They All Want My Cucumbers!

So I’ve been on the first diet of my life. Here it is. The Four Hour Body by Timothy Ferris. I like it because Ferris backs everything up with science and chemistry. I’ve had to change a lot of things. In short, I eat vegetables, legumes, eggs and lean meat. No dairy, bread, pasta, rice, or fruit.

My first diet ever!

What I like is that there’s nothing about ‘ you must eat a grapefruit 17 minutes and 33.08 seconds after you eat but 9. 25 minutes before you exercise’. He does have science nerd pages, but you can skip those if you want.

In just 15 days I’ve lost 8 pounds.

Not bad.

This is yet another chapter in My Love of Fight and the demons I want to conquer before I turn 50. The thing I wanted to find out was if I had what it takes to make a major change in diet and lifestyle, to fight the natural tendency to just ‘let myself go’. I wondered if I could speed up my metabolism, firm up my just-go-south body tissue, and say NO to certain foods that I’ve always enjoyed. I am proud to say that so far I have fought well. One of the biggest challenges is when we watch TV. (not TV, really, because we watch everything on the computer) When we are getting ready to watch Survivor, Peter and the girls get their snacks: a large bowl of popcorn and another large bowl of Doritos. Me? I have a peeled cucumber, sprinkled lightly with salt. It takes all my strength to not take one little broken piece of a cheesy Dorito. But I don’t cheat.

However… as soon as I take one bite from my cucumber, Peter turns his head and in mid-crunch he asks, “mmm… can I have a  bite?” So I give him a bite. Sometimes he takes two!

Then, Amanda looks at my cucumber as if she has never seen anything that looks as appetizing as that, and she asks, “Me too?” So I give her a bite.

And then there’s my spinach and cottage cheese for breakfast. Peter has thick-sliced nut and wheat bread toast with a generous slathering of real-fruit jam spread on top of a layer of my former lover – Butter. I have to admit that my divorce with butter has not been amicable. It haunts me in my sleep. But I remain faithful to Spinach and Cottage Cheese. But Peter… oh the cheater’s heart. He said something about Spinach being a huge part of his childhood and would I please make him some of that too.

Interestingly, no one in our family has ever asked for a cucumber for a snack before. Or spinach. Ever. I guess I just have a way of making something very simple look very good. I wonder if I could get them to beg for a spoonful of lentils? Considering that my bowl of lentils looks more like papier mache, I’d be really surprised if I have to share them too.

So I will keep will-powering through this diet, and will keep you posted. They all want my cucumbers but I’m interested to find out whether or not anyone wants my lentils.

Wrestling With the Box of Proof

In less than 2 months I will be fifty years old! It doesn’t bother me at all. Back in January I wrote a post about my love of fight and how I need to wrestle a few demons before June 9^th arrives. One of those fights involves my mother. Not her, but her death.

I often wonder what Mom was experiencing when she turned fifty in 1987.  She had no idea there were only nine years left in her life. How could she know? No one knows that sort of thing. 

Mom loved hunting for partridge.

The reason I face this demon right now is because it was 13 years ago this weekend that my mother lay in her bed at home, and though I was unaware of how soon she would meet the last day of her life, I believe she knew full well that there  were only a couple of weeks left.

A month earlier my mom and dad called to tell us that Mom had pelvic cancer. Right away I went online to do my research. I found the treatments I was sure her doctor was already prescribing, hoping always for a good outcome of more years, hopeful that chemo and radiation would buy time and allow her to live longer than just 59 years. Surely Mom would live till her 60^th birthday on July 23^rd of that same year. Surely.

We talked on the phone even beyond what our budget would allow. I kept asking her about the treatment. It hadn’t started yet. I understood the medical system in Canada and how frustratingly slow it could be. She reassured me her doctor was doing all he could. 

My sister, Mary, went to visit Mom regularly. She started being a little bit more open with me about the seriousness of Mom’s cancer, how she really wasn’t doing well. I wanted to go back to Canada to be with her. Yet every time I talked to Dad and Mom they gave no clue that it was quite so serious. I wrote an email to one of  Mom’s closest friends, a pastor we’d known for a few years, and asked her if Mom’s cancer was aggressive, if I should come home. But she answered that she wasn’t aware that it was that serious. She’d visited Mom a few times at home, and she ‘seemed to be okay’. Surely I could believe her. Surely. 

It didn’t matter what they all said. I really wanted to go be with mom. My gut told me I should be there. I knew she needed me. Whenever we were in Canada Mom would come and stay with us for a few days or weeks. It would get a bit stressful because even though Mom loved Peter dearly, she always took my side of any issue no matter what, and poor Peter had to go toe-to-toe with both of us. Each time she came she knew that I would help her get into a healthy diet and exercise routine, that I would take her to meet my friends, that we would do a few new things and see a few of my favorite places, and she could always count on me to take her to my hairdressers. Now that Mom was sick, I wanted to take care of her again, to do all the things I knew she loved. I wanted to shampoo her hair and set it in rollers and give her a bit of a modern hair-style, and not old-lady curls. I wanted to be the one to give her sponge baths when she couldn’t make it to the tub. I would have massaged her feet and tickled her back, brought her breakfast in bed and spent long afternoons doing nothing but talking about all her childhood memories. 

But I couldn’t go. We had no extra money for the flight. We wondered if I were to go back to visit her, then what if she held on for a long time? Would I be able to stay away from home and baby Amanda and young Joel’s homeschooling for that long? And what if I did visit, only to return back to Thailand and have Mom pass away shortly thereafter? How could I ever afford to fly back to attend her funeral?

It was a horrible dilemma and I never wish it on anyone. 

So I prayed.

I think it was more like I conjured holy optimism… fasting, praying, trying my hardest not to sin during those days so that God would have to hear me, so that I could somehow earn his favor to be spared this pain, so that I could convince him to let Mom survive the cancer. 

I kept sending links to Dad about treatments and options and hoped that mom would be starting any or all of them soon. Time was ticking. I could envision that horrible pelvic cancer spreading irreversibly by the minute.

Then on May 16^th a call came. At midnight. We always knew that a call at midnight was a worrisome thing, unless it was just a case of forgotten time zones. I recognized the voice of my oldest sister, Judy, trying to stifle her sobs saying, “Patti, honey, I think you need to come back home now if you want to see Mom one last time.” 

Peter was out in a small village near Buri Ram for the week and I had no idea how to contact him. We didn’t have cell phones. Desperation became a taste in my mouth. I was in an angry panic. I had to get on the soonest plane and get back to Mom right away! How could ministry go on as normal when I was losing my mom? I screamed silently and angrily at Peter from the depths of my guts, “Where the hell are you? How can anything in Buri Ram be more important than me getting back to Mom right now?” 

Convinced that God decided against healing Mom ( an idea I have also wrestled with and learned much about prayer and control and outcomes and faith) and I believed that anything I said wasn’t going to move Him one way or the other, I got mad at him too and screamed, “I loathe the day I came to this country! I left everything and everyone for You and you won’t even show up for this!”

After many phone calls, I flew out of Khon Kaen the next day, and went to Bangkok, where I would stay overnight at the home of friends and take a Cathay Pacific flight to Toronto the following morning. It was May 18^th in Thailand, but still the 17^th in Peterborough, Ontario. I woke up early, got dressed and came downstairs with my suitcase. My friends were ready to drive me to the airport and we were heading out the door. 

Then the phone rang. 

It was Peter.

He was calling to tell me that he’d talked to Dad on the phone.

Mom had just passed away.

That was one difficult flight. 

And so this is what I have fought with mom about since that day:

 

Mom, why didn’t you tell me?

 

During the weeks after her death I wanted to know why she never told us how serious it was. I would have been there earlier if I’d known. I could have been there. 

One quiet morning when it was just me and Dad I asked him, “Dad, why didn’t Mom tell anyone how serious it was?” 

He sat there in the timeless pose of my father, legs crossed, shoulders relaxed, a mug of coffee in one hand and a cigarette dangling in the other. He took a long puff on his cigarette, then purposefully tapped the ashes into the ashtray as he did when he was pensive. With a frown in his eyes his words came out all covered in smoke, “She didn’t want people to suddenly treat her differently just because she was dying. She didn’t want people who normally would not have given her the time of day coming over and pretend to care.”

I couldn’t fault her for that. To me it felt like one last passive aggressive guilt-tripping Mom thing. But it’s true, isn’t it? When people know you are dying, they treat you differently. They take the time, they make time, and they are generous with loving gestures. If you knew your loved one was dying would you have to scramble to make up for lost time, working hard to let them know how much you loved them? Or would there be a solid trail of evidence left over the years that proves you had loved them?

In my wrestling I have to believe Mom knew I loved her. I wasn’t one of those ‘no-time-of-day-ers’ Dad was talking about. My four sisters – Judy, Mary, Robin and Sam- were all there around her in the end. My sisters said that it seemed like Mom was holding on, painfully, waiting for me to get there. They told me she asked for me, softly, “Where’s my Patti?” There is a strong family resemblance among us Livingstone girls, and my dear sweet sister, Robin, even tried to impersonate me at Mom’s bedside so that Mom would finally let go. 

I always felt like I failed her in the end but today, with you as my witness, I am letting go. I was always angry about the lousy financial restrictions of our work that caused Mom having to die without me by her side. And I was always just a little bit angry with Mom for not having trusted me with the truth about her cancer. I’m letting it go. Finally.

A few days after the funeral, my sisters and I gathered in Mom’s room. We sorted through all her things, dividing up all the keepsakes we wanted to have, crying and laughing and remembering. I have a box full of treasures from that day. And do you want to know the interesting thing about the things I chose to keep for myself? The things I chose to keep were pretty much all gifts I had given her over the years. There are unorganized piles of photos of great moments together, and it was proof that I had been in her life all along. Mom’s things were a trail of evidence that I had loved her not just because she was dying, but that I had always given her the time of day.

 And as I think of her, I will go through my box of her things, things that I had given her, the Box of Proof full of evidence that I had loved her well in life. And surely there will be peace. Surely.

Tweaking Destiny

I don’t think every surprise in life has been strategically pre-planned and pre-timed. I used to think they were, but I’ve lived a lot and seen a lot and it’s just too hard to believe that anymore. I’ve seen people who actually tweaked their own destiny, made adjustments to it, and because of it changed the course of the world or at least changed the course of the lives of others.

They are radicals who speak up even before it’s trendy to talk about ‘such things’. They are researchers who won’t sleep until they break through from hypotheses to fact. They are thinkers who keep asking the strangest questions until they get the answers or at least come up with better questions. They are artists who won’t quit mixing  it up because they just know there is another expression or colour out there. Sometimes they are world leaders obsessed with power.

What got me thinking about such things? Well…

It’s coming up the the 14th anniversary of the day when a premature baby girl from the Lahu tribe in Northern Thailand came to live with us as our daughter, Amanda Jasmine Siriporn DeWit. I’ve had a lot of questions concerning the events leading up to that April 14th in 1997. Did God ordain for her biological mother to get malaria and die giving birth on a dirt floor in a meager hut, just so that Peter and Pat would be able to adopt her as some sort of comfort after having lost a little son? Did God ordain for her father to run away in fear of the ghost of his dead wife so that an elderly grandmother would then be left to be the soul caregiver of this baby? Was the elderly grandma following a pre-determined plan when she threw the baby girl into the jungle and left her there to cry for three whole days, naked and alone and vulnerable to all the creatures of a tropical countryside?

Some would say yes, but I say no.

Where we actually do see God’s hand in such tragic events is when we step back, in hindsight, and consider all that could have been if anyone of those elements of Amanda’s story had been different. That’s where people who live by the Divine Rhythms can intervene, where they can do something to alter the course of someone’s destiny as well as their own, and they are able to recognize Beauty and Goodness even in situations that are universally considered ‘bad’ or ‘evil’.

It’s an evil result of greed that people in some parts of the world still have to die from malaria, that they live in such dire poverty that a grandmother can’t even find powdered milk to nourish a newborn. It’s evil that there are societies that allow their men to run away and leave their children fatherless. It’s evil that not everyone has access to quinine or mosquito nets, nor clean water, pre maternal health-care  or midwives. These are evils that exist. No doubt about it.

In the middle of all the evil The Glimpse of Beauty we get is that a little girl escaped that cycle of poverty, escaped the fate of her mother, and who, because of having survived what was meant for evil, will be able to live a life of purpose and insight, Beauty and Goodness that she brings to our family and everyone she meets. Both of our girls were a ‘surprise’ to some extent, and yet it makes total sense that they were born. Human biology makes sense.

The girls keep surprising us, and we enjoy the options of each day and the choices we have to respond knowing that somehow, somewhere down the road, all things can work out to be Good.

Here’s a video of Amanda’s story that our middle son, Joel, made. You can hear Alycia in the background too. Make sure you watch till the end and catch the great bloopers!

Love Thy Stranger

Alycia

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Having lived in Bangkok all their lives, my girls are very much aware of the real world. They see it up-close every time we go out. The prostitutes. The red-light districts. The hustlers. The bag-snatchers. The bribery and corruption. There are no illusions for them. They get the good, the bad and the ugly. Some people worry that our girls see too much. Can they really process it well? Or are they being over-exposed at a young age? Won’t it scar them?

Well, read this and you tell me…

Not that long ago, Peter and I had to attend an event that was not interesting at all to Amanda or Alycia. Amanda stayed home, but Alycia wanted to come along because we would be going to Newsong after the event and she didn’t want to miss it. We dropped her off at the Emporium mall with plans to meet up in 2 hours or so. She had a cell phone and some money to get a meal and do something fun. She wasn’t as excited to be going on her own to the mall as I would have been at her age. I, on the other hand, was feeling a bit nervous about it.

After the event, we met where we had planned. She gave me the change that was left over. With a few quick calculations I realized that there was not as much change as I had expected. I needed to find out, trying not to sound like I doubted her yet trying to see where the rest of the money went. I don’t know why I was so worried about it, it wasn’t a huge amount.

“Hey you got here right on time! Did any strangers bother you?” I asked.

With a very patient sigh she answered, “No mom. No one bothered me.”

“What did you eat?” She loves Burger King, so I thought she’d have gone there.

“I didn’t go to Burger King,” she answered, reading my mind like she often does. ” Instead I got corn in a cup. I’ve always wanted to try that. And then I got a cream puff at Beard Papa’s.”

I am mentally adding it all up.

“Nice. I love that corn. Is that all you ate? Were you still hungry?”

“Ya, that was all. It was fine.”

“What did you do for all that time?”

“I went to play a couple of games, in that arcade over by the golf store,” she answered as the irony was not wasted on me; the irony of her being old enough to go to the mall alone yet young enough to still enjoy the kid’s arcade.

“Did you run into anyone you know?”

“No.”

“So…” and I dropped the bomb, ” Is that all the money you spent? There’s not much change here.”

“No.”

Aha! I knew it. I looked at her, grinning, waiting for the rest of it.

“I stopped at the 7-11 across the street.”

We usually get a purple Fruitare Popsicle when we stop in there.

“Did you get a purple Popsicle?”

“No. I got 2 bottles of milk.”

“Well that’s a healthy thing to have,” I reasoned, and who could fault a child for wanting to buy milk, of all things?

“Did you finish it all?”

“I didn’t drink it.”

“You’re saving it?” I was getting curious about this milk purchase.

“No. It wasn’t for me. I bought it for the man with no arms on the sidewalk.”

I think my face softened visibly, maybe something like the Grinch when his heart grew and his smile changed and his eyes became warm. I think my face did that exact same thing at that moment.

I tried to picture it. Alycia will almost always want to buy something for the street beggars, and she takes time to kneel down, to talk to them, and leave some food or drink beside them. But the man with no arms? That had me baffled. I was having a hard time picturing it.

“So how could he drink the milk with no arms.”

“I put a straw in it.” she told me, as if that answered everything.

I was quiet for a while. Then I had to ask. “But I don’t understand. Did he lean over and drink from the milk bottle on the ground?”

” I sat beside him. I held it for him while he drank from the straw. Till he had enough. Then I put it down and I left.”

I had no more questions. But she had one.

“Why?”

Why indeed! I guess I’m the one who still needs help processing the real life on the streets of Bangkok. And what better person to help me do that than Alycia, as she shows me over and over what it means to love thy neighbour as well as thy stranger.

We Argue a Lot but I Still Love You

Miss Thirteen

 

I have never read the book on love languages. I know that it was good for many, but I just can’t make myself read it. I’m pretty sure my love language isn’t in the book. Last week at the suggestion of a friend I thought I’d take the test online. That test just stressed me. I kept clicking and unclicking for every question, so much so that

Do You Really Want to Know?

 

Christmas Eve

 

I’d often imagined that if ever the story of my life would be told it would be told by my children. Not that it would be such a great story that they would feel compelled to tell it, but that I’d always imagined my life itself would leave me unable to actually tell anything, that it would turn me into a broken paralyzed heap unable to walk to the washroom  let alone tell my own story. I’d imagined that a book would be written by one of my sons, and then made into a movie; the opening scene being in a Bangkok hospital room with me propped up in bed, tubes curling into my nose and monitors beeping, my five children hovering around my bed in quiet conversation and my youngest daughter asking innocently, “What happened to mom?”  Then one of the boys would inhale deeply and exhale exasperatedly and ask, ” Do you really want to know?” and they would begin to tell my story as they remember it. Then at that point the movie would go into flashback and the viewers would find themselves in a dismally faded stucco house on John Street, in an old town called Whitby, Ontario. That is where my very tired and thin parents lived, along with my two older sisters, and that is where the story of me began.