Thanksgiving Ham

Sometimes I just hate myself.  

Generally,  I don't have time to wade around in my insecurities.  I have three children, a dog and a congregation full of people to lead and care for.  I'm 55 years old and have had plenty of time for God to help me to get over myself.  I've come to accept that I am not a compilation of accomplishments, abilities and actions.  I'm a person who has been profoundly shaped and transformed by the grace that I have found through Jesus Christ.  

But then I have a day like today and I just have a jag of DESPISING my weaknesses, my peccadillos, the stupid things that I have a tendency to do.  Today is Thanksgiving and I feel like I had almost ruined it.  I have roasted at least 40-50 turkeys in my life. It's not a big deal.  I can totally do it; just pick a recipe and make it happen. 

The New York Times Cooking recipe said to roast the dry brined turkey for 30 minutes at the unusually high temperature of 450 degrees.  I'm guessing that the purpose of this is to do something like a sear to lock the juices in. Then I was instructed to turn the temperature to 350 degrees for the remainder of the time.  It really was an elegantly simple recipe, something that an experienced cook, such as myself, could do quite easily while managing teen aged sous chefs, a hungry special needs young adult who kept emerging from his room demanding food and various side dishes.  

The problem was that when I turned the temperature on my oven down to 350 degrees, I had forgotten to push START! What that meant was that, after having been cooked for 30 minutes, my turkey had been hanging out in a slowly cooling oven for the next two hours.  By the time I checked on it, an hour before we were supposed to eat, I opened the oven door to a very comfortably cool oven.  The turkey might as well have smiled and greeted me with a hello for how uncooked it was.

This catastrophe, combined with the realization that I had forgotten to pick up a splurged order of various breads and baked goods at a local bakery until it was too late, drove me to my room to lay on my bed with the door closed, taking deep breaths. I hate that I am a forgetter. . . and a non-detail oriented person.  

One time, I was in charge of travel to a family cruise in Florida and I scheduled our return flights to be for the day before the cruise returned to port.  In college, I would schedule things so that I needed to be in three places at the same time.  This lack of organization is the thing that I am most tempted to judge about myself. 

Granted, I've come far from those organizationally out of control young adult days.  The years of being a full time mom of an incredibly medically and developmentally complicated child certainly gave me organizational and detail management muscles that I never dreamed that I would have.  I am also a pastor of a church where, together with a multi-talented team of staff members, we function pretty well as an intergenerational, multiethnic community of around 300 people who need to turn a middle school into a place of worship every Sunday.

But every once in a while, I still make mistakes out of my lack of detail orientation and organization especially when I am tired.  No matter how much I've grown and matured, I can't seem to escape this part of my personality.

Two things helped me to pull out of the vortex of self-chastisement.  The first is my amazing husband who did not share my hypercritical attitude.  He just told me that he loved me and drove to KFC and to the bakery to see if he could help save our dinner.  (KFC was out of chicken and the bakery was all closed up.).  Just as he came home, I realized that I had also purchased a small ham to serve at a later gathering.  I threw that into the oven to heat and serve with our stuffing, potatoes and veggies.  Fortunately, Thanksgiving dinner this year was just my nuclear family and my mother so it wasn't a huge deal.  The ham was barely warmed and rather boring but it was fine. 

In fact, the second thing that served to give me perspective and stop being so disappointed with myself was how much Josh loved the ham.  My son LOVED the ham.  He asked for more over and over again.  In fact, at one point, while I got up to get more from the kitchen, he grabbed a slice right off of his grandmother's plate.  My mom reflexes are still pretty fast so I grabbed it right off his plate before he could eat it and made him wait for his own piece acquired in a proper manner.  

At the end of this day, I am choosing to think not about what I did wrong or what didn't go well but about the things that I am grateful for.  The six of us were able to sit together for a nice meal.  We enjoyed the food, especially Josh.  My 83 year old mother was able to spend quality time with us.  We played a little game which had us ask each other interesting questions.  We laughed together about funny stories from our pasts. 

As much as I am a foodie, I have to remember that the food is not the point.  The most important part of any feast is the spirit, the love, the people and what or who you are celebrating.  I hope that I am able to keep this on the forefront of my brain as we enter into another season of food and celebrating.  

21

Last month Josh turned 21 to very little fanfare.  We had a family dinner with my mother and my sister's family.  Josh and his dad shared a birthday cake as is our custom since their birthdays are 8 days apart in August.  

It's strange to think that if he were a typically developing young man, he might be attending college or be in the military.  He would probably be driving and figuring out his relationship with alcohol.  He would be able to vote, gamble and earn a pilot's license.  Heck, in this country, he could even get a concealed weapon license (!) or adopt a child (!)

But most of those things are out of reach for my son and probably will be for his whole life.  Instead, Josh is diligently working on his tasks at his job at the Veterans Administration building such as breaking down cardboard boxes, wiping down tables and filling up salt and pepper shakers.  He enjoys his routine of going to his class at our school districts post-secondary classroom and doing his daily neighborhood walk.  We are still working on chores such as emptying the dishwasher and putting his clean laundry away. 

Josh has a simple, small life but, I hope, a very good one.  He has people who know him and love him.  There are people who are helping him to learn new things.  He is a part of several communities in ways that are meaningful to him.  He enjoys different parts of God's creation such as water, the wind, music and many different types of foods.  He cries sometimes, yells sometimes, and laughs a lot. 

Josh is not like most 21 year olds but he is living a life full of his own kind of meaning and blessing.  I'm so proud of how far he has come and I am confident that he will continue to grow as he walks further into his young adulthood.  

Smelling Mama's Hair

One of my son's obsessions is smelling my hair.  For some reason or another, Josh LOVES to smell my hair.  His favorite thing is to pull my head to his nose and take a good long inhale and then tap it gently with his hands.  Then he usually laughs and smells again.  

The other day Josh was walking toward his school bus in the morning.  When he was about 5 feet from the bus he stopped, turned around and then came back to me, saying loudly enough for the bus driver to hear, "Wanna smell Mama's hair!"  What could I do?  It was easier to let the kid take quick sniff of my hair than to convince him to get on the bus without it.  Maybe it gave confidence for the day.  I don't know.

I wonder if his sense of smell is important to him because he's visually impaired.  That's what they say, right?  That if you have a sense that is underdeveloped or curtailed that you start to strengthen other senses.  I do know that when Josh was young, he had an extremely sensitive sense of hearing.  High pitched sounds like babies crying or certain sirens made him scream and cry and hold his ears. We also went through eras where we put him on a "sensory diet" with routines where I would "brush his arms and legs" and do certain kinds of squeezing on his arms and shoulders to help him to feel calm.  Yeah, I guess raising Josh has been quite an education in how the senses work differently for some people.  Sensory differences are, after all, a huge part of the autism experience. 

But I really have no idea why he specifically loves smelling hair so much but I do know that he has always been especially drawn to long, black hair worn in ponytails like I often wear my hear.  Years ago we were at a one of the girls' soccer games.  Hope was playing and I was managing both Josh and Anna on the sidelines.  Josh seemed happy in his folding chair with his headphones and ipod so I allowed myself to wander a little distance away to be with Anna.  A few minutes later I looked up to check on Josh and saw that he had gotten up and was walking toward another Asian mom with a long, black ponytail.  It was clear that hair sniffing was on his mind. In that moment, time slowed down like at the high point of an action movie.  I found myself yelling "nooooooooooo, Jossssssssssshhhhhhh".  I flew through the air almost sideways like in a John Woo movie (but without the guns) in a futile attempt to keep my son from grabbing this random mom's hair and smelling it.  I can't remember if the lady was understanding or not.  My memory ends there.  

Thinking about that memory makes me realize that Josh has been into hair for a long time.  And we've been trying to train Josh to ask before he grabs people's heads or hair.  I realize that having a young man say to you "Wanna smell your hair please" isn't exactly normal young adult social interaction but it's better to teach him to ask for permission / consent first, am I right? 

The other morning I was helping him to brush his teeth and wash his face.  Standing behind him I put my face up to his head and smelled his hair.  It smelled just the way I remember it smelling when he was a baby.  It smelled like sweetness and connection and intimacy and memory.  In the split second post sniff, I was filled with deep love.  It reminded me of that time when I felt like I heard God say, "Would you raise this child for me?"  And like the first time, I said, "Yes, it would be a privilege."