Childhood.

24th
Mar. × ’11
By robertcloyce

I just had a realization of a weird dichotomy. Well, I guess I noticed it before, but never really thought too much about it.

I’m not a parenting expert.

Now, before you think that I am trying to tell you what to do, please stop and read that last sentence again. I’ll probably refer back to it a time or two, but if case you skimmed over it: I’m not a parenting expert.

Here’s the strange situation…

We want our kids to be kids and enjoy what it means to be kids, then we get caught up in the whole “competition” of life.

My kid might be 5, but I have made sure to tutor them in advanced mathematics. Therefore they are actually solving trigonometric equations before your kid.

Guess what, my kid is in first grade, but she can quote all of the capital of every country in Europe and tell you the lineage of each of their rulers (and the royal pets, if it applies).

Now all of that is great, right? Above-average children? Yeah, sure.

But this is what got me thinking. If kids bypass the whole “kid” thing, when will they ever get to experience that? If we encourage our kids to go ahead and dive headlong into stuff at age 5 that they will have plenty of time to explore at age 8, 9, 10, they will quickly get wrapped up in that and probably miss whatever they would have enjoyed as a 5 year old. The society around us is already doing a pretty good job of attacking our kid’s childhood, and they are successful unless we parents go on a strategic offensive against it.

Waldorf education has an interesting opinion on this. Besides the strong emphasis on childhood, and retaining the childhood innocence for much longer than society would want us parents to allow, Waldorf explains that a child will experience a heightened interest in a subject at certain points in their life. This is usually in direct relationship with their age and their school grade.

And no, this isn’t an interest because you introduced good, but age inappropriate material into your child’s life and now they are “hooked”.

My kids are 6 and 2.

My daughter is 6. I will not give her books to read that have a suggested age of 8 or say “young adult”. She doesn’t need to be introduced to material appropriate for an 8-year-old two years early.

My daughter is 6. She still cries when we have to leave her friend’s house. I’m not going to tell her to act like a big kid and suck it up. (We do address attitude issues, though).

My daughter is 6, almost 7, but that doesn’t mean I expect her to act like a 10-year-old. And I won’t push for her to be involved in activities that are advertised for 8-year-olds.

My daughter is 6. She still likes Arthur and Bubble Guppies (and sometimes Caillou). You know, the really kiddy shows. I’m not going to tell her that those are just for little kids and that she shouldn’t want to watch those. In fact, I’m going to let her decide to watch her kid’s shows without my commentary on what I like or prefer.

All of the same applies to my son. He’s 2. He’s not a “big” kid. He doesn’t have to act like a “grown up”. He can be a kid.

My son is 2. He plays little mermaid with my daughter. That’s fine. I’m not going to tell him that boys don’t play girl games. He’ll find that out soon enough. And besides, does a 2-year-old really understand the stereotypes on gender roles at this age?

My son is two. If he cries when he hurts himself, I’ll hold him. There will be plenty of times where society demands that he suck it up. So at 2-years-old, he can cry and still turn out ok.

So. I guess what I’m saying is that I have normal kids. I have a 6-year-old that does what normal 6-year-olds do. Is that boring to you that I didn’t just say my 6-year-old loves watching Jane Austen movies with her mother and talking about English culture and how she loved reading Sense and Sensibility (the young adult version, of course)?

I celebrate their childhood and do not wish for it to pass. If I started pushing for them to “advance”…it could very quickly be at the cost of their child-like mentality and approach?

I’ve just been thinking…please refer to the third sentence in this post.

(Plus other people write more educated articles and books about things like post-traumatic stress on children who advance through their childhood phase too quickly…and stuff like that.)

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Steps.

10th
Mar. × ’11
By robertcloyce

I’ve been feeling an inner urge to write again.

I’ve been pretty dry the last three months.

I lost most of my drive.

I’m good at faking it.

I’m really good at faking it. That is probably what my real problem is…and now, I just want to write something. I still have a lot to talk about.

Nepal was my last post. I’ll get back to that.

The miscarriage was before that. It’s still affecting us. The other night Cheyenne started the conversation on when we should think about having another baby, and I got scared. We argued. I think that I hide my insecurities behind the “cost” of having another baby…but I know that we are frugal enough to not be that fazed by it. I just get scared about the whole process happening again. Improbable, yes…but valid feelings none the less.

I’ve felt jealously a number of times, lately.

We’ve cried over and over again from being excited about babies being born to our friends, about pregnancy announcements, but also the memories of our baby.

I’m pretty sure it’s natural…Cheyenne was supposed to be updating her Facebook status with how many weeks along she is, and how we told the kids that the baby had fingers and what its heartbeat sounded like.

Some people are probably rolling their eyes at us, and that bugs me too. The “just snap out of it” mentality needs a slap in the face.

Life is really good, though. I mean that.

My life is a beautiful, complex creation of moments, triumphs, defeats, tears, laughs, struggles, breakthroughs, and baby steps. I like that last one…baby steps.

So after three months, I’m still walking through this “story”.

I’ll celebrate each of the steps.

 

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Time Machine.

15th
Dec. × ’10
By robertcloyce

I stood with my camera ready, focused on the doctor as he feverishly worked on a newborn baby, waiting for him to take a first breath on his own. Directly behind the doctor and a number of nurses laid the mother, her legs still held a part by the stirrups on the birthing chair.

She moaned quietly.

One nurse tended to her while much of the attention remained on the baby. Another nurse continually pated and rubbed the wrinkly feet of this little boy while another gave small compressions on the baby’s chest.

“Suction!” the doctor (a Japanese orthopedic surgeon) requested. A couple people scurried around and eventually rejoined the group around the baby. “It’s not working!” the doctor said, a tinge of frustration surfacing in his voice as he removed a long string of mucous from the baby’s airway. Still no breathing.

I had been standing in the room for about 5 minutes. I whispered a prayer and turned and walked out the door.

This particular rural hospital in western Nepal has forty beds, and sees about 20,000 patients a year. This day was no different. Families sat at the sides of their loved ones, concerned looks filling their faces, kids played in the courtyards, new patients filled out their paperwork and waited to see the doctor. I wandered the halls, greeted the patients with my hands pressed together saying “Namaste,” and took photographs. Nepali people love to have their photos taken.

I eventually made my way into a surgery (covered in the sterile clothing cover, head cover, and mask) to photograph a 15 year old boy who had suffered from something like club foot since he was an infant. The Japanese surgeon told me that this family had saved up 15,000 rupees (about $200) for this boy to have surgery. The boy laid timidly on the table. I overheard the doctor refer to the spinal anesthesia he had been given, and then they began to tighten the tourniquet to prepare for the surgery to begin. I would take about two hours. I left after about 10 minutes of the procedure, removed the coverings and walked down the hallway. I looked into the delivery room, the baby and mother were no longer in there. My heart was heavy as I tried to process these few hours at a rural mission hospital.

In some ways I felt like my world had collided with a world that I am so unfamiliar with. As if the airplane that I disembarked from was a time machine, and I stepped off into a world where time wasn’t a factor, life is hard, yet life is lived…and money isn’t as controlling for people.

Before we arrived at the mission hospital we stopped in a little village for tea. We drank out of stainless steel cups with the chickens pecking around us and the goats nosily wandering closer and closer. Boys gathered across the street to play a game that reminded me of shuffle board in a way, but it was played on a board about 3 feet by 3 feet. Other kids laughed as I would take their photo and show them on the screen on my camera. Women carried their large loads of grass and leaves on their heads, some sat cooking by a fire…life was just slower. I felt it. I think I let those moments sink into me, and that this village moment plus the experiences at the hospital really got me thinking about my world.

Fast-paced. Deadline oriented. Bills. Time. Things. Crazy….

This whole “things are different in a foreign country” is not new to me, but my life had changed so drastically over the last 15 years since I left Kenya as a missionary kid. So something inside of me always rises up on these trips…but today it just seemed to really stop me in my tracks.

There is a lot of tension inside of me now. I’m not sure what else to say, but I needed to write these things down so that I can come back to them and process this a bit more.

Namaste.

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Two Sentences.

4th
Dec. × ’10
By robertcloyce

On Tuesday night I sat in front of my computer crafting just the right words to add to the back of our Christmas card. Cheyenne was upstairs, so we chatted back and forth, agreed on something, and then I uploaded the files. Our cards were going to be arrive in a couple of days, and this is what the back would say:

The laughter in our house is going to get louder! In 2011 we will hear more giggles and share a lot of grins with our new little baby.

The cards arrived on Thursday.

Earlier that day I had been at work when Cheyenne called. She had some bleeding, and after talking to our midwife, they scheduled an ultrasound to investigate. I left work and headed home.

We sat in the ultrasound room knowing that it wasn’t going to be good news. I was watching the screen, and didn’t notice any movement. We were then ushered to a small hallway sitting area where we were told the news by our midwife (via telephone). Cheyenne, by the calendar, was about 11-weeks along, but they found a baby that quit developing at 6-weeks gestation.

The tears started.

We drove home stunned, calling family and updating them on what had happened, knowing that we were now just waiting for the natural miscarriage process to run its course.

We already had plans to have dinner with our pastor, so I called to cancel. I just left a voicemail, but then got a text that they wanted to bring us dinner. We obliged. By the time they arrived we had some time to process what was happening, and just thought it would be nice to sit and chat for awhile. It was a nice breath of fresh air before the dark clouds rolled in.

It was a dark, traumatic, and emotional five hour process. The kids were in bed, not knowing what was going on in the other room. We were mourning the loss of what would have been a son or daughter in between violent contractions. But in a strange way we felt stuck in between not really connecting with this baby (next week was going to be our first appointment where we would hear the heartbeat), but still feeling the connections that this little life was a part of us. I don’t really know how to explain that, or those feelings… As a man I never “felt” this baby in any way, but yet I felt so attached.

My heart ripped into pieces every time the toilet flushed.

Midnight rolled around. It was now December 3rd, Cheyenne’s birthday.

We finally went to sleep around 3am.

Friday found us stunned, sad, exhausted, but most of all, numb. I had ordered cupcakes to be delivered for our birthday weekend (Cheyenne on the 3rd, mine on the 6th), but they didn’t look as good this time. Our neighbors welcomed Shiloh-Grace over to their house for the day, and Huck watched a lot of TV. We just pretty much sat around and processed stuff.

At one point I went down to my computer to fix our Christmas card. I had 100 cards telling everyone that the baby that just passed was going to bring us a lot of laughter, and now we were breaking down, weeping, at any given moment. I stared at the screen and read those two sentences over and over. I put my cursor at the end of the second sentence and reached for the delete button.

I couldn’t hardly bring myself to do it.

I knew that when I hit the delete button, it was as if was erasing the existence of this baby. I know that sounds really weird…and it’s not really the truth, but there was a moment where I realized that this was the spot where everyone was going to find out. But now no one was going to know. No one was going to know that this little life was even around.

I deleted it.

I bent over my keyboard and cried. No one was around, and I cried a lot.

I reordered our cards, turned off the computer and went back upstairs.

Two sentences that I wish I didn’t have to remove. Two sentences that were going to bring so much joy to our lives. Two sentences that we were so excited to tell you.

Today I sat at the piano and practiced for tomorrow’s worship service. After I was done going through the songs I just started playing a song that had popped into my mind.

You hold my every moment
You calm my raging seas
You walk with me through fire
And heal all my disease

I trust in You
I trust in You

I believe that You’re my healer…

This morning we woke up to a beautiful snowy white covering all around us. The first snow had arrived! The pure, white covering just seemed to represent a fresh start. Huck came bolting back into our room “it no-ing, momma!”, he exclaimed. Cheyenne and I looked at each other and laughed, even more thankful for the two miracles that we have already been blessed with.

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Blessings.

29th
Nov. × ’10
By robertcloyce

All the food was cooked, the table was set, our plates filled and we sat and reached out to grab each other’s hands a say a prayer before we began to eat. It was our first Thanksgiving celebrated with just the four of us. I was saying the prayer of thanksgiving for the usual: food, job, and health. Then I started saying thanks for each of our family members.

I started with Shiloh-Grace because she was sitting on my right. I thanked the Lord for her loving manner, her laugh and smile, and her joyfulness.

I then thanked the Lord for our little Huckleberry and his “wildness”, his energy and the laughter and love he brings to our family.

Next was Cheyenne. I thanked the Lord for her being such a wonderful mother to our children, and a great wife and home-maker. I thanked God for her resilience and strength that has brought her through some very tough times, and for the love that she has shown me and the things that she has taught me.

I started to cry.

I was so overwhelmed by the many blessings that I had sitting at the table with me. Our home is truly blessed.

This weekend I didn’t do any work (and now I am paying for it). But it was so nice to actually “be” with my family. Not just in the same house, but spending every minute with them. We did crafts, we cooked, we laughed, we watched movies, we cuddled, we ate a lot, we played games…it was perfect.

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Blown Up.

8th
Nov. × ’10
By robertcloyce

I had another STORY moment. I stumbled across a song that had a huge impact on me at the conference just a month or so ago. When I heard it, I think time slowed for just a minute and I breathed deep in that moment.  The timing was perfect, too.

It was Sunday morning, and a new day. Saturday had been rough, emotionally tiring and quite honestly, horrible.

When relationships explode, why do they cause such a huge mess? A rhetorical question, but Saturday blew up. (Kind of weird that we saw fireworks on the way home from our dinner…)

I am so glad that I have a wife who is very vocal about our family, the things in our family, the things we do…etc, and doesn’t just bow down to everything that I say or do. But as we got home Saturday, things exploded. I continued my “argument” while my voice changed to some strange, really kind of high-pitched sound. I was furious. Some serious emotions about other events had built up and I was just trying to express them, and Cheyenne was trying to fix me. I didn’t want to be fixed in those moments, I just needed to vent…and so I said some not so nice stuff embellished with some four-letter words.

I got out of the car, threw my take out cup towards the trash (but you always miss when you are mad…or at least I do). It is the humorous moment that you just ignore because you have to keep the tension present, and going to pick up the cup would have looked so uncool in that moment.

Once inside the house I decided that I wasn’t going to stay around. I had this amazing idea of going for a drive. So I got out to the garage, got in the car and headed off. I just went around the corner and sat in a parking lot and stared at the Fox River. We won’t talk about “running away” right now.

I hate blowing up. It doesn’t help solve anything in any situation. And quite honestly, I hate the feelings that come over me when everything builds up so much that words just explode out of my mouth. I think those moments make me realize how fragile I really am. I realize that if I am left to my own devices, I will extremely screw things up. I also start to question my level of self-control.

I sat for quite awhile, sent some apologies over text and then went home.

I remember when I heard this song during the worship at STORY it really resonated with me. I am so conscious of my own imperfection, my sin, my fear, my lack of self-control at times, and my rottenness…and yet I am loved.

Hearing this song start to play on my computer Sunday just stopped time and brought back the reality that in my imperfection, Christ’s love is perfect…and he loves me.

You are good, You are good
When there’s nothing good in me
You are love, You are love
On display for all to see
You are light, You are light
When the darkness closes in
You are hope, You are hope
You have covered all my sin

You are peace, You are peace
When my fear is crippling
You are true, You are true
Even in my wandering
You are joy, You are joy
You’re the reason that I sing
You are life, You are life,
In You death has lost it’s sting

Oh, I’m running to Your arms,
I’m running to Your arms
The riches of Your love
Will always be enough
Nothing compares to Your embrace
Light of the world forever reign

You are more, You are more
Than my words will ever say
You are Lord, You are Lord
All creation will proclaim
You are here, You are here
In Your presence I’m made whole
You are God, You are God
Of all else I’m letting go

My heart will sing
no other Name
Jesus, Jesus

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Friendships Change.

25th
Oct. × ’10
By robertcloyce

(this one might be a little hard to follow because it is basically just rolling right out of my head.)

Friendships have haunted me most of my life. Not because of a lack of friends, but just the thought that one day we might not be friends anymore. Physical moves add distance, easier to just let the friendship slip away. Lifestyle changes eliminate things once held in common, friendship changes. Misunderstandings come along, common ground can’t be found and people just move on. I don’t know why, but I have just been evaluating this lately.

After leaving the friends of my early childhood and heading to Africa, there was always a hesitancy around my friendships because I wasn’t really sure how long I would be around. I guess this really hit more after high school. Strangely enough, I still keep in contact with quite a few of my high school friends. Even though we are all thousands of miles away from our “homes” and scattered through the world.

After high school, I think I turned into the cautious and guarded one that wouldn’t let anyone get too close. …But then that was one of the things that I wanted the most. (I’m such a strange paradox.) Good friendships would develop, and then crumble. Sometimes I didn’t know why, other times because I was a moron. So I would draw back and just live with shallow friends.

I do have some good friends in my life. I could pick up the phone and call any number of them and spill my heart out, and they would listen. But I think it would be one of those delayed phone calls, made after I have gone through the “I can do this alone” scenarios, and the “we’ve grown so far apart” thoughts.

I just think there is a part of me that is destined to be African such as (at the risk of oversimplifying) time doesn’t really matter, relationships do. Schedules don’t really exist, community does. Life is lived together. It’s not a rush, rush, rush society where everyone is too busy for anyone else.

Personally, our community was once important. Now it has been reduced to an acquaintance.

Maybe that is the core of it all. When you live in close community, deep friendships are guaranteed to form. But when we stop living life closely with others and start relying on appointments, distance is going to set in and separate us.

It’s a cycle for me. I won’t think about this for a long time, and then it surfaces again. So I wrestle with the thought of my personality, my interests, my quirks, my stories, my past friendships. Then I move forward.

This 31 year old probably has a skewed perspective on what it would look like to have a really close and deep friendship. But somewhere inside of me, it sounds like a good idea.

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Phone Call.

20th
Oct. × ’10
By robertcloyce

**This is the story that I allude to in the post below, “Stories Collide”.
Permission was granted to post these details.**

I got a text, out of the blue a few days ago, from an old friend. “Dude…Loved ur blog.” “Thanks…” I responded, and the conversation picked up. I shared how this was really good for me, letting me connect some dots and process some stuff, and was just an all around good “new” thing for me. We got around to honesty and transparency, made a few comments and then decided to continue the conversation over the phone.

“When’s good for you?” I texted.

“Well…Tonight after 10? He responded.

“I think that might work. I’ll be up. All right call me…and if I haven’t heard from you, I’ll call you.”

I got tired that night and we didn’t end up talking, but yesterday we caught up with each other for that phone conversation we promised each other about a week ago.

The conversation started off pretty quickly because we had already covered most of the pleasantries. I heard a sigh and then “I can’t believe I’m about to tell you this” followed.

My friend went on to tell me that on two separate occasions (in the past week) he had typed in a URL into his web browser that would have taken him to view pornography online.  Right on the verge of clicking the “enter” key, he erased the address.

Instead of acting as if the crisis was averted, or keeping this a secret, he shared these feelings with me, and as I mentioned in the previous post, our stories collided.

I started to tell him how I hit the enter key. It was pretty much a normal thing during my college years. No one knew, so I was getting away with it.  It was a habit that I kicked for a while, but never told anyone that I had ever had a problem. Never let the secret out into the light. Then it came into my marriage.

I remember sitting embarrassed and ashamed asking Cheyenne to forgive me and to give me a chance to earn her trust again.

We prayed together. We put up safeguards on our computers and I opened up to a good friend of mine about my problem (and past) with pornography. It was so freeing.

Now I had a chance to pass that on to a friend of mine.

We talked about how the routine that he had with his wife of reading scripture and praying had been neglected. We talked about how these temptations pop up out of nowhere, it seems. We talked about how we all think we can hold these secrets inside and beat our temptations on our own.

I told him that he needed to tell his wife about this, and then I winced inside. Had I gone too far? Did I just step over the line?

Tangent…I think that is the feeling that keeps so many of us from confronting each other in love and grace, and shedding the light on the darkness in each of our lives.

I heard another sigh “I feel so much better”, he said.

I got a text this morning. “I told her last night. …we cried and prayed. I feel a million times better.” Then earlier this morning I got an email letting me know that he had signed up for X3 accountability software.

My eyes started to fill with tears. This is what life is all about. This is what our stories are all about. We share our lives so that we can all build each other up, encourage each other, keep each other accountable, love each other, inspire each other, challenge each other, and most of all be there for each other.

If you have a part of your story that is still hidden, still kept in secret, find someone that you can trust and let them know what is going on. No one has it all put together (like they want you to think).

This story collision was unexpected, but uplifting. It opened up a new connection for accountability for myself, and my friend. [sigh] I need all the help I can get.

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Stories Collide.

19th
Oct. × ’10
By robertcloyce

The disciples came up and asked, “Why do you tell stories?”

He replied, “You’ve been given insight into God’s kingdom. You know how it works. Not everybody has this gift, this insight; it hasn’t been given to them. Whenever someone has a ready heart for this, the insights and understandings flow freely. But if there is no readiness, any trace of receptivity soon disappears. That’s why I tell stories: to create readiness, to nudge the people toward receptive insight. In their present state they can stare till doomsday and not see it, listen till they’re blue in the face and not get it.

Matthew 13:10-12

One day I was listening to This American Life on WBEZ Chicago Public Radio and the story they were telling was about people who like to spy on other people. This isn’t the peeping tom scenario, but amateur spies who have found creative ways to spy on their neighbors or even people they don’t know.

One scene talks about a lady who moves into a lower income neighborhood in Oakland and one night, through her baby monitor, she picks up a phone conversation from one of the neighbors, Lil’ Mo. Since she is convinced he is a drug dealer, and he openly calls the lady “hater”, she is anxious to listen to these conversations. Who knows what she’s going to find out. Long story short she gets pulled into the story of this family and somehow finds acceptance with the neighborhood.

Another scene told the story of a man who discovered that an obscure channel he could pick up through his VCR (connected to his TV) was actually a security camera in the lobby of a building somewhere in the city. The man would sit for hours watching and waiting for someone to walk by. One day he sees a lady in the lobby, and over a period of about a month he is drawn into watching this person move through the lobby of the building. Curious about her story, her life, her activities, he even started video tapping the channel so that he wouldn’t miss catching a glimpse of this lady.

I think at the core of each of these episodes is the desire to know someone else’s story. But what is even more interesting is that I get pulled into the story through the story. Did you follow that? The storytelling is so captivating and interesting that I want to know the details of these other stories, even if they just end with a guy deciding to delete all of the video tapes and move on, never discovering anything interesting about the lobby lady.

Jesus said it pretty good in the scripture above: “I tell stories to create readiness, to nudge the people toward receptive insight.” But it doesn’t stop with just Jesus. I’m telling a story that intertwines and collides with the Greatest Story, and my story is always affecting someone.

Just yesterday my story collided with someone else’s story. In a moment of honesty, vulnerability and accountability one story opened up the conversation for another story’s dark secret to be brought into the light. Guilt lifted, grace extended. We both walked away inspired and freed.

You, too, are a story teller. Embrace that and weave your story with another story and ultimately the Greatest Story. Imagine the extended community of story-tellers filling the world with a story of love, compassion, acceptance, grace and joy. I think that is a pretty cool picture.

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Free.

14th
Oct. × ’10
By robertcloyce

I watched the first Chilean miner rescued from below the earth’s surface the other night with tears in my eyes. What a beautiful moment of reuniting with his family, and truly getting a sense of what it means to be free for the first time since the collapse of the mine on August 5th. While this rescue was going on I thought about the story of baby Jessica, stuck in the well in 1987 and freed after some 50+ hours. Both of these stories draw us in because we all value freedom whether it is physical, spiritual or mental.

As I settled into our Thursday night routine (Project Runway), Mondo (my pick for who is going to win this season) mentioned how the whole experience has been very freeing for him. He announced publicly that he was HIV+ just a couple of episodes ago, a secret that he had held onto for 10 years.

It is so true that our life experiences can be very freeing and empowering. I see writing out the interwoven stories of my life as a very freeing experience. Most of my life has been spent worried about someone else’s definition of freedom for my life. I would act out the script that people around me had prepared and follow their directing, never offering any of my personal artistry.

So just a small post to say that Story-Year is the place where I am finding my personal freedom. My voice, if you will. I want to let this experience change me, enlighten me, reinforce me, or encourage me…and ultimately free me.

(And for anyone who might worry about this idea of “freedom”…it is freedom founded in Scripture, not rebellion.)

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