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Reimagining Family with Vanessa Sadler and Haley Wiggers
122 Plays7 months ago
Something sacred happens when we open our homes to those beyond our immediate families. Worldviews are widened. Memories are formed. Belonging is cultivated.
Together, Vanessa and Haley share their own memories of hospitality. As Vanessa remembers the impact of being invited into the home of a family during her years in college, Haley recalls the formative impact of her own parents' hospitality to both strangers and friends in the home of her youth. Spiritual Directors both, Vanessa and Haley take turns noticing one another's stories, putting words to they sense of welcome they have sought to grow as women as well as the loss of belonging they have navigated as they've aged.
Through it all, a yearning to keep seeking and sharing belonging ties these women's stories together. Listen in to share in the beauty of their conversation.
For more stories from brave, ordinary women, join us at Red Tent Living.
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Transcript
Introduction to Red Tint Living Podcast
00:00:01
Speaker
Hi, I'm Tracy Johnson, and this is the Red Tint Living Podcast, where brave women host honest conversations about their beautiful and hard ordinary. This season, we connect on stories of family. We're excited for you to join us. Welcome to our table. In this episode, we get the opportunity to listen to a conversation between Vanessa Sadler and Hailey Wiggers.
00:00:27
Speaker
It feels important to me to share that these women are both spiritual directors. So it unfolds into something that is rich and layered and just really, really beautiful. So enjoy the conversation between Vanessa and
Roles and Excitement of Spiritual Directors
00:00:48
Speaker
Hailey. Hailey, I'm so glad to be with you today. Yeah, it's good to finally be face to face.
00:00:57
Speaker
I feel like they maybe didn't know what they were doing when they paired us. We're two spiritual directors. This could go a myriad of directions. These podcast recordings, I feel like when you have people who have sort of a posture of like, I have a lot of different questions and curiosities. It ends up being
00:01:28
Speaker
spiritual direction session that other people get to listen in on. Yes. Yes. And people who have a natural open-handedness about things and a willingness to go to places that have been stirring maybe in their own hearts and minds off the mic, so to speak. Yeah. Anything's possible. How are you feeling coming into today?
Vanessa's Anxieties and Hope for Restoration
00:01:59
Speaker
I think I'm bringing a host of like anxiety from other related things, right? Holy week in the church. So in my role and job, things are like swirling. And so I feel like I'm always reminded of the need to sort of be open-handed and to have a pocket in my day. I think this will be really restorative in a week that feels really stressful and chaotic. Yeah.
Hailey's Journey of Reimagining Family
00:02:29
Speaker
What about you? I think this prompt of reimagining family holds so much, like on one hand, I don't know if you experienced this a lot, but I find that often holding multiple racial identities can
00:02:46
Speaker
I can like hold lots of things in my hand like over here I got this over here I got this and so coming in I'm like reimagining family can often feel like that feels like a really hopeful statement and a really hopeful prompt but at the same time also reminds me so much of
00:03:08
Speaker
maybe like what's been lost or what there is still to come that I haven't had an imagination for. And why might that be? Yeah, that's a web of...
00:03:29
Speaker
just interrelated, complicated, and beautiful and hard things that I think all play into, just family in general, but then even the term re-imagining sort of invites a lot of things to be true, I think. At the same time, yeah. Yeah. At the same time. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Wow. Do you want to go first?
Traditions and Symbolism in Family Life
00:03:57
Speaker
Or do you want me to?
00:03:59
Speaker
I'm happy to go first. I can't remember when we started the tradition. It's been so long now. Maybe it began a decade ago when our friends bequeathed us their dining table before moving out of the country. They were the first to pin their names on the underbelly of the table.
00:04:18
Speaker
We reserve the honor for those just passing through, staying only a day or a week, and the friends who have become like family who are moving on to the next adventure.
00:04:31
Speaker
The Sharpie goes to the people who won't be able to gather with us like they have before, passing plates and laughter and stories between us, people who've come into our lives for spells and stretches, who've watched our marriage bloom and wither and bloom again, watched our children grow and us struggle to grow with them as
Lessons from a Mentor Family
00:04:52
Speaker
they do.
00:04:52
Speaker
My mom and I lived a few hours away from her entire side of the family and several hours away from my dad's. We got together with her family on major holidays and long weekends during the summer to swim at my aunt's pool. I didn't learn about hospitality from them though. I learned from a mentor family I lived with in college.
00:05:14
Speaker
The family had a modest house just outside of Lexington, Kentucky. I lived with them during the summer while working and fast tracking my degree with a few courses at UK. Their two children were my age and their front door was never locked. It wasn't unheard of to walk into the living room each morning and find a new set of college students asleep on sofas as late night conversation and spontaneous jam sessions spilled into the early morning hours.
00:05:43
Speaker
The mother of the family could always be found talking with students and simultaneously whipping up another batch of mumus, a top secret mouthwatering over the top chocolate chip cookie recipe that involved wrapping the dough around a mini milky way, batches of which would disappear within moments of emerging from the oven. It was their attentiveness that held us all there.
00:06:08
Speaker
We were never in the way, never a disturbance to the family or their day. We were folded into whatever was on their calendar or we became their calendar. This is what I remember the most, the feeling of not being an inconvenience. Wise guides have told me there is a family we're born with and family we choose.
00:06:29
Speaker
I don't know that I would have chosen to be part of the Vernon family, and yet there are aspects of that period in my life I now see my partner and I, who attended the same college and knew the family too, have carried into the way we open our doors.
00:06:47
Speaker
As we enter our forties and relationships with our extended family shift and undergo their own metamorphosis, I'm so grateful for the adage that there is family we choose. One whose members allow room for us to
Themes of Belonging and Chosen Families
00:07:01
Speaker
roam and grow and change as people are so prone to do. Who cheer us on in the process. People who embrace our messy, memorable and marvelous family with all our quirks and failings and obnoxiously loud antics.
00:07:18
Speaker
Hmm, I'm curious for you as you read that and as you finish, what images are swirling through your mind? Yeah, I think I'm going back to the living room of that house in college. There was such a warmth, and I can just hear the chatter and the laughter.
00:07:48
Speaker
And there's just like a fullness to it, which just stands in really stark contrast to my own home growing up. I talk about those of us who were there never felt like an inconvenience. And I think that just speaks to why we kept showing up, why there were so many of us there. Yes, we were.
00:08:16
Speaker
away from home. We were at college or college students, but we felt welcome there. Like we felt like family. Yeah, it was really interesting for me to hear you talk about, especially just in light of just listening to your last piece, hear you talk about
00:08:40
Speaker
your mentor family, the family matriarch, excuse me, like making mumus. And that image swirling sort of of you watching her do this injects a position to your own mom, your own family history and experience. Could you talk more about what that felt like and was like for you?
00:09:09
Speaker
Yeah, even though she was making cookies, she was talking. She would be in the living room in a chair. She'd be holding the bowl and the batter and folding in this mini milky way while she was having this in-depth conversation with a college student about their life and their life's direction or what was most important on their heart at the time.
00:09:39
Speaker
But she was like just going about her life. And I might have been that person on any given day, right? Living with them for the summer. And that just stands in such stark contrast to, you know, what you bring up in that particular episode of what in my home was almost utter silence.
00:10:01
Speaker
Right? Like is when I talk about the warmth, there is a cold. It was cold in my home. It was cold and it was silent, but there was warmth and there was laughter here. Like it was alive. It was very much a beating, beating heart. It was a beating heart. What is it like for you to live and exist in that and like hold that tension in yourself?
00:10:28
Speaker
I think when I look back on it now, Hailey, tension is a good word for it because it was such a vibrant part of my life at the time and a vibrant part of my spiritual life. And my spiritual life looks so different now. Looks very, very different now. Still just as vibrant.
00:10:53
Speaker
still just as alive, but much less constricted, but much less constricted. And so when I look back, or even, I mean, I guess like even today, when I look at it today, when I look back on it from where I am today, I struggle to kind of like, how do I hold it? How do I remember it well?
00:11:17
Speaker
How do I not throw the baby out with the bathwater of that experience? And I think even in the prompt of re-imagining family was like, how do I re-imagine my memories of what family experiences were and have been? Because this was a family experience for me, of spiritual family. When spiritual family right now feels
00:11:46
Speaker
Messy and gritty and elusive is a good word. Feels elusive sometimes. Yeah. I feel like I'm still even grasping in my head what you said, like what you just said about re-imagining your memories. That feels loaded to me.
00:12:09
Speaker
Yeah, I think there's a part about, I think there's a part we get to in healing at some point. I hope there is. Anyway, I'm hoping. I'm hoping there's a part that we get to in healing where like I'm, and maybe it's cyclical, like where I mine a thing,
00:12:34
Speaker
And I want to take the best parts of it. And so much of my ask of the divine lately has been, I don't want to blind my eyes to
00:12:49
Speaker
the truth of my experience, maybe in my family, right? But I also don't want to blind my eyes to where I've experienced goodness, whether that's spiritually and or in my own family of origin as well. Because I think that there's a danger in
00:13:09
Speaker
being on either end of the spectrum of it was all good or it was all bad and how do we hold it? How do we see the entire spectrum of light and color within and move about it freely in new ways? Yeah, that's good. Well, does this feel like a good sort of natural place to transition to your story?
00:13:36
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, I'm sure. I'd love to hear it. Okay. Tyson and I have found deep delight in welcoming others into our home. A few years ago, we decided to invite a different family to come over for dinner each of the Sundays of the Advent season. For us, it felt like a practice of noticing, embracing, and welcoming into our lives people we maybe didn't know very well, and leaning into a hospitable and welcoming God.
00:14:05
Speaker
almost like the lungs of a living organism, the people to whom I belong and the people to whom I feel belong to me have expanded and contracted, being regenerated and incorporated into my very being continually.
00:14:22
Speaker
I remember my own childhood home being a hub in which people came and went. Sure, there were five of us in the Chambers family, yet the door remained always open to friends we would bring home or kids we would babysit and even strangers who found themselves staying on our couch just for a night. One day when I was in upper elementary or maybe middle school, I had just gotten home and was settling in to do homework as my mom prepared an after-school snack.
00:14:49
Speaker
There was a racket out on our porch, and I turned to see a young girl pounding on our front door, screaming, with tears violently welling out of her eyes. I don't remember what exactly she said when I opened the door, but immediately, without hesitation, my mom picked up her black trash bag of clothes, pulled her in to embrace her, and handed her my snack.
00:15:13
Speaker
When my dad had got home in typical dad fashion, he asked her to share what was going on. He asked her questions and helped her feel comfortable while my mom sat near engaging the young girl as if she was one of her own. She just stayed one night on her couch, but it's a night that will be etched into my memories as I remember the care my parents in particular modeled as they tended to her needs and invited her in. Expand.
00:15:40
Speaker
We would grow up, and many of our friends, college roommates, and now spouses and children would walk in and out of our family home like a revolving door. And my parents always would welcome, provide food or nurturing care to anyone we would bring with us, opening up the grip of who belonged in the Chamber's home, in our lives, in our family. Expand.
00:16:04
Speaker
When my dad died five and a half years ago, our nuclear family diminished in size, contracting, forcing us to re-envision our lives without him there. We had to re-imagine a world where his physical presence was gone and re-imagine what it looked like for him to belong with us still and for us to belong as a family together, contract.
00:16:26
Speaker
During his funeral and visitation, it was clear to me that somehow the hundreds of devastated people who lined up to view and mourn his life believed they belonged to him too. They would share stories upon stories of how he was the best coach or counselor or friend and about how the times I wasn't with him, he was with them, inviting them to belong to him in a way that feels like family. Suddenly I realized maybe all these people belong to me now too. Expand.
00:16:57
Speaker
Now, in my own adult life, shared with a spouse and a child who says goodbye to all his friends with a hug at the end of the day, I am reminded of the people, blood related or not, who I consider belong to me and the ways in which I've had to continually reimagine what my own family looks like. The students who sat at our table, who crawled on our couch to snuggle with our dog, who nestled their way into our lives and our hearts.
00:17:22
Speaker
the friends who've committed to us, who share their lives in a way that lets us in on the good, the bad, and everything in between. My mom, my sisters, my late dad, who hold a space, a place in my world now that will never change, who hold me fast, who remind me why I am proud to be a Chambers in the first place.
00:17:43
Speaker
I am reminded that my idea of family is ever expanding and contracting. As I see friends invite their second or third or fourth child into the mist, I lament the two losses we faced over the last year that left us having to reconsider and reorient ourselves to a new possible version of our family's future. Contract.
00:18:04
Speaker
Is there a way to honor both the chosen family, the given family, the lost family, and the comings and goings of people in and out of our lives that sometimes feels like a family of sorts? My parents.
00:18:17
Speaker
with the lives and the love they freely gave, taught me how to breathe on my own when it comes to belonging and family and inviting others in. With their own expanding and contracting, with their own offering of belonging out to others primarily, I learned both how to belong and who belongs to me.
00:18:35
Speaker
The contracting is a difficult space for me. The grief of having to hold who is gone and who never will be. And I'm still learning how to respond when it feels like my version of family is contracted from me and is beyond my own control. We are all maybe somehow doing this work as we reorient ourselves to new people, new family, new family seasons, and new or even old bosses.
00:19:02
Speaker
who we identify with shifts, family changes, people come in and out of our lives, but may we always allow ourselves permission to experience the gift of belonging anew. Thank you, Hailey.
00:19:17
Speaker
I'm just aware that you have let me into part of your story right now. And I'm wondering how that feels in your body as you've read those words.
00:19:37
Speaker
I think the words that you just even shared in sharing your own story are sitting with me as I look up. How do we honor the past, the present, and the future?
00:19:53
Speaker
Like, how do we hold that? And so I feel open and grateful to get to share and to kind of question with you all of this. Yeah. Yeah. Your, what you wrote has a very liminal quality to it. Like,
00:20:15
Speaker
You put words to your own experience in your home and losing your dad and it's also bookended with your own losses as you name your miscarriages and throughout
00:20:30
Speaker
there's like this refrain of belonging, belonging, belonging that's been like passed down to you from your family that you have carried forth. And so I'm curious just sort of how you're holding these losses and this expansive belonging that has like come into your purview of life.
00:20:56
Speaker
all at the same time. I feel like, at least today, I have been noticing grief more. The grief of the loss, I think. Particularly missing the presence of my dad in this season of life and holding, I think like the pain of going through loss
00:21:22
Speaker
I think I'm just aware that loss feels really hard because we have to re-shift mentally and emotionally. This person who deeply belongs to me is gone and they won't be here.
00:21:43
Speaker
but how do I, how do I hold them near? And then I think the loss of a love that, of a few loves that never were. And like feeling, yeah, so I think that feels more accessible to me today. But then I'm also, I feel like as I write this deeply aware of the value that my mom has had in my life,
00:22:11
Speaker
and our relationship and she did a lot of this just because that's who she was and she wasn't necessarily trying to be a certain way and so I'm aware of the grief and the loss of my dad but the gratitude for also her presence in my life then and now. Yeah.
00:22:35
Speaker
It sounds like they were very much a team in the way they welcomed people into the home. You could see that in the way that you wrote your mom handing this girl a snack who showed up at your door and then your dad being attentive and asking questions.
00:22:56
Speaker
I could also feel like the void that your dad left, not just for you, but for your community. Like he didn't just belong to you, he belonged to others. Yeah, and that is still being, I think unraveled to me five years after he died. I think
00:23:24
Speaker
It was a little bit of overwhelming when he died to see the response, the people that came out of the waterworks and said, like, your dad spent every Saturday with me for seven years. And I was like, what?
00:23:43
Speaker
And still, even now, I'm meeting people who I've never interacted with before, who are saying, this is how deeply connected I felt to your dad. So even seeing how the void is still reverberating.
00:24:03
Speaker
But also I think in the line, there was a line that I said, when he wasn't with me, he was with them. And so I think for our family trying to reorient, how was he even, what was even his image of family and who belonged to him was challenging and inviting.
00:24:23
Speaker
Yeah, for me it almost feels like a bind of like if I mourn, like if I actually grieve what I didn't have, like my dad wasn't actually here the way I wanted him and needed him to be and he was for other people.
00:24:44
Speaker
then that says something about him that goes against what was true for these other people or true about his character. But to do that would also invalidate your own experience.
00:25:01
Speaker
It's like a loose loose. Yeah. What do you think as we sort of shift, pivot toward, it seems like such a strange place to pivot and think about looking toward the weak? Because if we weren't recording, I would want to ask you about grief.
00:25:24
Speaker
and what your how it shows up for you and what it looks like and what does it smell like and what kind of texture does it take and how you maybe push it away or resist it but as you sort of think about we're in the midst of holy week and
00:25:43
Speaker
how might it look to hold the story as if you don't know the ending and consider that an invitation or an opening for grief for you? How might that change how you enter the rest of this week? Hmm, that's such a good question. I want to say I don't know. I also feel I think sometimes
00:26:11
Speaker
what I'm noticing that helps pay attention to grief is sort of a need for release.
00:26:20
Speaker
And I think that has often come in the form of like tears and crying. And I think you can, I can feel it often like in the behind my eyes, like there's something there. And so I'm curious. Yeah, just as you asked that I'm, I feel like I'm still unsure, but wanting to sort of explore how do I find that release where like, how do I invite the tears to come? However they may. Yeah. Hmm. Mm hmm.
00:26:49
Speaker
Yeah. What about for you, like as we pivot, what do you feel invited into? Yeah.
00:27:00
Speaker
We have been sort of flirting with different church families for a while for different reasons. And I think here recently I've felt more of a desire to be part of a community again, however that looks. And it might look a little unorthodox just because of the work that I do.
00:27:32
Speaker
But I think there's an openness there for me that I want to remain open and to not restrict, to not close off to it. Yeah, it's an openness that doesn't feel like it's going away like it has in the past. So I want to listen. I want to listen. What does it look like for you to remain open?
00:28:02
Speaker
I think being willing to risk, I think being open for me means willing to risk, be uncomfortable, which I don't really like to be. I mean, who does? Who likes to be uncomfortable? He just jumps headlong into that.
00:28:23
Speaker
Yeah, like okay, we're gonna We're gonna wade into the discomfort a little bit and just like know that that's coming and we're gonna buckle up a little bit for that. So Yeah, thanks just staying in it. Yeah. Thank you for your question. Mm-hmm. Yeah Me this has been so rich. I
00:28:46
Speaker
Yeah, I don't want it to end. I know, I know. I want to book a spiritual direction session with you. Oh, me too. Yeah, thank you for, I think, just inviting me to consider how the things that I'm writing about write are
00:29:08
Speaker
are playing out in me now. And just the different questions you posed have invited me to sort of see things I think maybe differently too than I haven't, than I didn't, I didn't come into this space knowing or realizing.
00:29:25
Speaker
Yeah, I'm always so appreciative of just sitting across from someone whose face looks like mine. Amen. I just don't ever take that for granted. It's so lovely. So good to be with you. Yeah.
00:29:43
Speaker
Yeah, you too. Well, I imagine you like me at the end of that, finding that there is a lot for us to hold and consider. If I had to sum up what it felt like this conversation was about, from my perspective, I heard the layers of belonging
00:30:11
Speaker
and becoming and then grief and what it looks like to hope again. And I thought it was so interesting. While the stories were very different, there was this thread that I could pull through about the importance and the impact of what happens when people open their homes.
00:30:38
Speaker
what gets created there in the realm of a family that you choose.
00:30:48
Speaker
It felt sweet to me to hear those stories. The places where college students were sprawled out on the floor and invited into conversations, those felt particularly tender to me as that is something that's part of the story that I have lived and that has been indicative of the home that we have built.
00:31:18
Speaker
So I definitely felt my heart being pricked and provoked as I was listening.
00:31:27
Speaker
And also, as I listened to the bind that Vanessa named for Hailey around where it felt like her dad wasn't always there in ways that she needed and yet her own experiences of belonging, being very tied to what she experienced in the openness that both her dad and her mom offered. And I found myself thinking about that for my kids and where I suspect that is
00:31:56
Speaker
a bind that they feel in some ways also. I loved the way that this episode ended. It felt a little different than some of our others. Instead of asking one another what they were taking away, they named what they each felt like they were being invited into.
00:32:19
Speaker
I loved that. So I guess that's the question for each of you too. What do you feel invited into as you hold the things that you heard in this particular episode? And I know one of the things that I feel invited into is what I just named, which is just remembering for my own family that the work that I do that
00:32:47
Speaker
often takes me away from them has a cost and I feel invited into thinking about where I've participated in creating a bind for my own for my own kids and being available maybe for what the conversations might look like that they would want to have with me about that.
00:33:11
Speaker
So there you go. Like you're invited to think about what you're going to take and feel invited into as part of this conversation. Until next week.
00:33:26
Speaker
The Red Tent Living podcast is produced by Katie Stafford and edited by Aaron Stafford. Our cover art is designed by Libby Johnson and our guests are all part of the Red Tent Living community. You can find us all at redtentliving.com as well as on Facebook and Instagram. If you love the stories shared here, we would be thrilled if you would leave us a review. Until next week, love to you, dear ones.