Affirmations

These are the things I believe:

• Credit cards do more harm than good.
• Sunscreens do more good than harm.
• Macey's is the only True and Living grocery store.
• Antibacterial soaps should be used sparingly. Like steak.
• Women should feel free to breastfeed their children in public places if they want to.
  Seventh Generation "organic" toilet paper is the worst product ever made, disintegrates upon contact with air, and results in bodily waste on your fingers.
• Whether you stay home with your children is neither a good indicator of intelligence (I know plenty of super-crazy-smart SAHMs and plenty of super-stupid grad students / professionals.... and vice-versa), nor good mother-ness-ship (I know plenty of super-crappy SAHMs and plenty of super-awesome-loving mothers who work... and vice-versa). Feminist efforts should be about equal opportunity and fairness - not living some formulaic lifestyle that validates other feminists' choices. So basically,
• People should live and let live. Within reason. Lengthy discussion to follow with Peter regarding clause "within reason."
• Jesus's most important message was to love one another.

That's about it. I used to have a much longer list of personal convictions, but life and experience wore most of them out of me. Before I was a science nerd (biology), I was a super science nerd (math/physics) and spent a lot of time working out proofs and thinking about theorems. You know, "If... then... " statements and such. Things are so tidy in math. I liked that. Not so much in life.

An important part of human development is understanding cause and effect relationships. If you touch fire, your hand will hurt; if you use Seventh Generation toilet paper, your hand will stink. However, looking or relying on such absolute certainties when it comes to humans or emotions or love doesn't work nearly as tidily as stating, "If two points lie on a plane, the line containing them also lies on the plane." People are multifaceted, changing, complicated creatures. For example, I used to hate beets, and now I love them. See how deep and complex I am?

I've been thinking a lot about decisions and their consequences. Should I let my baby cry-it-out? Should I allow myself a can of Diet Coke once a day? Should I read her Shakespeare or P.D. Eastman? Should I make her sleep in a crib all the time to foster independence or should I allow her to sleep on my chest to foster bonding? How can I child-proof my house so that she will never, ever, and I mean EVER get so much as a paper cut.

A few years ago I was a student at BYU trying to make a decision regarding a love interest. I wrote "pros and cons" lists. Assigned points, even. I thought of a thousand different considerations. One afternoon I was running along the Bonneville Shoreline Trail, trying to reason out these weighty matters. I finally stopped, in tears, and thought... I can't decide anything... there are no guarantees. And then I realized that that was the answer. There are no guarantees.

Maybe I would live happily-ever-after with so-and-so, and maybe I would end up single ... in my thirties. Gasp.

There was no way to know, really. All I could do was make the best decision given the information I had, and hope for the best. I finally heard what my friend Kendall kept trying to tell me - that life doesn't culminate at some arbitrary endpoint called death, where somebody deems it either a success or failure based on a list of "good" and "bad" outcomes; that life is now, is continuous, is dynamic. At the time, I was all transcendentist-like, so I was carrying some paper and penned:

There are no guarantees
You can climb every mountain
And ford every stream
And examine every stone and stigma for secrets
But this trail won’t be here in ten years.

Go ahead.
Magnify flagella and Neptune under carefully crafted lenses
Plot patterns and trends on neatly Cartesianed paper
Elucidate transduction pathways of molecules and societies.
But don’t be alarmed -
Today’s luminous discoveries will be scoffed at tomorrow.

Go ahead.
Breathe your Nepalese mountains
Look to Kant, to Jung, to Nietzsche.
But your canonized scripts might be wrong, too
And your constructs as fallible as Pisa.

You can love me or not, but please don’t ask me to sign my name
In blood
Or ink
Or promises to never change;
I will.

Because even the most scintillian structures in atoms dance erratically in waves
And the noncompliant universe breathes in
While we spin madly about,
Breathes out.

Don’t be alarmed.

Today I am taking some deep breaths and reminding myself: there are no guarantees. I will likely do something, sometime, that will permanently damage my child. She will encounter pain, sorrow, and regret, and there is little I can do to prevent it. So I'm trying to shift my paradigm a bit from, "How can I ensure my child has the most charmed and perfect life ever to be beset a child under heaven," to "I'll try my best to let my child feel how utterly she is loved and adored and wanted." I'll teach her how to keep on keepin' on. To forgive. To give. And maybe, during the continuum of her life, she will know more acceptance than heartache; more joy than disappointment; more kinship than loneliness; more hope than fear.

Maybe.
Maybe not.

But this I can guarantee: she will know love.