends couldn’t do in 1983, then that’s a change for the better. A change toward openness, toward real dialogue that listens to people rather than just preaching at them. A change from insisting that we “hate the sin but love the sinner” toward actually loving people. 

Listening to G’s story, thirty years ago, changed the person I became. Listening changes us. Listening changes everything. 

Because, as I’ve said before, if you say you love someone but you aren’t willing to listen to their story, you don’t really love them.

Unrepressed Childhood Trauma and Sandwich-Making

There’s a real feeling of what I can only describe as smug virtue when you get to say that you dislike something most people like, that also happens to be bad for you. Or, conversely, when you like something many people dislike, that happens to be good for you. And people are suspicious of this. For example, when I tell people that I really prefer dark chocolate to milk chocolate, or that I actually hate McDonald’s burgers, I get this shady look, as if people are thinking, “Sure, you say that because it makes you sound all lofty and noble and healthy, but I know you’re faking it.” I recognize this because I give people the same look when they claim to genuinely love kale or quinoa. Or, for that matter, when people insist that they actually love winter and really enjoy shovelling the driveway because it’s such great exercise. When some insists that their natural inclinations happen to line up with the good, the virtuous and the true, the rest of us harbour secret doubts.

But of course, we all have these quirks. We all have things that are supposedly “good for us” that we’re fortunate enough to actually like without effort, just because of our natural tastes and inclinations. I actually prefer the taste of dark chocolate; the fact that it’s supposedly healthier (or, at least, less unhealthy) is pure bonus. There are plenty of things I like — sugary, creamy Starbucks coffee drinks, for example — that are demonstrably not good for me, so it’s not that I’m just naturally virtuous. I know what I like; I don’t usually know why.

But one of my apparently “virtuous” preferences has a clear source in my childhood traumas, though it took me years to remember it (kind of a Recovered Memory Syndrome thing). If you give me two loaves of bread to make a sandwich, and one of them is sliced white bread in a plastic bag, I will always, always, always choose the other bread — whole wheat, multigrain, even if it’s freakin’ quinoa bread, rather than use sliced white bread.

I’d love to claim that I feel this way because I understand how white flour is stripped of all its nutrients and then the bread is pumped full of additives and preservatives, but no. The truth is there are lots of other things you can make with white flour that I will fall upon like a famished savage. Give me french bread, sourdough bread, any kind of buns or rolls or, oh bliss – croissants!! – and I will tear into them regardless of the nutritional content. I can even eat homemade white bread if it’s fresh out of the oven and has a bit of molasses on it. But store-bought sliced white bread makes me queasy, and I can sum up the reason in two words: BREAD POULTICE.

Now, I don’t know how many of you have ever used a bread poultice, or had one used on you. Likely not many of you, especially if you’re under 40. Despite the fact that my mother was the office manager of a medical practice and a keen believer in modern medicine, my childhood was peppered with good old-fashioned patent medicines and home remedies — I remember swallowing Milk of Magnesium, and having Merchurochrome dabbed on injuries where I would now put a little Polysporin. Minard’s Linament was used for aches and pains (though that was more something you’d see older folks put on themselves since kids weren’t expected to have those kind of aches and pains). Administering these things was mostly the territory of my Aunt Gertie, in whose house we lived until I was seven and who was my after-school caregiver for years after that. But nothing beat Aunt Gertie’s most memorable remedy: the bread poultice.

I don’t recall all the details of how or why the bread poultice was used, and I’m not about to Google it because I’m afraid that Google Images might bring up something that will scar me for life even further and perhaps put me off all bread products. What I remember is having an ugly gash or scrape on my knee — this happened to me a lot as a kid, not being particularly graceful. Aunt Gertie (with, it seems, the willing collusion of my mother, who presumably would have put a stop to it if there was anything shady about the process) administered a slice of white sliced bread to my knee and taped it on there to — and this is the phrase that’s run in my memory for forty years — “draw out the infection.” In my memory, the bread is damp. But was it damp when it was taped to my knee (with adhesive tape? Possibly…) or did it become damp as the sweat and blood and pus and … eww, I can’t even think about this anymore. I just remember going around for the rest of that day with that hot, damp, doughy mess adhered to my knee, all the infection presumably being drawn out of my innocent young body and into what was swiftly becoming the Bread of Disease and Nastiness. 

This may have only happened once in my childhood. Once may have been enough. What was the defining factor that determined, “This is an injury serious enough to treat with a slice of bread rather than just a band-aid, but not serious enough to seek medical attention”? I have no idea. I only know that while the scar on my knee faded with time, the scars on my psyche burn to this day —  usually when anyone presents me with a sandwich made with store-bought sliced white bread.

Writing Wednesday 69: Once Around the Writer’s Block

Writing Wednesday 68: Room to Grow (with Bonus HIMYM Rant)

Today’s video immerses us in pop-culture a little bit as I analyze why I (and thousands if not millions of fans) thought the series finale of the sitcom How I Met Your Mother was so badly executed. If you liked the series but haven’t yet seen the finale and have somehow remained unspoiled, please DON’T watch my video till you’ve seen the finale. Then come back and watch it. I think the basic problem was a writing-related problem, or, more specifically, a plotting problem, and it’s one a lot of writers fall prey to. That’s the problem of having your story so tightly planned that you don’t allow room for change or surprise. I won’t say anything more for fear of spoilers (there are plenty in the video!!) but if you’re a hardcore “planner” in your approach to plotting, you might want to rethink the value of having your ending locked in from the very beginning. Stories need room to grow, whether in the pages of a novel or on a TV screen.

Bible Movies: Why Is It So Hard?

Over the last few days, about 75% of my social media newsfeed seems to be taken up with reactions to the new “Noah” epic starring Russell Crowe. Do Christians like it? Do non-Christians like it? Do people who like well-made movies like it? (For the most part the answers seems to be no, no and no; the best analysis of the movie I’ve seen, and one of the few with anything positive to say, is here). A couple of weeks ago it was a barrage of posts by people telling me that I either must see, or absolutely must not see, the new “Son of God” movie.

Making movies about the great stories of the Bible is tricky. It’s rarely done well. Religious people get upset if you deviate too much from the text. Other viewers don’t like the movies if they stick too woodenly to a literal interpretation of the text. And no matter which audience you’re trying to target it towards, the mere fact that you’re dramatizing one of our culture’s most famous stories, stories that millions of believers hold dear, stories in which your characters have unironic conversations with God or may even BE the Son of God … well, it tends to produce uninspired scriptwriting and wooden acting, as if everyone involved in the film is overwhelmed by the great seriousness of what they’re doing.

In all the years of keeping my Adventist kids appropriately occupied on rainy, snowy, cold and windy Sabbath afternoons, I have seen a LOT of “religious” movies and “Christian” movies and “Bible” movies. I am convinced there are only two really good movies based on Bible stories, and they are these two:

Prince of Egypt (1998) and The Miracle Maker (2000) have several things in common. Both were made, as I understand it, with the consultation of a lot of Biblical scholars (mostly Jewish scholars in the case of Prince of Egypt, which is how it should be done in adapting any story from the Hebrew Scriptures. Both taken some liberties with the storyline to heighten dramatic effect (in the case of Prince of Egypt) or to create a relatable viewpoint character for young viewers (in the case of The Miracle Maker). Yet both remain true enough to the original story that all but the most nit-picky believers recognize the beloved Biblical tale and find it familiar. Both are made for kids, or at least for “family entertainment,” but aren’t cloying or annoying for adult viewers. Both tell the story well enough and have enough artistic merit (the high points being the beautiful claymation-style puppets in The Miracle Maker, and the soaring musical numbers in Prince of Egypt) that even those who aren’t believers can appreciate them as great stories, they way I might appreciate a terrific adaptation of a Hindu epic (and by the way, you should also check out the movie Sita Sings the Blues).

The two most important similarities these two movies share, though, are 1) They are both animated movies. Different styles of animation, but both animated movies. I really think this matters. Human actors often seem bowed down by the weight of the importance of the characters they’re portraying. As soon as you see an animated movie you’re freed from the restraint of thinking this actor “is” Jesus, or Moses, or whoever. Even if the voice actor is really well-known, the fact that you’re looking at a cartoon or a puppet somehow eases the pressure of having to imagine that actor in such a portentous role. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that my two favourite Biblical movies are animated.

And finally, 2) They both feature Ralph Fiennes. He’s Ramses in The Prince of Egypt and Jesus in The Miracle Maker, and he’s equally velvety-voiced and wonderful as the good guy or the bad guy. Need I say more?

So if the idea of Noah and Son of God both leave you cold for various reasons, and you’ve missed either of the above-mentioned movies, check ‘em out!

Too Many Funerals

If you live in the St. John’s area, you’ve probably heard by now this heartbreaking news story in which well-known local actors Andy Jones and Mary-Lynn Bernard talk publicly about the mental illness and suicide that took the life of their son, Louis, at age 28. If you’re not familiar with the story, please click that link and read (or listen to the audio) what this courageous family has had to say about a loss that people all too often cover up with shame.

Parents who lose a young adult child to cancer or a car accident are devastated, but open about their grief. They talk about it; they mourn; sometimes they start foundations. Parents who lose a child to suicide all too often feel that it’s not acceptable for them to talk publicly about how their child died, and I applaud Andy and Mary-Lynn for talking so openly about something so painful.

I didn’t know Louis Bernard; I met him a couple of times several years ago and thought he seemed like a bright, charming young man. Our acquaintance was so brief I can hardly say I felt his loss, except in that it echoed for me with the too-many other losses I’ve seen families go through. There’s no “right” amount of funerals for teenagers and young adults you should have to attend, because the only acceptable amount would be none. But I’ve been to more than my fair share as a teacher, especially since I’ve started teaching the the Murphy Centre, where the population of young people I meet is a little more high-risk than the average high school population. There have been too many funerals, and too many of those have been for young people who took their own lives, often after a struggle with mental health that leaves their families looking, sounding, and no doubt feeling, like refugees from a war zone.

One of the powerful points Andy Jones makes in that interview is that relative to other fields of health care, mental-health care “is still back in the 17th century.” While that’s obvious hyperbole (in the 17th century mentally ill people were nearly always just locked up, while today only some mentally ill people are locked up) it pinpoints an important truth; we understand far less about the brain, what can go wrong with it, and how to treat it, than we do about other parts of the body. And there is still far more stigma associated with mental illness than with other kinds of illness.

Mental illness is poorly understood and poorly treated in general (though of course improvements in treatment are being made all the time). It’s particularly devastating in children and young people, I think, because the impact of mental illnesses on their developing brains is even less understood. Also, I think, because teenagers have a strong tendency to self-medicate with alcohol and illegal drugs, which complicates the mental health issues even further to the point where addiction-vs-mental-illness often becomes a real chicken-and-egg problem. Another thing to remember as you read or hear Louis Bernard’s story is that his is, in many ways, a best-case scenario, in that he obviously had parents who were aware of his issues, not in denial about the fact that their child was mentally ill, and were willing and able to advocate for him. Can you imagine what going through this hellish nightmare is like for a young person who doesn’t have family support?

I don’t know much about the medical or social-work aspects of how our society deals with mental illness, but one thing I do know is the school system, and I know that our school system has virtually nothing in place to deal with young people struggling with mental illness.  Think about the supports we have in place for young people with learning disabilities. If your child is diagnosed with dyslexia, the public school system has a whole array of resources and accommodations that are supposed to be put in place to help him or her — extra time for writing tests, the ability to have tests read to you and answers scribed, access to audiobooks, support from a language specialist, etc. Now, I realize that young people who have learning disabilities (or their parents) will be quick to tell me that these supports are not always put in place as and when they should be, and school systems vary widely in how effectively they actually use these supports. I get that there’s a lot of room for improvement.

But what gets me frothing at the mouth is that in the case of learning differences, at least a structure exists, even if there’s room for improvement in how it’s applied. With mental-health issues, none of this exists. When your junior-high student is diagnosed with depression or severe anxiety, there is no “Pathway” to send them down within the school system. There’s no ready-made list of accommodations for the school administration to look at and say, “What resources can we call on to help this student?”

One of the big misconceptions I face about the place where I teach — which offers high school completion to young people who didn’t finish in the regular school system — is that all the students we deal with either have behavioral problems or severe learning problems. In fact, the majority of students I see every day have no behavioral issues and are very capable academically — some are even brilliant. There’s a complex tangle of reasons why students may not finish high school in a traditional setting but if I were asked to name the number-one issue I see most often it would be: mental health issues. Schools are so ill-equipped to deal with mentally ill young people that far too many of them end up dropping out. The fortunate ones find other ways to get an education. Some of them come to our program which, like everything, works for some people and not for others.

I was explaining this recently to a group of high school teachers in the traditional system who were talking to me with the usual assumption that everyone I deal with is a “hard case.” “Actually,” I said, “a lot of the students I work with have mental health issues, particularly the ones with anxiety issues so severe they simply can’t be in a regular classroom with 30 other students.”

“Oh, but those kids will never make it anyway,” one older teacher replied, so quickly my head spun a bit. “I’ve seen plenty of those — they try it in regular school, then they get moved to District School, then they try it at the Murphy Centre, but they’ll never get through high school.”

I was a little stunned, especially since I know many students who are living proof he’s wrong. I tried to put it in perspective and remember that this was one teacher, talking out of his own experience and probably a fair amount of frustration, but it was tempting to see his statement as emblematic of how the school system as a whole (though definitely not all individual teachers!) throws up its hands in despair when dealing with kids who have mental illness. They simply don’t know what to do. We simply don’t know what to do.

And I don’t have the answers, but I know it needs to get better. Several years ago our provincial government promised to build a in-patient treatment centre for youth with complex mental health issues (along with another for youth with addictions, an equally pressing and related problem). As you can see, this plan is still on the books, but it’s taking a very long time. The only time we’ve heard anything about it in the news for the past several years was when a group of neighbours in the area where the treatment centre was to be built protested that they didn’t want a bunch of mentally ill teenagers running around their perfect suburban neighbourhood (I’m paraphrasing here). Which brings us right back where we started: to shame, ignorance and stigma.

Shame, ignorance and stigma are the reasons that families often try to deny or hide mental illness, even (especially?) when it ends tragically in suicide. I am so impressed with Andy Jones and Mary-Lynn Bernard for speaking out about the terrible loss of their son. I only hope their courage and honesty shines a little bit of light in dark corners and helps us all realize that people with mental illness, and their loved ones, are fighting as hard as they can in a brutal battle. They can’t do it alone. Just like people battling any other kind of disability, they need all the rest of us — the doctors, the nurses, the social workers, the neighbours, the church members, the co-workers, and yes, the teachers — to step up and fight alongside them.

Writing Wednesday 67: Don’t (Necessarily) Quit Your Day Job

In today’s video I tackle the frequent phenomenon of writers who feel they need to quit that boring, soul-sucking day job before they can dedicate themselves to writing their novel. While that obviously works for some people, I worry that writers who don’t have the freedom to do that may feel they can never commit to creative writing because they have other jobs.

As a writer who has pretty much always had some kind of “day job,” I wanted to talk about my own experience and poke at that presumption a bit. Which is what I do in the video above.

When the Job is Done (Hint: it’s never done)

If you’ve ever heard me talk about parenting — which I try not to do, at least not with any authority — you may have heard me say that all I want is for my kids to be healthy, happy, decent people. Lots of parents say this. It’s not at all true, of course. I mean, I do want those things, but that’s really a bare minimum.

I want so much more.

I want my kids to be healthy, happy, decent people who are also Christians, and Seventh-day Adventists, and politically left-wing, and avid readers, and huge sci-fi/fantasy geeks, and patriotic Newfoundlanders, and involved in creative work, and and and and … I want so many things for them. Things that might get tucked under the umbrella of “happy, healthy decent people” but, when I look at it more closely, boil down to “I want them to be happy and healthy and decent in all the same ways that have worked for me.”

This of course is a big improvement over, “I want my kids to fix my mistakes and not screw up their lives in all the same ways I’ve screwed up mine.” At least, I think it’s better. And probably more justifiable and achievable. If I believe in the values I live by, obviously I’d like my children to share those values, and if I’ve been a relatively decent role model I hope I’ve at least made those values look mildly attractive. But in the end, it still comes down to, “I want my children to live their lives in the way that I think is right for them to live.”

If you’ve been reading this blog for awhile you may have noticed that I don’t blog about my kids nearly as much as I did when they were younger. As they move into the teenage years, (Chris is 16 and Emma is almost 14) I’ve become much more aware of how separate they are from me; I don’t feel like they’re characters in my story that I can write about freely without violating their privacy. I’ve also become aware of their “separateness” in the sense that they are developing value systems of their own that don’t necessarily match mine in every way. And just to be clear here: I have great teenagers. I know from the work I do exactly how rough the teenage years can be for some kids and parents, and I am having (so far) a very easy ride through parenthood. But I’ve also noticed that even the parents of great, stellar teenagers are still worried about the choices their kids are making and the values their kids are developing.

Because it’s such a key part of life for so many people I know, I want to look at this for a couple of minutes specifically through the lens of religion. I think almost every parent who follows any religious/spiritual path themselves wants to pass that on to their kids — after all, you wouldn’t be on this path, or in this church, if you didn’t think it was the best way to live. For some parents this is not a very big deal as long as their kids are the above-mentioned happy, healthy, decent people; to others (including most Seventh-day Adventist parents I know) it’s a huge deal.

I grew up in our church, raised by SDA parents among other SDA kids. I have watched my friends go down their various paths in life and I have watched the many generations of church-raised kids that I taught or was a youth leader for, go through life as well. For a long time, I thought there were three basic outcomes for a parent trying to raise their kids “in the faith” (our faith, but a lot of this applies to any faith):

1. You did everything right, your child joined the church and continued to be a committed church member throughout life.

2. Your child rebelled as a teen, left the church but later came back as a young adult when they had kids of their own.

3. Your child rebelled as a teen, left the church and God, and completely screwed up his or her life.

I mean, that’s obviously a rough sketch, but those were, in my mind (and in the minds of lots of other churchgoing people) the basic outcomes, even though the real life we saw all around us suggested there were far more possible outcomes. Now that I’m parenting teenagers while living through my own middle years, I see that while any of the three outcomes above might happen, a lot of other things might happen too. Those could include, but not be limited to:

4. Your child joined the church and stayed in it, but it never brought her spiritual fulfillment and she was always hurting deep inside.

5. Your child joined the church and appeared to be a productive and committed member, but in mid-life discovered it wasn’t working for him and left.

6. Your child left the church and found spiritual and personal fulfillment in a different faith community.

7. Your child left the church and lived a completely secular life but still seemed to be happy and fulfilled.

8. Your child left the church, showed no interest in it for years, and then returned in midlife or even in later life.

Or, of course, any combination of the above, or any one of a number of other outcomes I didn’t think to add to the list. The longer I live and the more I observe people, including myself, the only thing I can be sure of is that everyone’s life is a long, strange journey, and it’s hard to predict where people will end up.

 

If I had stood in my church youth group 30 years ago and looked at the young men and women around me and tried to predict, on the basis of who they were then, which of them would be active members and even leaders in the SDA church by the time they were 50, which would have nothing to do with the church, and which would have ended up somewhere completely different — I would have had a lousy success rate at guessing. Nothing about the home they were raised in or the way they thought as teenagers predicted where my friends ended up, which is all over the map. And the other thing is — for those of us who are blessed to still be alive — we haven’t actually “ended up” anywhere yet. We’re still travelling, and even as we approach (or in some cases have passed) age 50, that road still has unexpected twists and turns.

That’s the other thing about parenting: when do you know the job is done? When do you know that your kids have turned out all right, and are happy and successful and living by the values you taught them and generally going to be OK? The answer is of course that you never know. Unless your child dies before you do — which is the tragedy we all hope will never happen – you will never know how your child’s life story ends.

I know of people who have died secure in the knowledge that the kid they raised has turned into a good, churchgoing adult, maybe even a church leader: that parent never knew that ten years down the road their adult child was going to reject all those values and become a Buddhist monk. I know of people who have died confident that their beloved child was enjoying a happy marriage and family life: the parent never lived to see the horrific divorce and custody battle that sucked up their child’s middle years. I know of people who have died grieving the fact that their child was “lost” to God and to the church: that parent never got to see the rich and lively faith their child developed in her 40s and 50s. 

In other words, we don’t know. As parents — particularly parents who, like me, might be a teeny bit control freaks — we have the illusion that we can influence our kids’ lives — not just to be healthy, happy and decent people, but to reflect and build on the values we’ve spent years teaching them, whether those are religious, political or personal values. And we can — but also, we can’t. My kids are not puppets I’m controlling, or characters in a story I’m writing. They’re human beings who will make their own decisions, their own mistakes, walk down their own paths. To a large extent, I can’t even imagine what those paths will look like. And I hope I never know the end of the story, because I hope my kids go on living their lives and making choices long after I am gone.

In the end, all we give our kids is the starting point of their journey and the bag they pack to take with them: the things about which they will later say, “My parents always taught me….” It’s not that those things don’t matter; they matter a lot, and we all try to start that journey in a good place and pack their bag with the things they’ll need. But where they travel from there is not our decision and not in our control.

As I begin on this parenting-teenagers journey, soon to be followed by the parenting-young-adults journey, my biggest challenge — maybe yours too? — is learning to let go of that illusion of control, to let go of the outcome. And, of course, to hope that whatever roads they walk down, we’ll have a relationship that will allow me to walk beside them from time to time, and enjoy the journey.