Part 1
When I was seven, I filled a yellow dishwashing glove with hot water, tied off the top with a ponytail holder and drew a face on it with Sharpie. My baby. I made her because I liked that, unlike plastic Barbies, she felt real— warm and wiggly, despite being clinically jaundiced. I’d never seen anything like her. I wouldn’t call her ugly, but maybe she transcended beauty?
I wouldn’t put her down. My mom took a picture of me eating mac n cheese while holding her swaddled in a soggy tea towel (she’d sprung a leak in her index finger.) Despite my mom’s reassurances, I was scared that we didn’t have enough money for me to keep refilling her, as we were always being being hurried out of showers and told to “turn off that spigot!” while brushing teeth.
Wow was that early mothering crisis a foreshadowing of the plight of modern single parents: not having somewhere to put our babies down and fearing we’ll not be able to refill them. With food and housing and medicine and education; but also, with sufficient relational stability and our own best presence free from constant insecurity. But hold on, that’s what the yellow glove baby will talk about in Part 2!
For now, I just want to suggest three sacred roles in a full life on the belonging frontier: To be the not normal leaky glove baby. To hold and love a leaky glove baby. To turn on the spigot for someone else’s leaky glove baby. I make no apologies for this metaphor.
Be the baby! The first developmental task of babyhood is to learn to receive. To be poured into with all we need to grow. To learn joy by being enjoyed as irreplaceably valuable in our bare existence. To be held, protected and cherished as someone’s without expectation or catch. Every cry and leak attended to. This is our foundation of trust and self-worth, formed before conscious memory. And throughout our lives, this is the question on repeat in the back of our throat: will they love me for me? We need to surround ourselves with people who say yes.
Love the baby! The response to being loved is to bounce that love back and watch it exponentially grow, creating a virtuous circle of love-dovey-ness. (Joy is measurably exchanged thousands of time per second between a baby and caretaker’s eyes!) But even if we didn’t have a sufficient experience of being loved well in those early years, we can start where we are by extending that care to someone or even something else that we have a natural inclination to love. Learning to love someone for their own sake, as an “end in themselves” without instrumental value to you, is both the first and last step, according to the boatload of saints, of becoming a good person. The question is: how can I love them for them?
3. Refill someone’s baby! When we’re basically filled up in reciprocal relationships, we can spill love towards others who we need nothing from in return. We can invite the transfer student, the new co-worker, the single parent into our tight knit families and friend groups to share our relational resources. Or we can pay attention to who is struggling to rest, to stabilize, to live free from fear, which impedes their ability to be there for their own friends and family in the ways they want to, and offer to help them nap, to be a shield, to somehow willfully involve ourselves in the solutions they see for their lives to flourish.
As we move through these sacred roles, we develop the holy capacity to love and be loved in every widening and deepening circles until we’re a beloved community of dancing yellow gloves. Amen and amen.
Finally, please send me your requests to turn other cleaning tools into elaborate belonging metaphors. Sending open spigots and not normal baby dolls from the belonging frontier,
Cat
P.S. - Other friends along these tracks:
Maid by Stephanie Land
Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited
A foreboding look at being in no sacred roles on the belonging frontier…