Mommy Brain

I put this book on my reading list for this year because it was recommended by so many people - most of all, of course, by her. I stayed up late night-before-last finishing it, and immediately added the other three Crosswicks Journals to my master to-read list.

Before this, the only L’Engle book I had read was A Wrinkle in Time. I re-read it this year - aloud to my daughter, and didn’t quite love it as much as I had remembered when I was young. Probably because I’m not anymore. Young, that is.

Ms. L’Engle is an honest Christian. At one point, she recounts a conversation she had with a student. The student had asked, “Do you really believe in God, without any doubt?” Ms. L’Engle replied, “I believe in God with all sorts of doubts.” That’s honesty.

Here are some other favorite portions:

“Love can’t be pinned down by a definition, and it certainly can’t be proved, any more than anything else important in life can be proved. Love is people, is a person. A friend of ours, Hugh Bishop of Mirfield, says in one of his books: ‘Love is not an emotion. It is a policy.’ Those words have often helped me when all my feelings were unlovely. In a summer household as large as ours I often have to act on those words. I am slowly coming to understand with my heart as well as my head that love is not a feeling. It is a person.” p. 45

“We often respond to the rejection and contempt of youth towards parents by such thoughts as: Why would my child feel or act this way? I’ve always given him everything he wants. I’ve made do with less just so he could have a good allowance and all the clothes and cars he wants. I haven’t made harsh rules; he can stay out as late as he likes, and I never question who he’s with. And this is the thanks I get.

Happily, more and more of us are coming to realize that such a parent is an ogre to the under-thirties. This kind of parent has given the child all the material goods of the world and not enough of the structured and disciplined love that would make the child truly free. Such a parent has earned, instead of the respect and admiration he was trying to buy, nothing but distrust and contempt. He is the “ugly adult” the child does not want to become.

What about the mothers who loathe the thought of getting old, who think it is a disgrace to look or act their age, as though becoming mature were something to be ashamed of instead of rejoiced in, mothers who pride themselves on dressing like their teenage daughters, and consider it a compliment when people say they look like sisters. Perhaps the daughter doesn’t want a sister; perhaps she wants a mother. Here I am grateful for my resemblance to the giraffe - this is one temptation not available to me. On the rare occasions when someone, thinking to flatter and please, has made the ‘more like a sister than her mother’ remark, my reaction has been rejection. I’d far rather be a reasonable-looking fifty-one than a raddled thirty.

And what about the men who made a fetish of being hearty pals to their sons? What sixteen-year-old boy wants a forty-year-old man as a pal? I’m not talking about friendship; that’s something else again. Maybe he’d rather have a father instead, a father who, with love, says, You may go this far and no further, a father who makes rules and sets limits, who, when he says no, means no. Friendship, regardless of chronology, is based on mutual respect.” p. 112-113

“When I do something wrong I tend to alibi, to make excuses, blame someone else. Until I can accept whatever it is that I have done, I am only widening the gap between my real and my ontological self, and I am thus excluding myself so that I begin to think that I am unforgivable.

We need to be forgiven:

to be forgiven in this time when fish are dying in our rivers; in this time of poison gas dumped on the ocean floor and in the less and less breathable air of our cities; of children starving; being burned to death in wars which stumble on; being attacked by rats in their cribs…

we need to be forgiven in this grey atmosphere which clogs the lungs so that we cannot breathe, and breathless, spiritless, can no longer discern what is right and what is wrong, what is our right hand and what is our left, what is justice and what tyrrany, what is life and what is death.

I heard a man of brilliance cry out that God has withdrawn from nations when they have turned from Him, and surely we are a stiff-necked people; why should He not withdraw?

But then I remember Jonah accusing God of overlenience, of foolishness, mercy, and compassion.

We desperately need the foolishness of God.” p. 232-233

“If the Lord’s table is the prototype of the famly table, then, if I think in terms of the family table, I know that I cannot sit down to bread and wine until I’ve said I’m sorry, until reparations have been made, relations restored. When one of our children had done something particularly unworthy, if it had come out into the open before dinner, if there had been an “I’m sorry,” and there had been acceptance, and love, then would follow the happiest dinner possible, full of laughter and fun. If there was something still hidden; if one child, or as sometimes happens, one parent, was out of joint with the family and the world, that would destroy the atmosphere of the whole meal.

What is true of the family table is, in another sense, true of the conjugal bed. Twin beds make no sense to me. I can understand an occasional need for a separate room, but not separate beds. If a man and wife get into bed together it is very difficult to stay mad. Both Hugh and I have tried, and it hasn’t worked. The touch of a hand is enough to dissolve me into tenderness; the touch of a cold foot enough to dissolve me into laughter. One way or another, reparation is made, relations restored, love returned.

Only a human being can say I’m sorry. Forgive me. This is part of our particularity. It is part of what makes us capable of tears, capable of laughter.” p. 235