Always put on your oxygen mask…
I was a goddamn inspiration tonight. There was music playing in the kitchen, our bowls edged with the leftover remnants of eaten chili. That powdered red dust turned liquid making bathtub lines on the inside of clay. Something by Billie Holiday was playing echoing around the old one-inch hexagon tiles and wide plank wood walls. Or maybe Josephine Baker.
Seventeen was doing dishes. It was his night. Fifteen and a half stood at the edge of the kitchen watching, listening, butting in when he felt particularly impassioned. Nine sword-battled Fifteen and a half for a little while then got bored, gave up, and went into the living room. So it was just them and me, the original two and their mama.
I had them young. They were babies at the same time, Irish twins, both in diapers, both entirely dependent on my body to keep them alive. They both had rubber band wrists and hair that looked like a cross between an old man and a stoner. I could see the pale blue rivers of their veins through translucent skin as they fell asleep. One laid plopped on my chest, latched on and sucking now and then when a dream would wake him. The other lying next to me in footie pjs.
I sang them special songs when they went to sleep, and we had all our rituals, all those millions of little secrets that belong to a mother in love with her children and the children in love with her. I was their entire universe for just a little while. No wonder it’s so hard to picture what it will be like in a year when I walk by an empty bedroom, David Bowie on the wall, the guitar packed up and long gone on the road trip to wherever he will live next. The bed will strangely be made, his landry non-existent. There is a day coming when I will miss the mess they are now.
They feel it, too. Both of them, but particularly the oldest because he will be the first one to put on his life vest and jump out of the raft. All of us will watch him sputter and flail and I will hold my breath until I know he’s caught his. This is the problem with being a mother in love: I have always been one to put on their oxygen mask before my own. It seemed only appropriate. If I go down, I go down loving them as my last act.
My heart melted open for them with the music and the clanking of dishes and the nervous and holy energy that swirls in the room where we eat our supper and tell most of the day’s secrets. Because my thin-skinned babies aren’t babies anymore. Six months is now Fifteen and a half. Two is now Seventeen going on Eighteen. Even so, there is still a sense that they need me to feed them, to tell them that life has something beautiful and nourishing for them, that the monsters aren’t real and that everything is going to work out alright.
But I love them too much to lie. So tonight I told them that they are going to die, that we are all going to die. It’s on my mind a little more these days because next month I will be 40, at least halfway baked. If I live as long as my dad, I have fifteen years left on this earth, fourteen good ones. I told them that life is too short to worry about not getting into NYU or Julliard or second-guessing if they are good enough, worthy enough of the dreams that keep them up at night. I told them “Your life is going to end. So while you’re here, you might as well live it. Live it all. Live it down to the dregs. Chase down every wild and harrowing dream. If it dies while you’re holding it, let it. Honor it. Mourn it. Then chase down the next dream and the next, until you die.” I told them the monsters are real, but they aren’t new, and there are people across history who remind us that the monsters don’t get the last word. Love does. Sacrifice does. Kindness does. Especially if you start with yourself, then move out in concentric circles.
I told them that I had known them since they were cell clumps and so I think that means they can trust me. “I’ve been watching you your whole life. I have always known the world will open its arms to you. I can’t wait for the world to meet you. It will be the one good thing about sharing you, about watching you walk out that door.”
Seventeen got quiet and realized he didn’t have any more arguments. Fifteen and a half followed me upstairs, pretending he needed to check something in his room but really, walked me to my door at the opposite end of the hallway. “Mom,” he said, his lanky, teenage man-arms stretched out to me, “Thank you for the things you said. I love you.” I held him for a few seconds longer than normal and told him, “you’re gonna be great.”
Eighteen years ago I got pregnant, dropped out of college, quit my pursuits and surrendered up my body and every dream to their open, hungry mouths. They drank me, gulp by gulp, they took my breath into their lungs. They still do.
election.
This time, 20 years ago, I was nursing my wounds. My right forearm was black and blue, swollen and scabbed over from a night that haunted me before it had even ended. I had just spent eight hours pounding my body against a gymnasium floor in hopes “God” would win.
At nineteen, I dropped out of college at the University of Northern Colorado and ran away to the San Juan mountains, to join a religious Christian group called “Youth With A Mission,” aka, YWAM. Miles up a winding dirt road I spent my weeks at a “base” where about twenty of us, teens and young adults, were indoctrinated with a potent brand of religious conservatism. We believed in election, that God had chosen us to know the truth and to share it with all the nations. We spent months in training at the base, all to be followed with an outreach trip, where we would take this message of truth to the shores of other countries to try and save them from an eternity in hell. I now know the proper name for this: religious colonialism. But we called it mission work. We called it good news. We called it God’s grace.
It’s the place where I learned how to fake fitting in. Where I was told my dietary allergic reaction was a manifestation of unconfessed sin. Where base leaders knelt by my bedside as I vomited, refusing to leave until I confessed something that seemed big enough to wretch my body in this way. The base is where a local “prophetess” from down the mountain came to teach us how to speak in tongues and exercise the gift of prophecy to be “saved,” even if some of us had to play pretend. It’s where I gathered confirming evidence for all the freight the conservative church had burdened me with; that my body, my essence, my being, was bad and that fear and submissive compliance were the only way forward.
That November we traveled almost 400 miles from our base to the YMCA of the Rockies for a YWAM retreat summit. Hundreds of kids like me gathered in a gymnasium the day of the 2000 presidential election. The leaders stood at the head of the room, where a huge projector was set up, to display election results as they came in that night. “We are God’s warriors,” they said, “and the Bible tells us to plead and pray, without stopping, to get God to move on behalf of our nation! Now is the time for us to pound the ground. Now is the time to turn the ear of God to our cries on behalf of a Christian leader!”
They were talking about Jericho. We Christians had a song about it. In the old, felt flannel graph of church Sunday school rooms, the town of Jericho is placed in the center, sandy-colored wall hemming it in, and the people of God, or the Israelites, are placed outside the city walls. As the story goes, God’s people marched and stomped around the walls of Jericho for seven days and, on the seventh day, blew loud trumpets and the walls “came a-tumblin’ down.” God told them it would happen this way and, because of their faith, it did. None of our grown ups ever told us that the story was never confirmed, but rather discredited when the ruins of the city were found later. None of our grown ups left a lot of room for questions on issues like these. Truth was truth. Get in line or pay for it in the after life.
How we got from the walls of Jericho to George W. Bush is too long and too bitter a political tale for me to tell here. But on November 7, 2000, the leaders of YWAM at the Colorado YMCA of the Rockies were convinced that Bush was God’s man and that we youth were the ones to “march” him into the Oval Office. I wish we could have just marched. But instead, they came up with the idea of pounding. Someone had prophesied, the voice telling them that God would be moved if we got down on the ground and pounded it with our fists, without stopping, until we got our answer from God.
My stomach rolls and hollows itself out from shame and disgust each time I remember it. I remember the hours upon hours spent on my knees. I remember the hard, unyielding gymnasium floor. I remember the high ceilings with round yellow lights where I glanced, as if looking for some kind of rescuer in the room. I remember the thudding echoes of hundreds of fists, like horse hoofs tromping together in a drumbeat of religious extremist desperation. I remember the first skin breaking, the haunting glances of my peers, the internal terror that all of this, all of it, felt oh so wrong. I remember the news projected on that big white screen and I remember the voices of the leaders booming on the loudspeaker each time another state turned red, the callout of “another victory in God’s name!” As if that state had been drenched in the salvific blood of Christ.
The funny thing is, in the least hilarious sense, we didn’t even vote. All of us were far from home, counties and even several state lines away from the places we were registered in. And that’s just for those who were registered to vote, although many weren’t. There was no mention in the weeks leading up to the election of absentee ballots. There was no warning in the days leading up to the “retreat” that we would be spending daylight til dawn breaking our bodies for a White, Texas Republican man named Jesus. The night turned to morning with conflicting news reports, states being called for Gore, more pounding, and then a sudden shift to Bush. The entire place would erupt. I just kept looking at those ceiling lights wishing I were anywhere but there. We fell into the cars and church vans at the end of that retreat dead-eyed, weary, and unsure if our efforts had produced what we thought they would.
A few weeks later, as the Supreme Court decided that 537 Florida votes made George Bush the next President of the United States, I packed up all of my things, got in the car with my boyfriend-turned-fiance, and drove away from that base for the last time. It took me fifteen years to finally talk about that night, to begin dismantling the corrupt and cult-like religious systems that had formed my worldview around God, politics, my neighbor who was different from me, and my own worth.
This morning we woke up and still don’t officially know who the next president will be. My husband, that guy who drove me down the mountain for the last time, told me there are people literally kneeling outside of the buildings where ballots are being counted, Red MAGA hats on their heads, bodies swaying in that familiar mantis way, as they pronounce God’s just judgment on this nation, and a win for President Trump, their version of “God’s man.” And it all flooded back into my body; the cold hard gymnasium, the way my fists and forearms purpled and ached in the days after election night, the horrors of the Iraq war, millions of innocent lives lost under the direction of the president I pounded the ground for. I thought of the atrocities enacted against minorities, Black lives, and members of the LGBTQIA community, some of whom I would come to know and love intimately, and even parent. I thought of the way my body and psyche have worked tirelessly to metabolize that religious trauma and the ongoing work I do each day to reform the world of my being so I can actually live at peace with myself and others.
I guess in a way, I am still counting ballots. Still counting moments of fear-based chaos and trauma, still counting fallacies and moments of terror, still parsing out the fake news of religious fundamentalism and how it dehumanized me to the point of being a cog in a wheel, capable of untold harms, to others and to myself. Twenty years later, I am still nursing my wounds while someone out there is pounding the ground.
Grown-ass woman on her first day of school.
This morning I stood looking at the backwards reflection of myself in the bathroom mirror - wrinkles around my eyes, greying sprouts in my hair, and asked, “what does a grown-ass woman do with her hair on the first day of school?” No, it’s not my kids first day of school, it’s mine! It’s my first day back as a college student after taking almost two decades off. Yes, a whole adult could have been raised in the time I’ve taken away from school. In those years I’ve managed to cultivate a life, a 19 year marriage, and three sons - ages 16, 15, and 9. Due to Covid-19 my first day back is not in-person so it really wouldn’t matter to anyone else what I did with my hair. But it mattered to me.
I think that sometimes, the uniform you wear can get you in the right frame of mind. This morning I needed to embody this new chapter. I needed to look like I didn’t just roll out of bed with the heavy breasts of a woman who is almost forty and nursed three kids. I needed to look like I didn’t just spend the first hour of my day neglecting my meditation practice in lieu of calming my nine year old after he had a colossal meltdown. I needed to look like I didn’t just walk downstairs, pour a cup of coffee, and open a computer. All of these things are real for me, but I also did my hair and put on a bra, monumental achievements for a mother of three who woke up this morning and became a college student again.
Whenever I tell close friends or family that I’m going back to school I keep getting the question, “What degree are you going back for?” which feels aggressive to me. It feels like the question grown ups loved to ask when I was younger, “what are you gonna be when you grow up?” I hated that. I couldn’t even buy cigarettes but somehow I had to decide the entire course of my life, on command? I always worked hard to come up with an answer, like a dog sitting for a treat, something that might encourage them to take me seriously, to know I was gonna grow up and BE something. Depending on the month, I answered: surgeon, pediatrician, psychologist, counselor, nurse, lawyer, teacher, midwife. I did not become any of those things. Instead I became a wife, mother, doula, photographer, writer, podcaster, pubic speaker, retreat leader. So these days when asked to predict my future, I am pleading the Fifth and continuing the work I have been doing: taking life one day at a time, working hard to be present to all the challenges and gifts the day brings, and then see where I end up in a few years.
It has been such a good day. I have cried happy tears and jumped up and down and opened my first textbooks and poured over the list of assignments that are due in the next few days with elation. I am so excited about homework! I know this sounds just a tad bit ridiculous but I have waited so long for this day. I have pushed it off for years, through newlywed life, motherhood, career changes, financial obligations, and peripheral passions. I have told myself I wouldn’t be good enough, smart enough, brave enough to go back to school. That loud, bullying voice of self-rejection has pushed this dream back further, year by year. This year I woke up, in more ways than I could list here, and I knew it was time. I now recognize that this door is opening at the exact time it was meant to for me, and I am giddy to learn every piece of what it leads to.
The weather in Missouri still feels like the devil’s hot breath is on my neck. Fall hasn’t come yet. My kids are still on the Summer break that started at Spring break, cuz-Covid. There will be no buying of a new backpack, no wearing it on one shoulder. And even if I had said Jansport backpack and was wearing it to the actual school campus, I’m literally too old to wear a heavy backpack on just one shoulder. Seriously, it would hurt. I would get back problems. This is what I told Jeremy in bed this morning, when he suggested I wear a backpack downstairs on one shoulder. Then he and I laughed about it until both of our eyes were wet. I am getting old. I am in college. I am so ridiculously grateful for both.
We really don’t have that kind of time.
In her book “Bird by Bird” Saint Anne Lamott tells a story about dress shopping with her best friend Pammy, in the year Pammy was dying of cancer. Anne was looking for a dress to wear on a date, not her typical wardrobe, and she came out of the fitting room modeling the dress for Pammy, feeling “very shy and self-conscious and pleased.” Then she asked Pammy, “Do you think it makes my hips look too big?” Pammy answered, “Annie? I really don’t think you have that kind of time.” It’s always made me laugh but lately I get it in my bones.
As the covid drips of days have turned into a massive waterfall of strangeness, as oppression and injustice seem to run rampant, as more people are reported dead in the New York Times body count, I just keep thinking about Pammy’s near-death wisdom. In the middle of muscle memory and knee-jerk worries about small stuff, I’ll catch myself and say, “Oh ash, we just don’t have that kind of time anymore.” I used to think I had that kind of time. The time spent controlling everyone else around me; their choices, their beliefs, their pains and traumas and fatal flaws. I used to think I had the kind of time where I could treat loved ones poorly, abuse their kidnesses, and come back later to apologize. I used to think I had time to waste on social media scrolling mindlessly until I hated myself or someone else. I used to think I had time to worry about my legs, or what I now lovingly refer to as my covid-thighs. As my therapist said a couple of weeks ago, “At some point you just get to the point where you say, ‘okay, I guess these are my legs now.’”
Each day, something happens to make me fear the world is falling apart, that human kindness and love have gotten lost in the political swirl of it all. Daily, souls are dying of what others experience as just a bad cold and still others claim is “a hoax.” The town we live in, with its long racist history, does not feel like a safe place for my Black son who grows bigger by the day. In the fall, it won’t be safe for either him or his high school brothers to return to school face to face, largely because of others' negligence and refusals to take Covid seriously.
Because of Zion’s health issues, we’ve been quarantined since March. In that time, I’ve crisis-schooled a special needs child with medical and cognitive disabilities, tried to counsel my teenagers through these unprecedented days while taking away most of their freedoms, stayed married, kept up with therapy and recovery and writing group, continued spiritual deconstruction and the rebuilding of my faith, kept writing for a column as well as my book, and have joined a committee in my town on a project that will bring honor to Black souls that lived and died in our community. I’ve also decided to go back to school in the fall and finally finish the college education I started twenty years ago. You know, easy stuff.
Things have changed this year. They have changed so much that I’ve cried and mourned and slept and yelled big loud fuck words at the sky. In the wake of all the change, there’s plenty I no longer have time for. It’s taken my weak arms swimming through some serious waves of grief until I get water up my nose to help me start coming to terms with this: I now feel released to laser-focus on what I DO have time for.
These days the questions I ask sound like, “What is my work for today? What is the good I can and must contribute to this one day? What is the work that only I can do today? And how can I do that work and still stay connected to the realm of awareness of Divine Love within me?” Because the rest of it - the worrying about my face wrinkles or thigh dimples or if I’m losing followers or if I can save everyone from Johnald Schrimp - well, I just don’t have that kind of time.
These days I try to find time for some or all of the following:
Meditation
Incense
Music
Humor
Coffee / Tea
Eye contact
Yoga
Research
Writing
Reading
Deep breaths
Orgasm
Conversations
Sunlight
Rest
And when my phone alerts me, “Your screen time was down 43% last week” I breathe even deeper and sink into the richness of all of the work I did, the healing and loving and listening and lamenting and laughing and creating, that was mine and only mine to do. And I feel grateful.
I don’t know how you are braving the deluge of these days. I can only hope you are spending your time in ways that are gentle, that help you inhale and exhale love, as much as possible. I hope your work brings deep fulfillment and pursues equity for others, even if it’s hard. I hope some hours are spent loving your remarkable, impermanent, beloved self and the not-here-forever ones around you. If not, I hope these words become a permission-giving mantra for whatever your soul needs in these strange, strange days. So many lives have been lost and nothing is guaranteed for next month - not mine, not yours, not those we love. In light of it all, there’s so much we really don’t have time for anymore.
Or as Pammy said, dear one,
“I really don’t think you have that kind of time.”
I’m sending you all the love I can from here, right in the middle of the falls.
When Life Hands You Hackers
I’m here because my site got hacked. Somewhere in the deep bowels of my old website and blog there lived a parasite, some kind of digital tapeworm working its way through the insides, gobbling up passwords and permissions and shitting out riddles I couldn’t solve. I tried youtube videos and forums and enlisting my husband to help me battle it out for months. Then I realized there was no fixing it. I mourned for about thirty seconds before I realized this was a big fat belated birthday gift in disguise.
I started fromashparsons when I was trying to convince myself and those around me that I really really want to be a writer and, pinkie promise, someday I am gonna pull it off. I tried to write like my idols. I tried to make myself sound more experienced and holy than I actually was. I tried writing a memoir before I knew the proper spelling of the word memoir. After 15 years as a professional photographer trying to claim her right to write, I still felt the need to use as many photographs as possible to supplement my words. I didn’t believe my story was enough. Which really stunk because it’s the only one I’ve got.
Time and experience and countless hours of keeping my pen moving on the paper have provided me with evidence. I am a real writer now because I have, and continue to, put in the hours writing. I have been published and had opportunities to perform some of my stories live. I’ve been accepted into and completed one of the most prestigious writing workshops Yale has to offer. I have begun to put my words out there and have heard the response I always longed for, “I’m so glad I’m not the only one.”
This new site feels like graduating from diapers to big girl panties. Or maybe it’s more like the time I bought my first thong. Sure, at first it was a little weird to have some fabric shoved up my crack all day but now I couldn’t picture life without it. Much like that thong, I hope you stick around and come along for the ride. I hope you read the words here and that they do something for you. I hope they are door-openers. I hope you reach out and let me know where my story fits into yours so I can be reminded that I’m not the only one.
As is the emerging pattern of my life, something messy that I never would have asked for has been transformed into something new. I am determined to take this bloated tapeworm and make beauty out of the excrement.
Two Months
It’s been two months since I was in a public place. Same goes for my husband. Same for our kids. We haven’t set foot in a grocery store, restaurant, coffee shop, library, pharmacy, nursery, meeting, post office, or even Target. We don’t know what the bare shelves looked like in person. We don’t know how humans have been behaving out there, not really, not firsthand.
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Two months ago our youngest, Zion, went through a complicated surgery at the children’s hospital to help with breathing issues and lung disease. Every airway was compromised. The surgeon made it clear that he is at a very high risk for the threat Covid-19 would pose. We were not to have contact with others, in or outside our home. We were not to go into public places.
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That afternoon I sat in the surgery waiting room with jeremy. It was the first time no family or friends were allowed to join us in that room, to distract us or bring us coffee. That night the hospital would stop performing all surgeries unless they were emergent, life saving. I knitted zion a scarf and sipped crappy coffee out of styrofoam as we watched a press conference on the news. People were encouraged to gather in groups of 10 or less. That night I couldn’t sleep. I stared out the windows of the hospital to a world that would be forever different to us when we left than when we had arrived.
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That was the last time we were in a public place. And that day it was more like a ghost town. There were only a few families like ours, with war-weary kids and parents exchanging scared, knowing glances. Because Zion was one of the last surgeries on the board, they let him drive a tiny jeep down the hallways and into the O.R. He suffered through a scary and painful night and the next afternoon we drive his weary body home and tucked him into bed. There was a sign in the neighbors window waiting for us, welcoming us home. None of us could imagine how, eight weeks later, it would all seem so impossible, so strange, so abnormal to have been anywhere but here.
Hatred, Like Love, Starts at Home
Yesterday we left the house and ran off to the wild to find some signs of life together. We waded through the rushing stream to get across. We fished for algae and threw rocks. He fell in. We dried his shoes and clothes out in the sun. We laid on our backs and watched the trees wave at us, and we waved back. He told me “This is just the best day of my life. I’ve got you. I’ve got this river. This is just the best day ever...” I told him I’d love him forever.
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Another innocent, unarmed Black man has been shot and killed. This time it was Ahmad Arbery, a 25 year old who was out jogging in late February when two white supremacists chased him down and killed him. There is now video footage. The names of his killers are known. Nothing has been done to bring justice for this murder.
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I feel the need to speak to the white women here for a second, especially my fellow mothers. To the ones who reach for their purses or lock their car doors when they spot a Black man in the vicinity. To the ones who see big black boys and think “troublemaker.” To the ones who may have taught their children, even inadvertently, that a white neighborhood is the same thing as a “safe” neighborhood. I feel the need to speak to the ones who are willing to vote for a racist president for the sake of a “pro-life” agenda that is clearly only pro-white-upper-middle-class-life. I too have felt afraid. I have racially profiled. I have judged a human by their skin color. Then I watched as white people suspiciously began to eye Zion as he grows taller and bigger. Beloveds, fear is not getting us anywhere good.
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Hatred, like love, starts at home, where small children overhear conversations about us and them, black and white, saved or lost, gay or straight, safe or dangerous. We are teaching our children what value to place on human life. What if the other was your child? What if your beloved was the endangered one? The outcast? The at-risk one? The hunted one? What would change for you then?
My Sad Bad Mad List
All week long I’ve been saying that our feelings are mentionable and manageable. But I almost forgot what Zion, 8yrs, was carrying.
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Zion’s brain, like that of many special needs kiddos, is often a chaotic swirl where everything feels too loud, all the edges are too sharp, and the next moment is always too unpredictable. I almost forgot that his routine at school, with his teachers, in the same Special Ed. room, and with the same therapists, is what calms him and lets him know everything will be okay. Knowing things will be the same every single Monday, Tuesday, etc., is not just life-giving to him, but essential in feeling like life won’t gobble him up whole.
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On top of that, Zion had a complicated surgery two weeks ago. So he’s been in pain and healing, while physically needing to limit activity and have no contact with others because of his high risk.
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I almost forgot all this, until he destroyed a collection of items in his room yesterday and melted down, reminding me that his brain was going absolutely haywire. I took a deep breath and stopped, saying, “I bet this has been a really strange time. I bet it’s been hard for you to understand what’s happening..” He crumbled in my arms weeping, needing his weighted blanket and for me to wrap around him and calm him enough so that he could finally speak. When he did, I asked him what he was feeling and told him I’d write it down so that we could see it and face it together.
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Today I made “My list of things during the covid-19 era that make me feel sad/mad/bad.” There were 20 things that needed to get out of my body and onto the page. There were F-words, letdowns, annoyances, things that made me sad, angry, scared and hurt. But after I wrote them, just like Zion, I could breathe a little easier and the knots in my tangled-up mind unraveled a bit looser.
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Zion folded his list and slept with it last night. I asked him if I could share it with my friends so they could make their own, and he said, “Oh yeah! that’s a great idea!” I don’t know a more earnest and pure-hearted soul. And I think those are the ones we should be learning from right now. So this is your invitation🧡 Zion and I send you our love.