Tremendous fun to tragedy & trauma

I had a wonderful weekend in Chicago with my 3 younger children and my oldest daughter, her husband and their baby, Guthrie. I got to babysit - yay! Except poor little Guthrie won't take a bottle, he just wants his mommy's booby. So we had a few tragic hours when he was sure he had been abandoned to his heartless, empty-boobied grandma. But when Mommy reappeared there was rejoicing in babyland!

More about Chicago later.

On Sunday morning in Chicago I received a phone call from my brother - our mother had had a massive stroke and they didn't think she would survive. We drove home to Grinnell, I talked with my sister, and on Monday my sister and I started driving toward Texas. Tremendous thunderstorms all the way down through Missouri on Monday. Hot, hot, hot on Tuesday. We arrived at my mother's house late Tuesday afternoon.

So now there is more to do than I understand. I am angry, sad, confused, helpless. Mother is coherent, sad, angry, funny, depressed. She gave us instructions for her funeral : no sadness, no hymns, only music by the Tijuana Brass. Pitchers of margaritas, chips and salsa. She told us what she wants on her tombstone and started to cry. "I loved to dance," she said.

But she could survive many more years - just paralyzed on her left side. No painting, no dancing, no walks in the park. I asked about wheelchairs and the neurologist said, probably not. I don't understand. I don't know what to hope for.

Hold fast

A few nights after the fire I couldn't sleep. I sat in the living room of our new house, amid the packing boxes and junk we've already accumulated and left in piles here and there...and wondered, what do I do, what do I do. Not about insurance or repairs or replacing things. But what do I do with my dream?

For 45 years I've nurtured a dream, and for about the past 10 years I've known in my heart that my dream just ain't gonna happen. Choices I made, or choices others made for me that I accepted, however half-heartedly, have altered the course of my life and pushed my dream ever further away. But I kept remembering that line from the Langston Hughes poem: Hold fast to dreams... But what if you can't hold fast anymore? What if holding fast hurts more than letting go?

So I sat in the dark and cried a little. And remembered that I used to pray, and that when I prayed I felt closer to God, and when I feel close to God, I feel safe and cherished. And I thought about so many of the books about prayer that are popular today, and how they make all sorts of promises: If you just pray the right way, you can have everything you want, wealth and success, all your dreams will come true, because that's what God wants for you! Anyone who pays the slightest bit of attention to the news knows that prayers don't work that way. Many people will say that prayers don't work at all. Just look at Darfur - you think those people don't pray?

But I digress. I must have my little rants at those other Christians. Where was I?

Dreams. Prayers. Oh yeah.

I needed to pray. But what should I pray for? All the usual stuff, but for this specific time in my life, when I don't know what to do with my dream, how do I pray about that?
And I picked up a pen and a notebook and I scribbled: "Pray for what God wants for you, not for what you imagine you want."

Last night I was reading a book by one of my favorite writers, Anne Lamott (I call her Annie, as if we're friends), and she quoted another one of my favorite writers, Kathleen Norris:
"Prayer is not asking for what you think you want, but asking to be changed in ways you can't imagine." I sat up really straight when I read that passage. And read it again, and again. Okay, I'm listening.

When I feel my mind exploring that sore, tender spot where my dream used to be, I catch my breath until I remember. And I hold fast.

"For I know the plans I have for you, for your welfare and for good, to give you a future and a hope." Jeremiah 29:11

The pinprick of light at the end of a very long tunnel

I had been wondering why our credit union hadn't responded to our house fire. It seemed very weird to me that they weren't interested in their investment. They've made a lot of money from us, since we were incompetent in watching our mortgage payments and hadn't realized years ago that the loan had gone into a reverse amortization. (We now owe $27,000 more on the house than what we agreed to pay for it in 1991.)

Anyhoo...come to find out, our credit union reps had been avoiding us, because they made a very serious error, and so did we. Years ago our homeowner's insurance was cancelled. At that time we received a letter from the credit union informing us that we must have insurance on our mortgaged house and if we didn't procure it, they would apply insurance to the house and add the premium payments to our house payments. Being ridiculously ignorant and lazy we thought, okay, do that. And we assumed they had. But they had not. Not only had they not procured insurance for the house, they actually filed a paper waiving the insurance, without informing us.

So now we have a burned up house, no insurance and a mortgage we still have to pay for a house that is unlivable, unsellable and unrentable. Do we have savings to fix it up ourselves or raze it? We do not.

My dreams of being debt-free are wisps of mist. The credit union may pay for damages out of their own bigger pockets. We may have to take them to court. Either way we are exposed as extremely incompetent folks. Our life is wide open to judgment and criticism. I want to leave for Tahiti and forget the whole thing. But I can't. Somehow I have to overcome my claustrophobia and start crawling through that very long and narrow tunnel and working my way toward that tiny pinprick of light. There is hope yet.

P.S. We found our 2 missing cats, safe and sound. The 2 injured rats have recovered. Whoopee.