Single girls who spend weekends at Comfort Inns with indoor swimming pools don’t need suede skirts.  They need bathing suits from Lands End and flip-flops.  They need ponytail holders and reading glasses.

Girls who attend retreats on holiday weekends in the wilderness don’t need expensive clothes.  They need notebooks and pencils and gift cards for the bookstore and the telephone booth since there’s no cell service.

And then I remember the black patent leather boots I didn’t need in New York City two birthdays ago that were more expensive than anything I owned and didn’t remotely suit my lifestyle.  But my mom bought them for me anyway because we all needed a little pick-me-up that long, cold winter.

And I built my wardrobe (and my life) around them and I wear them at least twice a week. Right here in so-not-NYC.  To work, to the courthouse, out to lunch, to parent/teacher conferences at school.  To meetings, to the grocery store, to the theatre at Central High School to see plays in which my children perform.  I also wear them when I go out of town.  They will never go out of style.

So I ask myself “What would Tina Turner do?” because I just heard her on my ipod.  Tina (what’s love got to do with it?) would rock the impractical-but-gorgeous little suede skirt.

And then I start thinking about Jesus again and what he would do and he would say “sell everything you have, give all the money to the poor, and then follow me.”  And I think that clearly Jesus never saw this skirt.  If he had, he might have said something altogether different.

We start each night with everyone in his or her own bed.  Willingly.  They all have their bedtime habits.  One drinks milk and listens to lullabies, a second likes her hair in pink foam rollers and says “Mom, tell me about the cases you worked on today,” and the third turns on the ceiling fan and opens the door so that there are no barriers between him and me.  He likes to know where I am.

That’s the evening routine.  The morning routine is that I am awakened by tiny feet kicking me and elbows in my ribs as the first to go to bed starts whining “is it morningtime?”  It doesn’t matter what I say or whether I even acknowledge him, he starts opening shutters and peering outside.  Then he talks incessantly: “Mom, is it dark or light?”  “Do we have school today?  I don’t WANT to go to school” and “I’m stirsty.”

Eventually I sit up and look around to see who is on the other side of him.  It’s almost always Anna.  Wade is there only occasionally.

Two nights ago, he came in late from his Robin Hood rehearsal and got in his bed.  Within 5 minutes, he was at my door. “I can’t sleep.  And there are shadows moving in my room.”  I assured him that I had just been in his room and that there was nothing there, but I just couldn’t force myself to get up again, so I said he could sleep on the couch or with Anna or with me.  He picked me.

I think it’s funny that he wants to sleep in my bed, but on the very edge of the mattress, at least four feet away from me.  Maybe it’s not really sleeping in the bed with your mom if you face away and almost fall off in your efforts to assert how much you don’t really need to be there.  I suppose this is that adolescent struggle for independence they talk about.  A struggle because he doesn’t want to need me anymore.  But after an evening spent in a dark theatre representing Sherwood Forest, he is haunted by shadows of things that aren’t really there.  (and Henry’s bedtime prayer that night: “God, please don’t let lions and tigers be real.  Amen”)

Anna, on the other hand, would be my roomie if I would let her.  We could borrow each other’s shoes and do hair and share makeup.  It would be SO FUN!  (for her anyway.)

The reason I let Henry sleep in my bed at night is that I don’t wake up enough to tell him no when he comes tripping into my room in his somnambulism.  And because thanks to Wade, I can see where this is going.  It won’t be long before his buddies let him know that it’s not cool to be a mama’s boy.  When asked who his friends are, he will no longer say “my mom is my friend,” like he does now.  In a few years, he will be snickering with his homies at my singer/songwriter satellite radio choices.

Ask me how I know.

Well I am definitely unfit for anything except the good life.  Not just because of Sewanee but because of glimpses I have been afforded into it.   Having seen the promise of it, I am just not going to settle for anything less.

My dad once told me that the mark of adulthood was not related to whether you were sitting at the children’s table.  (I was always at the children’s table.  I was the oldest of six grandchildren and it hardly seemed fair that even in college I was branded by generational inferiority and forced to sit with the kids.  I think now that they put me there to cut up their turkey and get their drinks, or maybe all my Christmas presents are running together with my Christmas pasts.  But I digress.)  In my father’s opinion, after much consideration, the telltale sign of reaching adulthood was liking tomato aspic.

I don’t know if I like tomato aspic.  I do like mayonnaise, though, the traditional garnish of tomato aspic.  I also like bloody marys.  So I could probably tolerate aspic since I imagine that it is sort of bloody mary jello.  It would be a modern twist to have one of those country-club toothpicks that is a little sword with an olive and lime stuck into the quivering square of spicy tomato juice and vodka.  (I think we should plan a party.)

But in my book (that I am writing, so consider yourselves warned.  I’m just kidding.  I would never talk about you in my book.  Ever.  If I did, I would make you anonymous by saying something vague like “a friend of mine”.  Seriously – no one will know that was you unless you tell them.  Or my description was really remarkable.), the mark of adulthood is having a firm grasp on what it means to actually live the good life.

My ideas of it have certainly changed.  Now it necessarily involves three children.  A lot of time outside.  Not too much real estate to take care of.  Not too many valuables.  Plenty of books.  A front porch and a hammock.  Vacations with context.  (When my friend Kate was growing up, her family took two week-long roadtrip vacations in the summers.  They were themed and carefully planned.  I love that idea.)

I want to see some things and do some things.  I don’t really want to buy anything.  I am in an anti-accumulation phase.  Or maybe it’s a battle in a long war against advertising, consumerism, acquisition and manipulation tactics.

I want the kind of tired for the children that comes from playing hard.  We are fairly weaned from the television around here.  It only seems to be turned on to show a movie on DVD, and that is only once every two or three weeks now.  I want high church and liturgy.  I want the kind of purity that is hard to find in this world.  I want to protect my home and my vulnerable children from a world that is in rapid moral decline.  I am talking about the language on the radio, the subjects of sit-coms, innuendos considered appropriate by the FCC.  Even questions about what “open marriage” means.  That wasn’t from my children – they don’t get to watch TV.

I want fewer electronic gadgets and more board games.  (Says the mother who just bought a round of ipod touches for Christmas.)  More singing with the (satellite) radio and less time with earbuds.  Dogs in moderation.  A healthy dose of what’s beautiful and right in the world and a marginalization of what is wrong.  Let’s keep all that ugliness and disrespect on the sidelines.

Those things are the lofty goals.  Today’s good life looked like this:

Meaningful work.  Health insurance.  Friends who forgive.  Friends who invite me and my children into their lives like we were family, offering us everything they have as ours.  Books expressing sentiments that I know like the back of my hand, but can’t articulate.  A set of four plane tickets non-stop from Austin to Nashville in July.  Children who announce “ready for bed!” at 7:30.  And when they say “Mom, you look so gorgeous in your pajamas” it doesn’t hurt anything.

Women in the grocery store who insist on telling me whom to support for DA.  I didn’t ask them “don’t you want my opinion on whom I would like to have as my boss?” because it seemed futile given their enthusiasm for their candidates.

Friends calling to say “Why can’t I find you on facebook?” and then explaining that they would read my posts in the middle of the night when they couldn’t sleep.  (My dentist said that when she woke up to use the restroom, I was her late-night entertainment and I thought maybe I didn’t want to know that.  Or maybe I was flattered.  I’m not really sure.)  I want to say “I am right here!  Call me up.  Let’s go do something.”  But facebook was easier.  Which is part of why I needed a break.

Because I’m craving some real.  Some conversation and the live exchange of ideas.  I want to get dressed and go out somewhere.  I want more than the virtual and the convenient.  I want the actual, the hands-on, the experience.  I want more of the good life.

It has been raining for about 24 hours now.  This is so rare and so welcome in this dry old neck of the mesquite woods.  It has also been so cold, but I still put leashes on two golden retrievers and took them for a walk in the pouring-down rain so they wouldn’t become too depressed.  There is nothing more fun than watching water-loving dogs running wild off-leash in the mud and through the ditches.  I had a raincoat and boots and it was cold, but it was worth every minute to see these old dogs frolicking like puppies.

That was five hours ago.  They are still wet and my house smells like one hundred and fifty pounds of wet, muddy yellow dog, but it’s a smell I kind of like.

The scent of all is right with the world.

I have talked about successive lives in people I know.  Ian’s family lived successive lives.  Wealth, fame, poverty, economic recovery and social redemption.  Mr. Cron the elder was the head of a movie studio in London when Ian was young.  He was also a member of the CIA.   And a raging alcoholic.  It’s the tale of how an ordinary-looking family (I guess) can carry some enormous secrets.  And how moms can survive practically anything while they try to give their children a normalish childhood.  And how a family of six plus a British governess lived in a tiny apartment in the wealthiest suburb in America.

And how in a family with addiction, nobody escapes unscathed.

(One of my bff’s is the third and youngest son of an alcoholic father and a mother who battled her own psychological demons.  He is genuinely delightful and he would do anything for you.   He tells me that when he senses stress and tension in the air, it’s like the curtain is going up and he is ON!  He tap-dances, he makes you smile, he tells jokes – anything to distract from the negativity.  I think it’s funny that he knows this about himself, but I guess we’re old enough to be self-aware these days, in our forties and all.  If you are old enough to be self-aware, and accurate in your assessment, then I think you’ve lived long enough to earn a memoir.)

Ian barely survived some turbulent teen-aged years.  He developed addictions of his own in protest against his dad’s alcoholism and constant absence.  Then Young Life captured his interest.  He continued to drink.  He became a youth minister after college.  He married.  He stopped drinking at some point.  He had three children.  He went to seminary, and he is an Episcopal priest in Connecticut with a home in Tennessee.

In between those life events, there are harrowing stories of tragedy, great adventures, celebrity moments, violence, extreme risk-taking, and the sort of grace that covers over everything, making it all meaningful and worthwhile in some inexplicable sense.  Which is the real beauty of a memoir, I suppose.  When you can’t live without being distracted by “what does it all mean anyway?”  That’s when you know it’s time to write your memoir.

As long as you are over fortyish, you ought to be able to see some semblance of a theme taking form.  Until then, it is possible that not enough has happened to you to render you sufficiently humble to display perspective.

Another of my oldest and best-beloved friends planted a flower farm out in the country.  She lives in a region where things grow in nature and you don’t even have to have a sprinkler system.  But it didn’t work out.  Flowers grew and they were beautiful, but she and her husband were not able to make a living growing flowers for wholesale distribution.

She and I have the same girl-power educational background.  We both have traditional upbringings, but with feisty mothers who believe girls deserve the same opportunities as boys and encouraged us to set our sights high and never give up.

She told me that the decline of the flower farm was the first time that she realized the flaw in her understanding of the world:

That even when you want something badly enough and are willing to work really, really hard for it, it is still possible to fail.

Nobody ever told us that when we were in school.  They were all “let nothing stand in your way!”  Which is helpful.  Children need that.  And every single one of us will then be surprised when something we tried really hard at didn’t work out the way it was supposed to.

And that, in my opinion, is a great foundation for a memoir.

I recommend JMFCIAMe.  You will really, really enjoy it.  I would let you have my copy, but Kate asked first.

I know that parable.  Anyone who has ever been to Sunday School knows it.  I thought it was about me.  You know, how when you have lost everything you have or thought you had, home is where when you have to go there, they have to take you in?  Home has always been my last resort.  Like Max from the Wild Things, home is where somebody loves you best of all.  And your supper will be waiting there.  And it will still be hot.

I know that the Parable of the Prodigal Son is about coming home.  I think it also reflects a dynamic I have seen over and over again in families: sibling rivalry.  Where the mom and dad are getting old and one adult child who lives nearby does everything for his elderly parents on a daily basis, only to see the fatted calf killed when a visiting sister or brother comes home for a three-day visit?  The sibling who stayed home says: “Why is he worth celebrating when I am the one who has been responsible and I never leave home without my cellphone in case you fall or have some kind of emergency, and I go to the grocery store for you and handle your repairs and take you to your doctors’ appointments while my brother has this whole other glamorous, carefree city life and pops in for the weekend and we are having a party for HIM?  What is fair about that?”

I know you’ve all seen that dynamic.  I think it plays out in every family to some extent.  It’s an ugly way to feel, and it’s hard to combat those thoughts of unfairness.  But there’s another parable that speaks to being concerned with how much more somebody else has than you – the parable about the landowner and the denariuses.  I think the moral of that story is along the lines of what I always tell my children:

“Why don’t you worry about you and let me worry about _____ (insert name of alleged sibling beneficiary of greater largesse).”  In other words, how many denariuses I think YOU need in relation to someone else is my business – not yours.

Tim Keller, the author of The Prodigal God, asserts that the parable is about two ways of deviating from the Christian gospel.  The first is by running away, frivolously disposing of all that has been given to you, and living a life free of rules and restraint.  The second is to be the moralistic older brother who has kept to the laws, who has done everything according to the disctates of society, and who feels that he should be rewarded for all the good he’s done, the chores he has tended to and all the fun he has declined.

Mr. Keller says that both are doomed.  Both ways of living are out of compliance with the gospel.  That Christianity is less of a religion than it is a radical approach to living.  That neither brother is assured of a place in the kingdom of God based on his actions alone.  That it is the heart that has to change and no amount of repentance for the past misdeeds will make you right with God until you acknowledge your inherent sinfulness and Christ’s sacrifice in your place.

He writes it much more beautifully and compellingly than I do.  Mr. Keller is an artful explainer and raconteur.  The book is tiny and its message is essential to understanding Christianity.  In fact, I think it should be required reading once a year or so.   I don’t know if my children are old enough for it, but I think the older two (at 10 and 9) might be.  It could save them some of the regret I carry over my own mistakes and misdeeds that I based on a false understanding of my moral obligations and allegiances. 

It’s only too late if you don’t start now.

“I don’t have one,” I said.

“Well, maybe I could be.”

Girls who read have a little perspective.  They know that the sun doesn’t rise and set on who said what about whom.  And what party they did or did not get invited to.  Or whether they had a date to said party.  (Sometimes they might have to talk about it for a few days, though, just to, like, “process” it. But we they eventually get past it. Really.)

That’s why we need to read.  To get us outside ourselves and our petty little lives.  That’s what was beautiful about the book Chasing Francis by Ian Morgan Cron.  My friend, Claire ( I’ve never had a bff named Claire before.  Some things are just meant to be) knew Ian from the time he was the featured speaker at a Laity Lodge Artists’ Retreat she and her husband attended last fall.  My friend’s husband is a musician and she is a talented and artful seamstress.  They are les artistes extraordinaires, so it’s only fitting that they would attend the artists’ retreat.  (I attend the retreats for recluses that take place on major holidays, but my friend Kate and I have decided to enroll in the scholars’ retreat.)

Chasing Francis is a work of fiction.  The protagonist is the pastor of a large evangelical congregation in Connecticut.  When a friend’s child dies, he suffers a crisis of faith and flees to Italy to hide out.  Instead of being allowed to retreat, he becomes a pilgrim walking in the footsteps of St. Francis.  He wrestles with the idea of what it means to be Christian in post-modern times and he finds parallels in the society St. Francis inhabited before he started his order of monks. 

He discusses the conflict between the head and the heart.  The head is what drives modern theology, the heart is the agent of mysticism.  He makes wondrous and amazing discoveries that challenge his life’s work up to that point.  Your usual finding God/faith restored kind of story.  It does talke place in Italy, and I believe it predates Eat/Pray/Love.  And it’s more relevant and thoughtful.  Less about finding yourself, more about finding God.  As allegory, it’s very good. 

As weekend entertainment, it’s been great.  Every time I left the house all day yesterday and the day before, I looked forward to being able to come back home and read some more.  And now I am in that mournful state: bookless.  Luckily, though, my mother just called and said “Read Phyllis Tickle”, so thanks to my mom and Amazon, I believe I shall.

Within the scope of that employment, I have held three distinct positions in the office: juvenile prosecutor, family violence prosecutor, and now just plain vanilla felony prosecutor.  That last designation is one I share with everybody in the office.  We are fairly despecialized.  We just do it all.  Whatever.  Violent, non-violent, severe, minor, horrific, mundane, jury trial, bench trial, plea hearing.  No problem.  I like it.  It’s a little bit of everything.  Except juvenile and motions to revoke probation.

But because the juvenile docket is so constant, sometimes I get to re-visit that division for old times’ sake.  And to help out in a pinch.  Like when the juvenile prosecutor has a baby or is out of town or busy in a trial.  I hold the office record for time spent in the juvenile sector.  I really loved that job.  I do not wish to go back to it (sorry, Leland), but I learned everything I know about parenting and prosecution and ultimately, vocation while I was there.

I started working for the DA, not because I had a burning desire to see felons pay for their heinous infractions against society, but because I needed a job and they had one available.  I was living in Austin but a move was imminent and so I started looking for paying work.  The only thing I really knew how to do at that time was draft Petitions for Divorce and Divorce Decrees, talk to unhappy divorce clients on the phone and in person, and attend mediations with unhappy people who were in the arduous process of marital dissolution.

But in Texas, the juvenile justice code is neatly nestled into the family code – as these are children we are talking about, after all – and so I was able to say “Why yes.  I am very familiar with the family code and I have represented some juveniles.  This was true.  Out in Lakeway at municipal court.  I had even represented a youth or two at detention hearings at the sprawling Travis County juvenile facility.

I couldn’t believe it, but they hired me.  Charlotte Harris and Steve Smith were the elected DA’s.  An election was underway, though, and they told me that it was possible that a newly elected DA might not honor their choice, so it was somewhat tentative.  Or at least temporary.  I had a job for the month of December.  Once the newly-elected DA took office Janury 1, well, we would just hope for the best. 

He kept me.  He kept all of us.  On my first day, the outgoing juvenile prosecutor said “you have a certification hearing on Thursday.  Harvey will be your witness.  He’s testifying in the grand jury today, so you should go over there and meet him.”  I didn’t know what the grand jury was, what a certification hearing was or what Harvey’s testimony had to do with me.  But I learned quickly.

I stayed with the juvenile docket for about four years and at different times I have gone back to it when they needed me.  I love the governing standard for juvenile justice in Texas, which is “the best interest of the child.”  That is in contrast to the ethical standard for prosecutors of adult offenders where our duty is “not to convict, but to see that justice is done.”  Both standards entail a good bit of discretion, and I have always taken the responsibilities entrusted to me seriously.  That’s not the same as always knowing what is in somebody’s best interest or knowing how to see that “justice is done.”  But I have gained a wide perspective over the years, and I definitely know more now about what to consider than I did when I started.

I think that’s why our office always starts a new prosecutor in the juvenile section.  So that when you inevitably mess up, it won’t be the end of the world.  Most prosecutors stay in that position about a year or so, but every time I had the chance to “move up”, I asked if I could stay.  I loved my judge and the staff at our juvenile probation office.  Those people who were shining stars to me when I started are still at the JJC, working with kids they can never do enough for.  We can’t solve their problems.  Emotional, familial, behavioral, educational, cultural, attitudinal.  We just are not God. 

But I have never ceased to be impressed with our juvenile probation officers.  The ones who stay and the ones who leave and then return are those who know that while they can’t unshape a child’s early life, those kids need them.  A lot of our kids gain weight in detention because it’s the first time they have had access to three hot meals a day.  They have great school attendance because there’s no possibility of skipping.  They know the unfailing, unflinching love of Mr. Graves in detention, and it’s said that some of our scariest, meanest, toughest youthful offenders have offered to turn themselves in only if Pat will meet them to take them into custody.

I was never able to leave them: Mark and Pat and Mickey and Monica and Melanie and Edward.  Valerie, Gary and Tillman,  I always felt that if they could stay faithful to their callings, then I could stay faithful to mine.

Toward the end, I was often discouraged.  I would ask the judge to put these kids on probation, and then I would get referral paperwork that showed how badly they had screwed up this opportunity for a better life.  Nobody ever called me and said “Claire, I just have to tell you how our efforts – yours and mine and the judge’s – have turned this kid’s attitude and home life around, and now everything is going GREAT!”

Faced with a constant barrage of bad and sad stories about children who never had a chance, I started suffering from some burnout.

So this one time, at juvenile pre-trials, in a fit of despair and desperation (what?  you didn’t know I had those? my poor mother knows), I cried out to the unsuspecting staff “Does anything we do even MATTER at all?”  And then we did what I always do when I have to pick myself up out of a crumbled heap and keep going: we planned a party.  At the JJC.  It was my birthday and they even ordered me a cake.  And then every officer told one success story.

They ranged from “This kid was found as a baby in the arms of his mother, who was dead.  He spent his life in foster care and was never adopted.  He spent some school holidays at the JJC or with our staff.  Here is his football picture from college.  He received a scholarship.  And here’s another picture of him with his wife and baby”.  Wife.  Not babymama.  Not his yearbook photo from the penitentiary – his football scholarship, uniformed, posed, proud picture.

And none of the other twenty or thirty stories I heard compared to that one.   How could they?

 But the other one that stands out is this one: ”My kid’s name is Jose.  When he left his job at Taco Bell to take a position as a bagger at HEB, he gave Taco Bell two weeks’ notice.”  And that was BIG.  Seriously, with these kids, that was the height of responsibility and maturity – recognizing that his employers had needs, too.  Also known as empathy.  Not a small thing at all.

And that day, right there, as a burned-out young prosecutor, I learned one of the greatest truths I know:  That everything – absolutely everything –  depends on what your definition of success is.

Actually, let’s don’t have the controversy, let’s just discuss nicely something that has been on my mind lately.  Feel free to disagree.  I never mind learning where I am wrong, even when it causes the very foundations of my idealistic weltanschauung to crumble. 

(I’m not sure if I should italicize weltanschauung.  There is something about italicizing foreign words that makes them stand out even more, and then I seem all pretentious, and in my opinion, it’s the essence of humility to recognize that another culture has a better word for what you’re talking about than you do.  Just sayin’.)

I happen to be highly proficient in rebuilding crumbled weltanschauungs.  Some people fall apart.  I just agonize a lot, repent and then get back up on that horse, mix a few metaphors and then rebuild it with modifications.

It’s kind of radical, and I hope you are ready for this:  I believe that the birth control pill ruined the way we think about sex, pregnancy, and children.

I know.  Radical.  I’m not even Catholic.  But I think they were onto something when they opposed birth control.  Because now, unless we have determined that we are ready to have children (however misguided that little sentiment), we are so surprised when sex results in pregnancy.  And the pregnancy becomes a problem we have to solve rather than the gift of new life that it could be. 

One friend found herself unexpectedly pregnant.  She was just out of graduate school and embarking on a new career that promised to be very challenging in its early years.  She was also married, but newly so.  And she was in the state of shock and awe and responsibility we all are when we learn that we are expecting, and a wise friend said this to her: “Babies are a blessing.”  And that unexpected (at that time) child is now turning sixteen and causing his mother all kinds of anguish and she wouldn’t trade him for the world.   (The friend who quipped that little one-liner about babies?  Catholic.  Coincidence?  I think not.  Maybe I am Catholic.)

I am not here to argue that abstinence education works.  It doesn’t.  But neither does birth control.  I have lots of friends who conceived in spite of birth control.  And really, I have lots of friends who have had unexpected pregnancies.  Including me – thankfully I was married at the time and never had to think about what my options were. 

But have you ever stopped to think how absurd it is that conception following sex is a surprise?  Why don’t we expect pregnancy to follow sex? 

Because we came of age with the illusion of birth control. 

I read two articles yesterday.  I found each to be compelling and communicative of its hosting site’s weltanschauung.  Both are worth a read.  I was particularly struck by the differing attitudes toward pregnancy.  One is as a redemptive gift and the other as an inconvenience. 

I could associate with each one – having been a blase teen-ager and also being a mother of three fascinating and unique individuals (one of whom wears all camouflage, a cowboy hat and a cape and boots at all times.  And carries a compass and a canteen.  Inconvenient?  At times, yes.)

I hope you’ll peruse them and think about them.  And I hope you’ll comment.  All weltanschauungs welcome.  Really.

http://www.virtueonline.org/portal/modules/news/article.php?storyid=15457

http://motherjones.com/politics/2004/09/way-it-was