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This post is dedicated to the thirteen who fell yesterday, with desperate prayers that those left behind will find some light to see by.

If you didn’t stop by Momastery yesterday, please read this first.

4/28/04

Dear Glennon, Victoria, and the Annandale Terrace third graders,

Thank you, very, very much for the great box of magazines, phone cards and letters! What a morale booster! As you can probably guess, this past year has taken a toll upon our great soldiers here in Baghdad, Iraq. Your kindness and generosity make a real difference and remind us that we are loved and that there is life after our tour in Iraq.

Just so you know the impact of your kindness, I want to explain what we’ve done with your gifts. Of course the magazines are always a big hit. The men especially want to thank your husband and his friends for their excellent taste in reading material! I had people knocking on my door begging for the magazines all night so I finally surrendered and put the boxes in the hallway. The letters from the third graders will be passed out to single soldiers who don’t have anyone to receive letters from. You would not believe what an incredible impact these letters have on someone who has nobody to care for them or to write to them – and we have many within the battalion. Lastly, we distributed the phone cards to those soldiers who we’ve identified as having family issues or separation issues to ensure that they are able to make it through the end of the deployment. Your kindness, quite literally, will help some of our married soldiers stay married by offering them a chance to tell their spouses they love them when they would otherwise not have the money to do so. It will help our single parents stay in touch with the children they had to leave with other families prior to deployment. It will help our young soldiers who are having a difficult time coping with the harsh realities of war, by offering them a chance to call home and talk with loved ones. In short, you may not have realized it, but you have touched many lives in a powerful way.

Please tell the other teachers at Annandale Terrace that all of you can be proud of our young American kids. Our American kids- our soldiers – have given the Iraqi people hope through their example. These young soldiers, many of whom are so young that they could have been your students a few years ago, display everything that is right about America. Their compassion, sense of fairness, and ethnic and religious tolerance are a model of what Iraq will someday be like. As the teachers who helped mold these Americans, you can and should be proud.

Lastly, on a personal note, I would like to thank all of you for thinking of us. Your letter was both an inspiration and a blessing, I have nightly meetings with all the key leaders of the battalion and I read excerpts of the letter to all of them. Two of the women who work for me started crying and then the men started misting up – which they promptly cursed the women for. Okay, so now you have the picture…a bunch of hardened veterans after a year in combat getting misty during a meeting over your letter. We were all a little shocked. Your words clearly had an impact on all of us and for that we will forever be thankful.

Thank you also for the kind words about Cathy. She is the real hero among us. From consoling the wives and children of soldiers who didn’t make it and will never return to their families, to crying with mothers who lost one of their children during our deployment, to caring for the spouses who broke under the stress of seeing their loved ones in combat, she has done it all. She is the bravest person I know and I fall in love with her again each day.

Thanks again for being there for us,

Paul Hurley

There are many Cathys at Fort Hood today, comforting the children, spouses, and friends of those who died yesterday. I bet they’ve been up all night. Let’s pray for the Cathys today.

Love,
G

Thank You

Nov 052009

Wednesday is Veteran’s day. I’d like to start celebrating veterans today, though, and keep celebrating for the next several days. One day is just not long enough.

This post is dedicated to Hugh Curtis Newton and his little girl, Kelly.

I was going through some old boxes last night and found a letter I wrote to my friend Cathy’s husband, Paul. When I was a new third grade teacher at Annandale Terrace Elementary School, Cathy was my role model. She was a dedicated teacher who spoke her mind clearly and respectfully, with a bit of a southern drawl. She loved her husband, children, country, friends, and students and didn’t waste much time talking about anything else. Cathy was tough, but also warm and very funny. I loved her. I told her all the time that I wanted to be just like her when I grew up. She always reminded that it was time, because in fact, I was grown up. I usually told her that I wasn’t quite ready yet, but I was taking careful notes.

Cathy moved away when her husband, Paul, was deployed to Baghdad for a year tour of duty. Paul was a Lieutenant Colonel with the 47^th Forward Support Battalion. Cathy and Paul were smitten with each other. They had been married for something like 15 years, but they always acted like freshmen on their first date. When Paul came to meet us for happy hour, Cathy would sneak off to the bathroom to fix her hair and lipstick before he arrived. Her eyes would light up when Paul walked into the restaurant and he would always pat her on the bottom when he thought we weren’t watching. They’d often hold hands and flirt, teasing each other just so they could make up and kiss. They’d always leave early because they “missed their kids,” but I always suspected they were going to make out somewhere. They were magic to me. When Cathy told me that they were moving and Paul was being deployed, I told her that I was devastated for her and the kids, but really I was devastated for myself. Cathy didn’t complain. She said she was sad, but mostly proud of her husband and his soldiers. It was always clear that Paul was Cathy’s hero in more ways than one.

The Hurleys moved and the year dragged on. I lost touch with Cathy but thought of her family every night as I watched the news stories about the war. One evening I decided that my students and I would send care packages to Lieutenant Colonel Hurley’s troops, because that seemed like something Cathy would do. The Annandale Terrace student body is made up of recent immigrants, many of whom came from the Middle East. It is a school full of children who have seen much, and tend to be decades ahead of American children in terms of world wisdom. Most of my students understood war, and they understood what the soldiers were sacrificing. They wanted to say thank you, and I wanted to help them.

We ended up sending a huge package filled with phone cards, sweets, and magazines. Each of my students wrote a thank you letter to a soldier. The students from the Middle East wrote about the families they had left behind and thanked the soldiers for fighting for their grandmothers, grandfathers, aunts, uncles, mothers, and fathers who couldn’t fight for themselves, The students’ letters were tear -your –heart- open beautiful. I cried as I read them one last time and placed them in the box to be mailed. Here’s the letter I wrote to accompany theirs.

1/25/04

Dear Lieutenant Colonel Hurley,

My name is Glennon Doyle Melton. I had the honor of teaching with your extraordinary wife, Cathy, at Annandale Terrace Elementary, and I got to know your beautiful family one afternoon when I helped with S…’s birthday party. Cathy has been a role model for me as a teacher, wife, and mother. Her strength, humor, and fierce loyalty to you and your children continue to be an inspiration to me. I also respect greatly her passion for you. It always seemed to me that you treated each other with the respect and affection of a couple falling in love. After you moved, I got married and had a little boy of my own, and I’m going to try my hardest to recreate what you two have with each other and with your children.

I am not sure how to begin to thank you and the incredible men and women with you for your bravery, honor, and sacrifices. Before September 11 and the war in Iraq, I and many other Americans believed that our lives, liberties, and happiness were God given, inalienable rights. We know better now. We know that these were never rights, but priceless gifts bestowed on us by you, our American soldiers. As we continue with our lives in the states, please know that we do so with a new awareness that we owe every peaceful moment to you. You are the reason that we are free to work and pray and hold our children. You are the reason that the families of my immigrant students came to America to find hope. You are the reason that Americans sleep in peace. Because you are there, we are here, safe and eternally grateful.

My students and I heard that you might need some phone cards to contact your families. When you call them, please thank them for us. We know that we are surrounded by warriors on the home front, and that their daily sacrifices make it possible for you to protect us. Your wives, husbands, and children are also our heroes.

I was told that you might also need some reading materials. The Maxims and FHMs were collected by my husband’s friends, not my students!I wasn’t going to send these racy magazines, but Craig demanded it. He insisted your guys would want them, and that soldiers in a strange land should be able to read whatever the hell they want. I agree.

We love you. We are proud of you. We will pray for your safety until you return in May.

Godspeed,

Glennon Melton, Victoria Curtis, and the Annandale Terrace Third Graders

Tomorrow I’ll post the letter we received from Lieutenant Colonel Hurley and the 47^th Forward Support Battalion. It’ll knock your socks off.

If you have a friend or family member who is a veteran, would you comment and post his or her name? I’d like to know about them, and keep a gratitude list of their names.

Thank you.

Closer To Fine

Nov 042009

“The best thing you’ve ever done for me, is to help me take my life less seriously. It’s only life after all.”

-The Indigo Girls

This week I’m discussing beliefs and disciplines that help me relax and live bravely. The strategies I’ve written about so far have been proactive strategies, things I do before I am upset to remind myself that I am loved and that the world and I are all right. These things are good, and they help me maintain a peaceful heart, to some extent. But the thing is that I live with three children, and I am convinced that they meet early in the morning to plan the most effective way to take me down each day. So, the fact is that my peace is not going to be consistently maintained, no matter how much reading, writing, praying, or yoga I do… because there are very strong willed forces working against me. These forces are led by a little girl who will remain unnamed, but I will tell you that her name rhymes with fish.

Allow me to offer a specific example. Here’s what our evening looked like last night, after Craig and I suggested that everyone had to eat their dinners even though dinner was, admittedly, gross. One nanosecond before this moment, we were all discussing our upcoming weekend and laughing and talking about daddy’s day at work and generally feeling like a lovely, well adjusted family. Then – this.

Now, the problem is that I am not good in these situations. There are mothers, my friends Gena and Casey come to mind, who roll with these scenarios. When their kids tantrum, Gena and Casey’s facial expressions don’t change. Their eyes, weary smiles, and demeanors suggest: “Oh well…kids will be kids,” and then they calmly do whatever needs to be done to diffuse the situation.This approach is not my first instinct. My first instinct is to freak out. My first instinct is to remember that yes, this chaos is proof that I have ruined my life and the lives of everyone in my home and that we are a disaster of a family and that no mother, in the entire history of mothers, has ever been forced to endure the drama, decibels and general suffering of this moment. My instinct is to tear my clothes and throw myself on the floor and bawl and cry out worthless declarations like “I can’t TAKE this anymore!” My first instinct is to allow my anxiety and angst to pour out like gasoline on a raging fire and indulge in a full-on mommy meltdown.

This, Craig suggests, is not helpful.

So, after a few years of parenting, it became clear that I needed a strategy to help me regain my peace after I had already lost it. Because I am going to lose it, frequently. That’s just the way I roll.

Enter Joan Didion.

Have you read Slouching Towards Bethlehem? Ms. Didion is a VERY serious noticer and writer. No pan jokes. No fluff. Every word she chooses is necessary and perfect, precise.She leaves no room for argument or conjecture. As you read you understand that Ms. Didion knows what she’s talking about and perhaps you should just hush yourself and read on. Also, she trusts her readers to recognize the important parts of her writing without even using italics. Or maybe it’s just that she doesn’t go off on tangents so she doesn’t feel the need to constantly use italics to signify that she is now coming back around to the point. Let that be a lesson to me.

In an essay called “Self-Respect,” Ms. Didion offers the only strategy that has ever consistently helped me regain my mommy peace once I’ve lost it:

“It was once suggested to me that as an antidote to crying, I put my head in a paper bag. As it happens, there is a sound physiological reason, something to do with oxygen, for doing exactly that, but the psychological effect alone is incalculable. It is difficult in the extreme to continue fancying oneself Cathy in Wuthering Heights with one’s head in a food fair bag. There is a similar case for all the small disciplines, unimportant in themselves; imagine maintaining any sort of swoon, commiserate or carnal, in a cold shower.”

Yes, Ms. Didion, yes. It’s the little things. The little disciplines that help us get through the day and regain peace. It’s not necessarily a different career or parenting philosophy or neighborhood or husband that we need. Sometimes it’s a deep breath, a bath, a glass of water, or a paper bag.

I now store paper bag hats on all three floors in my house. And when everyone starts losing their minds, I put on my bag and breathe and hide. Tada! Instant quiet time, oxygen, and a reminder that things are not necessarily as dramatic and horrible as my kids or jumpy head might suggest.

Here are a couple more pictures from last night, during phase two of the family tantrum, when we had moved things over to the couch for a change of scenery.

I draw smiley faces on my bags because I know that a large portion of my kids’ mommy memories will include these bags, and I’d like them to be smiley memories. Also, I love how the smiley face makes me look content, even though inside I am scowling and hyperventilation and ruing the day I was born. I think the thumbs up gesture really completes the effect. One piece of advice: if you decide to employ this strategy in your home, don’t be tempted to cut out eye holes. I tried it once, and it ruins everything, because, well, eye holes mean you can still see the carnage, and the carnage can see your maniacal eyes.

No eye holes.

Just to preempt the question that many of you plan to email me when you finish reading….No, I am not joking. I really do this…which might have been an excellent alternate name for this blog.

Anyway, bag or not, I’m just saying that it’s helpful to adopt “small disciplines” to remind oneself that life is much too important to be taken seriously.

Enjoy your day, friends. Good Luck.