Resurrection in the world

In just a matter of days, we’ll come to the high point of the Christian tradition: the resurrection of Jesus. Pastors across the country will stand in the pulpit and use one of my favorite phrases–they’ll remind congregations that not just something has changed because of this resurrected Christ, everything has changed. The pastor I worked with started to talk about it last Sunday: because of the resurrection, “we are Easter people.”

Yet, I can’t help but wonder whether that resurrection life, in our current worldview, is really available to all people, not just in death, but in life.

There was an odd thread this semester connecting the two courses I taught, one on ministry with older adults and the other on young people, and it was the concept of “therapeutic culture.” For older people, this means we live in a culture that attempts to deny aging, because it smacks of weakness, failure, and bodily frailty. In our highly medicalized culture, we use therapeutic techniques to overcome these problems of the body, to fight against not just aging but also death. And we often prefer to live in the denial that we can win such a fight against time and mortality.

In contrast, in her book Chronic Youth, Julie Elman traces young people’s cultural evolution from “rebels” to “patients.” Today the same teenagers who were presumed innately rebellious and disruptive to society have become the object of therapeutic intervention and techniques. We are fascinated by the human brain, by young people’s ability to be conformed to the ideals of society and docile citizenship: the whole goal of adolescence becomes synonymous with young people being rehabilitated from their deficient youthful states to become obedient, accommodated citizens.

In theorizing adolescence through the lenses of therapeutic culture, rehabilitation, and conformity, Elman deftly shows how such a model leaves young people with disabilities behind. If they cannot be rehabilitated or conformed to suit or assimilate or accommodate to society, they cannot become capable, productive human beings.

Indeed, Elman’s work led me to puzzle through the concept and purpose of rehabilitation, which is something, as a parent of a child with multiple disabilities, that I’ve always felt uneasy about. When we constantly champion therapy as hope for young people with disabilities, how do we do so in such a way that maintains their integrity as unique and important human beings? When we stress the import of rehabilitation, especially for young people who are born with disabilities, I wonder what we think or hope they are being rehabilitated to? Because there is no prior state of health to often return to, perhaps rehabilitation is a never-ending, dehumanizing pursuit? Perhaps like those who are aging, young people with disabilities become victim to a spiral of therapeutic culture that champions a certain kind of person, a certain kind of life that they can never achieve?

I’ve struggled through this puzzle for so long, because my own child has been the recipient of meaningful, dignifying therapy–the kind that has appreciated who she is and at the same time spurred her on toward substantive goals of social interaction and self-expression. But that doesn’t mean I’m not fundamentally uncomfortable or unsatisfied with rehabilitation as one of the primary metaphors through which we instinctively interrogate the lives of people with disabilities. As anthropologist Gail H. Landsman points out in her study of mothers of children with disabilities, mothers clung to hope in therapy not because they really desired to change and alter their children, but because they thought it more plausible to change their children rather than change the way the world sees them. (A really poignant essay by Maria Rohan in Motherly discusses a similar challenge.)

But this has all got me thinking that if we truly are Easter people, if we truly are the church, we don’t have to buy into the gospel of rehabilitation, because we’ve got different, more transformative gospel at the heart of our faith. Rather than rehabilitation, especially for persons born with disabilities, surely resurrection, as a process of transformation, makes more sense in this world: people with disabilities, like all of us, live within the hope and promise and process of resurrection. They are not being rehabilitated or returned to some prior pure, whole, or able-bodied state, but they, too, are being transformed, made a new, dynamic, empowered, uplifted, exalted creation in Christ.

The problem, of course, is that too often a resurrection gospel has been far too therapeutic when it comes to people with disabilities. People with disabilities are implicitly told that resurrected life is either impossible because they can’t be rehabilitated as “normal,” or only narrowly possible in the hope of a miraculous overcoming or disappearance of their disability in life after death. But this is a false and human dichotomy, coopted by able-bodied imagination, hopes, and fears. This is why theologian Nancy Eiseland gave us such a powerful insight into resurrected life when she drew our attention to the scars and the wounds that Christ still possessed when he was raised from the dead. Christ’s body, imperfectly rehabilitated, yet fully resurrected in our midst, should remind us that signs of life among Easter people may look radically different than what therapeutic culture witnesses to.

And so here I am this morning, longing again, as one is wont to do in Lent, for resurrection in a fallen world. But what I continue to pray is that God would give me the wisdom to behold resurrection, in all its complexity, grace, and abundance. For when we preach of a mere gospel of rehabilitation as Christians we sell short the transformative, life-giving work God longs to do in this world in and through all of us as vessels.

But selling short people with disabilities is not just a problem for them, it’s a problem for all of us. For in a world in which we all grow old and die, therapeutic culture will never win the victory over death that has been won on the cross, a victory that doesn’t just involve the changing of a few lives, but the very world, the conditions, the parameters and limits in which we live. And living like Easter people, in light of that reality, means living with a promise that sees and uplifts and champions life among all people. It means we get to work in ministry that resurrects rather than rehabilitates, that points to who and where God is, even when the world may struggle to understand. And in so doing, that world, especially for people with disabilities, must and will be changed.

Inside Notre Dame, 2013. Photo by Evan Schneider.

How it feels to be free

As we roll Lucia away from the face painting station on Saturday, a bright blue and yellow seahorse on her flushed cheek, I overhear the student ask the next little girl who’s climbed up into the chair how old she is.  “Four,” she replies effortlessly.  “Oh, you must be in preschool then?” the woman asks.

Lucia is four.  Lucia is in preschool.  But she doesn’t climb up on chairs or talk.  I rather marvel at the young girl’s speech and motor-skills until I remember that my kid is the one people sometimes describe as “really disabled,” that my kid is the one who’s developmentally behind, delayed, atypical.  It’s only in brief dissonant moments like these that I sense that my kid might be “other” to someone else or that our life might be considered atypical, because of course, to me, she’s just another four year-old with face paint, and we’re her parents.

Face paint, complete with a smile.  My photo.

But I’ve often felt like I’ve glimpsed something other-worldly in my daughter when she laughs, because the giggles tumble so uncontrollably out of her taut little body, erupting out of her, they seem to send ripples throughout the room.  When we’re in public, I love to catch people, especially otherwise grouchy looking people, finding those giggles downright contagious, moved by the pure joy of the sound of her laughs, the generous, inclusive flash of her wide smile.  She lacks words, but in these moments words are obliterated, unnecessary.  She can’t really move on her own from her wheelchair and yet when Lucia laughs with true abandon, completely undeterred by anyone else around her, it strikes me that she is uniquely, utterly free.

Earlier that Saturday morning when Lucia and I sit there lazily in the living room, still in a stupor from a sleep study we completed the night before at a hospital an hour away from home, my husband says something astounding.  He reminds me, the anthropologist, that the oppressing milestones of developmentalism inflict not just stress, but moral judgment on many a parent.  Feeling as though it is up to you to usher your child through life’s varied stages with utmost precision is constraining and exhausting.  And by that yardstick, our four year adventure in parenting is one colossal failure.

 

Lucia at her sleep study.  My photo.

But then, we’ve also been set free.  

We live life and we parent simply for the joy of it all.  We don’t worry if we’re doing it right, because all we can do is seek comfort and happiness for our girl.  We’re hurt when she hurts, of course, and there are times we wish we could fix things that we can’t.  That pain that she feels and that hopelessness that we often feel are not to be understated. And yet, because of all the things we can’t do as parents and perhaps some of the things Lucia can’t do herself, we’re also very free.

We can’t hardly do anything but love her, and so we do, one joy-filled day at a time.

And it’s weird, precisely because Lucia does so little, I feel like it’s easier not to get lost in what she does, but to get to know her for who she is–a generous, patient, gregarious little soul–and it reminds me that none of us are the sum of our accomplishments anyway.  So why do we let ourselves treat our kids that way?  As if life is mostly gain and growth, when they’re all we’ve ever wanted, just as they are.  Maybe it’s because deep down we’re not sure we’re really enough just as we are as people and parents.  We could always be doing more, right?  We are our own enemies of freedom, our own robbers of joy.

But before you say that we’re extraordinary or that Lucia’s extraordinary (okay, well that may be true!), let me tell you something else: there’s little in life that we actually control and when it comes down to it control is not at all what it’s cracked up to be.  What’s extraordinary is that in a world of such chance and circumstance and chaos, we three get to live life together.  We get granted these moments of joy and freedom that are other-worldly and grace-filled.

Now as a Christian, I tend to think joy is a gift from God, but whether you’re a person of faith or not, you may be able to agree that joy seems to come from elsewhere and only deigns to nestle itself between people with audacious graciousness–it’s always granted, never earned.  That’s the one thing I guess we’ve come to understand about parenting, too.  Its freedom is granted, but it also requires our willingness to let go of all the things we think are so important to receive it.  I’m sure it may look like many of those things have been stripped from us, wrested from our control in becoming Lucia’s parents, but I just don’t see it that way.

Lucia smiling outside during spring.  My photo.

Because when Lucia’s gone, I doubt I’ll remember or cherish how well she stood in her stander, how efficiently she swallowed bites of puree, or even mimicked the sounds of our voices, but I’ll never forget the sound of her laughter.  I’ll pine for it, like I pine for nothing else.  And I’ll pine for the way that laughter bid me to laugh alongside her, when I wouldn’t have had the courage to laugh with such abandon on my own.  Without Lucia, I wouldn’t be a parent.  Learning to love Lucia, I, too, have been set free.

 

Telling my story

The other evening a few of my friends indulged me in asking about my summer research project on disability and joy.  I yammered on a bit about my excitement about what I might learn from families with persons with disabilities who are nonverbal, and then my husband spoke up.  He talked about the presumed extremes and edges for families raising children with disabilities, especially children with rare and life-threatening conditions like ours.  “Either you’re at one extreme, devoting all your time and energy into fighting this disease and finding a cure, or you’re slumped over on the couch, defeated and depressed, resigned and remorse that life is so cruel and painful.”

Of course, I’m paraphrasing.  Although my husband has spoken of these extremes often, down to the very way he first framed our public announcement of Lucia’s diagnosis, I’m not sure it had ever occurred to me how these hostile extremes prey upon and distort the reality of life as we know it with Lucia.  Why didn’t I think to frame my project this way, I thought?  After all, isn’t it this insidious framing that makes the pairing of “disability and joy” so presumably unexpected and rare?

Part of the announcement we made about Lucia back in 2015                                        (click here to link to the WHYY story).

These stereotypes about parents of kids with special needs, made it and continue to make it really hard for me to open up as Lucia’s been in a really trying and uncertain period of feeding intolerance. In our first ethnographic interview for the project this week, one of the parents spoke eloquently about the burden of communication that’s placed on she and her husband to keep the world appraised of her child’s medical status and progress report.  A few weeks ago on a Sunday where I’d finally resolved to open up about how overwhelmed my husband and I felt about Lucia’s feeding difficulties, I quickly found myself sandwiched between two platitudes–the one about God giving special kids to special parents and the other about kids being able to overcome their disabilities with hard work, and I just wanted to scream.

When well-meaning friends jump so quickly to wishing life was otherwise for us and striving to help we and Lucia overcome all her challenges, I feel shortchanged and silenced, because it starts to feel like our life’s everyday difficulties come as such disappointments to others, and then I feel the burden of having to help others find narratives of progress amidst our very chronic, circular story.  Of course you wish the best for us, but when that comes at the cost of your narration and my silence, I can’t help but feel you’re wishing away so swiftly and expertly the difference between us, without acknowledging that that difference is where my family and I live.  I know it may sound harsh, but in these moments I often feel as though people would rather experience my family’s thriving or failing as a spectator sport, watching from a distance, finding some sentimentality in it, and then going back to their regularly scheduled lives, buffered by that comfortable (manmade) chasm between us and our seemingly very different realities.

I’m aware that neither my humble ethnographic project nor my blog posts can suddenly or significantly alter the cultural scripts surrounding families with family members with disabilities (let alone people with disabilities, especially people who are nonverbal, but that’s for another post…), but I do believe there is great power in helping families tell their stories as they want them to be told.

When I came home from church that evening a bit emotionally battered and bruised, I thought about why those conversations stung so much.  They stung because the truth was that amidst great hardship, I didn’t feel that things were just hard on the eve of Lucia’s fourth birthday, I also felt exceedingly grateful.  And so I began to write parts of this post and I resolved to try again.  Yet another Sunday, I told my story with its mix of grace and hardship and beauty and pain and joy, oh yes, deep, resounding joy, to a few members of another family during coffee hour.  I remember the concerned look on their faces, their heads nodding, I don’t remember much of anything they said, but I certainly remember how I felt.  To be accepted as I was, not really by their words, but by their nods and their faces and their hearts, was like a balm to my soul.

Resounding joy.  My photo.

They did me the honor and ministry of letting my story hang between us, but what may have been slightly uncomfortable to them felt so freeing and resonant and powerful to me.  I realized that I have tentatively decided to share my story on this blog over and over not always even so that others can understand, let alone feel better, but so that in this swarming world that buzzes and pulses and consumes and compresses my daughter’s life into sound bytes and platitudes and pity, I can simply hear my own voice.  I know it sounds selfish to put it that way, but perhaps the battle that parents with kids with disabilities are fighting is not primarily one against disease or difficulties but against the perception that their kids lives don’t matter or that their kids aren’t like other kids or their families aren’t like other families, because they can be summed up in stereotypes that pronounce their differences in cruel, inhuman ways.  The isolation isn’t primarily physical but social, one where you find yourself telling a story that should be yours but that either no one else wants to hear, or everyone else wants to narrate, resolve, and redress for you.

But stories always have more complexity, a life of their own, and depth beyond what we can ever imagine.  They’re just one more fabulous aspect of what makes us human–that we all have a story to tell.

Thank you for letting me share some of mine.  And thank you, most of all, for really hearing it.

 

 

What I learned in 2017

Looking back, 2017 on the blog will be remembered as the year I broke my silence, the year my writing became resistance.  Only a year prior, I’d begun sharing Lucia’s story, but this year, that personal side of politics became something that as a mother, a pastor, and a professor who studies disability, I just couldn’t remain quiet about.

Speaking at an event at Princeton University.  Photo by Evan Schneider.

But as much as there is to share about what I’ve learned this year, there’s thanks in order to you, dear readers, for hanging in with me throughout all the feelings and frustrations and for your own listening ears, your caring, and your advocacy.  Whether you’re a new reader, or you’ve been around for awhile, thank you for sharing our family’s struggle.  I certainly hope you’ll let me know which posts continue to resonate with you, what you like best and what you like least about the blog, what you’ve learned in 2017 and what you’re looking forward to in 2018.

Love these two.  My photo.

Here is a look back in hopes that these lessons learned from the year prior will carry us forward in making this world more just, more healthy, more good, and more compassionate:

1.  Resistance is not just about marching and advocating, but writing, educating, and bridging the divides between us.

2.  It’s easy to underestimate people with disabilities, even for parents; thank God the joy God has given Lucia defies all odds! (And she is still loving school!)

3.  Unfortunately, people with disabilities cannot take healthcare for granted, but thank goodness for your advocacy this year!

4.  I’ve loved using the Enneagram as a tool to understand myself and those around me better.

5.  I’m so grateful for the differences God has made in all of us.

6.  “My Baby Wasn’t Born Healthy and Her Life Still Matters.”

7.  We must to learn to see differently.

8.  Christian calls for unity must not undermine difference.

9.  I fight because we are a Medicaid family and healthcare is about human dignity.

10.  There’s nothing like a little silence.

11.  And I will not give up in 2018!

(And a look back at What I Learned in 2016 if you’re so inclined…)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Why we can’t support this tax bill

I have something to admit.

On Saturday morning, after weeks of seeing proposed changes to this tax bill and fighting against the disastrous impacts it could have on people with disabilities, people who are sick, and people who are poor, I got lost in the numbers.  You see, as I started to comb through the final outline of the bill, I started to wonder whether it was really all that bad.  It does seem to be providing more generous tax cuts to many more people than initially forecasted.  It’s possible cutting taxes for corporations could create economic growth.  And they did remove some of the truly egregious aspects–taxes on graduate student tuition, while expanding medical expense deduction thresholds.

But then I scanned the text for the lectionary the following morning—Isaiah 61:1-4, which reads:

The spirit of the Lord God is upon me,
because the Lord has anointed me;
he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed,
to bind up the broken-hearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives,
and release to the prisoners; 
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour,
and the day of vengeance of our God;
to comfort all who mourn; 
to provide for those who mourn in Zion—
to give them a garland instead of ashes,
the oil of gladness instead of mourning,
the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit.
They will be called oaks of righteousness,
the planting of the Lord, to display his glory. 
They shall build up the ancient ruins,
they shall raise up the former devastations;
they shall repair the ruined cities,
the devastations of many generations.

And I was reminded that our God is a God of justice (by Isaiah, because he says so, in verse 8).

Church under construction in Yunnan, China.  Photo by Evan Schneider.

So tax bills, especially for us Christians, aren’t a matter of crunching the numbers but of seeing the bigger picture, and we simply cannot support policies that cut taxes for the wealthiest among us while ignoring the plight of the poor.  Numbers aren’t just numbers.  They represent people.  And people who are struggling should be prioritized over tax cuts to those who are wealthy.

But that’s not what our government wants us to think.  

Our government wants us to believe that by helping the rich, we can all help ourselves, that not everybody needs or deserves health insurance, that Puerto Ricans aren’t entitled to the benefits of other citizens, and that poor children don’t deserve healthcare as much as rich ones.

But just stop for a moment and think about why you pay taxes and who you want those taxes to serve?  Our family moved to a high-tax district but one that we knew would support Lucia’s special needs at school in spite of the cost, and I’m so thankful that those who live around us are willing to pay more so children can get a good education.  Our family also benefits from services through the Medicaid program that is funded by federal and state tax dollars to support people with disabilities, people who are poor, and people who are old, especially those who have substantial medical need for daily living.  Many elderly people who are sick and disabled benefit from the substantial Medicare program that threatens to be cut to support this bill.

So here we are again, cutting benefits for people who really need them, so rich people and corporations can get a tax break.  For a moment, I accepted that there could be some breaks for all because that’s what the government is saying, but that’s not only fuzzy math, it’s fuzzy morals.  Our taxes can’t pay for the things people really need and give huge breaks to the wealthy, and what’s more, they shouldn’t bother with making the rich richer, ever, because it’s wrong.  The Old Testament prophets and Jesus, whose birth we celebrate in this season, make it clear that Christians are called to liberate those who are oppressed and to bring good news.  This tax bill is not good news and we cannot ignore our responsibility, as unpopular as it may be, to speak otherwise.  We cannot turn mourning into gladness unless justice is justice for all.

Wake up, American Christians, it’s almost Christmas, and we have work to do.

Thanks-giving

I can’t tell you how often these days my husband and I are brimming with joy as parents.

Every time our daughter smiles and giggles and babbles her sweet sounds, life–nearly four years of it together now–just doesn’t get any better.  Indeed, when I look at photos like this, Lucia’s face pink and scarred from laying her cheeks in stomach acid night after night when she couldn’t tolerate her feed, I think just how far we’ve come.

…and smiling through it all!

But a lot of things have also stayed the same.

Lucia still needs a tube to feed during the day and overnight, she’s still prone to seizures, she’s having trouble breathing, and she’s scheduled for major surgery in 2018.  Our family equilibrium isn’t typical, and it doesn’t come from a respite from medical complications, technological procedures, or nursing interventions.  Rather, it is those very things and an incredibly spirited three-year old that often makes life so much fuller, grander, and more beautiful than we ever could have imagined.  Ever since we got private duty nursing through Medicaid when Lucia was about a year and half old, not only her cheeks, but her lungs, her digestion, her joints, her nutrition, and her mood have all shown such growth.

In this season of thanks, we have so much to be thankful for.  

And yet, I’d be lying if I told you that 2017 wasn’t anything but an incredibly trying year.  In the midst of all of Lucia’s persistent health challenges, we’ve also faced major threats to her healthcare and provisions for people with disabilities all year long.  Living life with this constant threat hurts more than the uncertainty we face with Lucia, because it’s complete manufactured and manmade.

And  I can’t help but think about how the spirit of this Senate tax bill seems so out of sorts with this week’s cherished American tradition.  They call it Thanksgiving, because it was one of the Pilgrims’ first corporate acts of giving thanks for the good harvest.  And while the stories we tell our children about the miraculous sharing of a feast between the white colonialists and the Indians may not be entirely accurate, they reflect an idealized notion that thanks must be freely given and cannot be readily given unless there is peace, justice, and provision.

So this week, the prospect of giving thanks when so many are facing the looming possibility of losing their healthcare, people who are poor and hungry will suffer because of the bill, and people with disabilities will lose benefits and supports because of it, seems downright trite and inhumane.  I wonder if when we go to celebrate this week, we might practice yet another storied, American tradition–that of patriotic protest, dissent, and advocacy and urge those we love and those around our tables to give as we give thanks.

You give to my family every time you make a phone call to your senator and tell them that people with disabilities shouldn’t suffer so that this country can save money.  You give to my family when you pay your taxes and portions of those taxes go to programs like Medicaid that support nursing care, medical coverage, and medical equipment for kids like Lucia who are deemed too costly by private providers.  And you give to families, especially those who find themselves in need this season, when you make clear that we cannot celebrate tax cuts when the poor get poorer and the hungry go hungrier.

Miss Lucia laughing in her stander.

If this truly is not just the season of giving thanks but also of giving, then let us gather together to make not just my cup, but every cup of every parent in this country overflow with gladness.  None of our journeys are typical, but that’s what makes this country so great.  Let’s not let a few hard-hearted people in Washington make it otherwise, especially on Thanksgiving.

And from the bottom of my heart, for all your phone calls, prayers, and support,

thank you.

 

Why healthcare is about human dignity

It’s a new bill (this Graham-Cassidy repeal bill), but the same, old story.

Curb healthcare to the poorest, the sickest, the oldest, the neediest, the youngest, and the disabled to cut costs.  But without healthcare, without Medicaid,  not only will costs soar, most importantly, real people will suffer.  I think of my own family–without private duty nursing provided by Medicaid, especially those overnights–we’ll surely be in the emergency room with our medically fragile child far more often.  If Medicaid is removed and we’re forced to rely on our private insurance, even if we run through our savings, we’ll still seek healthcare for our daughter, and we’ll continue to struggle to care for her at home (which is why Medicaid exists), because that’s what families do.

Simply put, the welfare of our nation is hardly improved by an assault on the most vulnerable.  And if this is the American way, our country will soon be defined not by its dreams and its opportunities, but by its exclusion of those in need.

Yesterday, my daughter and I struggled to get around in a crowded place–I had to get out to push shopping carts out of the handicap parking space (good thing I could even do so) and I struggled to push her wheelchair through a sea of tight twists and turns.  Few people moved their chairs, and as we endured looks of disgust, glances of pity, and the fundamental unwelcome of barriers to entry, movement, and accommodation, my eyes filled with tears.  As I sat down next to Lucia, I took her face in my hands and kissed her. I whispered in her ear, “They don’t know how special you are, but I do, and I’m so glad.”

More happy whispers between Lucia and her dad.

As I wrote about recently, no matter how hard they try, no politician nor party nor hospital nor inhospitality can ever take away our family’s joy.  But as I look around the already trying, precarious nature of Lucia’s fragile life, I sure wonder why they try so hard–why they target families for whom society is already so unkind, for whom another year of life is hardly certain, families who know all too well pain and fear and heartache and who now face even more fear and uncertainty–financial, medical, and even physical.

You, politicians, cannot take our joy, but you are playing hard and fast with our very lives.  As you go to vote this week, may we as the people continue to remind you that your task is actually to protect the weak, guard the sick, provide for the poor, rather than trade them for your own political gain. You are not doing right by my daughter and my family and something much more basic than our joy–her human dignity–is what’s at stake.

What will you do to make this world more inclusive?  To give my daughter more opportunities and grant our family more dreams?  Or will you continue to deny her the basic healthcare she needs to live her life?  Will you not even give her that human dignity?

Take your cue from families like ours.  With everything we’ve been through, we never give up on one another.  Don’t you dare give up on us.

A Medicaid Story

It was an ordinary, sunny, Saturday morning when I crept downstairs into Lucia’s room to dismiss the night nurse.  “It was a beautiful night,” one of Lucia’s nurses, Viktoriya, purred in her thick, Ukrainian accent, flashing a wide smile, gesturing toward Lucia, still sound asleep in her bed.

I smiled, too, and sighed in relief.

Lucia hadn’t been having “beautiful nights” as of late: for almost a year now, she’d been screaming and crying out in pain in the wee hours of the morning and as she was just waking up.  The crying was so extreme that the nurses and even we, her parents, couldn’t comfort her.  Finally, we’d figured out that she was experiencing muscle spasms and cramps because especially in her sleep, she can’t move purposefully, so a low dose of Valium had recently been providing some relief.

But with Viktoriya (who mind you was a doctor in Ukraine), Lucia often had “beautiful nights,” nights that Viktoriya never took credit for, but rather rejoiced in innocently, as one would a gift.  And yet, we knew there was something special about Viktoriya, about the meticulousness of the care she gave, the extra knowledge she possessed about the medications Lucia was on and their interactions, even the way she played with Lucia, offering her therapy when she’d wake up early in the mornings.

As we neared the front door and we talked about the pulse oxygen machine–the pediatrician had asked to get the alarm rates to make sure Medicaid would approve its rental for the coming year–Viktoriya detailed with precision the attention she paid to Lucia’s heart rate.  “You see, when her heart rate starts to climb, I can see she’s getting uncomfortable, so I do not wait for her to cry,” she said, “I turn her.”  And she motioned.  “I turn her from side to side all night and she never wake up,” she said cheerfully.  “She sleep perfectly just like that.”

Even as I write these lines, I am in awe.

In awe of the devotion and care my daughter receives as not only she, but my husband and I all sleep through the night, all the while a nurse keeping watch, anticipating and aiding Lucia to find safety and comfort and rest.  It’s just no small thing that in a world where life is so difficult for Lucia, where at night she faces seizures and breathing and pain, a nurse not only keeps watch for the big things, but guards her sleep, attentive to her every desire, a desire even to move.

As Viktoriya left that morning, I scribbled a post on Facebook, letting my little world know what she’d done and been doing for us, and why Medicaid has been such a boon, a comfort, a watchman for our Lucia and for our lives.

Cuddles with my girl.

I did this before I knew Medicaid was about to come under threat yet again.  I did this before I knew I’d begin losing sleep again not because of Lucia’s medical conditions but because of the care that may not be there in years, months, or weeks.

How I feel about Medicaid is how I feel about Viktoryia and so many of the nurses who have come into our lives–they are a gift.  We can’t possibly pay for the healthcare that Lucia would need to live and that in itself is frightening and humbling.  Yet the state and the federal government give us the support we need to live our lives as a thriving, joyful family, not just of 3, but of 9.

That’s about how many nurses, plus two parents, it currently takes to provide Lucia the round-the-clock care she needs to make it through the day.  Or maybe it’s more like 16–that’s the addition of the five specialists that Lucia sees on a regular basis, her medical care that Medicaid, too, helps support.  Or maybe it’s more like 20–that’s her therapists and her teacher at school, a special needs school where Medicaid helps supply equipment, her Medicaid-supplied nurse makes it possible to attend, and Lucia gets great education and therapy.

I could go on.  I know the numbers are much higher still–it’s you, millions of people who pay taxes and the government, that help support families like ours, that make it possible for Viktoriya to play watchman at night so Lucia doesn’t seize uncontrollably, so she doesn’t wake up crying in pain, and so her parents don’t have to hold vigil night after night as they struggle to work and to care for her.  It turns out, I’m not just in awe of Viktoriya, but the abundance we have received through Medicaid, which is in no small part thanks to all of you.

But today, I am also weary.  Weary of the proposed cuts to Medicaid in this newest bill in the Senate, and weary of the plan to make savings from cutting people from healthcare who need it most.

Please join me in bombarding Congress with stories of gratefulness about children like Lucia and the gift of Medicaid by calling your Senators over the next few days.  Please share our story and Viktoriya’s story.  Please tell them that Medicaid is about people and long nights and “beautiful nights” and families like ours.  Please tell them what Medicaid has done for us.  And please tell them how thankful and in awe we are of the people who have provided for our daughter.

Psalm 130

¹ Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord. 
²   Lord, hear my voice!
Let your ears be attentive
   to the voice of my supplications! 

³ If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities,
   Lord, who could stand? 
⁴ But there is forgiveness with you,
   so that you may be revered. 

⁵ I wait for the Lord, my soul waits,
   and in his word I hope; 
⁶ my soul waits for the Lord
   more than those who watch for the morning,
   more than those who watch for the morning. 

⁷ O Israel, hope in the Lord!
   For with the Lord there is steadfast love,
   and with him is great power to redeem. 
⁸ It is he who will redeem Israel
   from all its iniquities.

Why they can’t take our joy

A few weeks ago a former student emailed to update me on her summer.  “How’ve you been?”  she asked spiritedly.  “I’ve spent the summer distracted by healthcare,” was the confessional, somber, and bitter beginning of my reply.

Indeed, in the last few months, alongside the very real threat of losing the ACA, Lucia’s Medicaid benefits, and healthcare for millions of Americans, there’s also been the more subtle feeling of frustration that this fight has also taken its toll on my academic and pastoral passions, reduced me to someone who wasn’t producing or creating so much as maintaining vigilance, waiting on others’ words and others’ actions–merely responding.

And I hate being in response mode.

I, like so many Americans, truly despise the discipline of waiting on anybody or anything–I’m even kind of lousy at waiting on God.

When there’ve been great gushes of joy as there are in everyday life alongside Lucia, I felt resentful that they still felt tinged by a foreboding, ominous fear.  How can you mess around with joy when you feel such aching fear and trembling, I’d cringe.  And then I’d smart because I’d be angry that 13 men in a private room were even threatening to take my joy from me.  How dare they do that?

This summer has been filled with ups and downs, victory and solace punctuated by deep uncertainty and angst—so many bills, so many promises, a little hope, very little peace.  So even the things that normally come naturally to me–forging ahead with bravery and decision–have been called into question, fretted and flummoxed by the helplessness and fatigue I’ve felt.  I’ve found that it’s easy to be brave when it’s just you, but it’s much harder with someone else depending on you.  Or when you’re made to feel that bravery is foolish or may count for little in the end.

Speaking at the RunRAllWomen Rally on Friday night.  Photo by Evan Schneider.

But what has made all the difference in the last few weeks, through the wise spiritual counsel of trusted friends, is to discover that bravery is possible even in the face of tremendous fear and uncertainty, because joy is resilient, defiant, and knows no boundaries.  This is the message I shared last night about our life with Lucia at a rally for equitable healthcare–that joy may be an unlikely home for advocacy but it’s effective because it’s genuine and human and resounding.  That being human means sharing vulnerability and fragility but it can also mean finding joy in the most unlikely of circumstances and working together for change.

In these last couple of weeks, even before the Republicans voted against the repeal of the ACA, even before so many of you stood up for the needs of those on Medicaid (THANK YOU!!!), I realized that even if they take away Lucia’s healthcare and they deem her life of little value, our family will still have our joy in each other and in God, and we will rise in the face of all of it.  We will go on and create and make beauty from ashes because that’s what we do, and nobody can take that transformative joy that we’ve found in Lucia, one another, and in God away from us.  It doesn’t make any of it okay, of course–the assault on the healthcare of the most vulnerable in this country.  It almost makes it worse that in a world filled with real life challenges of health and life and death for kids like Lucia, it could be something manmade that’s the death of them.  But it reminds me that I’m not waiting on our government’s bills or decrees or approval to live my life–I never was.  Instead, I’m happily and graciously bound to a family and to a God and to people who love us and whose love is real and here and stable.

Of course, the one problem is that however lovely these words, they are tinged with privilege.  Many people won’t be able to lean on family or something as seemingly ethereal like creativity, but practically translated as amazing university employment.  People will be so hurt and scarred by revoking healthcare and Medicaid and those the most hurt won’t be me or my family but those whose dignity has not just recently come under assault but rather has long been denied by the classist, sexist, ableist, racist undertones of America’s unrelenting “greatness.”

But I do think it’s something–it’s certainly not nothing–to feel joy amidst fear and live to tell about it.  Indeed, this is what I find defying and powerful about so many saints of the church, champions for justice, and seemingly ordinary people who have gone before me.  Please, please don’t hear me wrong.  I’m not giving up, but rather recalibrating our fight.  I’m suggesting that we bravely, boldly live our joy-soaked lives even, perhaps especially in the face of such an assault.  Taking pleasure and joy in our humble lives becomes an act of resistance in itself, a luxury that many struggle to find.

Our family celebrating at my sister’s installation service.  

And this is precisely why we must not measure ourselves by human standards because we see human standards faltering in our midst everyday.  I’m reminded these days that they can’t take our joy because our lives never belonged to them or even to us but to God.  And same thing with that joy.  It’s roots are deeper, wider, grander than many of these legislators have ever encountered.  May they feel its fury, its vibrance, its resilience and may they be led beyond fear, as I have, to seek justice.

 

Why we need to learn to see differently

It’s the stunning yet simple basis of all anthropological knowledge, really–this truism that we’re not all the same, we’re different.

Take my daughter, for instance.  Whereas most people get up out of bed every morning and walk, she giggles or cries until we come get her.  Whereas most kids her age start to brush their own teeth, put their own backpack on, eat breakfast through their mouth and head to school, we do the brushing, Lucia’s backpack hangs on her wheelchair, and she eats her meals through a feeding tube that’s attached to her stomach (she eats a lot of her food through the same tube overnight, which is actually pretty efficient!).

But even anthropologists who believe in the wisdom of learning from others are only human.  Because we, like everyone, only have one primary perspective, one pair of eyes and ears through which we experience the world, we still tend to succumb to ethnocentrism–the belief that not only are people who aren’t like us weird and different, they’re less than.

Lucia gets that a lot.

People presume that because she rides through life in a wheelchair or because she gets her feeds through a tube and perhaps most especially because her brain is different that all this comparatively limited functionality that she has amounts to a pretty pitiful and dull, if not brutal life.  They ask me if she will ever do certain things like walk or talk or eat, if she will “be like that” forever, and when I tell them she likely won’t walk or talk or eat in typical ways, they frown and shake their head or grimace.

But what if I told you that some of the very things that make you skeptical about her quality of life, like that wheelchair or that feeding tube, are the things that bring her mobility, joy, and comfort?  Lucia eats through a feeding tube because her body can’t process food orally without it heading into her lungs, which caused numerous scary and painful bouts of pneumonia until we got that tube.  Lucia rides in a wheelchair because that enables her to feel the wind in her hair, to head outside and to school, when otherwise she might be in the house all day.

What if I told you that a lot of the limits placed on Lucia don’t come from her differences but from the way we perceive her differences and from the supports and benefits that we deny her especially because she’s different from us?  When I invite my students to view the world anthropologically, through the lens of others, especially people with disabilities, it kind of blows their minds.  The fact that we able-bodied people are part of the problem for people with disabilities never really occurred to them.  It never occurred to them that subtly viewing someone else as less than and placing limits on their lives, compelling them to be someone they’re not, live in a society that’s only made for the able-bodied, and then wonder why they’re not thriving is discrimination, not liberation.  

This ethnocentric way of viewing people with disabilities as less than is called ableism and it’s not just endemic in American society and everyday interactions across differences, it’s front and center in this debate on healthcare.  Maybe you didn’t see it, because your ableism kept you from the truth, but denying life-giving services to people who are different on the basis of their differences–i.e. cutting Medicaid for people for who literally need it to live their daily lives–yeah, that’s discrimination.  Or reserving healthcare only for those whose bodies are “normal,” who don’t have preexisting conditions, or denying hospital services to those who are inevitably going to have to use the hospital because they’re made different and they’re living in a world that’s downright inhospitable to their differences–that’s textbook ableism.

But we all saw Donald Trump begin his campaign by mocking a reporter with disabilities.  We have all seen headlines that compare that same President who mocked someone with disabilities to people with mental illness.  We’ve heard about people with disabilities staging protests in the offices of Senators and being dragged out of their wheelchairs by security on Capitol Hill.

Open your eyes.

It’s not people with disabilities who need to make more concessions to the society that already demeans their existence, down to their very lives and whether they’re worth living–it’s you and me.  We all need to change our way of seeing our fellow human beings, our fellow Americans, as pitiful and less than and deficient.  What is deficient are our healthcare proposals that purport to deny people coverage based on innate differences.  What is deficient is our rhetoric that excludes and codifies people who we don’t want to accept or don’t understand.  What is deficient is a country that seeks to find its greatness at the expense of its very citizens.

Lucia a home wearing a cap during her portable seizure study this past week.  My photo.

Please don’t shake your head or frown or grimace at my daughter’s quality of life.  Instead, please pick up the phone and call your Senator and shake your fist at them for failing to grant the necessary supports that make her different life possible.  Become an unlikely advocate and listen to the concerns of those who are different from you not just because they’re different but because we’re all human.

After all, the root of anthropology is anthropos, human being.  Providing good healthcare comes down to the recognition that we are all human beings but that we’ve constructed an able-bodied world that’s only fit for some.

So don’t cut my daughter’s Medicaid because she’s different.  Affirm the value of her life by keeping it.  Let’s keep the ACA and its supports for all kinds of people.  Let’s keep healthcare that’s working for people like you and me and people like my daughter.