No, not that. Ok, not only that.

The kids are with my folks this weekend. My parents took them to Easter services today, doubtless trying to de-heathen them. So here we are, Hubby and I, a couple of old smoothies on the loose. Last night we went out for dinner and then went to the bookstore; and today we went to the coffee shop, then on to a leisurely drive, and a late lunch. You know what we did the whole time? We talked about the kids.

Going out for meals without having to keep two unruly children occupied is a rare treat. And a trip to the bookstore without spending the whole time in the children’s section? My idea of heaven. But my favorite part was the drive. We ventured further south than we usually do, and even visited the new, partially completed Tulsa Hills shopping area. By the way, very little is open on Easter Sunday. But we eventually drifted back towards more familiar parts of town.

One of my favorite neighborhoods in Tulsa (aside from the one we live in) is the Riverview Neighborhood. With the quirky Spotlight Theater and large and charming McBirney Mansion, which is now a B&B, Riverview is a very diverse area. There are lots of cute houses and swanky apartments. The only thing lacking is a convenient grocery store. And the only thing lacking on the drive were two very demanding and loud children.

Hubby and I talked about them almost the whole time. About Pumpkin’s favorite movie (101 Dalmatians) and how uncanny her puppy imitation is; about how big a boy Monkey is becoming. And about how nice it was to be able to drive without someone saying, “Are we going home yet?” or “I’m hungry, I thought we were going to lunch!” Long, leisurely drives are totally lost on preschoolers and toddlers.

We spent the entire weekend trying to figure out what we used to talk about before we had kids. I tried, valiantly I might add, to steer the conversation to politics or religion, but somehow we always ended up talking about the kids. During our drive I tried to stay on topic with in-fill development and all the exciting growth happening in town. It was a bust.

Tulsa is home to some really wonderful architecture. And my boy wants to build cities when he grows up, so every neat building inspired some comment like, “Monkey would love that!”

What will we talk about when the kids are grown?

I was never much of a diarist. Even as a self-absorbed teenager, I was no Pepys. Well-meaning people would buy me those little locking daily diaries as birthday presents. They all held such promise, and with each new one would come a resolution to write in it every day. Their pink or red or blue covers, their gilt-edged dated pages, and shiny brass locks with the minuscule keys beckoned me, “Write me, write me!” And I would dutifully answer, “Of course, of course!” I would pop the clasp and open the book, the sharp tang of vinyl newness filling my nose. The pages were so white and crisp with the barest hint of roughness at the edges. But I could never fulfill the promise of each new day, a fresh new page. And what to write? At 12 years old, there was precious little to write about. Nothing I cared to set down for posterity anyway.

I still occasionally find these pathetic relics, discarded like half-chewed bones. I read through them, hoping to find some kind of keen insight into the child I was, but they are void of any meaning. At 12, and 13, and 14, well, pretty much every year of my life ending in -teen, I was a sad specimen. Tiny, pasty, weird, clumsy (but you knew that), adolescence was hell. And I sure didn’t want to write any of that crap down. What was there to say, “Got tied to the jungle gym by my shoelaces, again.” “Told a really funny joke, nobody laughed because I was the one who told it.” “Got picked on for being me, again.” “Ate lunch with the pathetic little band of other outsiders that have become my one refuge in an increasingly hostile environment.” “Mom told me how awful my skin is, again.” (I wish to state for the record, Mother, that I have always had nice skin, teenagers get zits. I still get complements on my skin to this very day, little thanks to you. Yes, I’m bitter much.) “Dad gave me another book on how evil everything I want to do is.” “Am considering a descent into madness to stave off the rising tide of desperation.”

What I ended up writing were things like: what kind of underpants I had on, and how I wished I could be taller. Or the elaborate fantasies I built up about the incredible, graceful, beautiful girl that I wasn’t. As I got older, I would fill little notebooks with pieces of the real me. I realized the diaries were too obvious, too cliched. And as a writer, I despise cliche. And my mother was not to be trusted. She could’ve searched my room for contraband all she liked and I wouldn’t have cared, but there was no way I was going to expose my thoughts to her. The notebooks were nondescript, no one could’ve guessed the tortured thoughts they contained. Just the usual teenage angst, I suppose, but as negative emotions on my part were not tolerated, doubtless those writings would’ve gotten me a visit with a doctor. And to be honest, I was pretty harsh on my parents in those notebooks. These blogs of mine, these are now my little notebooks. But now, I don’t care if my parents read my writings, not that I think they do.

I have said before that my parents made many mistakes with me, all parents do. It’s truly unavoidable. The only thing we can do for our kids is try to learn from the past and not make the same mistakes our parents made. We need to make all new ones. My father was stern and scary and not very involved in my activities. He was, however, overly-involved with the church (and as scary as Daddy seemed, I was jealous of that stupid church!). So I joined in a lot of church activities myself, thinking that maybe he’d find some worth in me. That is a mistake I will not make; if you put religion before your children, you’re doing it wrong.

My mother, a captive of her own miserable upbringing, could not bring herself to be supportive on a day-to-day basis. I can count on one hand the times that I felt she was actually “in my corner”. I think it all goes back to my great-grandfather. He died well before I was born, but by all accounts, he was a vicious, brutal man-at least to my grandmother. My grandmother, in turn, married perhaps unwisely to escape. There weren’t many options for poor women, during the 30’s and 40’s, in rural Oklahoma. Maybe she shouldn’t have married, maybe she wasn’t particularly suited to mothering. Whatever it was, my mother never learned how to be nurturing or supportive.

After she finished high school, my mother wanted to go on to nursing school but my grandmother wouldn’t hear of it. Gammie didn’t have a very high opinion of nurses; actually, she didn’t have a very high opinion of anyone. At her mother’s insistence, my own mom went through some kind of clerical training, which she hated. When I was younger, there were two possible tracks I wanted to take for my future: writer or doctor. My parents never took my writing seriously, never encouraged that talent. When I wanted to go into journalism, my mother insisted that I take typing class, because I would never be able to support myself as a writer.

So, when I wished to pursue my other main interest, science, and go into medicine, my mother informed me that my high school grades weren’t good enough. I would never get into medical school. Because my high school GPA was only 3.2. The sad thing is, I listened to them, to her. I let them affect my future by believing in their low opinion of me. After years of feeling like a constant source of disappointment to them, I managed to disappoint myself.

I get it now, my grandmother signed up for a life she didn’t want to escape her childhood. Maybe to punish my mother for that life, Gammie thwarted her hopes for the future. My mother, having never been taught how to be a supportive parent, and having never gotten over what Gammie did to her, thwarted my hopes for my future. I do not, for one minute, believe that she did this on purpose. But, since she had never been encouraged in any way, she didn’t know how to encourage me. Perhaps she thought her words would spur me on to do better in school, but they didn’t. I gave up on what I wanted and sort of drifted through my first attempt at college.

Now, here I am, finishing college at nearly 40. I will have achieved my goals by the time my children are old enough to begin exploring their own futures. My mother could not reach beyond the mistakes her mother made and be supportive of me. I will not repeat that mistake, I will not drag this grievous error into yet another generation. My children will have my full support in whatever careers they choose to pursue. Oddly enough, it was having children myself that helped heal some of the dings to my psyche.

By the way, my mother went back to college when she was older than I am now. She’s a successful R.N. and I couldn’t be prouder of her. Way to go, Mom!

As a nursing student, I am taking a lot of science classes. Mostly life sciences, to be sure, but science none the less. And one thing, in all my studies, that I have noticed is how all life is intimately tied together in evolution’s intricate dance. Just look at mitochondria. Another thing I’ve noticed is that my science professors either side-step this entirely or refer to it only obliquely. Yes, this is Oklahoma, the buckle of the Bible Belt, but still. I wish that at least one professor would come out and say something along the lines of: “Life on this planet, over the course of billions of years, evolved from single-celled organisms to the myriad life forms we see today.”

One of my professors, who happens to be demonstrably conservative, very nearly came close to acknowledging this, but stopped short. He was discussing the harmful effects of artificial fats, like partially hydrogenated fats, on the human body. He told us that naturally occurring animal fats were more easily processed by the human body because…..then he stopped himself here. What he didn’t want to, couldn’t, acknowledge was that humans process animal fats more efficiently than laboratory-created fats because we evolved on this planet eating the other animals that also evolved on this planet!!!!!! But his conditioning could not allow him to admit to this simple truth. (I am in no way advocating the eating of animals or animal by-products to my readers that might have a problem with this, I am simply illustrating a point.)

But I have to say that I get it. I know why professors are reluctant to state the facts of evolution, a lot of christians get all bent out of shape and scared by the very thought of evolution. For folks that frequently decry “political correctness”, they sure are hypersensitive about this; and they stamp their widdle feet and get all pouty when presented with things that don’t fit into their neat little packages. To me, this speaks of a very childish kind of faith. If a person’s faith is shaken and devastated by learning about The Big Bang and evolutionary fact, well it wasn’t much of a faith to begin with, so he or she isn’t out much.

As a Christian, my faith is in no way threatened by evolution, or the Big Bang, or the true age of the Earth or the Universe, heliocentrism, and that the earth isn’t flat. But I don’t find it necessary to completely segregate faith and science. For most other christians, I would have to say, please separate science and religion, you aren’t any good at mixing them. Setting aside the fact that I do not hold with biblical literalism, the bible is not a scientific text!

So why do people want to use the bible as a science book? That’s easy: fear. Let’s look at the number 2 billion, that’s about how many years multi-cellular organisms have been on earth. 2,000,000,000. Looks harmless enough, right? But that is not an easy number to truly contemplate. Once a person starts really thinking about how many years that is compared to the 80-odd most people get, well, bless their pea-pickin’ little hearts, they just can’t abide it. 80 (one zero) to 2,000,000,000 (nine zeros), not really a fair fight is it? Don’t even ask most people to start thinking about the age of the universe. Which is, according to Cosmology 101, 13.7 billion years old! If we were to state that comparing the age of the universe to that of a human, with 1 year=1 billion years, then the universe is a teenager! And multi-cellular life on earth, at 2 billion, is but a mere toddler. As for homo sapiens (that’s us!), according to The Smithsonian Institution, we’ve been kicking around for only 130,000 years. If I’m figuring right, we haven’t even been conceived yet. This is where the analogy breaks down, I tend to think of humanity as in its toddlerhood. Currently raising toddler number two, I know how destructive, selfish, and unthinking toddlers can be. And yep, that’s pretty much us as a species: given to tearing stuff up and throwing temper tantrums when we don’t get absolutely everything just the way we want it and in a timely manner.

Seems like a lot of people have a real problem with not being the biggest grown-up on the block. How many among us would be comfortable admitting how scary everything can be? This fear of fact, fear of the astronomical, is a form of agoraphobia, some people have it and some people don’t. I can stand under the big, Oklahoma sky and love it, not fear it. My physical position on Earth is much like that of a microbe clinging to the surface of a soccerball, but I never fear that I will loose the bond of gravity and go spinning off into space. While I can’t truly grasp the enormity of 13.7 billion years, I don’t fear it, I don’t have to deny it. I embrace it in whatever dim fashion I can.

As for faith and science, I see the Hand of God in the majesty of the Big Bang. I cannot claim to know the mind of the Almighty, but it seems more probable to me that He is more present in the terrifyingly large number of 13.7 billion than in the mere 6000 or so that young earthers want to grant Him. As if we could box God into a less fearful package for our own comfort! The sheer sacrilege of such a thought is undeniable.

And why should my faith be threatened by the notion that my ancestors were much hairier apes and didn’t just spring from the mud wearing the latest style hat, as it were? Please don’t burden me with the “In His image” line. Here again, people want to limit God, make Him just like us, only older.

And to those who don’t want their children to learn about anything that isn’t in the bible, like dinosaurs (I’m not kidding), well don’t come crying at my door when your precious babies finally learn the facts for themselves and hate you for deceiving them. Didn’t God give us these questioning minds? These searching souls? If so, why would He want us to freeze our knowledge base at that level more suited to a nomadic, desert tribe 5000 years ago, at that time void of education and rife with superstition? The Creation Story is just that, a story, presented to a people with no scientific knowledge, in a manner that was comprehensible to them at the time. Humanity has matured in the intervening years, even if only a little and only in some ways.

I have my Truth, you have your Truth, everybody has their own, individual Truths, but facts are the same for everyone, whether you like it or not. My challenge to other Christians, heck to anyone who needs to grow a little, is this: don’t try to make God, or your Truth, more manageable by trying to shrink Him down to your size. It won’t work. Grow in your own faith, or Truth, until you can accept that others might not share that Truth or faith, but that the difference doesn’t lessen yours at all. And try not to fear the astronomical, it can’t hurt you. The only thing that will weaken your faith is fear-fear of the unknown, fear of the different, fear of feeling insignificant.

But science, science is not to be feared, but embraced. The God of Abraham, the God of Jesus, the God of the Big Bang, the God of evolution, He gave me a scientific mind and I won’t deny His gift.

Cross-posted