I’m posting over at Prodigal Mag today, and it’s an important post for a couple of reasons :

First, there has been some tension in the Prodigal community this week. We’re debating the issues, about gender equality and abuse apologetics and Scriptural exegesis. But at the heart of this discussion is also the issue of storytelling: when and how to tell a story and whether a story is ours to tell.

I’m learning as I go that one of the biggest challenges of being a nonfiction writer is learning to handle our loved ones’ stories with care. How we share true stories might not always communicate truth, and for that reason, not all storytelling is created equal. As writers and storytellers, we have to discern this boundary and respect it. And as readers, we have the right to criticize writers who we discern have crossed that boundary.

There have been some concerns that this boundary was crossed in one of Prodigal’s posts this week. My hope is that my post helps communicate better boundaries for storytelling to everyone, whether in the Prodigal community or the internet at large, whether you’re a writer or not. My hope is that my post brings healing to some of the hurt expressed this week.

Second, the post includes a pretty big piece of news on my part. I’ve been hinting at it for months here in on my little blog, but haven’t been quite ready to say it “out loud” on the internet. But after a lot of prayer and sweaty palms and hard work, I am finally ready to share it with all of you.

I’m writing a book.*

It will be a memoir about my mother’s battle with metastatic breast cancer, co-written by her and I.** I am two-thirds of the way through my proposal, and I’ll be sending it to a potential publisher next month. Darrell Vesterfelt is acting as my agent.

As you can imagine, this endeavor means that my mother and my family have entrusted this story to me, and that this project bears a lot of responsibility.

Join me over at Prodigal as I discuss the weight of writing this story, won’t you?

–

*Bet y’all thought I was going to announce that I’m pregnant. But I’m not. I’m procreating a book instead. I WIN.

**More on this later, I promise.

Perhaps by accident, it’s been almost three weeks since my last blog post. Silly me to think that I’d land stateside with my hands on a keyboard and content ready for you in a matter of days.

Instead, I returned from the Dominican on Saturday and then left on Sunday for my grandmother’sfuneral in Michigan. She died on the Friday morning before I went home. We were driving to the beach when my phone magically found cell reception long enough for me to get a deluge of messages, one of them holding the sad news that she was gone. Her funeral was on the following Tuesday, and then I came home to a mountain of emails and office work.

And then I just kind of let myself live this past weekend without my computer. I met dear blogging friends Kristin and Brenna and Tammy for breakfast on Saturday morning at the Lucky Platter in Evanston. (Go there and try their apricot cheese flakey immediately. Also, go visit my friends’ blogs. They’re wonderful people.)

And then, because my best friend just graduated culinary school and I haven’t seen her face in almost a month, we celebrated Saturday evening with a leisurely dinner at Bavette’s, a new place in the Rivernorth neighborhood with a 1920’s Paris atmosphere and a menu that’s, well, … c’est maginifique. I’m still dreaming about their peppered duck and goat cheese terrine with apricot mustard.

All this time, I’ve barely sat down to write. I didn’t take my laptop with me to the Dominican, thinking I wouldn’t have much time to write anyway. And I was right, I didn’t, but I’m glad I left the temptation behind. I journaled when I could, but being digitally disconnected for a whole week freed me from the stiffness of sitting at a computer for twelve hours a day so that I could walk through neighborhoods that were economically impoverished but rich in tangible love and community, and put my muscle behind a shovel and pour out love in the most literal ways. (If you’d like to know more about the service projects we did in the Dominican and the wonderful communities we got to connect with, read this post from our friends at Iglesia Communitaria Christiana, one of the churches we partnered with.)

Writing makes me present in my day to day life in a myriad of important ways, but my trip to the Dominican and this whole whirlwind month was an affirmation for me of something I’ve wrestled with for nearly a year :

It will be here when you get back.

It’s the total antithesis of what blogging experts and literary agents tell writers about platform and audience. But whether or not that’s good for a writer’s platform, as people, we need to hear that it’s okay to step back from things and take a deep breath. The blog is a means, not an end. And the blog has to be secondary to the actual writing that you feel called to do. It has to be secondary to the ways we live out life tangibly, whether it’s having dinner with friends or serving a community in need. It has to be secondary to actually making time to process our lives on a deeper level.

For the first half of 2012, I needed the rhythm of blogging to keep me going as I grieved the loss of my mother. And then, my grief turned a corner without my permission or will, and what I needed was to be still. What I needed was to be filled up by the words and ideas of others, instead of always pouring out my own. What I needed was to rethink the way that blogging works for me as a writer.

The people closest to me – offline and online – gently encouraged me with those words : It will be here when you get back. We understand.

It was a radical act of self-care that was made with a measure of sacrifice that I haven’t really regretted – less traffic, less comments, less attention. That stuff comes and goes. And while I’ve given up some things, I’ve also gained a lot from the decision.

I needed to learn to be more realistic about the time it takes me to think critically about the things I want to write.

I needed to be more present in my life – in my home, my work, my marriage, my faith.

Blogging less often has afforded me the time to take on bigger, long-term writing projects.

And as far as writing goes, blogging less often has also given me more time to craft blog content that is more meaningful and challenging to me as a writer.

I’ve also had more time and energy to invest in my work community so that I can do things like lead a group of students on a service project in a foreign country. And blogging less has allowed me to process my grief more naturally, because grief is unpredictable, and it will never be over nor neatly packaged in a few blog posts.

And so that’s where I’ve been and what I’m doing. Breathing deep and learning a new rhythm, being faithful to the deeper callings in my life. And of course, this community we’ve cultivated after nearly four years of this blog (!) has been nothing but supportive, even when I haven’t felt ready to hash this out. I’ll probably stay at the one-post-per-week pace on this blog for the foreseeable future while I work on those writing projects.

Maybe I wrote this for myself more than anyone else, but but thank you for your patience and grace. And if you are feeling fragile and broken because the pace and rhythm of your life has spread you thin, please be encouraged. Go out for a breath of fresh air, or a meal with friends, or a chance to invest in community in a new way. We understand. We’ll be here when you get back.

Tonight I get on a plane to a country I’ve never been to before. The university I work for asked me to lead a group of students to the Dominican Republic, where we’ll partner with an organization that helps local churches provide basic resources to their community – clean water, food, shelter, childcare.

They asked me back in October, and I hesitated – am I the right person for this? Me, the introvert? Me, the non-joiner? Me, the oft forgetful, haphazard, doing-too-many-things-at-once girl? It’s a big commitment, to lead a team of students, to raise the funds and stick through all the challenges and pull myself out of my introversion and leave my life behind for a week.

But I shut my eyes and clutched the phone and just said yes. 

Sometimes you just have to do that, you know? Forget how busy you are and how you don’t really know if you can afford to step away from life as usual; it is time to do something different and trust that it will be good and right and maybe eye-opening.

It’s been an adventure just trying to get us there.

There have been challenges every step away, from finding a co-leader to go with me, to raising all the funds, to making sure my international students received their visas on time, to wondering whether my paternal grandmother will hang onto life for a few more days until I get back and can be there for my family, right down to finally being able to pick up my passport this morning. (YES. This morning.)

I couldn’t even write about it because a part of me wondered whether it would actually happen. But it is. And every time I’ve worried about whether I’m right for this or things will turn out okay, things fall into place. Every. Single. Time. Our trip is fully funded, everyone has their visas and passports, and my grandma is still hanging on.*

And so I’m learning, before I’ve even set foot on the plane, that this isn’t about shriveled, whiny, confused me, but about faithfulness, trust, arms-wide-open life.

Let the real adventure begin.

—

Say a prayer for G’ma Phyllis and my family, will you? And for our team, that we have safe travel, teachable moments, and a whole lotta fun. See you in a week, friends. 

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post about questioning my own authority and the way I’ve felt silenced by certain power dynamics, especially in the conservative Christian culture that I grew up in. Today, I’m over at Prodigal Mag exploring the ways in which that culture gave me false authority, especially in terms of purity and modesty culture, and how it influenced my relationships – to my boyfriends and my friends.

It’s on the drive home from dinner that she and I start talking about the modesty/purity culture stuff. She’s been reading links here and there that I’ve posted on Facebook – you know the ones. She tells me she really related to Sarah feeling like “damaged goods” and really appreciated Emily “turning in her v-card” and was fascinated by that statistic she saw about 80% of our Christian peers not being virgins.

My best friend is one of the 80% and I am one of the 20% —

But we sat in the same youth group and heard the same purity talks. Why did we choose so differently? What were the things we believed or didn’t believe about sex that led to our decisions? How do we feel about those choices now?

It occurs to me as we talk that this conversation with my best friend should have happened ten years ago. (Read more here.)

If you haven’t been aware, the Church’s longtime stance on purity has been a topic of much debate in the faith blogging sphere as my peers and I sort through its implications for rape and abuse culture, sexism, and developing a healthy sexual ethic. If you would like to read more posts about the topic, I suggest you peruse this helpful roundup at A Deeper Story, or follow along with Preston Yancey’s series on developing a healthy sexual ethic.

Today I’m linking up with FemFest, a three-day synchroblog devoted to exploring feminism and its importance, co-hosted by J.R. Goudeau, Danielle Vermeer, and Preston Yancey. Click over to Danielle’s blog to peruse the rest of these amazing stories, or to contribute your own. 

~

This story of mine, it’s about a woman and her daughter. It’s about a fight for life and a fight for faith.

And it’s also, I’m discovering, about a fight for feminism.

I’m not sure my mom would have put it that way. She had some negative opinions about feminism, most of them owing to the particular breed she grew up with in the late 70’s and early 80’s. As she told it, there was a lot of hostility back then. A lot of confusion. My mother was college educated, the primary breadwinner in our household, a leader in her church. She would never have said that men and women aren’t created equal. But if I had to put words to it, “feminism” was not the lens through which she understood gender equality. She understood what it meant to be equal in the eyes of God, and that’s what mattered most to her. When feminism began to form, it was mostly in secular culture. I don’t think she knew back then how one could inform the other.

But as I read through some of the things she wrote about her experience as a young woman, as a wife, as a mother, as a cancer patient, I’m seeing this theme emerge. On one level, this is just a story about coping with tragedy, about the tension of grief and faith.

But because it is about breast cancer, it is also a story about women’s health.

And you could look at our family history and point to genetics as the main culprit, but that would only be half the story. From the dosage of birth control her (male) gynecologist prescribed her without batting an eye, to the endless treatments and choices she made to try and defy doctor’s prognoses once she was diagnosed with cancer, everything about my mother’s experience tells me a story about someone else deciding what women should do with their bodies. It tells me about dangerous assumptions and naive women and sickness being passed from one generation to the next, daughters without mothers and mothers without daughters.

—

Do I have kids now or later or never?

If I don’t want to have kids right now, what kind of birth control is healthiest for my body?

Do I have to take responsibility for birth control because – physiologically speaking – I am the one that will get pregnant? What can I expect of my partner?

Once I have kids, how do I stay healthy enough to raise them? When should I start having mammograms?

These are the questions she faced. These are the questions I face. These are the questions all women face everywhere, all the time.

My mom became her own advocate, she started asking questions, she took the reigns and outlived her doctors’ death sentence by several years. But it wasn’t until the tests came back malignant. It wasn’t until a lot more research had been conducted and showed that super high doses of birth control might actually produce something scarier than an “untimely” baby.*

And I guess the thing about feminism that I need, the reason why feminism matters, is that like breast cancer, it has motivated me to be my own advocate.

Feminism has motivated me to not only be concerned about my health and my future, but to do something about it, even if it’s telling my husband I’m not okay with taking a pill; I want you to wear a condom.

And feminism motivated me to marry a man that could look me square in the eye and say, I am willing to do that for you because more than anything, I just want you to be healthy.

And feminism is motivating me to tell this story, this story of a mother and a daughter, of breast cancer and women’s health, of grief and faith and feminism, so that our daughters grow up independent, happy and safe in their own bodies.

—

What’s your story with feminism? What has your experience been with learning to advocate for your own body? How has this factored into your choices with birth control? All voices are welcome here. And yes, male readers, you’re welcome to share your experience and understanding, too. 

*For more information on the troubling correlation between birth control and the increasing rate of breast cancer among women ages 25 to 34, see this report published by NPR today. Note that the NPR article clearly states that this is merely a correlation, not a confirmed cause, and that in my post I am merely writing about my mother’s experience and the likelihood that her dose increased her risk of breast cancer, which was hormone receptor positive.