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Three newly tenured faculty in good spirits. Congratulations also to Duane Bidwell and Grace Yia-Hei Kao, my colleagues at CST.

On December 1, 2011 the full professors of Claremont School of Theology rendered a unanimous vote to recommend that the Board of Trustees award me tenure.

In the academic world, tenure is a significant accomplishment to which many aspire from the early days of graduate school. It means job security – no small thing in these economic times (I can only lose my job if there is “financial exigency” and the school needs to close, or I commit some significant moral or professional transgression). It also means I have the academic freedom to pursue the research of greatest interest to me and I cannot be fired because someone in the institution disagrees with the politics of my work.

One of the more challenging aspects of the tenure application process is the recording of one’s academic productivity. A tenure applicant must keep records and evidence of the teaching, writing, research and service in which she has engaged for the previous decade or so. Then she must submit a curriculum vitae (C.V.) with said accomplishments listed in a particular rank and order.

This is harder than it sounds. For weeks, my two colleagues and I (all submitting tenure portfolios at the same time) sent emails at 1:30 am as we tried to figure out how to classify and describe our professional lives on paper. Does this sound like me? Where does one put “this”?

My C.V. quantifies what I’ve been doing for the last seven years or so. I wrote two single-authored books, co-edited an anthology; and wrote seven refereed journal articles, six invited journal articles, six book chapters, six commentaries, three book reviews and two encyclopedia entries. I gave ten keynote presentations and presented on over forty academic panels or conferences. This is the stuff of tenure.

As I compiled lists and corresponding documentation, I became acutely aware of what was not on paper. My friend and colleague Grace Yia-Hei Kao recently wrote a wonderful blog describing the roles that family and wider community play in the journey to tenure. Indeed that is a large part of what is not seen in the tenure dossier.

As I reflect on my journey to tenure, I recall the experience of developing my career while living with severe depression. I experienced my worst suicidal ideation in the first year of my doctoral program. My mental and physical health was severely compromised for most of my doctoral program and through the majority of my pre-tenure academic career.

Many times I attempted to hide the reality of my condition and its impact on my work.

• Always choosing the most expensive hotels during my guild’s conferences so I could sleep in between academic sessions and return to another event
• An in-patient hospitalization during the school year that no one on my job knew about because I called it “a family emergency”
• Committing to publishing or presentation obligations when I felt well, that I simply could not manage when I became ill before the deadline
• Taking numerous low-paying preaching and speaking opportunities to pay for the bills I incurred because I was managing a chronic medical condition without health insurance
• Asking my advisor to mediate homework assignments with other faculty because the medication I was on scrambled my brain’s ability to process information or drive in straight lanes
• Doubling my student loan debt in one year so I could finish the degree and get a job with medical benefits
• Lecturing on material I knew well because I lacked the focus to read for more than 10 consecutive minutes and could not prepare for class

In short, it was difficult.

• There were senior scholars who told me that I should not reveal or write about depression before tenure, one of whom called me “reckless and crazy” for the idea.
• Intimate relationships were often compromised when I chose between what-was-healthy-for-us and what-would-keep-me-alive.
• I had to learn to admit when I simply could not do what I wanted to do or what I had promised I would do.
• I lost countless hours of productivity to the inertia of depressive days and weeks.
• I was always conscious of all that I could not and did not do.

I spent years trying to save my career from the perils of my internal world. A look at my C.V. suggests that I was successful. But there is nowhere on the page to tell the story about the life of my mind.

For me, and thousands of other people in the world, living with a depressive condition also means working with a depressive condition.Work is more challenging because of silence, stigma and shame and sickness. If I take “mental health days” off for all the days I need them, I would have no income. This is my job. I felt like my choices were limited.

While there is no category for articulating the challenges, there is also no lines for saying how I survived. There were adversities, but there were also advocates:

• The advisor who could distinguish my intellect from my illness, and facilitated my leaving residency so I could relocate to a place with greater support
• The fellowship coordinator who brainstormed ways for me to find additional funding as the medical bills and relocation expenses piled up
• The non-profit colleagues who coached me in navigating county health services
• My supervisor who took my revelation of depression in stride indicating that “we all got something Monica”
• My fellow-academics who wrote or whispered about their shared experiences of trying to read and create when their minds failed them, or medication made them loopy and tired
• My therapists who supported relocation for a new job when we both knew it undermined the stability I had recently attained – new doctors, new friends, new weather patterns
• The memoirists whose writings were like air when I needed to know that I wasn’t alone

I work at an institution that doesn’t require me to focus on one aspect of my identity, passions or interests. I have mentors who support the work I do in both the academy and the wider public. I have colleagues I truly consider friends and allies. None of this is on paper either, but it makes the “life of the mind” much better.

I cannot name what separates my story from another. I don’t think it has anything to do with faith, blessing, intellect, perseverance or medication. I know too many people with those qualities and a different outcome. There is an inexplicable grace to survival and success. Down deep, I suspect that it is the flip side of that coin that robs life without cause or consideration. We don’t get to choose which side lands on us each day. Rather, we live, we work and we do our best. And we tell the stories of what can’t be seen on paper.

6 Week Ultrasound

“Life is robbery.”

I re-read this Alfred North Whitehead quotation to my students in the last weeks as we read through Adventures of Ideas. We were taking a welcome break from the philosophically demanding Process and Reality.

I explained that this is one of Whitehead’s more frequently cited sentences because he succinctly and poetically describes his position that life entails loss, and you can’t go back and get what you lose.

I said the same thing to one of my girlfriends as we chatted in my kitchen a couple of weeks ago. I was cooking and catching up with a friend I had not seen in nearly twenty years. As we chronicled our lives from the intervening decades, my friend said: “I have a religious question.”

In moments like these, I curse the fact that even my closest friends think that I have some special kind of knowledge as a minister and professional theologian. I took a deep breath because that phrase usually precedes some difficult, heart-wrenching question that has no satisfying answer.

“Sure,” I replied.

My friend began to talk about some difficult events in her past, and some of what she lost as she wrestled with her own challenges. “Do you think,” she asked me, “that we can go back and get what we lost? Do we get a second chance?”

I turned into a Whiteheadian and told her that we can’t go back in time. We can’t reach back and wrest out what has been lost. Sometimes that is good because this is how we can move past – and even eliminate – some of the worst things in the world. But when we lose things we’d rather not have lost, we don’t get them back. I echoed my teaching moment by saying, “That’s why the philosopher I study says, ‘Life is robbery.’ ”

But we get second chances. And third and fourth ones. God never stops calling us. As we move forward, there are new opportunities. It’s not the same, but we get more chances – often in ways we don’t expect.

I know it didn’t make her feel any better.

We were quiet for awhile and continued cleaning the kitchen and stirring the pot of soup together. We broke the silence by moving to discussions of our future. We talked about how we might live, love and grow. We laughed about how we were closer to being parents than kids and how that transition sneaked up on us. Then she asked the question I often hear these days:

“So what do you want? A boy or a girl.”

I paused. After miscarrying, I’ve come to understand the answer I’ve often heard others say: “I just want a healthy baby.” But I didn’t say that. Perhaps it was the length of our acquaintance, the comfort of the kitchen or the recent evocation of Whitehead that made me tell her the truth.

“I want my babies back!”

It’s been five months since my partner and I saw the bleep on the ultrasound. In the four months after that, I saw my OB/GYN, hematologist, nurses and anesthesiologist more times than I’d ever wanted to. While I have an intellectual level of gratitude for trustworthy practitioners, good health coverage and supportive friends, none of it actually gets me what I want. I want the twins the doctor mentioned under his breath from the space between my legs. I want the babies that my partner kept kissing in a place a little higher on my stomach than where they really were, kissing from the moment we realized my period was late. I want the babies about whom I called my mother – even before the official test came back. I want the growing belly, nausea, maternity clothes and upcoming parental leave.

I deeply believe what I told my friend about second chances, but right now, that means nothing. Grief renders hope philosophical. Grief smothers my ability to think, reason and plan. Since my honest moment in the kitchen, grief has robbed my life of a measure of joy. Life broke into the house of my body and soul and took something that cannot be recovered. There’s no one to blame. It just happens sometimes. And I’ll cry about it … I guess, until I don’t.

Motherhood

I wanted to be pregnant if only for the possibility of helpful hormones.

“Pregnancy is great for some women with depression,” my psychiatrist says. “The hormones can help.”

I think of my women friends with depression who tell me that pregnancy nearly killed them. That depression was only alleviated by taking their meds, and hoping everything would be okay. That they love their children, but hell if they’d ever get pregnant again.

Medication-free, I rely on strict sleeping hours, a careful diet and daily exercise to be the brighter side of human. Skip one of those for a day, and depression erupts into my life like a Jenga puzzle tumbling down.

I curse my fragility. I swear that there are normal people out there who don’t have to do so much. I rail at God for making my life so complicated, so difficult, so precarious.

Even with these three ingredients firmly in place, they take me to mid-afternoon. As complicated as my relationship with medicine is, I begin to worship the pills that would give my un-conceived children ten heads (okay, I exaggerate, not ten heads, but no guarantee on developed lungs, heart and brain).

My psychiatrist checks in: How is it? How are you doing?

“It’s hard.” I replied. And that’s the good version.

I have read the bad version. Nearly ten years ago, I went on a quest for camaraderie. I headed to the bookstore and read every memoir on living with depression that I could find. Nothing scared me more than motherhood with depression. I read wonderfully written books like Sometimes Mommy Gets Angry by Bebe Moore Campbell, The Beast and The Ghost in the House by Tracy Thompson, Beyond Blue by Therese Borchard and essays whose titles and authors I now forget.

• What if I have no pregnancy glow?
• What if the hormones make me suicidal?
• Will I have to choose between the potential health of my unborn babies and my life?
• Will I be able to take care of babies?
• Will the sleeplessness and responsibility send me to some dark place?
• Will my children be scarred because I lie in bed all day and can’t get up to take care of them?
• Will ECT be the only thing that can cure me? If so, will I forget the birth, my childhood stories, my grandparents?
• Will I be so sick that I’d happily surrender my memories?

Postpartum depression could kick my ass! If I make it that far.

On the other hand, I want children. I snuggle next to my partner and say “Babies!” And we get big Cheshire cat grins on our faces.

I’m a Mama’s girl. I have a great Mama! She understands me; knows how to take care of me; checks on me; gives me soft cotton socks; lets me lie to her and say “I’m fine,” when her gut tells her I’m not. She knows when to butt in, and when not to. She wears imperfection like grace, and gives love and affection like a rainstorm.

I kiss our teenager all over her face, and examine her outfits before she walks out the door. I realize that I am turning into my mother, and it’s one of the better parts of my life. With the teen, I have learned that I can.

I can wash clothes, help with homework, walk to school, and cook dinner while feeling like my world is coming to an end. I don’t smile as much. I snap more than I should. Most of my professional work is undone. But . . . I can be a mommy – while being depressed.

So it is with confidence, terror and the strange sense of ability that I face the prospect of motherhood. I assume that these feelings won’t go away for a long time. But living with a bipolar depressive condition helps me to make peace with extremes and contradictions.

The doctor says that we can try again.

With confidence, terror and capacity, I try. We try again.

Strike Picket Line

I grew up in a state of unionized workers. My mother was in a teachers’ union. My father worked for one of the “Big Three” automakers and UAW is an acronym every Michigander knows. Every year, there were talks of negotiations and talks of strikes. The only thing worse than buying “a foreign car” is crossing the strike line.

My babies went on strike. They held up signs in my uterus and said “Hell no, we won’t go.”

When my friend described the miscarriage this way, I laughed out loud.

For the first time in weeks.

I laughed.

They come by it honestly, she told me. They get this from you and your partner. “Didn’t you know,” she said while I giggled, “that you would have activist babies?!”

So we waited. We waited for the babies to let go and bleed out.

But they stayed put.

For weeks.

The doctor said he wanted it to happen naturally.

I’m not sure the word “natural” is right.

I was pregnant with non-babies who were on strike. I had all the hormones and the breasts that wouldn’t fit into my bras. I had the nausea, but this time with pain.

We waited. For weeks. For my activist babies to throw in the towel.

I lacked the energy to go to church.

I stayed in bed.

I got up long enough to care for the teenager in our home.

At night, in the morning, in the day, my partner and I huddled together, crying, not crying, talking, not talking.

Sad.

Picturing, asking, pleading, acupuncturing, nasty-tasting-Chinese-herbal-tea-begging the blood to come.

Let go, I begged the babies.

Bleed, I commanded my body. Yes, I asked my body to bleed.

Can’t we just end this?

Binding of Isaac

A lot of religions consider blood to be an appropriate sacrifice to God or gods. Kill the fatted lamb, say scriptures in the Hebrew Bible. Lay the ram on the altar – instead of your son, God tells Abraham. Place the blood upon your doorposts, and the angel of death will pass you by. Slit the chicken’s throat for the orisha, say many Yoruba religious traditions.

In most churches of my youth (and too many of my adulthood), the Eucharist is still taken to the words of:

There is power, wonder-working power in the blood of the Lamb

What can wash away my sins? Nothing but the blood of Jesus

Oh the blood of Jesus can never ever lose its power

Blood is the force of life. Blood is supposed to bring us closer to God.  When humanity has erred, God recognizes blood and will forgive. These are the lessons of blood atonement.

As a theologian, I prefer my lessons on fellowship, forgiveness and friendship to come with large loaves of bread – without a side of blood.  In Yoruba traditions, I don’t reject the sacrifice of chickens, but this vegan would rather give a bottle of gin.

Can’t I talk to God without the sight of blood?

Miscarriage is bloody.  And it’s a sacrifice.

When we first learned of the miscarriage, we could barely speak. Our eyes spoke to each other.

We can do it again.  We can do this again.

But when I put my foot in a church, I cried.  In the safety of my faith community, in proximity of the wooden altar . . . the moment someone asked how I was doing and seemed to really want to know, I bawled.  I fell into a heap on the floor, and I bawled.

The next day, my partner and I went to another church service.  We sang, we laughed, we cuddled.  They baptized a baby, and I bawled.  With snot running down my face, my partner’s arms tightly around me, I cried again.

We whispered to one another, We can do it again.  We can do it again.

But I had stopped bleeding.  I bled enough to reduce the heartbeat.  I bled enough to reduce the size of the little-grain-of-rice baby.  But I did not bleed enough to fully miscarry.

At the next ultrasound, the doctor said it almost under his breath: “Two sacs.  Twin gestation.”

He made some notes on the paper.  We asked him to repeat what he said.

“Twins?” we said aloud.  We really wanted twins.  Both our mothers are twins.  We really really wanted twins.

Can we do that again?

This enough-but-not-enough blood loss was a sacrifice I didn’t want to make.

Our babies were laid on the altars of I-don’t-know-why and sometimes-it-happens and it-doesn’t-matter-why.

It didn’t make me angry with God.  But it didn’t draw me any closer either.