Thoughts from inside the fiery dumpster

July 2021

There was no newsletter in May or June. Did you notice? I hope not. I hope your life is full of sunscreen and popsicles and lightning bugs.

My life is a dumpster fire, so much so, it feels only fair to say I mean no disrespect to actual dumpsters that have caught fire. Like this one, right in front of my house. (I wish I were kidding.

If God communicates through burning bushes, who the hell is tryna communicate with this!?

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For as long as I can remember, people have said I am "so calm / chill / down to earth," so when I tell you my life is a dumpster fire, it's likely an understatement.

My only goal for June was to keep my kid from going back into a psychiatric hospital for the second time in as many months. I failed.

(Since much of this story isn't mine to share, we'll skip straight to what I'm pondering from inside the firey dumpster.)

I don't actually think I failed. I'm a damn good mom who did everything possible for my kid. The problem is, in this country, with our fantastic mental health care (sarcasm is medicine), it still wasn't enough.

As Nakeia Homer says in her delectable book, I Hope This Helps, I've checked my record and it includes begging a dozen or more specialists over the years to tell me what more to do for my kid. I've done everything suggested, but nearly every time the answer was, "You're already doing everything. There's nothing else you can do."

That response crushed me each time. Far from affirmation, those words ushered in hopelessness. Now, strangely, they give me peace. They are my receipts, part of my Damn Good Mom record—I did everything I could.

The collision of human nature and western individualism / exceptionalism has led us to believe we are in control of things we've never been. The list of what we have control over is strikingly short, and—shockingly—other humans are not on it.

Whoever wrote "teach your child the way they should go and they won't depart from it" clearly never had children.

Some parents learn the control lesson earlier than others. Some are enlightened and knew it from the beginning. Others refuse to relinquish their perceived control and exchange connection for an illusion of power. (We've all seen them in public restrooms and at the zoo. It’s painful isn’t it?)

When you have a child with special needs, there's no illusion. But things can sometimes get a little foggy. Despite everything my children have taught me about control (namely, how little I have), I still made it my objective to keep my kid out of the hospital.

The problem? My kid didn't make it theirs.

Inside the waiting area of the juvenile detention center where my kid ended up when the psychiatric hospital had him arrested (Yep. Read more here.), there is a poster that reads, "You cannot save someone who won't participate in their own rescue."

I would argue that you cannot save someone by putting them in a cage, but I get the sentiment. It aches in my marrow.

My ability to control my kid's decisions, their healing, their rescue from themselves and their trauma stretches only the length of me. This is true of all the hurting people in our lives. I wish it weren't.

I have a friend who hates the phrase "Loving people to death." "Why are you trying to kill them?" she wants to know. I'd never thought of it like that before. "I'm trying to love these kids back to life," she says.

I like that better. My friend has also helped me see that sometimes loving people to life means you have to go to hell with them first. The cycle of resurrection present among us and our messy world, always.

My thoughts on hell have shifted over the years. I tend to believe along with Teresa of Ávila who, when asked by the sisters in the Spanish Catholic Church, “Do you believe in hell?” said, “Oh, yes,” and then is rumored to have whispered, “It’s just that no one is there.”

How could anyone come face-to-face with the Divine and respond, "Nah"?

I stopped believing hell is an eternal afterlife of torture and began to recognize it as a place people inhabit here and now, on earth in real-time somewhere between people I love in Miami living in roach-infested squalor and SWAT teams descending on my neighbors here in Louisville.

Hell is living with mental illness in a country that stigmatizes and criminalizes you for it. It's when those sworn to serve and protect kneel and asphyxiate. Hell is condos collapsing onto families and their domestic workers whose names we'll never know. It's late-stage capitalism. The ocean on fire. Vaccine apartheid. The erasure of indigenous children. Black maternal mortality rates worse today than in the antebellum south.

Hell is this dumpster fire many are living in now.

And the questions we must ask ourselves in light of the blaze are: Are we willing to go to a fiery hell with those we are called to love? What will it take to love them back to life? Will we risk it, given our lack of control and propensity to get burned?

Like the real thing, jumping into fire means you will get burned. Maybe by proximity to the flame. Maybe by the person you love. Love and good intentions won't protect you. I wish they would.

Solidarity will wound us—you cannot walk out of a fiery hell unscathed—but it also holds the power to put us all back together whole.

Isn't that the point?

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There are no book or podcast recommendations this month because trauma makes my brain impenetrable to information, but I do want to share this YouTube video. In full disclosure, I'm human, and sometimes I want to bounce instead of sitting in dumpster fires and loving people back to life. That’s when I listen to this on repeat: