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Memory

I try to retrieve the memory like scrambling for a foothold. It’s not often I’m the one to forget — maybe it’s from constant musing, maybe it’s from journaling, but I hold many many memories within my grasp, ready when needed. I’m surprised that I can’t recall — “Don’t you remember her?” my mother asks. “When you were in college? This and this and this happened.”

It takes a few minutes as I’m buckling Cy into his stroller. We’re leaving my childhood church where I’ve dropped off our 6 and 4-year-old for Vacation Bible School. Finally, I find a blurred face, a rushed conversation from over fifteen years ago, and my mother has jogged awake a memory I hadn’t retained.

_ _ _

Walking into that old church, I was overwhelmed by the smell. It wasn’t strong, and it wasn’t offensive. The overwhelm was pure memory. This was where I cut my teeth on theology. This was where I debated predestination, Calvinism in general, the point of baptism, the role of women in the church and in the family. I sat in the newly cushioned pews (they were wood when I was young), and I laughed out loud when the children started singing “We’re Glad to be Here at Vacation Bible School.” I laughed because I didn’t need the slides to remember every word, and some things really don’t change, even in 20 years.

Suddenly, I’m fourteen years old, a volunteer. My brothers and sister are there, and we’re surrounded by our friends, fellow learners, fellow strugglers, fellow beloveds. We’re singing our hearts out because back then, there was no such thing as embarrassment, and now, at 36, I sang loudly enough that two little girls in front of me spun around to see who was making that racket.

My girls were excited as they exited the sanctuary with their cousins and the rest of their class. They smiled at me but then scurried off, eager to play games, sing, and make crafts. Snack, of course, was one of their favorite parts, and it’s surprising how much goldfish pleases a child (or sometimes an adult). I left them, grateful for the safety of them having a teacher I’ve known my whole life.

_ _ _

I’ve been wrestling with interesting questions these days. I’d have it no other way, really, despite the fact that it makes for some teary conversations with Gabe and some long, worn-out journal entries that rarely provide answers. How do we share the love of God in a real, tangible way? Both with our children and the world? How do we acknowledge the Church’s failings without throwing her out with the bath water? How do trust the Holy Spirit to protect my babies’ hearts when others could unwittingly (or wittingly) lead them astray?

There is no perfect place here on this earth. Doughnuts help, but Sunday morning worship is still rife with quiet murmurings of unsettledness, lack of connection, deep, unspoken pain. What memories are my children gathering every day with such open hearts and minds it hurts me to observe them? Their inevitable future pain is already causing me pain, and I watch as they learn that evil exists:

“Mama, why did Europeans do that to the Native Americans?”

“Mama, why doesn’t he have a leg?”

“Mama, why are some people poor and others aren’t?”

Yes.

“Why, Lord?”

_ _ _

I will pick them up from VBS for the next five days, and I will listen attentively while they compete with each other to tell me about their mornings. Somehow, I will trust the Holy Spirit’s power to shut their ears to all that is unnecessary and open their ears to all that is True.

Their little brains will form memories in the same sanctuary where so much of my faith was formed and so many of my early thoughts of God were both challenged and upheld. It would be a lie if I said every memory there was beautiful and rosy. It would be a lie to say that in some ways, I have not sought to do the exact opposite with my faith, my children. But it would also be a lie to say that it didn’t shape me. I know I could call so many of those people, and even though we haven’t talked in years, they would be there for me. It is a lie to say beautiful things have not come from those memories, that place.

It was not a perfect place then, and it is not a perfect place now. But from what I hear, it is the imperfect that God uses to do his good work.

[Photo credit: Gabriel Knell]

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Delight

The morning sun flecks on my face through the maple leaves. I’m sitting on our front steps with my mug of coffee, and the sweet smell of spring grass overwhelms me. If you’ve ever gotten out of bed before the rest of your house, brewed a strong cup of French press dark roast, and relished a moment or two at the dawning of a day, you know how delicious this feels. I greet neighbors as they leave for work, I watch sparrows and robins flit about looking for worms, and I wait for the running steps of my daughters down the stairs behind me, their eagerness to join me outside propelling them forward and nearly through the screen door.

But they aren’t awake yet. So I sit.

Delight does not always come naturally to me. I truly believe we are born with certain dispositions (and these can be nurtured and shaped), and I think mine leans heavily towards mourning. I like to think this preemptive mourning comes from the deepest delighting, but I’m not sure that’s the truth. I think its origin, most honestly, is fear.

The milkweed is growing tall next to me, its fuzzy leaves belying its milky bitterness inside. We had a monarch hatch last summer, so I am hopeful for another successful chrysalis. I’ve watched so many monarch caterpillars die over the years, and yet, I hope.

The honeybees aren’t even awake, that’s how early it is. The sun hasn’t yet hit the front of their hive, so they wait, patiently or not, for a day’s work. Every time I walk past them, I feel a deep sense of joy. Look at this life. Look at this community of life. I delight in their togetherness, their deeply important work, and my garden (fingers crossed) will provide for them and be pollinated by them and we will all rejoice. Time will tell.

I am slowly reading Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights; slowly because the mini essays are like snapshots I savor. I love when poets write essays. Only poets really have a handle on the right word, the flow of sound, the power of connection. Gay makes me ponder what I’m delighting in — gives me permission to take delight in the absurd, the funny, the sad.

Of course, as other parents of young children will tell you, it is my children that are reteaching me delight. It abounds in their enthusiasm over the smallest insect sighting, the sprouting radishes, the ripening strawberry. I wish I could say I had taught them this, but it is more honest to say they were born with it. It seems more my job not to squash it in them than to teach it to them.

So what do I delight in? What is pointing me to God?

The list looks a bit like that which I am tending, but it isn’t identical, and neither are the items on both lists for the same reasons.

My children consistently delight me. (Notice I did not say constantly, a distinction pointed out to me by a youth group leader in high school, for which I am forever grateful).

Gabe, without whom so much of my life would never have come to pass. Although this is true, delight doesn’t seem quite the right word for how I feel about him, but it will have to do.

Reading a book I can’t put down. The magic of story, of truth well-told. Of connection, if you will.

Learning new skills in the kitchen: fermenting, bread-baking, broth-making. I’ve begun to dabble with grinding my own grain, for kicks more than anything. Or is it the delight of feeling the wheat berries slip through my fingers before becoming flour?

The seeds sprouting in my unkempt garden beds. The hope of a new season.

The joy a new baby brings. Waiting for friends and family to add to our little flock of young ones.

As I sit feeling the cold stone against my bare toes and hearing the opening of the girls’ bedroom door above me, I desperately try to hold on to this feeling of delight as the day unfolds. There is much to mourn in this world. Let us not begrudge someone a bit of joy, a bit of delight where they can snatch it.

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Connect

“Right, Mom?”

I hear this tagline often these days, attached to a little statement of fact.

Too much sugar hurts your tummy.

The sun rises in the east.

There are wolves in the woods out back.

The facts are not always true, but I don’t care so much about that. I usually do correct her, especially if there’s an egregious error, but it’s the “Right, Mom?” that gets me. A little moment of connection — a moment of don’t we think the same things?

___

I watch a young couple with what seems to be their first baby. They are oo-ing and ah-ing in a way that just straddles the line of endearing and annoying. I am alone, eating a delicious chicken salad sandwich (Do you know how much more delicious store-bought chicken salad is?? It may just be that I didn’t have to bake a chicken, pick the bones, shred the meat, mix it up, etc. Writing out the steps is enough to make me wonder why I ever make it from scratch.), and I watch their little girl stumble along the pavement. She has on a neon pink sweatshirt and matching pants, and I almost lean forward to tell her mother how adorable it is, how adorable she is. My children are not here as a connector, the easy answer to interacting with strangers in public, so I don’t say anything.

___

We bring the kids to live music once a month at a local brewery. We love the brisket and the music, and I watch my children try to play with the other kids there. How do you teach a four-year-old how to enter into play with peers? Can it even be taught? I watch and wait as they stumble through the motions of connecting while Grateful Dead cover music floods the room. “I’m Spiderman!” and they sometimes play along, shooting each other with webs leaping out of their wrists.

I write this in a similar way, really, these little essays webs shooting through my fingertips and into your mind. I’ve wrestled with how writing can be part of this very full life I’m living. How can I spend more time in solitude? What is the best way to use that solitude to feed my soul? What motivates me to write anything at all? Because if it were truly just for my own enjoyment, couldn’t it just sit in my journals, piling up in the corners of my bedroom?

But the word that keeps resurfacing is “connection.” I want to connect with people, with you. I have a handful of dear friends who live far away but inhabit my spirit when I write, and they are among the people I write for. My words webs that connect us, my thoughts echoing between us.

This world is so full of discord, disconnection, disharmony. Maybe this is how I’m tending this space — with words to connect us across the multitude of barriers that might exist between us.

“Right, Mom?”

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Tend

I pat the wet dirt around lettuce starts in my newly-made window box. “It isn’t really a window box,” Evangeline tells me, and she’s right. At 12 feet long and hanging from our deck railing rather than a window, it’s more like a deck box, but that doesn’t sound very nice at all. We’ll stick with window box.

It’s rainy and barely 40 degrees, and I have to get these plants in today before they dry out. My dad gave me his extras, so I’m benefiting from the tending he’s already done. I suppose that is the story of my life, actually: benefitting from the tending of my parents, already done.

I think about this word, tend, as I work, and I remember the beautiful book the girls love called A Little More Beautiful: The Story of a Garden, and its refrain: sow, tend, water, mend. The girls read this line every time we come to it (recite it, if we’re honest), and I love the sounds these words make together. In the book, a little girl notices the absence of an elderly woman, a woman whose careful touch had quietly brought beauty to the lives around her. It’s a story I want to live out, really, a story of noticing.

What does it mean, to tend? Attention seems an important part. My father-in-law told me once not to give something so much attention, because where my attention went, there went my soul (or something to that effect), and it’s stuck with me. The things I tend in my mind are not the beautiful things I tend in my life. They often don’t bring the joy that planting, watering, weeding, and harvesting my little garden bring, and they almost never have a resolution like making a meal. I may do it three times a day, but at least there is an end to each of them.

No, the things I’ve been tending in my mind are not where I want my attention to rest. What, indeed, do I want to tend to?

The minds of my children: their eager questions; their thoughtful ponderings; their desires, and their fears

My home: a sweet place of refuge from the world, if we let it be

My music: listening to and making music that moves me; teaching my students to tend to their own musical worlds

My people: this is specific, concrete, because I am learning how to better define “my people;” tending and giving attention in a way that nurtures us both

This list is not exhaustive, but, really, it feels more true because of what is not on it than what is.

This is my prayer — that I will tend to what is mine to tend to, and leave to others that which is not.

Tend

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Say Good Morning to the Bees

I hoist Anneliese up onto my left hip and open the sliding door with my right hand almost simultaneously. I’ve walked around seedlings scattered across the floor, slipped on my sturdy muck boots, and found the egg basket tucked away beneath a discarded jacket. Evangeline doesn’t need much from me to do this daily task: she gets her blue crocs and puts them on, decides she doesn’t need a coat, and tells me next time, she can open the door for me.

We step out into the morning sunshine.

Evangeline’s mud kitchen beckons to her from the deck. I hadn’t covered it with the blue tarp, so it sits in all its dirty, creative glory. Measuring cups, bowls, ladles, all strewn about in some sort of crazy genius laboratory. I think what a gift for the girls to play with — what a gift for me of time.

I might have my boots on, but I swear I can still feel the silver-dewed grass in my toes. Not every morning is so festooned, a consequence of light rain the night before and perfect temperatures, I guess. The smell of sweet grass, earthy dirt from our freshly turned garden, and the tiny red leaf buds on the trees fills the air, and somewhere between our house and the chicken house door — somewhere near the beehive where the eager girls are just beginning to take off for their morning flight — I take a deep breath. Anneliese shifts in my arms. I kiss the sweet spot beneath her rounded cheek. I wonder, How many more mornings will I hold you? How can I savor these mundane moments that pierce my heart with joy?

I open the henhouse door to the coop and the girls come running out. There is a fresh bed of raked leaves for them to explore, and their happiness is obvious. Evangeline runs to the side of the house, determined to unlatch the egg box door for the first time (she’s been struggling with the lock for days now). This must be the day she clicked it open because I hear, “Mama! I did it! I did it!” and indeed, the door hangs open and two smooth brown eggs lie waiting to be scooped up and carried by a three-year-old in her little basket.

“One for me, and one for Anneliese,” she says, putting them in her basket. She divvies the eggs up each morning, and there is a clear hierarchy: Evangeline, Anneliese, then Mama, then Papa. The order never waivers.

We head back to the house, my heart still momentarily filled with a quiet appreciation for this fleeting phase of my life, when Evangeline stops and turns around.

“Mama, go back and say good morning to the bees!”

She has no pretense (not yet) and no agenda, other than to experience the world and encounter it with awe. Later that same day, she will scream at her sister when she tries to take her crayons. She will look at me with the desperation of a wronged child, one whose tiny sibling just doesn’t understand. There are already layers to little ones, and I would be wrong to disregard that.

But this layer, this doing of a morning task that I often begrudge, this is what will sustain me when I want to run out of my house and slam the door. This is what will sustain me when the mud kitchen looks more like the charged scene from a restaurant movie than a children’s play toy.

Say good morning to the bees!

And I do.

[Photos: Gabe Knell]

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Two-Year-Old Questions and Exhausted Mothers

There is a home video of Christmas morning, 1996. My family references it on a regular basis, not just because we enjoy home movies, but because there is a snippet hidden among the frantic gift opening that highlights a common occurrence in our family.

I am standing in front of the camera in a light blue floral nightgown my great-grandmother made me. I am opening a small package, and it’s clear my mother is on the other side of the camera. I’m seven years old and oddly subdued in this video, like my young girlhood is already slipping away and awkward adolescence is making an early entrance. As I open the paper, I see the crimped edge of the wrapping paper, and I remember the new scissors I had just gotten: crimping scissors. I must have thought my mother used similar scissors to cut the paper because I ask her why the edge is like that.

It’s a simple question, a silly question.

My mother cannot answer it.

She tries to respond, words coming out slowly. It’s possible she never went to bed the night before, lack of sleep stifling her ability to record, listen to her child, and respond. She tries to explain that when you get to the end of a tube of wrapping paper, it often has those crimped edges. That no, she did not use special scissors even though it looks like she did.

This is what she is trying to say, but her sentence peters out, dangling in the air, and I stare at the camera in complete confusion before moving on.

~ ~ ~

I’ve been thinking of this moment often these days. It’s been a source of laughter for years, and my mother, a good sport, laughs along with us. What was wrong with me? Why could I never answer your questions? Why do words fail me?!

I’ve been thinking about it, though, because things have taken a turn in our little family of four. I’ve been staving them off since she was born, afraid and unsure of how I would answer, but the questions are now coming in droves. I find myself blinking, like my mother, words trailing off and leaving me with a little girl who thinks she is asking simple questions, who thinks her mother must be daft.

“Mama, why do we all get old?”

I am standing at the kitchen sink washing mugs that can’t go in the dish washer. I think we are having a perfectly normal, unremarkable morning. Evangeline is sitting on the floor behind me and has surrounded herself with colorful blocks in all sorts of interesting shapes and patterns. I turn around and she’s looking up at me from the floor, her short wispy hair crazy from sleep. I wonder how playing blocks got her to such a question.

For a moment, I think. I do not want to instill fear in my almost-three-year-old, but if she’s asking the question, she’s already fearful, isn’t she? My preoccupation with the passing of time fleets through my mind, and I desperately want to spare her a life of scrambling for more.

“Because time doesn’t stand still,” I say, fumbling. “Because we are in time, and we move with it.”

What does that even mean?

I don’t know how to proceed in a way that is both true and gentle.

Our bodies are deteriorating? The earth is spinning on its axis, whipping us around, and our cells are slowly dying until we, too, die?

Everyone you have ever loved will die?

No, no, this will not do.

“Yes, we move with time,” I say again, “and good things happen when you get old. You become wise, you know a lot of things, you surround yourself with people who love you. Being old isn’t all bad.”

She looks at me with a similar face I wear in the home movie: a look of confusion and loving condescension. Poor Mama, doesn’t make any sense, she seems to think, and turns back to her blocks.

Her curiosity and investigative nature are such beautiful parts of her, and I long to nurture them. Yet when I hear her asking such questions and getting different responses from others, I am startled. I want to jump in and clarify: I would have chosen my words so differently! Are you even thinking about how this will have an impact on her little mind? Her little heart? But she will need to learn to become who she is within the vastly different ways of being, and my job is to guide, not to control. I’m just not sure what that looks like.

This is just the beginning, I know this. Every day she gets bigger and more ready for the world, and the world is meeting her even in our own home. She will ask easy and difficult questions, and she will receive a plethora of responses. Right now, she needs us to guide her, to help her determine right from wrong, to help her categorize the catastrophically overwhelming amount of information she is coming in contact with. Later, we can help her break down some of those categories. Later, we can help her see nuance, gray area, uncertainty. I dabble with it now, answering, “I don’t know, honey,” and “It’s kind of a mystery,” and “It’s very complicated science,” and she rolls with it like a champ.

I think of my mother’s slow and incomplete answer to my silly question that Christmas morning, and I am filled with renewed understanding (also, it is not lost on me the depth of my toddler’s question vs. the frivolity of mine!). Question after question begins to wear on you, you lose precision, you tire. My hope is that I tell her this, at least with the important questions. I like to think that I will have the wisdom to ask for a moment, a break before barreling forward into the unknown with my toddler in wondrous awe holding my hand.

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A Way to Mark Time

Time is one of the things over which we have no control. It cannot be stopped or manipulated and it flows in only one direction — at least as far as we know. It can, however, be sanctified.”

Alan Jones

It is December 5th, the second Sunday of Advent, and the first December I have not been a teacher. I woke up early to shower and go somewhere the other day, and as the water rushed over me, I thought I do not miss this. There is nothing to be mourned from 5:30AM wake-ups, hustling lunches, diapers, and book bags out the door for a 7:30AM start to my work day. Those are not the things I miss about teaching.

I feed Anneliese with one hand as I type this with the other. Her entrance into our lives back in April was more and less disruptive than Evangeline’s, more and less life-changing for me, more and less miraculous. As with most things, I try to assess as I go so that I can experience the moment in real time, rather than in some sort of nostalgic reflection: having a second baby doesn’t seem to be as emotionally or mentally difficult as having a first baby; I am still the “new me” of motherhood, so there is no big identity shift; logistics are a nightmare as they never were with only one child; there is no more playing around (there were times with one baby that I felt like we just had a little buddy we brought along to everything we did — now we have two little buddies, but that’s one buddy each, and not everyone loves an incessantly-talking-toddler-and-incessantly-grunting/screaming-baby combo).

[Anneliese is done eating. I give her a huge slinky to toss around on the top of her high chair. I think I hear Evangeline stirring upstairs. Type, frantically.]

When September rolled around, I felt the itches of a new school year. I am 32 years old, and this was the first September (minus one outlying year after college) that I have not begun a new academic year since I was three years old. Many teachers have similar stats to their life resumes, but when I realized that was 28 years of fresh starts and new notebooks and new syllabi, I was shocked.

[I asked a former teacher how many years it would take before I stopped measuring time in school years. She smiled sweetly and said, “Probably never.”]

I wondered how I would feel after I left teaching, who I would feel like. “Once a teacher, always a teacher,” is both terrifying and lovely — more than once, I have found myself on the cusp of correcting a child I had no business correcting, laying out expectations in too-obvious a format for regular adult communication. And of course I could wax poetic about the daily instruction and guidance I give my daughters etc. etc., but that feels like trying to shape my days into something they aren’t. I’m “teaching,” sure, but it is so much more personally rewarding longterm than classroom teaching, and so much less rewarding on the daily level. They are similar, but not the same.

On this second Sunday of Advent, I can’t help but think how the Church calendar has influenced my spiritual walk and my writing. Both Advent and Lent create this mysterious space that opens me up to inspiration. This year, my inspiration is taking the form of moments of candle-lighting, hat-knitting, and a slow movement toward rest. Again, a year spent with the Sacred Ordinary journal, and the short daily reflections coupled with more extensive searching in the weekly Examine are allowing me to tap into that part of me that used to commune with God in the quiet, but now communes with Him in the bustle and loud of a home taken up with others.

Time is always on my mind. As a mystery and as a bringer of death. As an agent for healing and as a vehicle for change. How to mark it? Should I mark it? What would happen if I didn’t?

September used to mark the beginning of a new academic year. September of 2021 flowed from August and into October in a seamless wave of walks, diapers, coffee dates, middle-of-the-night wakings, and endless dishes and laundry.

December used to mark the beginning of Advent. December of 2021 still marks the beginning of Advent. When I cracked open my blue Sacred Ordinary and looked at the wheel of the Church calendar, I wondered at the consistency, at the shared experience across time. We will light the second candle of Advent today in our living room and across the globe. I’ll read the Scripture reading, and Evangeline will want to light all the candles at once because who wouldn’t?

I may not be teaching, but it is still Advent. Christ is still coming. Christ has still come.

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How to Pray in the ER

Sitting alone in a dim emergency room, cordoned off by a sliding glass door and curtain for privacy. I have been here before, but never alone. The last time, I was 22, and surrounded by not only my parents, but all three of my younger siblings. I didn’t know then that I’d long for so much chaos.

I’ve sent Gabe home. He wanted to wait in the parking lot because you never know how long the ER will take — you hope it will be quick and I’ll be running out there with a relieved skip in my step. Go home, I say over the phone, feed the baby and put her to bed. It’ll be awhile.

I sit and I wait. What will they detect? What dark, amorphous shadow will they discover in my lungs? Will it be large, so big they hook me up to an IV? Is surgery looming? Or will it be small? Small enough to terrify, but small nonetheless? Or, hope against hope, will it be nothing? Just two lungs working hard but not broken, filling to not-quite-capacity, but all systems go?

No one told me Covid could cause blood clots. For all the reading and listening I’ve done over the past 11 months, I have never encountered this fact. I knew to watch for a fever, for difficulty breathing. It was this — the hitch in my breath when I breathed too deeply, the thick choking cough — that made me call my midwife, and then my primary care, and then the respiratory specialist. Not till I sat with the specialist did I hear the word “clot” or “given your history,” and not till then did I realize there could be far more wrong than Covid.

The tv hanging above the door is dark, and I have no desire to turn it on. I have no book, no distraction other than my phone. Social media holds no enticement, and I look at the clock. How to be patient? Is the doctor looking at the images now? The CT results clear to him but unknown to me? I worry I was forgotten, as though they could forget the pregnant woman, positive with Covid-19, possible blood clot. As though there were any sort of hubbub in the small hospital at all.

The hands on the clock tick, so time is passing. No one checks on me. I was told half an hour to read the results forty-five minutes ago. I practice a deep breath. There it is: the catch, the cough.

The anxiety of waiting.

Picturing my daughter eating dinner with Gabe and my mother, babbling away, asking where I am. Or not asking, because fear doesn’t yet exist.

The first time, as I learned I had a blood clot in my thoracic outlet, I floated. I was young enough to have never thought of clots and healthy enough to think I could will myself back to health. Death was possible (as it is always), and in the days and weeks afterwards as I took my daily blood thinner, I wrestled with my fear of Death in a real and profound way.

I would miss my family, my parents and brothers and sister.

I would miss my friends.

I would miss the future I had imagined and was just now beginning to realize.

This time, ten years later, I am 32 years old.

I would miss all those things, but this time, my little girl is being tucked into her crib by her grandmother.

This time, my husband waited in a freezing cold car because he didn’t want to leave me alone at the hospital.

This time, a new life spins and swirls within me, refusing to let me forget that my lungs breathe for two.

Something my mother did very well was teach me how to comfort myself: You need to make a list of things that make you feel better. And when you’re upset, look at that list and choose one thing.

So I start singing.

It is soft, almost a whisper, and I am surprised that with such tired lungs I am able to sing whole lines. Words flow from me, from my memory. I can’t pray because I have no energy left to create. Instead, I receive the words passed down to me, and I both use them to soothe and offer them as prayer.

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound

that saved a wretch like me.

I once was lost but now am found,

was blind but now I see.

Hymn after hymn filling my little room just loud enough for me alone to hear. And as I sing, I realize what a gift I have been given: to have words within me when I have none of my own. Our minds are so malleable, so open. It’s easy to forget that what we read and see is imprinted in our brains. The headlines that are keeping me awake at night — I fill my mind with things that torment me. Yet, here I am in a hospital bed, and years ago I had been given words of comfort and rejoicing for a time such as this.

Suddenly, I remember my great grandmother. At 105, she had little memory left. On good days, we had sweet conversations that replayed enough for me to anticipate the next line. On bad days, she didn’t remember which great-granddaughter I was. What she always seemed to remember were the words to the hymns I played on the piano, her tired but lively voice singing words that were not her creation, but were hers nonetheless. Her mind was often not with us, but the words emblazoned there 100 years ago reminded us of her soul.

Processed with Focos

When the doctor comes back, saying “No blood clots, but your lungs are covered in Covid pneumonia,” I rejoice. I want to reach out and hug him. How odd to rejoice over that! But blood clots are far, far worse, and my prayers, humbly and perhaps awkwardly lifted up, had been received and lovingly answered. When the nurse leaves, I remove the EKG pads myself, toss them in the trash, gather up my clothes. I bend down (with difficulty) to tie my boots, and walk out of the ER with a huge smile on my face.

Evangeline is asleep when I get home, and I don’t wake her. How I want to hold her in my arms! To snuggle her soft head against my face. Instead, I eat reheated macaroni and cheese on the couch. I tell my mom and husband about singing in the ER and what a strange experience it was. Eventually, I go to bed, trusting that I will get to hold my daughter in the morning.

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On Being Finite and Turning 32

“I hate self-reflection,” someone told me the other day. I pushed her to give me details, to figure out where the discomfort lay. As someone who has never been able to avoid self-reflection, no matter how hard I try, I was fascinated.

It seems to me that thinking about who we are, why we do what we do, and processing experiences is just a part of being human. The word “self” in front of anything can feel like navel-gazing, and I can’t deny that this is a pitfall for me. But to do without debriefing life? This seems rather empty.

Because reflection has always been second nature, I knew something was wrong when I stopped remembering. What did we have for dinner last night? I made plans for this afternoon? Along with this forgetfulness came my inability to verbalize what was wrong. Gabe’s patience is legendary, and I tried to tell him what was going on, but for the first time in a long time, I just didn’t know.

Planners – Sacred Ordinary Days

I asked for a copy of The Sacred Ordinary Planner for Christmas. As the world demands attention, other things have been neglected. God has not shouted at me, but he has been whispering, and nothing points me back to Him more than my insufficiencies. It is not judgment I feel — although, perhaps at times I should — but more God quietly reminding me that I am finite.

There are many ways that this finitude has come to light. Multiple times a week, I need to remind myself that I cannot heal other people’s relationships, that I cannot be the best (or favorite) teacher of every student, and that not sticking to a budget 100% does not make me a weak person. The most glaring of these though, is the daily work of mothering. I never knew I had a strong imagination; as a little girl, I longed to have dreamworlds like L. M. Montgomery’s characters, castles in the sky I could escape to when I was lonely. I didn’t know that my imagination just took me elsewhere: to a farm with rolling orchards and familial partnership, to writing and publishing books someday, to singing opera in a sparkly navy gown (before I even really knew what opera was).

Likewise, I didn’t know that I have imagined what kind of mother I would be long before I became one. Not in some tangible, obvious way. Becoming a mother felt so far off for awhile that I forgot it was a possibility. It’s more that I imagined This Other Me who would suddenly appear, with patience and creativity and endless joy. I imagined easily floating through days where my children learned, where I created, and where we all grew in a bond of mutual admiration and respect.

This is not to say that these things never happen. Evangeline is without question a delightful child. Her weaknesses are beginning to show; her humanity is peeking through her demands, through her longing to connect. It is more that I am still me, and I struggle with being at the beck and call of anyone, let alone a little girl under three feet tall. I remember that attachment is healthy, that flour flying all over the floor and counter is worth Evangeline feeling the thrill of baking, of being a helper. I remember these things, and I seek connection with others who feel the same way. There is no other way for me to be, so how to refine the way I am?

When I sit down to write in my planner, I don’t yet know quite how to use it. Do I make lists? Set goals? Describe whatever inner landscape I’m experiencing that day? I keep missing days, and the amount of reflection that is required at the beginning of each week feels impossible: Reflect On This Week — Reset Next Week.

How can I do this when each week feels daunting?

How can I devote energy to reflection when all my energy has been sucked up by work and by others and by my own exhausting cyclical thinking?

When rest feels unattainable, and 5:30AM comes too soon?

I turn 32 today. An unremarkable number, although prettier than 31, I would argue. As I read the lectionary yesterday morning with the book resting on my belly, the little life inside me kicked against it. I won’t read into the action — as tempting as it may be — but I will reflect on the burgeoning of new life even within the body of an aging one. God speaks in many ways, and maybe one of those ways is a tiny baby’s movements, the rolling of a growing belly.

Every morning, the first thing Evangeline does when I pick her up her from her crib is bend down and kiss my belly.

“Baby kiss!” she says gleefully.

To distill her joy and make it available to everyone. To bottle it up and save it for myself on rainy days when tears come and problems feel unsolvable. I know she will eventually encounter life. She will meet people who hurt her — I will hurt her — and she will begin to feel the more complex emotions of adolescence and adulthood. But a little part of me wonders if perhaps one of her greatest gifts will always be her joy, and if that is what she will use to change her world.

I turn 32 today. We will eat takeout, reminisce about the past year, and dream towards the future, towards spring, towards new life. It will be hard for me to turn off my work brain and turn on my home brain. We will be exhausted by a little voice that repeats, by a little body that wants to be near, by refusal to eat dinner and demands for “Chocolate!” But I know that I will look up at Gabe across the room and smile, because the things in our life that take the most work are the things that are worth it.

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A Poem for Election Day

It’s not the first time I’ve voted
but it is the first time
it has felt like a funeral — faces
grim, strained
looking down at phones
as the long line winds around the corner
(corners) and the cold November wind
whips dead leaves whirling
down the sidewalk.

Yet, this isn’t the saddest thing
about this day. That, instead,
is the empty preschool playground
I stand beside; the sun-bleached
picnic table picnic-less since March,
the fence leaning, the swing-set empty,
the imagined children’s voices.