Normal

 

Last week, my family did what normal families do all the time. We took a vacation.

Sort of.

We loaded up a big SUV full of stuff and went for an interstate drive, north out of Georgia, into Tennessee to Knoxville, winding through Appalachia through Lexington, KY and up to Cincinnati.  Along the way, we stopped at McDonald's to eat.  We tried to count the number of golden arches we saw, but we quickly lost count around 9 before we'd even left the state of Georgia.  We listened to kid-friendly music and sang along, mostly VeggieTales.

It wasn't a vacation, though.  We don't have family in Cincinnati.  There is a great children's hospital there that specializes in treating pediatric airway difficulties.  We went to get my 1 year-old daughter a second opinion about surgical options for her airway, with the hope that one day she might breath, swallow, and speak successfully.

The freedom I felt during this simple drive took me by surprise.  I felt like we were normal for a few days.  It refreshed my awareness about how small Margaret's health issues have made our life.  We rarely leave the house as a family and we haven't in two years, going back to Margaret's harrowing time in utero.  Our circle of friends is smaller than it might be.  Our ability to take risks and explore professional opportunities is constrained.  Our experience of the world's bizarre variety is restricted.  Interstate 75, with our full family together, felt enormous and looked lovely.  A Korean meal in Cincinnati felt like a night on the town.  Staying in a hotel was delightfully strange.

No one has a normal life, if by "normal" one means "without hardship" or "without undue restrictions upon one's self-determination."  Our lives are all circumscribed:  peculiar family histories that corral us, debilitating illnesses, social or culturally-imposed barriers, personal foibles that we never come to peace with.

But why do we ever compare the lives that we have with the lives that we imagine we might have "if not for...?"  Where does our sense of what we are owed or deserve come from?  Is there health in being angry for what I don't have?

I have taught in sermons that it's important to lament - to be angry and frustrated with God for what we don't have that we believe we should, by right, possess.  I think it's a practice that helps us come to terms with the reality of our circumstances.  "Dammit God...."

But in my own life, in response to my own challenges, I'm not angry - not, at least, an anger that I can access in a helpful way.  But nor am I in a serene place of acceptance, where the blessings of what I have overshadow the sense of loss over what I don't have.  Instead I feel like I'm floating.  It's as though I can still watch, in my own mind, a television program of my "normal" life--the one without a sick child.  I really do see it.  And I don't watch the program from a place of being at home in my own situation.  I live it, but I can't be sure that I really own it.  I don't feel as much as I think I ought.  Feelings in my life are rarer than I wish they were.

But I did feel last week.  I felt good to be together with my whole family, driving.  For a few days, I was outside of my own confused relationship with the normal life I don't have.  We were all together, experiencing something thoroughly new.  It was a novelty of togetherness that I haven't felt in a long time.  I felt something.  I was in my own life.  That, probably, is what I've missed.

Maybe the "normal" that I've been missing is the experience of inhabiting my own life and feeling.