I was eight the year Back to the Future came out, and I remember it as my first major cinematic experience, complete with the packed theater erupting in applause when Marty climbed over that car and landed on his waiting skateboard. I then related the movie in detail to friends who hadn’t yet seen it, and when I described the ending, I quoted Marty asking Doc Brown what happens in the future — ”What, do we become assholes or something?.” I had forgotten to censor myself. My friends laughed, but as a Rule-Following Good Girl, I was horrified. Based on all I’d heard during my Bible Belt upbringing, swearing was A Big Deal. So I ran inside to the grownup in charge and, in an evangelical version of Catholic confession, admitted my sin and sought absolution. Which the adult gave, but not before adding on my way out the door, “Just don’t let it happen again.”
Reader, I was SHOOK. I hadn’t let it happen the first time! This wasn’t a choice I’d made — to swear like a common sailor — it had just slipped out! Suddenly the idea of accidental sinning plagued my mind, and I wondered how God might see fit to punish me the next time I unintentionally allowed a wrong word to cross my lips.
Some time after, or around when Back to the Future II was released and we all found out that Marty’s kids were indeed the assholes, I started competing in (and winning) class spelling bees. I remember preparing for these events: sitting at home being quizzed through a book of longer and longer words, gazing longingly out the window at the other kids playing. I did get a free ice cream from McDonald’s upon my victory, but I also compounded my skewed view that words were something to be mastered, leading to glory — or gotten wrong, ending in ignominy. There was one right way to be, just like there was one right way to spell each word, and the smallest error would get me kicked out of the competition. Or the kingdom.
Words matter, just not the way I thought they did. I defined everything according to a scarcity model: there likely wasn’t enough (of God’s love, or patience) to go around. Then grace came along and turned all that shit upside down by changing the definition of everything. Now, I’m a middle-aged woman who has run all out of f*cks, until one comes out of my mouth (because my growing premenopausal brain fog seems to keep me from being able to recall most words except the four-letter kind). Language is a precious resource when your mind starts to … if not go, then at least make note of the nearest exit, which isn’t as far away as it used to be. With words being a tight commodity, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about words lately — holding on to my favorites that grace has chosen for me — and words sure aren’t what they used to be.
Take, for example, the words us and them. That pair barely exists for me anymore, when it used to be a clear and comforting dividing line in my life. The form of different — formerly them — that resided in my body for nine months and is now exemplified by my older son has, in its synonymity with grace, destroyed such parlance. Deficit language has been a focal point recently in discussions about how we describe the disabled and marginalized among us. Word choice matters, it is argued, because when we define people according to what we perceive they lack, we dehumanize them, and this colors everything from interpersonal relations to public policy. When my son was diagnosed as autistic almost a decade ago, I shied away from the word because of the shame I felt was associated with it — not realizing that I was contributing to, and carrying, that shame myself. I could only see his diagnosis from a perspective of scarcity, of deficit: it represented all the differences that would hold him back from a normal life.
Since then, the meaning of words like autism and normal has changed for me. While autism does make his life harder, most of these difficulties are due to a world that is not (yet) set up to accommodate the way he processes information. A world that sees his honesty as a liability, or his detail-orientation and the delays it can cause as an encumbrance. But these differences are only problems when viewed through a skewed lens — or a defunct dictionary. When I need the house cleared of company at 9pm or I require an honest opinion of the new dress I got, there’s only one person I go to. My son’s divinely-designed brain renders him unwilling to compromise the truth when it comes to words. As words are purveyors of information, he sees no point in squandering them uselessly, the way so many of us do every day: in passive aggression, or false praise, or equivocations, or idiomatic expressions meant to soften blows at the expense of more truthful and forthright utterances. His devotion to truth has converted me, fortified me, given me the words to say to rooms full of people who now know our story after I have (over)shared it.
And when truth is told … well, hold on to your f*cking hats, because one of two things happens: you either repel people, or you draw them closer. Those who are repelled can be recognized immediately: their general awkwardness around you, their slow backwards walk, their plastered-on smiles. These are the people who haven’t (yet) been slapped in the face/kicked in the ass by truth, which is to say, they haven’t felt (or allowed themselves to feel) the kind of love that wrecks your life to put it back together the way it was meant to be.
But those who know firsthand the love that does its work with a sword in one hand and beams in the other, demo and rebuild, know that this love always takes the shape of a redemptive arc: my older son’s honesty; my younger son embracing that same honesty when he calls out my own passive aggression and I see generational tendencies begin to crumble; that same son’s notebook full of stories that reminds me that good things, including a love of words that tell stories, get passed down too.
Advent is another word whose meaning has changed for me over the years. It used to represent only Christmas and its attendant traditions: something was coming, and it was fun. Oh, and it was Jesus’ birthday too. Now, Advent both carries the jubilant tones of Yuletide and also includes the longing underneath that harkens to a future fulfillment, the now-and-not-yet stretched across the whole of human history, the darkness of the cross threaded inextricably with the innocence of the Nativity. In her book Advent, Fleming Rutledge writes:
For those who cannot or will not look deeply into the human condition, sentiment and nostalgia can masquerade as strategies for coping quite successfully for a while — but because it is all based on illusion and unreality, it cannot be a lasting foundation for generations to come.
When I’ve stopped — by choice or by the bitch slaps of grace — ”wrap[ping] my fear around me like a blanket” and started standing on the rock-bottom of a true foundation, exposed but real, I recognize that among all my favorite words that contain four letters, love is the one above them all. Love is the Word, “the God who breaks his own silence by coming in person” (also Rutledge). Inside this Word are held all others, and so am I.
Which is how I can rest in the fact that we’re all the assholes, and that’s okay, because the Word of Love came, and is still on its way, and this both changes and gives true meaning to everything.
So let’s — to quote a now-problematic movie — go get the shit kicked out of us by love. Merry Christmas, ya filthy animals.
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Thank you, Stephanie! I like you even more than I did before. So grateful for your words.