Summary of Carry On, Warrior: The Power of Embracing Your Messy, Beautiful Life - Book Summary (2016)

Part IV. HOLDING ON

Chapter 35. Hard

This way of life—living out loud—is hard. It’s good, in many, many ways, but it’s hard too. Most of the people who read my stories don’t know me, but many do. And it’s tough, sometimes, on the people who know me. It’s hard on my family and my friends. Sometimes I wonder if it’s hard on my poor neighbors, who have to know SO MUCH about us. When I see them outside and they say, “How are you?” it’s funny, because they already know. It makes us closer and further apart somehow. At this point, when I meet someone new, I know immediately, by her face, whether she reads my work. When someone invites me to coffee, I want to say, “Perfect. Could you bring along four hundred extremely personal essays about your life so we can start on even ground?”

In many ways living out loud is the hardest on me.

I mostly love writing. It serves me, heals me, and satisfies the creative cat constantly clawing at my insides, trying to get out. It helps me make sense of things and holds me accountable to myself.

Recently I wrote an essay about my hopes and dreams, and I included in it my belief that my fourth child is in Rwanda. This is the response I received from one of my readers: “Hi Glennon
… may I make a gentle reminder that you DO have four children? Please don’t discount the one you chose not to raise on this earth. I’m wondering if that’s part of your desire to adopt, to make up for that decision?”

My, my, my.

First—let us be clear, this person had every right to have this response. Most of my readers have agreed to an unwritten rule that we don’t use the truths I tell against me. But no one’s forced to follow this rule. I walk onto this field every day without armor or weapons, by choice, and so the risk is that every once in a while, someone will shoot. It happens. It hurts, and it always, always makes me want to quit writing. But I don’t. When I want to shut off my computer, take my life back as my own, curl up into a protective roly-poly ball, I don’t. I come back to the page because I want to keep loving and remaining open, even though neither love nor openness is easy.

Love is not warm and fuzzy or sweet and sticky. Real love is tough as nails. It’s having your heart ripped out, putting it back together, and the next day, offering it back to the same world that just tore it up. It’s running toward pain and grief and brokenness instead of away from it. It’s turning the other cheek ’til you get whiplash. It’s resisting the overwhelming desire to quit, to save yourself for yourself. It’s exhausting and uncomfortable. Sometimes it’s ugly, like using your bare hands to search for gold in piles of crap.

I try to live my life the same way that a carpenter who lived two thousand years ago lived his. Once he stood on a hilltop and explained how to love well to a huge group of people hanging onto his every word, shocked by the countercultural ideas he was suggesting. And they recognized what he was saying as the Truth. He wasn’t telling them anything new, actually. He was just reminding them of everything that was already written onto their hearts.

The first time I read the things Jesus said about love, it all rang so true to me that my heart about exploded. It rang hard but true. Jesus said that when someone hurts you, you should love that person, and you should turn the other cheek over and over and over again. Seven times seventy times, I think. I’ve been writing for over five years, so I’ve got to be getting close to that number. Let’s just say that the four hundredth and thirty-nineth reader who tries to hurt my feelings is going to get his ASS KICKED.

But the person who questioned my desire to adopt is not lucky five hundred and thirty-nine. So, since my Jesus insists, I must turn the other cheek. The beautiful thing about turning the other cheek is that it forces you to break eye contact with the person who has slapped you, and this little turn changes your perspective. Now, all of sudden, you are looking away, forward, to something better, more beautiful, and your heartbeat settles, and your palms stop sweating.

So here I am. I’ve turned. I have a new perspective. I have tried to do what my friend Meghan often suggests, which is to “listen for the love” in what’s said to me. And so I’ll try to address this reader with love.

I have no doubt that my abortion has something to do with my desire to adopt. As do my parents’ teachings that we belong to each other, and Sister’s passion for the powerless, and my gift at mothering, and the extra money and other resources that God’s given me to share, and my faith, and my relationship with my husband, and my teaching experiences with underprivileged children, and on and on and on. My dreams are the sum total of everything that has ever happened to me, everyone I’ve ever met, every book I’ve ever read, every friend I’ve loved, every mistake I’ve made, and every song I’ve sung. So I would be silly to pretend to be certain that the two, abortion and adoption, are entirely unrelated. Everything is related to everything, obviously.

What begs to be addressed here is the reader’s suggestion that through adoption, I’d be assuaging my guilt for my abortion.

Please, let me be clear: I don’t have any shame about my abortion. None. I know that’s hard for some people to hear, because in some circles, if you are a Christian and abortion has been a part of your life, you are supposed to beat your chest and gnash your teeth and repent and then join crusades to end abortion by any means necessary, and speak through tears to large and small groups of people and swear to them that abortion was the worst mistake you’ve ever made and explain that you pray for your dead baby in heaven every night. THEN your sinner-self will be embraced and used as a poster girl. Literally, likely.

But I won’t say or do any of that, ever. Because none of that is true, for me. I know it’s true for some, and I respect that each has her own path. But it’s not true for me. I did the best I could at the time with the resources I felt I had. I’ve apologized, yes—but mostly to myself. I feel sad for the lost girl I was, and I am fiercely protective of that precious me who had to go through that scary day and the days that preceded and followed. Far from ashamed, I’m really quite proud of her for making it through. I don’t feel ashamed. I feel forgiven and whole, and I know that God never let go of my hand before, during, or after my abortion. God and I are clear on this issue.

As Maya Angelou says. “I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better.” Amen. There is no room for shame or regret in my life. I’m too full. I am too forgiven, too adored, too fully loved, too full of ideas and dreams and passion to waste my precious life pretending to be crippled by something that is imaginary, like shame. Shame is an illusion. It disappears so easily.

I have confused feelings about the abortion issue. I think that “issues” like abortion are really just “people,” so it’s best to think of them as such. One at a time. One person at a time. I don’t feel shame about my abortion. But I don’t love abortion either. And/Both. I think there are probably better ways.

But I also think that if you really, really hate abortion, it might be nice to volunteer at a Boys and Girls Club and become a mentor, to offer a kid another way to experience love and connection so she doesn’t go looking for it in the wrong places. It might be wise to try to jump into the mix before it’s too late. I think the picket lines at the clinics might be a little too late. Offering unsolicited suggestions to a writer who had an abortion more than a decade ago is certainly too late.

As for me, in keeping with the one-person-at-a-time theory, I think that if a young friend confided in me that she was pregnant and was considering an abortion, Craig and I would hold her and tell her that she was loved and that she had many choices.

We would tell her that she could live with us, and we would make sure she was taken care of, physically and financially, and that if she wanted to keep the baby, we would help her start her life.

We would also tell her that if she didn’t want to raise the baby, we’d raise the baby for her.

And if she decided that abortion was the only way, we would hold her hand and love her through it and demand that she know that she was as loved and adored the moment after the abortion as she was on the day she was born.

The only meaningful thing we can offer one another is love. Not advice, not questions about our choices, not suggestions for the future, just love.