Letter #17 - Our parents, part 2

Dear boys,                                                                                                      02/14/14

                MKs have made their mark on the attention-I’m-a-victim scene. And I have participated vociferously. Look at me, here I am, I am special because I live in a cultural in-between and nobody really understands, I can’t help it, I am the victim of my parents’ choices, they had no idea what they were giving up for me, I have lost so much I never had, I don’t have a home. Etcetera. 

                I have participated in this woe-is-me-acknowledge-my-superior-inferiority game more than you have. Thank you, Peter, for faithfully pointing it out and for trying to live differently. Thank you, Matthew for quietly adapting. Thank you, James, for not trying to blame your struggles on being a missionary kid. You all put me to shame.

                What I have not done, amongst all my dysfunctional groaning and grieving, is acknowledge my parents’ hurts and losses too. As I revisit my childhood, it is suddenly striking me that my parents do the same thing. They left home and relationships and came back to find both changed. Sometimes when we drive through new neighborhoods in Palmyra I have heard Dad say, almost to himself, “This used to be a farm. And that was an empty lot where I used to chase bees and fireflies and catch them in a jar.” (No wonder his children chased scorpions and snakes and froze them in mayonnaise jars. Just different resources.)  What I experience here, my parents experience too. Their families are older, they have lost relatives, the places they played in are gone, the culture they knew is gone too. Now I wonder if some of their shock at changes in technology, modesty, church culture is a form of grief. 

                They gave up more than their childhood places, relationships, and cultures. They gave up potential career opportunities, retirement savings, business connections, educational advancement, support systems, parenting resources. They gave up friendships and the opportunity to be acknowledged for what they invested in, because their work was so alone that there was nobody who really knew how much they were giving. Except for us. And I…  I just complained about what I didn’t have.

                I immerse myself in my memories, try to swim deeper in them. I am my 28-year-old mother with her sandy-blond-hair braided under a kerchief, wearing a pink-and-white flowy African mumu, holding my chubby 10-month-old son on one hip and keeping tabs on the curious 2-year-old daughter who thinks she can catch the lizards that scurry the walls of the Tilaberi Guesthouse. I am my father turning 30 just after he makes it to Africa, butchering French with my thick Pennsylvania accent and trying to learn my second language in 3 years. I am my mother cleaning dust and cobwebs and bats out of the old stone Tahoua house, interrupted by the 2-year-old daughter who is fussing because she wants to wear the hat with the strawberry on it instead of the one with the cherry. I am my father sitting on a palm-frond mat in the sandy Tahoua yard with the turbaned Wodaabe language teacher, keeping an eye on my 1- and 3-year old children while they play in the mud after my pregnant wife finishes hand-washing out clothes and dumps the wash-water in the sand.  I am my pregnant mother trying to cook healthy meals she isn’t hungry for with nothing but onions, tomato sauce, squash, and Nigerien rice while navigating the dynamics of having a Nigerien male househelper who speaks primarily Tamajeq and cleans the house his own way. 

                        I am my father interrupted in language study and ministry planning by his crying 3-year-old daughter who eventually explains that she is crying at a picture in her Bible book of Satan laughing at a suffering Job – it isn’t nice, she says, for Satan to laugh at sad Job – and I am wondering how to parent tender hearts that break unexpectedly while I minister to broken ones around me and while my own heart isn’t whole. I am my mother, knowing that the last two missionary families who lived in this house experienced the death of their first daughters, seeing one of the girls’ tombstones by the church on the compound, driving my jaundiced 4-year-old two hours to Galmi to be treated for hepatitis A, driving to Galmi with the threatened miscarriage of my second son. I am my father consulting Where There Is No Doctor, packing his 2- and 4-year old children into the back seat of the Toyota Hilux next to the frantic Wodaabe couple who hold their seizing son in their lap while they speak incantations over him and slap him and blow in his ear to blow out the demon, and driving 2 hours in the African night to the mission hospital. I am both my parents, relieved and honored and perplexed when the boy recovers from meningitis and his grateful parents want to give him to us because they believe we saved his life.

                I am my father encountering a desperate Wodaabe man in the market who reports that the local hospital will not operate on his 6-year-old’s gangrenous leg because they claim they can’t match her O+ blood type, walking into the Hausa hospital director’s office to confront the tribal politics at work, donating his own blood and insisting the operation happen promptly. I am my parents making a decision I don’t understand but thank God for, taking their 4- and 2-year old children to the hospital to see the 6-year-old as she sits on the bare bed frame with the flies swarming around her poorly-wrapped stump, holding their hands as we walk between the filthy walls of the hospital corridor, allowing the girl’s father to pull back the dressing and reveal a poorly-closed amputation site, letting the 4-year old give her favorite toy to the little girl and not telling her it won’t fix everything. I am my father working exhausting hours cleaning out the compound junkyard and pausing to bring home abandoned kittens he finds so the kids can keep them as pets. I am my mother faithfully feeding the kittens reconstituted powdered milk and explaining the concept of death as the kittens don’t make it. I am my mother being patient with the 4-year-old who says, “I want to pray to believe in Jesus, but not until after lunch.” (But what if Jesus comes back before then?!?! I don't know how my mother had the faith...)

                I am my parents moving to a remote town with no other English-speaking inhabitants to be near a people who have asked to be taught the Bible for the first time in their history. I am my mother putting Tabitha, Peter, and James in the shower of El Haji Alpha’s mosque-like guesthouse (now the Sonitel headquarters for Dakoro) and pouring cold water in a trickle over each of their naked bodies squatting froglike and shivering amidst their protests that they would rather be dirty, wondering how it is going to work to keep them clean here when the water is so cold in cold season and doesn’t always run anyways. I am my father, interrupted from sleeping countless times to watch out for the kids – putting a tarp over their shivering bodies when they had to sleep outside in cold season, reaching to the earwig-covered rafters over their beds in the old Galmi trailer to swipe the insects with a butter knife into a pan of water that I flush down the toilet so that the dropping earwigs won’t keep them panicked awake.   

                        I am my father leaving his wife and children alone in a bush town three hours off the main road without electricity and with a water generator that sometimes breaks for several days, trusting them to God for several weeks at a time while I live with the Wodaabe nomads, eat their food and drink their water, and teach literacy and the Bible in my third language. I am my mother homeschooling and completely caring for four and then five children, unable to call anyone for advice or support, too busy to write many letters, subject to a postal service that delivered letters trans-Atlantically in 2-3 months, without email access, refilling kerosene lanterns at night, trying to keep up with the children’s personalities and conflicts. I am my mother carrying and delivering four healthy children in African despite limited dietary choices, minimal access to prenatal care, roads that threatened premature labor, and frustration from her other children who disliked the life disruption of a new sibling. I am my father trying to pass on the things I most valued – the abilities to read, memorize, study, and discuss the Bible with verbal fluency and in multiple languages – to four or five distracted children who don’t realize that the time I spend with them is time I could have spent resting or teaching adult learners who really want to learn. (Who don’t realize until much later that this is how I am most comfortable connecting emotionally, too, and how I wanted to get to know them.) I am both my parents dealing with strong-minded children’s behavioral problems with no one to advise me. 

                I am my father learning in his mother’s upset letter that his dearly-loved grandmother died suddenly over a month ago – Mom wants to know why he hasn’t replied to her other communication yet – I didn’t receive it – and breaking down crying in front of my children for the first time when I tell them that Nana is gone. (Who do I go to about how it hurts? I don’t know.) I am my mother torn between supporting my father in his extremely demanding ministry and reminding him that his family really wants to see him too. I am my father with my back aching from installing extra seats in the back of the Toyota Hilux to accommodate the family that is larger than I expected to have, driving the terrible unpaved Nigerien roads and loading hundreds of pounds’ worth of supplies onto and off the roof rack without help until my oldest son goes through his growth spurt. I am my mother hearing about 9-11 on the short-wave radio, trying not to scare the children when I tell them to each pack a bag in case we have to evacuate. I am my father parking the truck by the gendarmerie and making sure all the windows and doors of the house are locked at night even though my children complain loudly that it is stifling inside and there is not enough solar energy stored to power a fan. I am both my parents hosting up to 100 people from the Wodaabe tribe sleeping in our yard every night because of the cultural expectation of hospitality, feeding them all, graciously navigating their cultural lack of privacy, walking the line between shielding my children and helping them understand realities of life. 

                I am my introverted organized father meeting and investing in hundreds of people daily, coming home to a noisy disordered house full of expressive children who don’t want to go to bed when I am tired. I am my extroverted spontaneous mother away from women like her for up to 4 months at a time, trying to keep order in a house with 7 children and a disrupted water/power supply, planning curriculum for and homeschooling up to 6 different grades at a time, maintaining routines for my insecure children. 

                I am my father discouraged and depressed on furlough in the States, exhausted from visiting one church after another and from attempting to plan a return to a ministry that drains me, frustrated with my teenage and pre-teen childrens’ disagreements and disrespect and disconnectedness from me. I am my mother recognizing my children’s social and behavioral needs but unsure how to meet them, weary with my own. I am both my parents realizing that their America has changed, unsure how to live faithfully in their own culture, unsure how to guide their children in it. I am my mother living far from family and friends in a small house trying to navigate the difference between living in a town with no paved roads and living in Chicago suburbs, trying to keep the constantly-escaping 2-year old out of the swamp across the street, confused by unpredictable meltdowns in which the 18-year-old lies on the carpeted floor of her room and sobs, caught between her teenage sons’ assertions of independence and her husband trying to maintain some level of authority, still homeschooling elementary-schoolers and missing the world I’ve known for the entirety of my parenthood. I am my father struggling between ministry to American Muslims, a young family, postgraduate studies, and the chasm of difference from warm collectivistic Niger to cold individualistic Illinois. I am both my parents facing decisions they don’t know how to make with nothing but the certainty that someone – child, friend, immediate or extended family, acquaintance, you name it – is sure to disagree with whatever they decide. I am both my parents unable to talk to almost anyone about what they have left behind because the world they left is so far from what their peers have experienced.

                       I am my father waking up at 3 a.m. to drive his 10-year-old daughter to Chincoteague so she could watch the ponies swim in, and 12 years later lying on the freezing concrete garage floor changing her oil filter to say I love you when she won’t listen to it any other way because she’s sure she knows so much more than I do about life. 

                I am my parents listening to their children’s fears, angers, concerns, questions, feeding them with the best they have in the house, giving them the warmest blanket during the cold winters with the thermostat turned way down to save money, validating their feelings at the cost of their own, never complaining that if their children don’t have something it is only because they don’t have it to give.

                We are not the real victims, we MKs with the silently-sacrificing parents who would rather burn themselves out in every direction than create a dilemma between the Gospel and their children. We are not the real victims, we who can lie on the floor and cry and question our salvation as our outlet for unspeakable confusion after we change cultures, and take for granted that our mother sits beside us and rubs our backs wordlessly. We are not the real victims, we who contradict everything our parents say and deny the relevancy of their perspectives and complain about our well-paid, secularly-recognized jobs and come and go from their rented house as we please with the certainty that they welcome our coming and are sad when we go. We are false victims if we live in any sense of persisting loss, because even though they made choices for us they didn’t deny us anything they themselves weren’t going without, and they gave us much more than they were able to keep – or maybe ever had to begin with. 

                I complain about lacking a “home,” and I drive through my home town - Dakoro - and realize that the home I knew is gone. And I talk about wanting to rebuild my concept of home. I make tons of fuss to cover my criminally outstanding ingratitude. I can use the word "home" with meaning because I know what it is and believe in it intuitively. I believe in it because my parents have always been a home to me: from the moment that I knew that even though the world is a horrible place where Satan laughs at Job in the ashes, I could take my tears to my dad, to the moment in the Nigerien airport customs lines where I caught sight of my father and couldn’t help bouncing up and down in line. I know what home is because I have a home, because my parents give everything – even their ministry, for the second time this summer – to make sure that they are my safe place. 

                There are many MKs who were victims – victims of sexual abuse at boarding school, of their parents’ displaced or poorly communicated priorities, of the people their parents ministered to, of their “home” culture even. But in seeking validation of our losses, maybe we have overlooked greater ones. I am a victim only of my ingratitude and my dysfunctional grief. My parents would be the true victims if their love didn’t turn their losses into sacrifice. They have lost everything, blood, sweat, tears, a flat stomach, a pain-free back, a gallbladder, pregnancies, sense of home, familiar fields, their own culture, their ministry, their friends, their potential and actual careers, their local reputation and recognition and status (in Niger now, you can say Dad’s name anywhere and someone will know who he is and when he talks everyone listens), their worldviews, their grandparents, and now to some degree even their children. 

And somehow they are richer for it. They are bigger, healthier, stronger, braver people than we will ever be. I think they need to hear this from us. They are so unused to hearing it that they don’t believe it. Josiah, arguing with Dad like a normal teenager, interrupted something Dad was saying and Dad responded that Josiah doesn’t respect his opinion. Josiah lost his teenage slouch, rising up so fast that for a moment I worried that he would hit Dad, but instead he held up his hand in denial and said, “Dad, you are wrong, there is no one I respect more than you and there will never be. I will never be like you, not because I don’t want to, but because I can never be as great as you are. If I had to write a paper on my hero, I would write it about you. If I could be like anyone, I would want to be like you, because you are kind and smart and humble and as near perfect as anyone can get. I just want you to know what I think.” I don’t think Dad was able to absorb it. Josiah said it so quickly and passionately that I don’t think he breathed in between sentences. It’s not easy for a teenager to say something like that, especially if they mean it. But I think it’s even harder for a parent to receive something like that when their kids rarely say it. 

So I didn’t cry for Dakoro when I left, because the only picture of Dakoro Tabitha I got was of the girl I still am. The girl who is selfish and full of ingratitude. The girl who doesn’t acknowledge what she has been given until it is taken away, and then doesn’t realize what she is taking from others when she clings to what she thinks she lost instead of what treasuring what she gets to keep or making room for something new. The girl whose parents never wanted to take from her, never meant to hurt her, apologize so readily even when they are not wrong. The girl whose father changes her car oil religiously and is learning to say “I love you” with words because he sees that she is a words-girl. The girl whose mother adopts all her children’s friends into a noisy disordered conglomeration of possessions, ideas, and conflicts that are proof that home is safe. The girl who lives in the victimization of her own lies rather than her parents’ powerful legacy of sacrificial giving… and giving… and giving… thankfully. 

This letter is a lot more for me than for you, but if in reading this you find any of it applying to you… then please start asking yourself how much you have been given and how you can start to give back. I’m the privileged firstborn who has the least right to complain. I am sorry for being a rotten example. Home is a place where everybody is safe. So maybe I should start making Mom and Dad feel welcome too.

Sai enjima,

Tabitha

 

Dad with a small friend in church (they just flock to him and want to sit on his lap)

Mom singing in church

 And just for the kicks of it... what happens when Mom and Dad have a seventh child. 

 

Look at the incredibly Eckertishness of Sarah. :) She is performing a song in the front of church. Just look at her face. No big deal. No need to be frightened. No need to expend effort smiling. Keep calm and confident and observe everyone boldly with abstracted interest as they observe you.  That is most definitely the latest and most evolved model of Eckert. (Or maybe, more honestly, what it looks like to be the spoiled youngest child of a secure transcultural home. :)) Oh my goodness. Her existence just amuses me into delight.