Last week I had one of those days where everything seems to fall apart.  Little stuff, I mean, in the overall scheme of things.  But isn’t it always the little stuff that adds up, piece by piece, until, before you know it, it becomes a big thing or even the Biggest Thing?

Meanwhile, genocide rages on in Africa.

But in my charmed corner of the world, the little things demanded to be tended to.  A kid with a broken filling.  Another one who won’t stop getting cavities.  After awhile and a couple of looks from a mom, it starts to feel like my fault.  Then I got home and unpacked my glorious bag of loot from Williams-Sonoma, purchased with the gift cards we received as wedding presents.  I laid out the shiny new items on my shiny new stovetop: dishtowels that match our kitchen colors, maple rolling pin, stainless steel spoon rest, and–wait for it–All-Clad 12-inch frying pan!  This is the kitchen of someone who has her shit together, I thought, followed by, Something’s missing. I realized that the sales girl, who I had suspected was not all that sharp, had neglected to include my Slow-Cooker Cookbook in my bag.  Which led to the utterance of one of my favorite phrases–“You have GOT to be kidding me!”–second only to “Help me, God” and “Nice move, jackass” (that one is usually restricted to the car).  I called Williams-Sonoma and asked them to set the cookbook aside, then I added another trip to the store to my to-do list for the next day.  And provided a gut-wrenching sigh as a soundtrack for the ordeal.

Meanwhile, human rights are violated daily in China.

I headed to my chair to sew a strap back onto a nightgown, the strap having been ripped out by the washing machine (which apparently, along with child toothbrushers and cashiers at Williams-Sonoma, has a vendetta against me).  I am not a seamstress.  But I know how to suture gums back together, and I am familiar with a needle, so I can usually come up with a mended solution that is functional, if not pretty.  Naturally, my needle kept getting unthreaded and the strap was more broken than I realized.  An hour later, I held in my hands the fruits of my labor: a nightgown with one strap looking like it had been attached by the drunk employee who slipped through the cracks at the Victoria’s Secret plant in Indonesia.

The Husband arrived home and I set about making dinner (though not in the slow cooker).  I grabbed the kitchen shears from their knife-block home and opened them.  Some screw fell out, disappearing into the ether, and the shears fell apart.  “What the hell!” I boomed to a startled Husband, who had not witnessed the previous events but even if he had gone through them himself would have reacted with more patience in one sitting than I’ll ever amass in my entire life.  I must have put on my “I’m headed for a meltdown” face, because he took the shears from me and, I guess, sprinkled some of his Good Person magic dust on them and they were repaired.  As I wondered why my life has to be so hard when all I want is to have it all together or at least appear to.

Then, as the internet goes out in Egypt, I remember how many of my life’s difficulties have been birthed in the Appearing to Have It All Together maternity ward.  And how many of its blessings came from the broken places, the torn pieces, the dark spots.  How those areas of brokenness are where the words now have space to spill out, how they provide such better acoustics for laughter, how it’s true when they say that what has been broken often heals back stronger than it was before.  How I was more broken than I realized but, held in the hands of a master who knows his way around being torn, I found out what healing looks like.  Am still finding it out.  And it is beautiful.  It looks like redemption.