The Birth of Kwagala Project

Anyone who knows me in real life has probably seen quite a few posts on Facebook and heard quite a bit in person about Purse of Hope, the charity founded by the amazing Kristen Hendricks and supported in a very significant way by the equally amazing folks at Total Attorneys.

When you look at the work that gets done and the lives that are changing every day, it's hard to believe that the organization is only a few years old, and that Total Impact House is even newer. Our first high school graduate just started at University!

Perhaps because the organization has grown so quickly beyond its roots, "Purse of Hope" no longer seemed to encompass all that it was...and that meant not only a name change but a whole new look. The organization is still providing full-service aftercare to victims of child prostitution, from education and vocational training to food, counseling, shelter and an incredible sense of family and community that many of these girls have never before experienced: it's just doing so under a different name.

Kwagala Project, so named because "kwagala" means "love" in Lugandan, is Purse of Hope grown beyond its seams--and growing in its impact every day. When you have a moment, please check out the new website and/or "like" the new Kwagala Project Facebook page.

Circles of Life

Last night, I spent a very long night at the hospital with my stepdaughter, Beth. We were hoping (in vain, it turned out) to transform that very large bump in her midsection into a very small child we could hand around and coo over and share the burden of carrying. Being pregnant when it's 93 degrees at 6 p.m. is no picnic, even without the contractions and odd compulsion to clean.

With Beth, Beth's husband Shawn and me all at the hospital, my 18-year-old stepson and 14-year-old daughter stepped up to take care of Andrew, Beth and Shawn's older child (older being a relative term that sounds a little silly when applied to a 2-year-old).

They did a great job, and even managed to get him calmed down to sleep in a strange hotel room with mom and dad both away. And that's when my life retrospective unexpectedly began.

As I sat in the hospital thinking about Beth at five, playing mother to her younger brother, and listening to the heartbeat of her second child, Tori sent me a text message. It said, "I don't know how Beth ever sleeps. I think I would just look at Andrew all the time. He's so beautiful."
I couldn't argue with that, but I have to admit that my beautiful grandson didn't have my full attention. Because in that moment I was transported back to Valentine's Day of 1996. At daybreak, my little sister tiptoed into my bedroom, looked at my 37-hour-old daughter and said, "Have you slept at all, or do you just look at her?"

My sister was 23 that morning. She wore silver shorts that zipped all the way around and had her new boyfriend in tow; his rainbow-snow-cone tinted hair was covered by a red velvet hat and although he insists to this day that it was a crooked smile he had painted on his face, I know that it was a fishhook coming out of the corner of his mouth.

Today, my sister is a 36-year-old librarian at a Catholic College. I haven't seen the silver shorts in years, and she's handed off her fishnets.

The infant she joined me in gazing upon that morning has become the babysitter, sitting up late at night watching her nephew sleep.

And the boy who trailed into my bedroom behind my sister in the early-morning hours, carrying a black rose, is married and about to become a father himself.

And, of course, that baby my daughter sat up watching last night is just days--or even hours--from becoming the big brother. And after that, the babysitter...the bridegroom...the expectant father himself. It may seem strange to think that far ahead--to look at a toddler and see new generations--but it would have seemed just as strange to think about the four-year-old wishing on a star at the drive-in as the mother, or the little boy whose "best birthday ever" happened at Chuck E. Cheese in July of 1997 as the 18-year-old babysitter, or my own infant daughter as the teenager who would get out of bed to comfort her nephew when he missed his mother in the middle of the night.

In Honor of Valentine's Day...

I usually try to keep the lines pretty clean--I don't think that most of my writing blog readers care about my personal life or my dog blog readers want to hear my philosophizing on Catholicism or...well, you get the idea. But since it's Valentine's Day, I thought I'd break tradition and remind you all (or maybe tell you for the first time) about my dating and relationship blog at http://life-love-and-online-dating.com

In addition to the obvious irony of the fact that I even have a relationship blog, my co-author is pretty entertaining (even if he does seem to think he has something up on Tiger Woods because he can operate a jackhammer...or something).

While you're in the Valentine's Day spirit (or the anti-Valentine's Day spirit), stop by and check us out. And while you're there, weigh in on our Valentine's Day Poll.

A Little Hope on a Dark Day

I’m not really the type to write a blog post about how much I like my friends. First, as you all know, I’m not exactly the warm and fuzzy type. I’m pretty logical. And logic tells me that you all KNOW that I like my friends, because if I 9/didn’t I…well…wouldn’t be friends with them.

But last night, I wrote a short post referring back to my pre-9/11 post last year. That post was all about how sad it was to me that the one positive thing we’d gained from 9/11 had been so quickly lost. In the immediate wake of 9/11, everyone was nice to everyone else and people donated whatever they had and those who were near to the scene reached out in any way they could. Perhaps my view was a little different because of my religion, but in that moment I saw the closest thing I’d ever seen to the world I believe God made—a world in which we were “one body”. And despite the terrible tragedy that inspired it, it was a beautiful, hopeful, affirming thing to watch and to be a part of.

And then we moved on.

Eight years later, we remember the tragedy. We remember the anger, and maybe the fear. We mourn for those lost and maybe even for the sense of security lost, but we don’t seem to remember that we discovered that we were all one people, in this thing together.

While I was lamenting the loss of that feeling and wonderingly vainly and naively (ever notice how close those two words are) why we couldn’t live that way every day, I suddenly thought about my friend Barb Cooper. Because Barb is that person every single day of her life.

You may know this already, because you may read her very popular blog, So, The Thing Is… Barb’s blog is, in a funny, non-preachy, self-deprecating kind of way, all about love: loving her family, her friends, her neighbors, her babysitter, the postman, and the stray cat peeking around the side of the house. Offering them her heart, willing their best good, and greeting every problem with an earnest, “Gosh, how can I help?” It’s an added bonus that she makes us laugh out loud in the process.

She’s a wonderful friend to me every day, but on this sad day, she’s more. As I contemplate the way most of us have drawn back into our shells and reverted to “me and mine” thinking, she’s an inspiration, and a point of hope. They may be few and far between, but there are people out there who live every day as we all should be…and maybe in a quiet, simple way, they’ll be the seeds of sustained change in a way that a national tragedy couldn’t.

Thank God I Don't Love You Anymore

I chose the title because it's the name of a song by my friend Maggie Brandon, and because I'm still amused by the fact that back in the third grade, my daughter (who has a great voice) recorded the song for a boy in her class (but requested that he return her tape after he'd listened to it).

But it's something I've been thinking about seriously lately. It seems we put a kind of premium on the ability to "get over" people. In a sense, in our world of relatively short-lived relationships, that makes sense. But in another, it's a sad commentary and maybe even risky business when we congratulate ourselves and each other for learning not to love someone anymore. On a personal level, it might seem like a triumph to close off that piece of our hearts when a relationship ends--or changes--but in the greater scheme of things is a little less love really a positive development? I'm inclined to think not.

For a mish-mash of reasons, I've been thinking recently about loving and stopping loving and loving again...and how maybe every love is diminished by the ability to "get over" the last one and the possibility that one day we'll "get over" this one, too.

My own life has been a bit unusual in this regard. Though I've been in a few serious relationships that changed shape, I haven't ever been in one that really ENDED. I broke off my first engagement in 1993, but we still talk regularly. I've been separated from my husband for four years, but just this morning he checked out a little sound my car was making, and I'm doing some writing for his website. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me that someone can be an integral part of your life for years and years and then that just disappears when things change. I think I'm about to walk away clean from someone I once loved for the first time in my life, and maybe that's why this is on my mind...maybe. But I think it's more than that, too.

I'm thinking more about training ourselves how not to love, and what kind of effects that's going to have in the end.