Lindsey Kay's Blog: *! (on Goodreads), page 5

Why school demographics make me break down in tears.

Right now I am trying, desperately trying, to finalize bullet points for a short presentation I’m giving Thursday on stress and the education system.  Instead of nicely polishing my documents and printing the flyers I’m handing out, I’m sitting here in tears.  Again.  This is not the first time this project has made me sort of lose it.  Thankfully I have waterproof mascara for the day of, because I’m pretty sure I’ll be losing it halfway through the presentation.

Here’s why.  First, you need to know about the ACE study done by Kaiser Permanente.  They were looking for a way to accurately predict the onset of certain chronic conditions that were high-cost to maintain, like diabetes, heart disease, and some kinds of mental illnesses.  They did a survey that covered every aspect of people’s lives.  Work, diet, family life, childhood, education, etc, etc, etc.  What they found was a direct correlation between what they termed “Adverse Childhood Experiences” and people’s health later in life.  Your mother was a drug addict?  Here, have a nice depression and eating disorder!  Your dad beat your mom in front of you?  Would you like a spicy heart disease and obesity with that?  It seemed counter-intuitive, so they conducted more studies to see why there would be a connection like that.  It led to major breakthroughs in how stress affects brain chemistry.  While occasional stress may actually heighten brain function, boost immunity, and help people survive the upsets of life, long-term stress is like a poison that there is no antidote for.  It changes the way the brain functions, killing short-term memory, deadening emotions, and hampering immune function.  This is especially dangerous for young people whose brains are still developing.  Brain scans of a child who experienced abuse at home compared to that of a child raised in a stable environment are just chilling.

So when you look at chronic stress and the educational environment, there are a lot of things to consider.  One is that teachers are more likely to feel forced to have “interventions” (disciplinary action) for students who seem distracted, whose grades are falling, or who are in the system because they have a personal educational plan or there has been law enforcement involvement with their family.  Those students, perhaps ironically, are the ones who are least likely to benefit from disciplinary action.  Why?  Their amygdala is swollen, they have too much adrenaline and cortisol in their system, they are afraid of authority figures and they feel defeated by life.  Rather than stopping negative behaviors, making those students feel on edge is likely to just cause more.  Schools who replace disciplinary interventions with the “compassionate” alternative of simply asking why a student is looking at their phone or not completing work and if they are experiencing any kind of stress find they have far better outcomes.  Of course they would!  If the school environment becomes a combative or stress filled one because of constant discipline or failure or some kind of combination of the two, the student is more likely to fight or freeze than to actually become engaged.

The problem is that teachers are looking at the issue from the perspective of someone who isn’t under constant stress and thinking of how they would respond, not their students.

The school district I will end up working for, in all likelihood, has 75% Hispanic students and 85% of all students receiving free lunches, which means that 85% of the students are in poverty and 75% of students may come from a home where English is not the primary language.  Many of those students have parents who are in back-breaking work situations.  You have 12 year old kids who raise their younger siblings while their parents work.  Kids who have family who have been deported and they’ll never see again.  Kids whose parents are using or selling drugs.  Kids who find school to be incredibly stressful because they are still unable to understand all of what is going on.

When you look at how the schools are doing with meeting learning targets, the outlook is dismal.

Of course it is.

People like to say things like, “the United States gives everyone an opportunity to make something of themselves.”

Mmhm.  But think of what a student can make of themselves if they had a traumatic stress disorder by the time they were 3, if their language development was nipped in the bud and they have been behind the class from day 1, being pushed and pushed by a teacher desperate to make them succeed to save their own job.  Traumatized at home, traumatized at school, doomed for failure from the time of their birth.

Right now these issues are gaining awareness, but they are far from being addressed.

And I’m going to give a short talk on it for the final in my Critical Race Theory class, because I’m a sap. I’m a sap who’ll break down in tears.

We like to say we’re past all of this, that latinos and blacks and everybodies are all equal in our society, while we walk around blissfully unaware of the privileges some people have just because they were born into stable homes.

But in all reality?  We’re all cursed.  You know that ACE study, that was trying to figure out how insurance companies could save more money?  Most of the participants were white men in their 40s and 50s.

It’s a big boat, folks.  We need to start acting like we’re in it together.

Societal oppression, dish soap, and knives.

The last few weeks I’ve been working on an essay project that has to do with societal oppression and the Bible.  (I’ll post the full text at some point.)  Of course throughout the whole thing I find myself ruminating about the families in poverty I work with.  Couple this with ongoing political debates about the Affordable Care Act, and I’ve felt like an emotional cocktail for the last month.  Of course, emotional cocktail means blog post eventually, because why feel and think about all of this stuff if not to lay it at your ever-patient feet?

The first thing I was thinking about was dish soap.  For the average family, dish soap is something you use to wash dishes.  You know you’re poor when you realize it also cleans floors, can be used as a body wash in a pinch (but not your privates- that stings), as a laundry detergent, to clean floors, and to bathe puppies.  Oh, yes.  When I was working at the shelter, we used to have families that didn’t like the Tide detergent we provided for free (for use in a High Efficiency front loading washer) and would use dish soap instead.  The first time I had to mop several gallons of soapy water off the floor because the seal started to leak I thought it was mildly amusing.  The fifth time, I was spitting angry and already knew to wipe the seal down with baking soda first, then with canola oil, then to run canola oil and baking soda through the dispenser to kill the suds.

The dish soap would leak out from the shower, too.

Dish soap is only the first thing which people in extreme poverty have special knowledge about.  The other is knives.  Not hunting knives.  Kitchen knives.  Did you know that if you don’t have kitchen scissors, steak knives work well on cardboard and tearing open freezer bags?  They do.  And a thin fillet knife is just the thing for opening a can of beans if you don’t have a can opener.  I, personally, wouldn’t have realized that a can opener is a luxury.  But yet I cannot tell you how many times I was supervising lunch prep and someone went at a can with a fillet knife before I even knew what had happened.  It didn’t occur to them that we would have a can opener, they didn’t even know what one looked like.

The normal person is blissfully unaware that there are everyday habits we engage in as members of the middle class that people in poverty do not know because they’ve never had the opportunity to engage with them.  Our clothes washers need fussy soap.  We have kitchen utensils which only have one purpose.  Some people have ten, fifteen things in their kitchen that can only be used for one thing. If you have to pick pennies out of your couch to scrape together the money to ride the bus to work, you do not own single-use utensils unless someone else bought them for you.  Garlic crusher?  Fuh.  No.  Juicer?  What the…? No.  Cappuccino machine?  It is to laugh.

It’s interesting to me when people disparage the poor, saying things like they aren’t smart enough to be rich.  Sorry, buddy, you ain’t smart enough to be poor.  The people who stayed at the shelter had MAD skills.  They memorized bus schedules, they knew who gave what away on what day and what thrift stores dependably had what kind of stuff.  ”Don’t go to Salvation Army for kids clothes, they never have any.  This store drops prices towards the end of the month.  Go there in the evening, sometimes you catch that store right when they are throwing out the day old bread and it’s still good for a while…”  And on, and on.  Repositories of knowledge that people with cash in their pockets simply don’t ever need.

And the middle class has it’s own rules.  Knowing what is good debt and what is bad.  Knowing what the hell a Roth IRA is and why you would want one.  Knowing where to get secondhand clothes with good labels and what stores discount what clothes in what season.  Learning those skills can be the hardest part of transitioning to a new class.  The quiet judgment of the women who wonder why you got your kids clothes there.  The panic the first time someone asks you to bring a cold plate for brunch.  (Why does the plate have to be cold?  What do you put on it?  If you go into Kroger and ask for a cold plate will they know what it is?)  There are a million things that people take for granted as a part of their lives, as common knowledge, simply because it’s what they grew up with.  And asking?  Asking is the worst kind of shame because it tells the world that you don’t really belong.  If you belonged, you would know.

They say that there is always someone richer.  You tell someone who makes $60,000 that they aren’t too bad off and they’ll point to the person who makes $100,000.  Tell that person they are doing really well and they’ll point to the person who makes $200,000.  Tell that person they are really quite fortunate and they’ll point to the millionaire, who points to the multi-millionaire, who points to Bill Gates, who I’m sure is jealous of someone.

When you’ve got a family of five and you feel lucky to break $30,000, everyone is rich.

When you’re homeless, anyone with a roof of their own is a lucky bastard.

We all have things we take for granted that we shouldn’t.

But the thing that bothers me the most right now?  Last week I washed a few loads of laundry in dish soap and baking soda, because I had made buying my kids warm clothes for winter a priority.  And in the midst of all the political arguments, I kept wanting to tell people I just couldn’t listen to them because they didn’t know about dish soap and knives.

What they picture as poor doesn’t reflect the effort and knowledge and work that goes into being poor.  Food stamps will keep you fed, if you’re smart about how you use them, but they won’t keep you from scrubbing your rump with dish soap when you run out of body wash.

It won’t keep you from opening the can of beans with a knife.

It won’t keep you from shaking out the couch cushions for the money to ride the bus.

It won’t let you take a single thing for granted, like the majority of this country does every day.

“You work and go to school? Who takes care of your kids?”

So I’ve seen this blog post getting linked around Facebook, and I’ve mostly scrolled by it with a good-natured “harrumph”.  It’s Matt Walsh writing about how his wife is doing a bang-up job of raising his kids, what with the birthing life into being and instilling of morals and hygiene and societal values while staying at home and never having a career anymore.  Most of the people I’ve seen linking to it are stay-at-home moms, and I don’t want to disparage what they do.  But one friend of mine took exception to Walsh’s tone because it seemed really patronizing to the mothers who do work, and that made me think about a lot of things.

Let me start by saying that being a stay at home mom is hard, incredibly hard.  I did it for five years, and looking back I think it was more emotionally draining and difficult than parenting while working.  You never get to clock out of being a parent, especially when your kids are on top of you every second of the day and a good bit of the night.  It’s hard to deal with feeling unappreciated and unproductive.  It’s nice to get a pat on the back every once in a while from someone who affirms stay-at-home-mommyness as something of a sacred calling.  But being a working mother is a whole different type of hard, and while I can’t say the two are equal or unequal, what I can say is it takes a strong-ass woman to do either with any amount of grace.  Women who manage to actively raise their kids into productive members of society in today’s world deserve praise REGARDLESS of their employment status.

My family needed me to have an income, so I went to work.  Then, I went to school and work.  And it’s funny, because while my professional life post-stay-at-home-mommydom has gotten me many “god bless your heart” pouts and shoulder rubs and people with wide eyes saying, “how do you MANAGE?”; there’s a lot less of a sense of screw-everyone-else solidarity amongst working women than there was in the stay at home mom world.

I suppose there’s a feeling that we’re betraying someone, or something.

It doesn’t help when people, in feigned congratulations of my courage, say things like “so you go to school AND you work?  Who takes care of your kids?”

Um, I do.  And their dad.  We raise our children together, thanks for implying that I am somehow crippled as a mother because there are hours I am not home.  No, I can’t always pick them up from school or tuck them in to bed.  But I am present in their lives, the moon that pulls their tides, regardless of if I am available to them every second of the day (including bathroom breaks) or if I am only with them for two hours.  What matters is if the connection to them is actively nurtured.  What matters is when over dinner I ask them what the happiest and saddest moment of their day was.  What made you feel victorious?  What made you feel like you failed?  What will you work harder at tomorrow and what you do differently?  What can I do for you?  Is there anything you want to talk about?  Want to cuddle and read a book?  Need me to mend the sleeve of your dress?

I mean, I may have to boil a days worth of parenting into a few hours sometimes, but there are other days I’m home all day.  There are days where I give my essay project the middle finger and decide to make cupcakes with my daughter or play Minecraft with my son.  I still actively work at being a parent.  I do not shove that responsibility off on anyone else (except their father, who actively shares it).

Being a mother is hard.  Being a parent is hard.  It’s hard whether or not you work.  All of the reasons to stay at home, or to go to work, belong to the parent and not to society.  Stay at home moms need to ask themselves if they have the patience.  Can they go for a few years without even peeing alone or reading a book uninterrupted?  This is a serious question, because child abuse happens when they cannot.  Working moms have to ask themselves can they feel connected to their child if someone else is the one seeing the first steps, hearing the first word?  Can they marvel at their children without having to know every detail?  These are serious questions.  My dad got a lot of Monkeypants’s firsts.  That was really difficult for me.  But you know what?  I get her everydays, and her everydays do not suck.  They amaze me.

Mothers shouldn’t have to stay at home to be congratulated and praised.  Fathers should be praised, too.  You know why?  Because like Matt Walsh says we bring life into the world and we rear it… regardless of whether or not we have another job.  We worry about our children and we do our best to raise them well.  We give ourselves to them, we center our efforts around them… and, yeah, sometimes we make getting or keeping or furthering careers a priority because as a parent we have a responsibility to ourselves as well.  We have a responsibility to model how to be a good member of society, and sometimes that means learning how to be a doctor or a schoolteacher or a nurse or an accountant or what have you.  And sometimes for financial or spiritual or personal reasons that means staying at home.

Sure it does.

But whatever being a parent means, we shouldn’t all have to be competing with each other to prove that we are somehow good parents regardless of how we live our lives.  We’re good parents because of who we are to our children and who they are to us.

 

Congressional Shutdown: What to call it?

I’m a big believer in the power of words, so as the shutdown drags on ever longer and more and more people begin to talk about it, I find myself wondering what words to use to describe it.  People call the congress “childish”, or “terrorist”, or “stupid.”  I try on each of those words and try to figure out what words are really appropriate, what are silly rhetoric, and what words do more harm than good.  Let us deconstruct together.

First off, I don’t think that “childish” is a good word to use.  While much of the dialogue seems woefully immature, I still don’t believe it’s a good idea to insult children.  Most children are aware that their actions have consequences.  This becomes clear even at a very young age.  My two-year-old Monkeypants knows when she’s gone too far.  She knows when it’s time to accept the time out and the fact that the toys have gone into the “no-no box” on top of the fridge.  She will give me a hug and same “sorry Mimi” with those big, tearfully rueful eyes, and she will behave as if she is remorseful.  Congress does not show that level of self-awareness.  Instead, as the consequences become more dire and the public outcry and condemnation mounts, they yell even louder as if throwing a bigger tantrum is the real way to get what you want.  Sorry, Congress, but my two-year-old even knows that won’t work.  So what you are isn’t childish, that’s not it at all.

Another word used in lieu of “childish” is “criminal.”  For one, nothing that congress has done is illegal.  They have the shield of the law over them, even if it seems contrary to the conscience that such could be true.  An analogy has been made that their actions are similar to kidnapping the American public’s needs and holding them blackmail, much like drug cartels do with rich tourists.  And while on a basic level that comparison seems to hold water, I think it needs to be examined in more than a cursory way.  What exactly happened?  The extreme side of one party looked at the failed budget negotiations.  They claim that their conscience would not allow them to pass a budget that funded items they disagree with on a basic moral level.  Hm.  While that may smack of a certain amount of truth, almost all politicians do so to some extent or another.  They yammer about funding for more tanks, for example, or for wheat subsidies, or for scientific grants, or for funding failing schools.  They moan and complain, but ultimately pass the budget because they come to the very sane realization that the majority of Americans are asking them to do so, and they serve our interests, not their conscience.  In this instance, while 51% of the public say they are unhappy with the Affordable Care Act, 27% of that thin “majority” want it improved, and only 23% of them want it defunded.  So the numbers reflect that over 80% of Americans didn’t want Congress to fail to pass the budget over that issue.  In that case, it means that if the House was feeling pricked by anything, it probably wasn’t their conscience.  It was opportunism.  That makes the “holding us hostage” language feel a little more real.  They saw an opportunity to take a visible stand, but it wasn’t in the name of the majority of Americans.  That’s what they said, but clearly the numbers show that was dishonest at best but most likely a lie.  The stand was in the name of political posturing.  So this isn’t like a drug cartel taking a hostage so much as political activists taking prisoners.  Only what is held prisoner is pregnant women’s access to WIC, vacationers access to parks, military personnel’s access to civilian contractors, scientist’s access to grant money, and the list goes on and on.

I can see why some people would say, “they are like terrorists.”  But that language is unnecessarily inflammatory and most people on the other side of the argument wouldn’t stay around long enough to hear the explanation, and likely wouldn’t buy into it even if they did.  Is literally halting people’s lives worth what slim political gain the Republicans garner?  I doubt it, in the long run.  That’s why I finally found the word I think fits them the most:

Opportunistic bastards.  Yes, I know, it’s still inflammatory.  But, I can’t think of anything that fits that is not.  I’m thinking of that guy at the bar who won’t take no for an answer.  You tell him you’re not there to be picked up and he says, ”you’re just saying that because you haven’t met me yet.” You tell him you are there with friends and aren’t interested in conversation.  He says, “sweetie you don’t have to play shy.”  Your friends come over to rescue you from your obvious discomfort and he tells them not to cock-block.  You laugh and say no really you aren’t interested in his cock and he says that’s because you haven’t seen it and asks for your cell phone number.  Hello, dude, no means no.  But he’s the kind of creep that will still try to walk you to your car.  The kind of creep that keeps sending you unwanted drinks.  The kind of creep that makes you feel like you need to ask the bouncer to walk you to your car.  The kind of creep who probably has roofies in his pocket and is just waiting for a congressional budget negotiation to totally screw you.  The kind of guy that gets more aggressive the more you say “no.”

A bastard, plain and simple.

Not a child, because children know that no means no.  Not a criminal, because the criminal justice system is full of people who pled guilty and accepted the consequences of their actions.  Not a terrorist, because terrorists show a callous disregard for the value of life.  And these guys, they never seem to cross that line.  No, they just terrify you because you wonder what will happen one day when the right opportunity strikes.  (Okay, maybe that sounds suspiciously like terrorism.)

They are just bastards, but unlike the bastards in the bar you can’t throw the drink they bought you at their crotch and just get up and leave and go somewhere else.

If only.

Why don’t the poor just get jobs?

No matter what you are debating, when it comes to talking about socioeconomic status, inevitably there will be that one voice of someone saying,

“Well, isn’t it their fault they are poor?”

There are so many different perspectives that can answer that question, and for some reason today I feel like laying out some of them.

Poverty plays a role in society; as long as society functions off of the same rules that govern it, poverty will continue.  This is the most straightforward, and perhaps the most harrowing answer to that question.  The honest truth is that there are a whole lot of jobs out there that require part time, seasonal, or unpredictably changing work hours.  Those jobs have to be filled by someone, and the likelihood that they would be filled by someone independently wealthy who simply happens to like picking strawberries, assembling children’s toys, flipping burgers or making farm equipment is really low.  So there are a number of systems in place to reinforce those jobs getting filled by people who honestly have no other choice, because society depends on them being there.  Our educational system self-selects for people who can get ahead and can’t, quietly reinforcing that.  Our legal system sets up safeguards to prevent some people getting on in society.  (Insuring there will always be work-release workers on those factory floors.)  There are tacit rules to each class that cannot be broken or communicated, insuring that someone born poor is fated to stay that way (with little exceptions, usually brokered by someone being willing to cross class lines, like a schoolteacher), and so on.  You can hardly blame the poor for filling the role in society which society has proscribed for them.  But, I have to admit, it certainly does make a fun pastime on Facebook and can boost your self-esteem, so if you really want to blame the poor there’s nothing stopping you other than the truth.
The educational system selects some kids for failure.  It sucks, but it’s true.  Teacher’s expectations of children pay a huge role in how successful those children are, and it starts on day one.  There are so many different classroom behaviors that tacitly reinforce certain rules and expectations, and while a teacher may believe they are giving a child what that child needs what they may really be doing is reinforcing a standard that grooms that child to be good for nothing other than the service sector or failure.  Studies have shown that when a teacher is told that a child is poor performing, or is expected to perform poorly, that child inevitably does badly.  When a teacher is told a child is high performing that child performs well.  This principle is true regardless of the child’s history of performance, and is based solely off of the teacher’s opinion.  So what happens when a teacher knows a child comes from an impoverished family and the parents are illiterate?  The system selects the child for the same fate.  ”Oh,” the counter-cry inevitably comes, “so I might feel bad for little kids, but once you are an adult…”  Yes, sure.  And I know many semi-illiterate adults who are in college trying to get ahead.  They’ll have to go to school for several more years than the kids who were selected for success, and they still have to deal with instructors low expectations because of that fact.  I’m all for addressing personal responsibility, but personal responsibility doesn’t absolve society of it’s obligations when society is actively damaging people.
It can take several years to get out of poverty, and sometimes families are borderline for an entire generation.  Of course we all are familiar with the talking point that government aid should be capped, limited, and offered for only a short period of time.  But if a family could be borderline impoverished for the lifetime of the parent in order to provide for the opportunities of the child- and even then it may take the child a few years to be considered solidly middle class.  The idea that all a family needs is one parent working two jobs for a little while is unreasonable.  After all, cars break down.  People get chronic illnesses.  There are legal problems.  Houses burn down.  Families are forced to move.  The economic instability of the poor goes far deeper than just the amount of money coming in.  There is a culture there, how the money gets used, how poor communities work together, how emergencies are handled- and breaking out of poverty is addressing the entire culture.  The idea that help is only needed for a short amount of time is looking at the problem from an upper class point of view.  As in, “if I need money to get by, I can work more for a little while.”  That is disingenuous.  To address poverty, as someone impoverished what all would have to change for them to have a new economic status.  Trust me, it will blow your mind, because you have never had to think of everything that factors into the class you are in.  Why should you?  Yet, it is way more than what six months of benefits can provide.

Poverty is a fact in our society.  It is part of how our economy functions, and while some individuals may give the appearance of having chosen it, the fact that poverty exists is not due to the choice of any individual person.

Let’s talk about healthcare, please.

I support the Affordable Care Act because I believe it will help our Gross Domestic Profit go up, and because I believe in social justice.  Let’s talk about it.

I spent a year working as the site supervisor for a homeless shelter, and then a year and a half as a “float” between several residential mental health facilities, so I’ve seen my share of people who have no choice but to rely on the state.  Any time an issue about state benefits come up, my mind immediately flashes back to my experiences there and I judge everything I hear not of how it affects me personally, but how it would change the situation for the people I have served.

Please, give me a few moments of your time.

Working with the homeless, I saw a side of the mental health industry that was chilling.  A large proportion of the guests at the homeless shelter had mental health problems.  Bipolar syndrome was a constant theme.  Why?  Because it, like schizophrenia, tends to manifest in adulthood rather than childhood.  The first symptoms don’t show up until someone is in their mid-twenties or later.  If you’re in college, in an office job, or in another supportive environment where you have a lot of hands-on supervision when the symptoms start to show, you have a good chance of being referred to help before it derails your life.  If, on the other hand, you are flipping burgers or nailing window panes on a factory floor, it’s far more likely that the first “incident” that lands you in front of someone who could help you isn’t going to be mild, it’ll be extreme.  More often than not the outbursts that can characterize mania (or the paranoia of schizophrenia) are misinterpreted as aggression or something more extreme.  There are books, and volumes, and scads, and rants, and epics of information on why it is that poor people with mental health problems seem to inevitably end up in jail or residential treatment for the rest of their lives.  But the truth is the answer is very straightforward:  right now, that’s just what the system is.  If you are poor, the only way you can stay medicated is if you are in jail or residential therapy indefinitely.  That means if you’re in your mid twenties and married with children when you first have an aggressive manic episode on a factory floor, not only is that the only route available to you, but it is the only route available to your family.

Ask yourself if that is just, or even necessary.  Is that the society you want to live in?

Addiction operates in much the same way.  White collar addicts can get chain prescriptions for pain killers, and there are many supports there to act as a barrier between the addict and extreme consequences.  For the poor, reality is again far more harsh.  Unless there is insurance coverage for treatment expenses, chances are treatment will happen when the addict is caught in an illegal action and sent to jail, or their children are taken away and rehab is proscribed by the state as a requirement for reunion.

Is that justice?  Is it necessary?  As the self-ascribed “greatest society”, is that how we should live?

Despite any issues that there may be with the Affordable Care Act, there are a few things it does which are absolutely necessary if there is to be any sense of social justice in the United States.  It makes it so that the poor can have preventative and maintenance mental health care, meaning that problems like bipolar disorder and schizophrenia can be treated before they become debilitating, and poor people with those illnesses can remain productive members of society and their families are not torn apart.  It also means that people with addictions can be helped before their addiction becomes so severe it becomes a legal matter instead of a personal one.  Even if you have absolutely no interest in those issues as a social justice matter, think about the expense.  How expensive is it to maintain treatment for bipolar disorder and schizophrenia through the jail system and residential programs as opposed to having insurance cover medications?  How expensive is it to treat addiction as a legal matter- court fees, jail costs, state paying for rehab- as opposed to treating it through insurance as a private matter?

The Affordable Care Act isn’t about coddling the poor, it is about saving money, saving lives, and keeping people economically stable and productive instead of burdening society with unnecessary expense and unnecessarily broken people.

If you don’t believe me, go to your nearest residential mental health treatment facility and talk to the people there about how they ended up in that situation.  Hear them talk about how schizophrenia made them homeless and years of going without medication or health care on the streets broke their bodies and caused so many complications they could no longer care for themselves or became suicidal, and the state remanded them to residential care.  Here them talk about how they ended up in jail because they punched their boss but now they know aggression is a symptom of their illness.  ”I can’t live without the lorazepam, without it I am violent, but I can’t buy it unless I’m here, so the state says I’m a threat to others.”  Hear their stories, and realize that if we defund the Affordable Care Act, there are only two options open to the very poor who have abnormal mental conditions:  jail, or residential care.  Neither of those options are freedom.

Then ask yourself if that is the society you want to live in.  If you want my generation, and the generation of my children, to send a significant segment of their population to be jailed by the state either literally or with high doses of medication administered several times a day, because their brains are wired differently and we can’t be bothered the expense of keeping them productive.

Think about it.

And when you get that statement in the mail saying your copay is going up to provide full coverage, realize this:  every time a copay goes up, a bipolar factory worker gets to stay on his medication.  Indirectly, your money isn’t going to brigands or scum or people who can’t be bothered to get better jobs; actually, it is going to keep people working and improve the Gross Domestic Profit.

Everybody wins.

luck is what you make of it, says the teacher.

I’m working very hard to practice meditation daily.  The good thing about being incredibly busy is that it forces me to prioritize.  Where I once was lax about meditation (who needs to make it a priority when there are all of these HOURS I can squeeze it into?) or exercise (hey, there’ll be time tomorrow, I don’t need to push it to the front of the agenda) or spending time with the kids (we’re around each other ALL THE TIME, why be intentional?) when time becomes scant, every second gets doled out like it is made of gold.  Here are the minutes for the kids, for exercise, for meditation, here are these precious minutes and I must let them linger on my tongue like fine wine.  Here they are.  These ones.

In my World Lit class we somehow wandered off on a rabbit trail, talking about what makes a person “lucky” or “privileged” or “the right person for the right time.”  My teacher said that luck is what you make of it.  Luck, she said, is ultimately how you choose to be aware of and take advantage of your experiences.  Everyone may walk by the same dollar on the street, what makes someone “lucky” is being aware of it.  Everyone may talk to the same business man at a party, but what makes the investor “lucky” is cultivating that relationship.  Sometimes even the worst experiences may be “lucky” if you are the sort of person who makes yourself lucky.  A bad accident may lead to an early stage cancer being caught, for instance.  Unemployment may let you write that novel.  Luck, then, is a state of being in the same way that awareness is.  Luck is a choice in the sense that we all label or own experiences, we can label ourselves as lucky if we view ourselves in a positive light.

I am choosing to focus on awareness and cultivate it in myself.  I am choosing to label my experiences as fortunate.  I am choosing to cultivate relationships.

Sometimes bad things happen, but I choose not to label my life as “bad.”

The past few days I’ve been slammed with being busy, but the funny thing is that in all of that I feel things have gone better than they’ve gone in a long time.  I’ve been deliberate about taking control and not resenting the things I have to sacrifice in return.  Little things, like groceries coming under budget, pile up and it feels like mounds of blessings amidst the insanity.  It’s strange, how being deliberate about being in charge of your life can bend something from feeling like a curse to being a blessing.  It’s like the difference between choosing to run a marathon and being chased by a murderer in the night.  But of them are about being in a race, but only one of them feels like a death sentence.

But our entire life is like that- we all have to go through more or less the same motions and emotions.

But how do we attribute them?  What label do we paste on everything that happens around us?  Do we choose to be lucky?  Do we cultivate the behaviors of luckiness, the awareness and relationships and attitude?

Or do we treat every single challenge as if it is a murderer bursting into our home, and constantly cover our eyes and wail about our unluckiness as we walk right by the twenty dollar bill in the gutter?

I’ve written a note to myself that I have to look at every now and then to remind me of the choices I want to make.  It says, “this is the life you are living.  You are not passive.  It doesn’t happen to you, you happen to everyone else.”

There was a time I allowed myself to feel like a victim.  I gained 50 pounds and moved across the country and did my fair share of wailing, and it really did feel like everything I cared about was wrenched out of my arms.  That’s what happens when you would rather be backed into a brick wall than listen to what the spirit is saying to you.  That’s not my life anymore.  I could be supplicant and pray and cry and get all legalistic and feel owed a better life, but what would change?  I’d become more of a jerk and I’d still have everything wrenched away from me routinely while the universe worked on getting my attention.

So it goes.

Hi-ho.

Or, I can choose to be lucky.  I can be open and aware and understanding, and cultivate the now-barren places in my life in expectation of finding seeds.  I find, as I am more aware, that seeds are small but all around me.  My life just needs time right now.

Time that I can treasure to the second, and dole out carefully.  Time I can choose to be aware of.  Time that I am not a victim of.

I’m lucky, guys.  I’m lucky.

 

Healthcare, Education, and Deep Sighs.

Last week I had a health scare, which may not have been the least bit scary if I had insurance.  As it was, I spent a week vomiting with the most painful diarrhea I’ve ever experienced, and I just waited it out.  I’m lucky, because the likely culprit is my family’s tendency towards food sensitivities, and not some kind of illness that would have required medication or hospitalization.  I stopped eating crackers and bread, started eating more bananas and yogurt, and have gone a whole day without my innards exploding.  Success!

As I was fighting with the sensation that Freddy Kreuger was trying to claw his way out of my bowels and wondering if I’d ever sleep through the night without crapping my pants again, I spent a lot of painfully wakeful hours in the bathroom ruminating over the things I was studying in school.  It was, to say the least, surreal.  My main topic of study, aside from linguistics, is cultural relations and race theory.  We’re reading the Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire, so in my mind I keep going back to the homeless shelter and thinking about my experiences there.  One of the main themes in my class journal is the way in which access to education creates systems of oppression.  ”Wait,” the immediate response of classmates inevitably comes, “in the US everyone is guaranteed access to education!”

Access isn’t the same thing as success, I reply dryly.

Besides, you may have two roads- one clear of debris and potholes, guarded on both sides by a gate and gatekeeper who knows you by name.  The other is a dirt road which is washed out by rain half the time and prowled by wolves.  They may both grant you access to the city, but you really can’t fault the people who live at the end of the dirt lane for never moving beyond their immediate surroundings.  ”Access” to education doesn’t mean that anyone is getting educated.

But that has nothing to do, really, with how sick I was last week.  The reason the two are inextricably tied together is the fact that my sickness started to really impact my education.  I was spending half of classes in the bathroom, I was distracted while reading, I was exhausted and out of sorts even when feeling “better”.  But I couldn’t go to the doctor, because I couldn’t pay for it.  If it was a food allergy that was starting to rear it’s ugly head there was no way I’d ever be able to pay for the bloodwork, colonoscopy, and other fancy tests to confirm it anyway.  Either I’d get better or I wouldn’t.

Yet in our society there are still swaths of people who look at students in my situation and tell them it’s their fault.  ”WORK,” people will say, “SO YOU CAN TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF.”  As if picking up a second job wouldn’t have a pretty harrowing effect on my own health as well as the well-being of my children.  Hell, two short years ago I was working 40+ hours a week WHILE going to school full time, and my job didn’t even offer me benefits because I was technically “on call” even though all the hours I worked were scheduled- and I couldn’t afford to buy insurance because once groceries, rent, bills, and childcare were taken care of (my only expenses aside from school) I’d have $50 left at the end of any given month.

God help me the times the kids needed clothes, or I needed clothes, or anything went wrong.

At least the government covered the kid’s health care.

But I’m 30 now.  Time to start worrying about breast cancer and ovarian cancer and cervical cancer and heart disease.

What if any of those strike in the 2 years before I get my teaching certification?  What if they strike after I have my teaching certification and I can’t keep teaching?

Wonderful things to worry about while hugging a toilet seat at 3am, let me tell you.

And then for whatever reason, a rash of friends started whining about “Obamacare” on Facebook, and I felt my blood starting to boil.  The Affordable Care Act, for what it’s worth, will allow my whole family to have healthcare coverage.  It’ll mean the difference between being able to see a doctor after 24 hours of vomiting and holding out for a week to see if I get better.  (Anything more than a week is just too dangerous, even if it means going into debt I have no way to pay.)  I really don’t know if I have the words to know how to address it, but I feel like I have to try.

Not everyone has access to the kind of job that provides health care.  More and more, employers are hiring people as part-time or on call to avoid having to provide health care coverage.  Even jobs that traditionally gave benefits, like in the health care industry, are no longer dependable sources of coverage.  Soon, the only entry-level jobs that will offer coverage are ones that you have to have a high-powered degree to secure.

So for working class people, the idea of “get a job” to get coverage is a bit laughable.  My husband and I are both employed.  He easily works 50 hours a week, I work 15-20 and go to school full time.  We’re within 20% of the poverty line.  We budget, we pinch our pennies, but at the end of any given month what is left over is in the double digits, not enough to pay the $600 a month it would cost to get insurance through his job.  I consider myself fortunate to be able to go back to school and eventually have a job that will provide benefits for me, but in the meantime I’m on the orange-juice-and-crossed-fingers health care plan.

So let’s look at some of the lovely arguments I’ve seen for why the government shouldn’t provide health care to lower-income families like mine:

It’s taking money from the rich and giving to the poor, and that’s communism/socialism.  There are many reasons why this argument is flawed.  This argument implies that nothing of merit is given back to the rich in return.  First, if my family has health care coverage we are less likely to be a bigger burden on the community in the long run.  We’ll get antibiotics before we have to go to the emergency room, for instance.  By doing that we’ll avoid racking up bills that we can’t pay, which means the costs currently incurred to pay for families like mine will be avoided.  The hospitals will be less overburdened, they’ll have to send less statements, they’ll have to employ less bill collectors and payment adjusters, and in the meanwhile working class people will miss less days of work, meaning they’ll be overall more productive and have more money to spend.  $$$, “Sweet!”, you should say, because that means a lower overall cost of providing health care which is more cost effective, doubled with a higher gross domestic profit which benefits all.  Hooray!  The second implication of this argument, and the one that I resent even more, is that families like mine somehow do not contribute to the overall well being of society.  We give charitably, we do our jobs well without complaining, we’re raising responsible kids who hope to have bright futures.  All of that is worth preserving, isn’t it?  The cost/benefit calculation shouldn’t start and end with “My money being spent on me > My money being spent on those jerks.”  It should take into account who people are capable of being when society better helps them meet their essential needs.  After all, we’ve already decided it is to society’s benefit that poor people with children be able to provide food for their kids, rather than those kids ending up in the system.   Health care is just as essential to a productive childhood as food.  Being healthcare unstable, or having parents who are healthcare unstable, is damaging to a child.  Trust me, it was not in my kid’s best interest that I spend a week puking up my guts and incapable of being able to devote my attentions to them.  It hurt my entire family.  Me having affordable access to healthcare will mean that my kids have the best possible parenting both in sickness and in health that I am capable of providing.  Having that means that they are better able to be successful in life and school and thus contribute to the economy when they are grown.  That’s good for me but also good for you- because an able worker is a funded consumer, and that should make sense to people who see $$$ as the bottom line.  We don’t want to raise a generation of kids who flunked out of school because they had to pick up the slack when their working poor parents with no healthcare got cancer- do we?
I have to work for my healthcare, why does that asshole get it for free?  Trust me, buddy, If I could work for my healthcare I would.  I don’t have that option.  Not because I’m dumb, not because I’m irresponsible, not because I have no goals but because the career I have chosen requires me to be in school.  If I wasn’t in school, none of my employment options would offer health care.  I am one of so many of my peers left in the same boat- working diligently, saving pennies, trying to do the right thing but still creeping further and further behind as the rising cost of gas and wheat and milk and cheese and meat and school supplies and kids clothes and shoes and paper and everything else drags us further and further behind.  Oh, and the garbage bill and electric bill and water bill are all higher than they were two years ago, too, while paychecks are not rising.  Essentially, this argument says, “there is an entire class of people in our country who are not deserving of what I have because they aren’t as smart or privileged as me.”  Oh, buddy, trying saying to my face that I’m not as smart or deserving as you.  (I know I’m not as privileged, that’s cool, I don’t need to be.)  Not only are you saying that this entire class of people- really, the bottom half of “middle class” that is too poor to buy out of pocket insurance but not poor enough for government benefits, is not as valuable to our economy as everyone else.  If you really think that, I don’t know how to respond.  People who are sick, overworked, and worry don’t consume goods, and people who don’t consume goods don’t keep the economy going.  Giving the lower middle class a little relief ensures that they continue to consume- the only other option be that they improve their lot independently (impossible, as new jobs being created tend to be either lower in quality than current jobs being lost, or requiring licensure that means going back to school) or just give up and go on benefits- which means they will contribute to the economy even less.
Everything Obama Does Must Be Bad.  (Or- MARK OF THE BEAST.)  If you disagree with everything Obama does because, well, you feel obligated to, why are you reading my blog? If you think that anything equating to socialized health care will lead to the mark of the beast, allow me to reassure you.  The Bible says that everyone (I.E, EVERYONE) will be forced to wear the mark of the beast to buy and sell.  It doesn’t say for healthcare.  So, there are two ways to look at this:  one is that healthcare isn’t buying and selling, so this isn’t the mark of the beast.  The other is to realize that the mark of the beast is a prophetic inevitability, so wondering about it is an exercise in fear mongering that God really would never encourage.  The spirit he gives us is not a spirit of fear.  Yet, if you want to be concerned about the Mark, here’s something to be more concerned about:  More and more, buying and selling is happening based off of unique identifiers or user IDs associated with the codes imbedded with mobile devices.  You can totally walk into your favorite coffee shop with presets in your phone that let them know what you want for breakfast, and then walk back out without any money changing hands!  It’s all automatic!  How long before your unique identifier is tattooed onto your hand or forehead?  Now, if you want to worry about the mark, worry about that.  Give me my health care, please.

Honestly, health care is an essential human right.  I believe that.  No one should ever have to face their body being damaged because they do not have the money to keep it in good health.  Without our bodies, we have nothing.  Yet there are hundreds of thousands of people who have to suffer unnecessary complications, face ridiculous health risks, or wallow in stressful uncertainty because they do not have the money to pay for health care.  Are those people really any less valuable to society than you?  If we want a society where everyone thrives, that has to be a society where no one faces an untreated chronic illness because they can’t afford a doctor, where kids never have to watch a parent unable to get basic care, where kids never drop out of high school or college to work because a parent is diagnosed with a chronic illness without healthcare and cannot provide for themself, and so on.  A healthy society is one where health care is available to all, so all are the most free they possibly can be to contribute and consume.

The Affordable Care Act is just the first of many more measures that need to be taken to be sure that America is a place where everyone is healthy and contributing.  This is necessary for the survival of our society, and I strongly believe that.  I hope this rambling explanation is in any way helpful in explaining my reasons.

For the Love of God, Be Kind.

I don’t even know where to start.  Today has been such a strange, emotional day.  Five things happened more or less simultaneously, each of them affecting me in curious ways.  I watched the latest episode of Breaking Bad with my husband, we went out shopping and had lunch (a treat we rarely indulge in), we helped a random stranger take home some furniture from the Salvation Army, I read a snarky news piece on the latest Miss America, and I felt knocked over by the news of another mass shooting.

All of these things within a few hours, and all of them heavily emotional for very different reasons.

To start out with, I love my husband.  I’ve always cared about him, and wanted him to be successful and happy for a variety of reasons,   But it’s been a while since I’ve felt like this is a guy I can spend a pleasant afternoon beside.  No, I should rephrase that, the fact that I enjoy spending time with him has been creeping up on me, and for whatever reason today it stood out.  This is someone who I enjoy spending time with.  A year ago I was uncertain I would ever say those words again, and even less certain that they would ever be thought about me in return.  The realization that we are behaving like friends is so bittersweet, because a very small and mean part of me wants to throttle my husband and remind him of all the damage between us.  Yet, that part of me is squashed under the warm fuzziness of not having to think about such rage on a daily basis.

Ironically I owe the fact that realization in part to Breaking Bad, a show which most certainly does not center around Good Old-Fashioned Family Values.  Yet watching the show together, debating it, surprising each other with well-thought out arguments and philosophical meanderings about the writer’s motivations has really helped us to remember what made us friends in the first place.  We can talk about things:  both the things that matter to us, and the things that interest us.  It’s the fighting about things that gets us into trouble, that distracts us from the talking.  If we can remember to talk to each other: not communicate about our wants and needs ad nauseum but just to TALK to each other, we might be okay.

Never downplay the importance of entertainment.  It gives us all something to talk about with joy and excitement in our hearts.  That really isn’t a bad thing.

But back to today.  We really need something to use as a stand for our daughter’s big terrarium.  It’s too big to sit on the piano, so to upgrade the Lizard’s habitat we need something that is, well, huge.  We’ll have to rearrange everything.  We went to the Salvation Army on the hope that we may find something used to re-purpose but it was to no avail.  Oh well, we contented ourselves with stacks of used books for 50 cents a pop, and I got a new pair of pants and a new pair of boots.  It was pleasant.

While in the checkout lane we were behind a kind of hard-core grandma, who was buying a lot of stuff.  She seemed agitated.  I asked her if she was alright and she lit up and asked excitedly if we happened to have a truck.  ”Why do you ask?”  She’d just bought a coffee table  but couldn’t get anyone to agree to help her home with it.  ”It’s not far,” she said, “I’ll buy your things if you could help me out.”  We decided to help her out but refused her money.  It was an interesting ride.  She was so passionate about antiques and she had so much knowledge she was so eager to share, even showing us around her apartment and talking about the statues and paintings there.  She was so full of piss and vinegar and just on fire about everything, it was so fascinating.  As we were leaving, she thanked us for helping an old woman out.  I told her age happens to everyone, we’ve all got to be kind.  She laughed and said, “oh, sweetie, age ain’t gonna happen to you for a while.”

Maybe so, but it helps to remember our shared humanity.

Then, the shooting.  It seemed bizarre and surreal that with all of the news I’m exposed to on a daily basis, it took so long for that to trickle through.  People don’t even sound shocked and horrified, anymore, just resigned.  ”Another shooting, only 12 dead.”

Only 12 dead.

ONLY 12.

It makes me sick to my stomach to realize the collective apathy that is beginning to set in, as if we live in a world where people are bound to be killed en masse, and any time where it doesn’t break the 20s it’s not too bad.  What is wrong with us?  Just a few days ago, a black man in the south was shot for “advancing on” police after having been in an accident and trying to get help, not all the details have emerged but initially it seems the man had done nothing wrong.  Then, there’s another shooting in NY where police injured bystanders while trying to shoot a man who appeared to have a mental illness, instead of subduing him by other means.

What a cold world it seems we live in these days.

My daughter has been up in arms about it, too.  She tells me that if we want to live in a nicer world, we have to be nicer people.  I don’t think it could possibly be easier than that.  I know in my own marriage, the key to having a nice marriage has been being willing to be nice.  No one wants to be nice to someone who is mean to them, and being mean to someone who is being mean is just asking for more of the same.  The show Breaking Bad is all about the same concept, violence breeds violence and greed breeds greed, the answer is never pushing for more- freedom only comes from letting go of vice and the secrets.  It seems at every turn that the protagonist may have his chance for the Hero’s Journey but he chooses vice instead, clings to it like a suit of armor, despite the fact that it is killing him.  You see the same thing with the people on the news.  Fingers point, the blame game is played, anger is spouted off as if it were cathartic, the right thing to do, a solution.  It doesn’t matter where you come down philosophically or politically, someone hates you for it and you hate someone else.  Real, tenable solutions are the farthest thing from everyone’s minds.  It’s as if we as a society have given up, and now we’re just looking for someone to blame for it.  It’s the gun lobby!  It’s the anti-gun lobby!  It’s law enforcement overreach!  It’s bleeding heart people!  It’s you!  No, it’s you!  Who even cares, it sure as heck isn’t me!  I’m the good guy!

Let’s talk about Miss America.  A lovely American woman of Indian heritage won this year’s pageant and the immediate news isn’t about her dedication to STEM studies (Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) or about her degrees or her platform of cultural competency, it is ironically about the fact that many people are lambasting her for being an “Al Qaeda Plant” or Muslim.  Perhaps people need a cultural competency class, because most Indians are Hindu and even if she were a Muslim, that doesn’t mean she has nothing to offer as a spokesperson for women’s issues or a cultural icon.

It’s interesting that every generation seems to have it’s bogey man, communists or Nazis or the Irish or the Jews or the Witches or the Catholics or the Anabaptists or the Native Americans or the, you know, whoever.  We always have to have the bad guy in the back of our minds to blame, you know, just in case.  I think it’s a reflection of the magical thinking that humans are so infamous for.  We believe that certain rituals protect us- be it incantations, or wearing our lucky socks, or knocking on wood.  We also need to be afraid, I think.  We need to work to overcome the bad things in the world because it makes us feel worthwhile.  So we LIKE pointing fingers because it means we’re moving forward.  But that’s magical thinking, at the end of the day we aren’t safer.  So why do we look for the bogey man?  Because if overcoming evil is as etched into our psyches as searching for meaning, as I believe it certainly is, if we don’t look for the bad guy out there we have to look for the bad guy inside.

But just like in Breaking Bad, if we never go dark we never have to worry about that guy out there.  We bring the outer evil on us because of the evil inside, just like in my marriage.  Ken was never my enemy, even when he was.  Even at the worst, my greatest enemy was the things I believed about myself.  We lose a lot of beauty from our lives when we close ourselves in to our own worlds.

Like my first instinct, to tell the lady at Salvation Army that I was too damn busy for her.

But I wasn’t, that was just my perception, and once I opened myself up to the possibility of helping I realized that I was helping myself, I was making myself less alone.

If you want to live in a nice world, you need to be a nice person.

You don’t need to get rid of all guns or all Muslims or all newscasters, you need to be nice.

Just, be nice.

Everything else flows from that.

It flows from your heart.

It flows from what you choose to cultivate there.

Be kind.

The ruins of the garden

My garden is in ruins.  The soil here is poorer than I expected.  Next year it’ll be truckloads of manure and wood chips, trying to get a little less sandy of a texture in the soil, better water retention and better quality.  Right now everything is dying, between the heat and how quickly the soil dries.  Not that the garden ever produced as much as I’d hoped, anyway.  We only got a few pounds of tomatoes off of most of the plants, It was a serious disappointment.  Part of me is bitter.  I put in all of that work for what?  Some spaghetti squash and green beans (the only things that seemed to produce with any kind of fervency.)  I feel cheated.  Cheated!

I look at the ruins of the garden, my little kingdom, dying off bit by bit like the Roman Empire.

I grumble and curse.

Then I remember that I have learned so much.  I’ve learned about gardening in the Steppe, which is so very different from gardening in the Midwest.  I’ve learned about what kinds of things I can expect to flourish here (beans, squash, corn, hardy tomatoes) and what I can expect to wither and die at the first sign of summer heat (peas and lettuce will never do well here, spinach has a short but boisterous growing season).  I have learned to water in the early hours of the morning.  I’ve learned to bury my compost to keep the neighbor dogs out of it.  I’ve learned that the stakes and tomato cages that worked in the Midwest WILL warp and give way here.  I’ve learned that I can start my seeds indoors even earlier than I expected, and that when I plant I need to cover EVERYTHING EXCESSIVELY will bird netting.  EXCESSIVELY.  My melons produced nada, nothing, zip.  But it is because the birds stole the shoots and I had to replant 12 weeks after the original seeds had germinated- those 12 weeks stole my chance at fruit.  Next year I will not let that happen.  I’ll keep my tomatoes indoor longer and force germinate them to start out with, and I will stake those puppies in hand knotted hammocks nailed to two-by-fours.  They will NOT have half their fruit rotting from being on the hot soil.  I’ll plant a lot more eggplant so I see a better chance at getting some fruit off them.  I’ll fall in love with more varieties of beans.

The garden next year will be bigger.  Bigger.  A better chance of enough of it surviving my learning curve, a better chance at produce.

Yesterday I was talking to a classmate who confessed to feeling like she’d started out this school year behind.  ”I’m failing at everything!” She was gritting her teeth in exasperation.

“You need to give yourself permission to fail,” I said, commiserating.  ”Accept where you are now so you can move on from it.  Accept, and keep fighting.  Don’t despise yourself and give up.”  Our teacher, eavesdropping rather obviously, had a knowing smile.

Ah, yes.  Yes.  I realized just seconds later that I was speaking to myself, too.

I need to accept where my garden is right now, accept the lessons it has taught me, and move on.  I need to plan for success and accept the failures and just keep going.

Because that is life.  Bitterness that life has cheated us is just thinly disguised rejection of the true gifts it has to offer.

Having God say, “Hells to the No,” is an answer to prayer, too.

And brown, withering corn produces the wisdom to plant it lower in the ground next year, where the water will pool better around the roots.

Scrawny, underproductive melon vines produce the knowledge to plant them where they have room to spread.

It all matters, even the failures.

Sometimes, especially the failures.

Sometimes the biggest learning comes in the ruins.