Looking back at 2025

 

You can see, I'm sure, the problem. It's vanity, I know, but were I to walk around in public with these monster shoes holding up my horribly big feet, they could not only pass for boats, but for entire piers. Ugly?--absolutely, an admission of age too. I'm confident were we to take a hike through the nearest old folks home--there's one or two  plenty close, by the way--we'd find a dozens of these leviathans on rugs in front of TVs. Can you imagine some college kid wearing these? And remember, I'm confessing something here--I'd need size 16. Huge, not boats, battleships.

But I'm sick of shoes that don't fit, or, maybe it's better to say, shoes that make my feet ache. I've got no idea if these could bring some comfort, but they're marked to do just that, not to be impress any of the guests at the opera, but to keep down complaints from my feet.

And that's a nice thought. My feet haven't smiled for years, and their aching is not getting any better. That's why I'm shopping this morning of Old Years Eve--not because I'm lookin' for pizazz--I'm just after comfort.

Old Years Eve is an officially approved day to look back, even though, at my age, it seems that I look back far more frequently than ahead; there's more subject matter back there than there is out front. I can honestly say that I didn't think much about old age until I started wearing a knee brace a year and a half ago, assuming that if I did it would somehow miraculously stop my knees from caving for no good reason.

Turns out faulty knees were a symptom of what was happening neurologically throughout my body, a condition, when professionally assessed, led to a diagnosis of spinal stenosis, a condition I'd never heard of until it determined to go to war with my body. There's a walker right beside me here, and two canes hanging from a coat rack at the back door. I don't go anywhere without, at least, one of them, a cane or the walker. I'm a public service message for the cripples among us, and, if I can and will believe every doctor and/or specialist I've seen, I ain't getting over it anytime soon.

So, from the vantage point of this Old Years Eve, what's to assess that's behind me during the year of our Lord 2025 isn't a bowl of roses. Lord knows hundreds, thousands, millions of humanoids find themselves in far worse straits, so what right do I have to complain, right?

Be happy the wheelchair is in plastic storage in the garage, long abandoned. Be thankful for a half-dozen physical therapists who not only direct my body's recovery but must have been told sometime in their degree programs that the very best therapy they can deliver may well be telling the patient that he or she is doing great.

I don't care, I love it. "Yeah, well, Jim," they'll tell me, "you did well today, don't you think?"

For all those sweet PTs, I'm greatly thankful this December 31st. For the three PTs at Heartland Home, who had the toughest job; for the half-dozen or so at Orange City Hospital; and now for the three or four here at Pro-Edge, thanks so much for putting me through the paces and then telling me, even through my pouting pride, that I'm doing just fine. 

"Just fine" is just wonderful. 

St. MTG

She's just about come to the point where her name can be invoked simply by way of her initials--MTG. She's not quite risen to the level of a woman who would have been her nemesis--AOC, or the new czar of American health, RFK. She might have, had she not had what she considers a true Damascus Road experience, at least that's how she might well characterize it, or so says Robert Draper of the NY Times in a highly discussed and long feature article earlier this week.

The intent is to help an American public understand her, someone who was the captain of the cheerleaders for Donald Trump ever since she came on the scene. She was not only an advocate, she was an accomplice. Today, she's on his hit list and was heard on her phone, in public, berating her in the savage rhetoric he's known for. What happened?

The answer that Draper gives is fascinating in an eternal sense because Draper claims--via her testimony--that MTG met that Damascus Road experience during the commemoration of the life of Charley Kirk, yet another Trump champ and conservative hero, who was gunned down a few months ago.

Draper says MTG explained it this way. Mrs. Kirk stood up and said, among other things, that she forgave her husband's killer. She did so because it was the Christian thing to do--forgive one's enemies. Next to take the podium was our beloved President who quite forthrightly told the audience that unlike Mrs. Kirk, she didn't forgive Charley's killer, but hated him--and mostly them because our dear President has rarely backed away from a friendly conspiracy theory.

When MTG heard those two diametrically opposed positions, she shuddered deeply because she knew that one of them was the "Christian" way, while the other--hate speech from the Pres--was not.

That was absolutely the worst statement,” Greene wrote to me [Draper] in a text message months after the memorial service. And the contrast between Erika Kirk and the president was clarifying, she added. “It just shows where his heart is. And that’s the difference, with her having a sincere Christian faith, and proves that he does not have any faith.

That difference made MTG shudder because it reflected on her own faith, and her own contribution to what she and others call our "toxic political culture." She looked inward and saw her own toxicity, her own sin, to be more traditionally theological. She knew she'd been wrong and had to change. “After Charlie died," she wrote a friend, "I realized that I’m part of this toxic culture. I really started looking at my faith. I wanted to be more like Christ.”

Wow! That, my friends, is a story, in Christian terms, a testimony.

I have a bit of a better sense of what it took for the disciples to accept Saul, their fierce enemy, as Paul, servant of the Lord. It's hard to think of someone more loyal to the whole MAGA fantasy that the blond bombshell from Georgia, and suddenly I have to look to her as Mother Theresa?

That's tough sledding, even in a winter like ours.

Almost immediately, she quit the House, resigned from her political position. She also gave up her sustaining family in the MAGA movement. Almost immediately, her life was threatened, as was the life of her son, a college student.

For a ton of reasons, her story is a block-buster. Might it push other evangelicals to reconsider their intense loyalty to the Donald? Will MTG now quickly disappear, given that her ability to generate headlines is compromised? Can she be believed?--after all, it's the old "come-to-Jesus" story. Is she a harbinger of things to come?--might there be more MTGs? 

And there's this: Paul's Damascus Road experience was no dodge. It was authentic, something believers recognize. 

After all, miracles happen--just ask us.

Lully Lula

 

 Breughel, The Massacre of the Innocents

This morning, just hit the "Listen" button and don't bother reading.

https://www.kwit.org/featured-programs/2017-12-31/lully-lullay 

Who to believe?

First, you are to think always of God,

of Wankan-Tanka. Second, you are to

use all your powers to care for your

people and especially for the poor.

Black Moon, Hunkpapa Sioux

Long, long ago it seems, I was told--no, warned--that I should be careful around Native spirituality because it is, well, enchanting, but not as profoundly beautiful as it sometimes seems from the outside--and maybe especially by white-liberal types (meaning, someone like me).  

The "warn-er" was herself Native, a sincere Christian Cherokee, a writer named Diane Glancy, who has made it her dream to draw out the stories which delve into spirituality, both Native and Christian--and Christians in Native settings.

This morning's little reading in a book Barbara gave me for Christmas, 365 Days of Walking the Red Road, started with this quote by a man whose name I'd never seen before.   

But some approximations are too difficult to look past. For instance, those qualities of living--spirit-filled living--held up as exemplary by the "Red Road," include virtues like humility, respect, generosity, and wisdom. The kind of life sought on the Red Road is a spiritual, ethical life. For quick reference, run through the "Fruits of the Spirit" (Galatians 5): Love, Joy, Peace, Forbearance, Kindness, Goodness, Gentleness, Self-control. It's long, maybe a bit more comprehensive, but basically we're all talking the same language.

A decade ago, I did a book for Rehoboth School and Mission in New Mexico. I interviewed families who had been influenced by their experience there. One man, a retired lawyer, told me that before his father had sent him off to the mission school, his father warned him about listening too closely to talk about the white man's god, but he also told his son that he'd grown to like the people who ran the school and did the evangelical work on the reservation. He liked them not because they were Christians but because those white people believed in the same things his people did--something his own people called "the Beauty Way." If his son would go to school there, he'd learn about living spiritually, ethically--and his father greatly respected that way of life taught in the mission school.

Want a shorter catechism? How about Luke 10: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” Now look up there at the top at the sermon delivered by someone named Black Moon. 

I'm not about to run out to Marty, South Dakota, try to find a Native church, and join up; but what I'm saying is that life itself, in a variety of avenues I've taken, has taught me to be far, far less sure of the Beauty Way is or has been in the tribe from whom I come.

One of the most conservative men I ever knew, Rev. Cornelius Van Schouwen, writing from the beleaguered country of France during WWII, couldn't help but feel at least something of what I'm talking about, even though the contrasting way of life is not Native--it's simply to believe where GIs worship and why.

The war teaches one to love the brotherhood of all Christians. As a chaplain, you don't ask a soldier what denomination he belongs to, but rather if he is a Christian.

Here, Van Schouwen is at his most theologically lenient. I am tempted to say it is the  moment at which he seems least sectarian through the years the diaries  present us. But a realization of the brotherhood of all Christians does not linger. 

 I can't help wishing it had.

Sunday morning meds from Psalm 32

 “. . .surely when the mighty waters rise, they will not reach him.”

I’ve been to Japan, studied Shintuism a bit, and not been seduced.  I’ve listened to ex-Buddhists describe their childhood faith but never felt much inclined to Buddhism either.  Native American religion interests me greatly, but I’m not about to jump into a breech cloth or a sweat lodge—well, maybe a sweat lodge.

 Last week, our preacher said the first commandment—to worship no other gods—is often a piece of cake if we think of Mohammed, for instance, or Buddha as God’s rivals.  He’s right. Most Christian believers aren’t tortured by their closet animism. 

 The god most of us really want to worship, our preacher said, is ourselves.  Pride is the first of the Seven Deadlies, and it has been since someone wrote up the list, since Adam and Eve wanted the apple God forbade, and since the instinct-like will to live was born in each of us.  We want what’s best for us—for better or for worse. The god God almighty doesn’t want us to worship is the glorious, omnipotent Me.

 I say that because I don’t always trust David. I trust the Word that emerges from his songs. I trust the God he trusts. I trust the truth of the scriptures themselves. But I don’t always trust him, and I don’t because, in this psalm at least, I think he’s protecting himself, like all of us do. Why shouldn’t he?  He’s human. 

 Psalm 32 starts so very well—a clear sense of intent, the thesis, proudly and yet lovingly proclaimed in the opening verses.  Then the story central to all believers, told well, convincingly, in the next four verses: he sings for joy because he’s been—hallelujah!—forgiven of his sins and miseries.

 Then things get messy. What he says next is understandable: Given what I’ve been through, he says, I hope all of you experience what I did of the glorious freedom of grace.  Fine. And then, “if you can.”  Odd sentiment, suggesting, of course, that our timing—or worse, God’s—could be off. Things may not work out. Strangely undercuts his enthusiasm, doesn’t it?  And then, “surely.” I don’t like where that word is positioned because it feels tentative—“surely you’ll not be harmed in danger.” Surely. Surely.  

 And then “you are my hiding place.”  Is David, post-Bathsheeba, post forgiveness, looking for a place to hide?  “You will protect me from trouble”???  From more Uriahs?  The great problems of the opening verses were not caused by enemies tearing down palace walls; they were created totally by destruction, pride as much as lust, David’s fierce desire to serve the great God of self—my wants, my needs, my sweet Bathsheeba.

 Even though he begins this psalm with triumph, there’s some shakiness.. He’s sure God’s forgiveness is the greatest thing that ever happened to him, he wants to sing his joy; but there’s a tentativeness in verses six and seven that has him pressing for words and even losing focus. He’s not even as sure as he’d like to sound. He’s not lying, but he sounds more like a salesman than a devout. 

 But then that very oh-so-human tenderness may be his greatest gift to believers thousands of years later, to us—that gift being that he sounds like we do.  Human.  Sometimes confident, sometimes not, sometimes wanting to be more confident than he is.  Sometimes even when we wants like mad to get it right, he gets it wrong.  So much like us. 

And—get this--still so much loved by the Lord. 

Rev. Tony Van Zanten (1935-2025)

It could be that I have no place in the commemoration, but something in me says that I do. The two of us hail from the same background, although I was never, as he was, a farm kid from northwest Iowa. But we were and are generational members of the same ethnic and religious tribe. We know and own the same culture markers--views of the Sabbath, the importance of Sunday worship, the sacraments, just two of them; we both have a Dordt diploma. Both of us have families who came to America from the 19th century Netherlands.

I honestly have no memories of him--of his reputation, yes, certainly, but of him, none. If I hadn't seen his pictures on the obits I picked up on the internet, I wouldn't have known what Rev. Tony Van Zanten looked like.

All of that having been said, I knew of him, knew, greatly, of him, knew him as a man who'd given his life for inner city ministry, mostly in Roseland, Illinois, a place largely abandoned by another band of 19th century immigrant Dutch, who found the Great Migration of African-American refugees from the American South too difficult to handle and therefore pulled up stakes and left for distant western and southern suburbs of Chicago.

Except Rev. and Mrs. Tony Van Zanten. They didn't leave. They came to Roseland precisely because of the people from the Great Migration. They came because a couple Iowa farm kids--Tony, from Rock Valley, his loving spouse Donna from Kanawha--decided somewhere in or around a stay in Harlem that inner city ministries was for them. They stayed. They put down roots. They loved and were loved.

Rev. Tony's death reminded me of a story that was, in all likelihood, vintage Tony Van Zanten. I wrote and directed a theater piece that told the history of the denomination in which both of us--all three of us, all four of us really, my wife too-- held membership, a theater piece, if I may say so, that was dearly beloved by a generation just a bit older than my own, a generation of the same tribe. Because it was so loved, the denomination determined to keep that theater piece around historically, so they found a place for a performance that could double as a stage for a video of the entire show--a high school performance hall on the west side of Chicago. 

Must have been a strange performance to witness because every few minutes the stage director would move the cameras or tell the cast to do the scene over again to get it right. 

That one-night event--staging and shooting--was very well attended, even though it was neither fish nor foul. But if you have access to a video of the show sometime, it's difficult not to notice that when the camera pans the crowd it picks up a row of four African-American men, maybe the only black faces in the crowd that night. Honestly, I didn't even notice them until I saw the video.

I got a letter from Rev. Tony Van Zanten sometime later. I may still have it, although a flood took out lots of those things from file drawers. I remember being shocked to read the return address was Rev. Tony because even though I don't think I ever met him, I most certainly knew of him. We had many mutual friends. During most of my life, few members of our tribe were as beloved as Rev. Tony for his peculiar and successful ministry.

The letter--handwritten--was maybe three pages long. It explained how he'd picked up four men from Roseland Christian Ministries, and told them he wanted them to come with him to this performance of sorts happening across town. He explained that he didn't tell them much about what they were going to see, but the five of them had hopped in the church van and made it to the performance hall in time to see the whole thing.

He wanted to see what they would think, he told me. He wanted to take four inner-city men along to the history of the very white CRC just to see what they would think. 

When it was over, he was thrilled, he said, because they loved it--not because of its spiritual content or because it offered a full gallery of music with which to sing along, although those things were part of its success. 

They were taken by the story, he said, because they never, ever presumed that the white members of the denomination that sponsored Roseland Christian Ministries were ever, ever poor. They had no idea. They only white people they knew, Pastor Tony told me in that letter, were, by their estimation, unimaginably rich. They had no idea that once upon a time they were dirt poor. 

That note stays with me, not simply because these four African-American guys really liked the show but because the show had presented an image of the white people they likely knew best as church people of limited means, almost half of whom had died in their first winter on Lake Michigan. 

He was thrilled because the story on stage had shaken them into a new and broader vision of members of Rev. Tony's church, and that's what Rev. Tony wanted me to know--that a show about Dutch immigrant ruffians, cultural inquisitors who loved nothing better than theological fencing, had made them readjust their perceptions of the white folks who came to Roseland Christian Ministries.

In all likelihood, that letter was swept away in the flood, but it's stored deeply in my heart, a story I've never told. 

Rev. Tony Van Zanten died on December 15, just a couple of weeks ago. 

There are hundreds of Rev. Tony stories. I have just one, a story I've never forgotten.

Should you care to visit his funeral service, there's a live stream available here.

Like Saints

When it came time to play them, we couldn't help wonder what the Catholics were thinking when they named the school "Immaculate Conception." Weird. If you're a sixth grade boy just about everything has something to do with sex. That Catholic school's weird name, whatever it meant, was about something good Christian boys had no business thinking about out loud, and the kids from that school plastered it on their uniforms? Seriously?

But we played 'em, weird name or not. As far as I remember, no teacher or coach from our school ever said much about the name. "Okay, guys, tomorrow we'll line up against 'Immaculate Conception.'" I don't think we giggled. It's just that when you thought about it a little--well, you know: it was something like foreskins and circumcision and all of that embarrassing stuff. When you're twelve, it's just weird that you'd say those words out loud.

When you leave the Raphael Rooms of the Vatican Museums, massive frescos that fill every square centimeter of your consciousness, you follow the flow into another space so laden with life-sized art you don't know where to look first because you're sure you'll miss something. And you will. 

Anyway, there she was, Mary mother of Jesus, Virgin Mary, in a bigger-than-life statue and surrounded by massive frescoes featuring dozens, even hundreds of human figures, some with addresses in this world, some, clearly, very much at home in the next.

It's the Room of the Immaculate Conception, and while I'd long ago come to understand the phrase in a 7th grade-boy way, I never took the time to think much, really, about the adoration of Mary, except in a very Protestant way--as silly. In this immense room, everything was the Immaculate Conception, not the divine act itself (although a score of artists have taken a shot at that), but the act's honored and historic place in Roman Catholic dogma and culture. 

In the huge wall behind the statue features two worlds. The world below is Rome--the Vatican, Pope and Cardinals all aligned for the celebration of the formal acceptance of the Doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. The world above features heaven (far left) and that other brimstone place (far right, where the sinners are, at this moment, falling from grace). Fig-leafed Adam and guilt-ridden Eve are on the cloud, upper right, Adam seemingly protecting his sinful mistress. 

But at the heart of the Heaven is the Trinity. There's a dove (the Holy Spirit) above Mary's head (she's in blue, traditionally), and she stands (while Christ and the Father sit) just a bit lower in foreground. Telling placements.

For centuries, the Roman Catholic church had accepted the belief that Mary was not only a virgin, but also, alone of all mankind, sinless. Not until 1854 did her divinity become defined as Catholic dogma, an act signed into canon law by Pope Pius IX. That moment is prominently featured in the center of the fresco, the Pope standing before his throne, surrounded by Cardinals, all of which makes this particular room, the Room of the Immaculate Conception, of far more recent vintage (1860s) than the Rafael Rooms next door (300 years older). The paint is still wet. 

Rome didn't make me any more Roman Catholic than I ever was, but for two weeks 

I was most definitely more of a disciple of that whole world than I'd ever been. Somehow the visual grace, art that attracts millions annually, helped me understand far more than I ever had about the historic church, even has me smiling in a whole new way at those grade school kids with that weird name printed on their basketball uniforms. 

It really, really was a big deal. That big, in fact.

I never had a problem with that wonderful last line of the Luke 2 story--"and Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart" (NIV), nor did i ever fume about her remarkable--"divine"--compliance to the angel's bizarre directives a chapter earlier: "May it happen to me according to your word,” she says at the angel's annunciation. She's what?--13 maybe, and she's about to be pregnant while unmarried, and, as yet, untouched in any ordinary ways.

The Lord God almighty knew what he was doing when he picked Mary out of the gallery. He wanted--and he got--someone who'd do whatever had to be done. "Of course," she could have said. "When should I write it in my calendar?"

But just last night, we listened to Rev. Andrew Kuyvenhoven point us at the strangely, and equally compliant husband-to-be, who likely understood he was going to have to fib to get this one through the ringer.

They're hardly human, those two. They get visited supernaturally--who's to say it wasn't just a bizarre dream?--and just like that, they fold, both of them. "Sure, Lord God," they say. "When does this whole thing begin?"

"How about this?" the Creator might have told them--"at the beginning of time,'"

I doubt that would have stopped them either. They just trust too much. They're like saints.

 

A Prayer for the Dead -- vi

Technically, the story is over when Bea ponders the star her mother deliberately placed beneath the linoleum cover they put on their kitchen table. At that point, Bea had begun to wonder whether she'd lived her life in the right way with respect to her missionary parents. That moment was the technical climax of the story.

The writer (that's me) has to make sure, as sure as my artistic sense will allow, that my readers come to see that, once this Christmas night is behind them, something big and basic will have changed in the way that Bea remembers her parents and sees the world. 

I've got to use that star.

_____________________  

She pulled her jacket over her shoulders, looking back at the dead baby, a gift for her blessed parents [she means that sarcastically, of course]. She stepped outside where Shorty was already waiting, and when he opened the door, she saw a bottle of beer between his legs. She pulled herself into the Pontiac and stared back at the porch light. It was the same car she would drive back from California herself a year later, alone and penniless, their little Frank, hungry, in the front seat beside her. 

What she'd done, Char had said. [She hasn't forgotten her daughter's accusation.] 

She put the cap back on the stripper and tossed the steel wool in the garbage, still holding the star. She'd had enough of refinishing for Christmas Eve. It was a holiday. There'd be more to get off and the legs to do before the dark cherry stain could reach into the old surface and pull out all the edges of the grain. 

She took Myron's flannel work-shirt off her shoulders and hung it from a nail, then used the rubber gloves to pick up the soggy steel wool and drop it in the can beside the door. She kicked clean newspapers over the clots of stripper that had dropped to the floor from the table, and rubbed the back of her hand over the clean wood. She walked over to the door and looked outside over the neighbor's fence at Christmas lights down the street where families stayed together [a bit of jealousy here]. 

She went inside and plugged in the coffee with her left hand and opened the refrigerator to a cake pan of brownies she'd made just that afternoon for Char. She slipped open the silverware drawer with her little finger and took out a paring knife, then carried the fudge back to the kitchen table, the medallion in the same hand as a paper plate she took from the counter. Behind her, the coffee maker snorted. It would be ready for Myron later. 

What would she do with the star? [That's the question I'm facing when I'm here in the writing of the story.] She sat at the table and laid it in front of her. Someone had lifted it finally from its secret place. It wasn't hidden anymore. She had to do something with it--her mother's desert star. 

She sliced through the pan of brownies in perfect squares, lifted one from the pan and ate it from the spatula, then took another piece from the pan and laid it on the edge of the dinner plate, then another and another. When she filled the plate with two circles of fudge, she reached up for wax paper to cover the bottom layer, then started in on more. 

It didn't really belong here in this house, she thought. Her mother had buried it for some reason she might never know or understand, stuck it away like a secret, and now it was unearthed. She reached in the junk drawer and found a piece of red thread, then poked the end through the weave of the star and held it up to dangle like a Christmas ornament. It needed to hang somewhere, she thought. Char already had the table. She could keep it herself, she thought--something from her mother, something from the grandma Char said she'd never had. [I'm running through some possibilities.]  

She emptied the pan, she ripped another piece of wax paper from the roll and covered the brownies completely. It was her mother's star, she thought, her mother's secret, something she would never under­stand, and her mother deserved it now, in the Indian way, part of herself, a memorial. [I've figured it out, but the mystery remains for you, I hope.] 

She left a note for Myron that said she loved him and not to wait up because she'd be back all right and she'd tell him about it in the morn­ing. Then she drove out of town, past the lights and the traffic until the city was a glowing dome in the darkness behind her and the edges of the mountains seemed a shroud thrown down at the horizon to cover stars in the dark desert sky. She knew she could find their graves in the darkness because they would be the only uncluttered stones in the cemetery, the only sites not decorated with offerings for the dead. She could find them. She had never been there before-even though she should have been, never having said good-bye, never really letting go. [She's bound for her parents' graves in a cemetery at the mission.]

Peter had said there were so many of them at the funeral, but there would be no one there at Christmas. She could leave the star with a plate full of brownies because her parents' graves should be honored for the holiday, she told herself, decorated in the Indian way to look a part of the world that they'd sacrificed so much of themselves to save, she thought, even their children.  

_____________________________ 

And that's why. Let's just step lightly through this last part of the story. 

She had never been there before-even though she should have been, never having said good-bye, never really letting go. ["Should have been," she tells herself. This self-criticism is new; the Bea at the beginning of the story would not have incriminated herself that way.]

Peter had said there were so many of them at the funeral, but there would be no one there at Christmas. [Way back when, this friend of mine told me he hadn't really stopped resenting his parents until he saw the many Native folks who came for the funeral. When he noticed specifically who his parents had given their lives for, he was overwhelmed, even thrilled. I bring it back here to suggest that Bea was equally moved by her brother's report.] She could leave the star with a plate full of brownies [this is a very Native thing to do, which is why Bea adopts the idea. If she puts the plate of brownies alongside the star, it will likely be the only decorations on her parents' graves--and her parents' graves may well be the only stones left undecorated since her parents' views of the afterlife differ clearly from Native rites and rituals. Protestant Christians don't "pray for the dead." Bea puts those things on her parents' grave on Christmas Eve because she blesses them, in all likelihood for the first time in her life.] because her parents' graves should be honored for the holiday, she told herself, decorated in the Indian way to look a part of the world that they'd sacrificed so much of themselves to save, she thought, even their children [ouch, but that she says it makes her just as human as you or I].