Mama Time

Went away for the weekend just she and I. It was magic.

Be Gentle

I live by semesters. This means that the things I think I see and the things I write in October, November, March and April are tinged with melancholy and fatigue. In those months life’s grey area feels less like the misty rain romance of Seattle and more like the long, slow drive across the state last year when I leaned against the steering wheel for miles, squinting into a fog that pressed against the road.

So I question what I am doing. I question whether it matters. And since the answers to big questions are hard to come by, I eventually turn my dissatisfied gaze to the minutia. Suddenly I need a haircut. And the expensive wrinkle cream they sell at the Mall. And impractical shoes I really don’t want to wear. And a pink dress.

This week I sat waiting for the aforementioned haircut in a cozy salon with taupe walls and magazines that offered GreatAbsInTwoEasyMoves. I had paint under my nails from the second coat I had applied in the mudroom before work. I had run from the shower to class to the appointment, so all the make-up I had planned to put on before I sat and faced a wet-haired version of myself for 45 minutes got left on the counter. I sat in the chair, draped in a black cloth that accentuated the harshness of a tired face and tried to make small talk. Mostly I said disparaging things about myself and the gracious woman cutting my hair tried to ignore the awkward mood I brought in with my backpack and man shoes. At one point I said something about the expansive real estate of my forehead. I had wanted bangs, but she had kindly suggested that bangs require work and she had correctly sized me up as the diggin’-in-the-dirt-for-worms kind of girl. I left without bangs. I also left with a stomach ache.

In OctoberNovemberMarchApril, it feels difficult to be myself. Because in OctoberNovemberMarchApril I start looking around, or even worse, turn the burning focus of the magnifying glass on the parts of me of which I am least fond. This helps no one.

And I think of a friend who has been finding solace on her rugged road in silent retreat at a nearby convent. Once, as she was leaving, one of the nuns leans close, held my friend’s face in both her hands and spoke the truth of God to her. “Be gentle with yourself,” she said.

So I sit down to write and think, far from the mirror. Because I want to be a person who looks out, looks up. I want to be someone who spends her sorrows on the hearts of others, because those are the tears that bring a beautiful harvest. The other ones – the OctoberNovemberMarchApril tears – only dehydrate the soul.

“They weep as they go to plant their seed, but they sing as they return with the harvest.” Psalm 126:6 NAS

The Long Robe of the Lord

Mister, Peanut and I had been enjoying the cold Spring sunshine at the Skate Park. They stretched their legs after a long winter and I marveled at how much they had grown since the last of the fall leaves had been buried by snow. Mister floated up and down the concrete ramps on his razor scooter – tall, lean and confident. He passed; flashed a “watch what I can do” smile, and headed for the half pipe. I smiled back and squinted at the sky, searching for a cloud, a traveling witness, to carry that smile, that confidence to the our birth mother across the ocean. Let her see him, I prayed. Let her feel the health of his bones and the strength of his heart in her soul.

We stayed until the baby’s fingers were red with cold. As Mister climbed in the van I tossed him a Kleenex with which to wipe the double-barrel snot trails that were collecting on his upper lip.

“Here you go, Little Man.”

“I don’t need it,” he answered.

“Don’t wipe that snot on your sleeve, Son,” I threatened.

“I didn’t. I just sucked it back into my nose.”

I looked in the rear-view mirror. The upper lip was bone dry.

“Mister, you can’t wipe your snot on your sleeve. That is so nasty. We are on the way to school and now you have snot on your shirt. It is just nasty. When I give you a Kleenex, use it!”

Without delay, he answered in calm and quiet defiance.

“When Jesus comes back, he doesn’t have a tissue. He is going to use his sleeve.”

I faced the road and just kept driving. Mister is an old soul. Maybe he knows something I don’t about the long robe of the Lord.

Gifts

Life with an almost six-year old is great, mostly because her deep knowledge on a variety of topics is matched by her acute, near-psychic sense of hearing and a willingness to teach others. This means, essentially, that she can sense that her brother is having a thought, know ahead of time that he is wrong and have the right information ready to refute him. This is amazing since we live in a two-story house and he usually speaks quietly. Just yesterday I was doing the dishes when Mister came around the corner.

“Hey, Mom. Duuunowhat?”

“What, Brother?” I asked.

He began to form a word, but was momentarily distracted by the loud stomping of a ballerina coming up the stairs. Before he was able to throw an elbow, she had stepped between us, the pink, purple and blue layers of her twirling skirt filling up the space.

“Go ahead, Mister.” I said, making eye contact.

She inched closer to the plate. Worked the shoulders. Choked up on the bat. He looked at her, looked at me, and then began again.

“Mom, I think we should get one of those flying mats so we wouldn’t have to drive the van anymore.”

“They don’t make those anymore,” she answered smugly, turning to sachet back downstairs to the royal ball.

At six, the potpourri of sassy confidence, imagination, unbounded energy and a willingness to speak is cute, especially when tinged with error. At sixteen is scares the boys. In the early twenties, yet untempered, it grinds through bosses. It does not necessarily work well in marriage either. This I have found out.

My husband calls Sister my "mini-me". Poor thing. Luckily for she and I both, we share our home with this wise and gentle man who understands that she is still listening to him, even though she is singing and drawing with her finger on the window. He thinks its funny when she makes up games and demands that we all play them. He loves that she goes with gusto and even sat up a little straighter when the Kindergarten teacher told us she left a note for the substitute that said, “Just ask Sister.”

I, on the other hand, am prone to discipline (or even resent) the "me" I see in her. Maybe because I know her gifts will likely leave her on the outside looking in, up late at night in a quiet house pondering the world’s problems, inexplicably dissatisfied with the middle road.

This week my husband brought home a book of Myers-Briggs personality summaries, a psychoanalytic horoscope of sorts. He was laughing before he even began to read mine. “This personality type, found in five percent of the population can be summarized in one word: Commandant.” The corners of his eyes wrinkled as he smiled and continued, “when this person is in the house, everyone knows who is in charge . . . he or she takes their work very seriously . . . they are prone to view their family as an extension/tool with which to meet their personal and professional goals.” Yuck. Double yuck.

But a gift is a gift. We don’t get to choose which ones we get. But we are accountable for our efforts to make something beautiful and make it multiply. That is the parable of the talents: each man a coin to invest. The sin – not in gambling – but in fearfully burying the treasure.

So, what, or more importantly how, do I teach this strong daughter? How do I help her see that all of God’s gifts must be tempered by a hunger for peace, an appetite for humility and a willingness to wait for the wisdom which must simmer? Maybe I don’t. Maybe those are the lessons that she will have to learn by skinning her knees.

But skinning the knees comes with a cost. Last month my mom took Sister out to by some new clothes. She had been asking Grammy to sew together the round and gaping holes on the knees of all her pants. “Sister, I can’t sew these pants. These holes are round. If I try to close them up, they will bunch and bother you. We will have to buy new ones.” And before Sister was home from her vacation, the new pants were already wearing thin in the same old places.

So I pray: for the protection of her gift and for lessons easy on the knees.

"Do not neglect the spiritual gift within you..." I Tim 4:14

Happy Birthday Babies!

There are no words for the joy you bring to this home, so I won't try.

We love you.
We love you.
We love you.

Beyond

Buzz Lightyear was waiting under the Christmas tree for Mister this year, making good on all the Disney promises of boyish wonder one would expect from a guy like Buzz. He has buttons, a laser, wings and a space helmet. He is a shot of courage for a shy kid in a crowded room, a faithful friend, and as of late, a spiritual teacher for Mama. Peanut has absorbed Buzz’s mantra and will randomly stop what she is going to crouch down only to jump up and yell, “Tibinimity and Beyond!”

She jumps from the couch. She jumps from the ottoman. She jumps from the train table, changing table, bottom bunk and top of the stairs. Like Buzz, she can’t actually fly but does not seem concerned since it always seems to work out. As of yet, there have always been arms to catch her. She cannot be concerned with gravity. She is only concerned with the joyful explosion of her muscles and mind, propelling her out into all that is beyond.

I am acutely attuned to her exclamation, as it is has become my unofficial job to spare her the consequences of gravity. And I began to notice this week that as my arms went out to catch the flying baby, my mind was mired, on most of the occasions, by the sticky mud of daily stuff. So I would catch her while replaying a tense conversation with a friend, or thinking about how most of my clothes seem dated, or feeling angry that I will never, ever, ever finish the laundry.

And then it happened: I was sitting down and actually watching her, actually present with my children in spirit, and I saw that she was God’s messenger. At the beginning of each semester I tend to fold in on myself and build a barricade from the outside world with brick after detailed brick: dentist appointments, immunizations, extracurricular activities, travel for work, travel for fun, childcare arrangements for 2012. Pretty soon I can no longer see the sky. Or breathe. But Buzz brought the gospel back to the basement of our house and the heart of my daughter.

Beyond is good. Beyond is real. Christ came near and offers the hope of heaven- which matters now and means that even as I move about in concrete ways, my soul can rest beyond, my gaze can fix on Jesus, the author of my faith. And the mystery of life with Christ is that as I look beyond I somehow see more clearly the things that are close up.

“How great is God—beyond our understanding!” Job 36:26

Kitchen Helpers

Lately the big kids have showing consistent interest in the goings-on of our little kitchen. Sis, especially, asks every night if she can help with dinner. She happily washes veggies, carefully peels carrots, hunts around in the fridge for the cheddar cheese and runs back and forth to the pantry in search of the Cream of Mushroom soup. Mister likes to turn the can opener while I squeeze the handle. Peanut opens and closes the refrigerator, making sure our perishables get lots of fresh air. With helpers underfoot meal prep takes at least twice as long. But I don’t mind. I love that they love to be with me- partners in the endless business of preparing our daily bread.

Just this week I overheard Sis telling a friend that she can make breakfast. “I can make two things,” she said. “Toast and cereal.” We have been eating a lot of toast lately. The morning meal takes around an hour as she moved from toaster over (with two oven mitts) to table. She painstakingly spreads the butter then struggles with the knife in the jelly jar, eventually tipping the jar so that huge, shiny globs of jelly jiggle out to pile on the toast. Mister always asks for half of one kind of jelly and half of another. He loves jelly and his scientific inclination for observation has tested, with reliable results, that half-and-half really means double when a novice toast maker is on duty. So they eat toast with obscene amounts of jelly, leaving a sticky trail from the table to the kitchen faucet.

At the church I recently visited the pastor suggested that God, with a few miraculous exceptions, provides for our physical needs through people. He has designed us to really need each other and charged us with the sacred trust of being his hands and feet in the places where we find ourselves. This pastor humbly addressed the ways that God’s system of provision appears unfair, complicated, and contradictory. But he also suggested that it brings God joy and makes good sense for him to come along side his children and teach them how to make and do things that he could have done more graciously and expediently by himself.

And I thought of Sis and the way she smiles when the toast is done, the way her dimple shows up as she hands her brother a cold slice of wheat with apricot and strawberry. It is beautiful. It is good. Even if someone else could do it better. Even if it takes a long time. And I pray that my days are used to provide something for others. I pray: that the pantry of my heart constantly has little feet running in and out for supplies; that it needs consistent re-stocking; that the food stuffs get used up before they expire. Lord, make it so.

“Give us this day our daily bread.” Matthew 6:11

MVM

I am in the beautiful Rocky Mountains this weekend. I am here for an important reason, but one that makes me deeply sad. I came with my family to honor the life of a man who blessed us for thirty years with his friendship, generosity and a focused zest for life and God’s creation. He went to meet Jesus in October in the state of his birth. I was not able to attend the funeral. But friends from Colorado gathered this weekend in a mountain chapel, where he had played the piano with surgical skill and gusto, to say good-bye. I cried. I smiled. I looked out the window at the slopes.

After the service, we went snowshoeing. The crisp air was rest, therapy, life. The view was beautiful but bittersweet. Were it not for this man and his family, I would not know Colorado. The beauty of this place would not be a cache of memories and foundational moments in my understanding of who God is, who I am, and what is possible in this life. So as I stomped around in the snow, I breathed little “Thank yous” for a life, too short but so full.

“The life of mortals is like grass, they flourish like a flower of the field . . . But from everlasting to everlasting the Lord’s love is with those who fear him, and his righteousness with their children’s children—“ Psalm 103: 15-17

something I wrote in his final days:

Back Country

Today I am praying, from the deepest part of me, for a family friend. They recently increased his morphine and stopped giving him food. He is in incredible amounts of pain and the people who would know say it is time. I cannot go to say good-bye so I ride my bike in the basement and pray. And think about how this man poured precious time and resources into my life. He flew us to Sea World in his plane. He played piano at my wedding and complimented my husband on his ‘exquisite taste’. He gave me his giant slalom skis when he upgraded.

I followed him down long sweeping stretches of the Colorado mountains in wide arcs, shoulders squared against the incline, knees bent, skis chattering with glorious speed. I loved those skis. The ones with his name engraved on them. I still have them.

But what I hold the closest, what squeezes my throat so I cannot breath, is the long rides up the chairlift. These where the times when he would ask about my school work and listen for the answer. He would tell me stories that said, “You are smart and able, so I will tell you some things you will need to know about this life.” A week away from the public high school, in the crisp Rocky Mountains, with toes pointed over the brink of a Black Diamond, is a beautiful gift to give a young girl.

I pray and picture us riding the chairlift again. It is sunny. The chair swings slightly and the sound of accumulated snow, falling from the taller limbs, echoes around and up. We talk. The chair slows to let us off and I curve to the left like always. But he waves, pulls on a hood and goes right. Into the back country. Through perfect powder, towards the thin trail of smoke rising from the stone chimney of a great timber lodge where he will sit with Jesus, warming cold bones by the stone hearth, waiting for his wife, daughter and granddaughter and the table he chose by the window.

Lacking

I spent a weekend in October at a Monastery. A group of women, for whom I have deep spiritual respect, invited me. So I went. What would be needed to really describe the experience is beyond my communication abilities, but suffice to say on the last day I found myself in a tiny chapel, which I had previously mistaken for a garden shed, having a good snot-fest cry on one of the two pews. My tears blurred the details of the peeling baby blue wallpaper and the face of a plastic, painted Mary as she tenderly watched over my little soul.

I prayed for my kids until I actually thought I would be sick (so while I cried and committed my children to the care of their Heavenly Father, I pictured myself walking back up the winding mountain path to this sacred space with a mop and bucket). I told God it was too much. Not that my life has any real hardship, but the moments when I consider seriously the privilege and responsibility of Sheparding little souls, I find myself wholly and completely lacking. Completely lacking, as in naked without a pen on the first day at a new job. Or at the airport, boarding a cross-continental flight with a baby but no diaper. A house without a roof. A car without tires. Instructions to dismantle a bomb written in Mandarin. Lacking.

And so I said to Him, out loud, “This is too much.” And he answered me right away, “It is not yours.” It wasn’t much of a fight. What could I say? It is true that as a junior high kid I had dangled my toes in an alpine creek and told God that if he was real he could have my whole life. I was earnest, but it also seemed like a safe bet. If he wasn’t out there then no harm done. But twenty-something years later, in a little shed part way up the mountain, my promise came back to both haunt and soothe. It is too much. The blinding beauty as well as the darkness of this life: too much. And so with each morning sun, I have no choice but to place it all in capable hands and rest.

“Satisfy us in the morning with your unfailing love, that we may sing for joy and be glad all our days.” Psalm 90:14

Listen All Gone

The baby looks a bit like a troll. Not the mean gobble-you-up kind that the Billy Goats Gruff encountered on the bridge; more like the happy troll dolls of my childhood, with perfectly round tummies, cherubic cheeks and fluffy hair that stands straight up. Her eyes are piercing grey almonds with sandy lashes that blink to buy time as she plots and schemes with her hands folded at the small of her back. She does what she pleases and if you ask she will tell you she is three although her second birthday wont come round until mid-February. She stomps around, crawling over us to sit on her brother’s head when she tires of making mischief out of sight at the end of the hall.

A good deal of our communication runs like the cliché ol’ Western shoot-out in front of the saloon. An example: she opens the fridge and takes out some yogurt. “No thank you, Baby,” I say. “We already had breakfast. We will eat snack as a family later. You need to put that yogurt back.”

“No,” she says, looking straight at me and rocking from heel to toe, a metronome ticking off the tense seconds while coyotes call and an unseen narrator whistles off stage left. “Peanut, you need to put that yogurt back in the fridge. Your mama is talking to you. You need to listen.” I put my hand on my holster. She blinks, twitches and puts the yogurt behind her back. A half step to the side, then a shifting of weight to the back leg in anticipation, like a triple jumper at the end of the approach.

“Little Baby, you need to listen.” I repeat. More blinking. Shoulders sway side to side, to reinforce the defiance.

“No,” she says. “Listen all gone.” Then she runs for her horse, yogurt cradled at her elbow like a running back. And so I chase. And chastise. Eventually the yogurt is in the back in the fridge. I call Grandma to update her on the toddler antics, turning my gaze away long enough to dial. A fluffy blur runs across the periphery and I pretend I don’t see. But then there is a still silence, the kind that signals a contraband haircut, permanent marker mural or the emptying of a Wal-Mart sized bottle of lotion. So I hang up and make my way down the hall to find a guilty baby sitting on her bed covered in gum wrappers.

“Gum baby,” she grins, shaking her head vigorously from side to side to blur her view of my stern face.

“Peanut, you know we don’t give gum to babies,” I say, frowning.
“Gum baby, all gone,” she grins again, wrinkling her nose, augmenting her response with American Sign Language, up-turned palms flicking the air- as if I did not understand the first time.

I turn and walk away, Sheriff Mom defeated, the evidence chewed and swallowed. Perhaps I should have turned a blind eye to the yogurt.