A couple of years ago, for our tenth anniversary, The Husband gave me a necklace and some matching earrings (and a bunch of other surprises, but I already wrote/bragged about that, #sorrynotsorry). In the years since, I lost one of the earrings in an accident (the accident being that I was walking the dog in the rain and it must have gotten caught and pulled by my jacket because when I arrived home, it was gone). I often look at that lone earring and long for its companion.
This week, I was trying to untangle a knot from the necklace and the silver ball on the end of the chain–the ball that prevents the pendant from sliding the hell off into oblivion–popped off. I realised I had two choices-: one was to immediately head out and get a new chain. I opted, of course, for the second choice: to tie a knot back into the chain and return it to my neck.
Which is where it sits now, knot firmly in place to prevent another loss. The silver, twisted seemingly contrary to its nature, keeping it close to me. Keeping it mine.
I’m thinking about these knots as I remember a conversation post-school-dropoff with a friend, regarding issues our kids are having, issues we didn’t expect or plan for. “This part was supposed to be easy,” she said, and I agreed, because I did not schedule any bumps in this specific road and management won’t respond to my calls about it. A knot I’m currently unable to untangle, and maybe…maybe, I’m starting to wonder, if it’s meant to be there?
The boys are getting older, which, it turns out, doesn’t mean fewer problems, only different ones, and I find myself coming to terms with my decreasing ownership of their stories, commensurate with their growing ownership of them. Of their images, which I no longer freely post to social media because they have a right to decide if that’s what they want (and honestly? I kinda hope they don’t buy into all the propaganda and just say no. Opt out). So I’m more in my own head, or in schoolyard or text conversations, working these things out on the ground or over games of basketball with them (we have a solid arrangement with the indoor hoop in Little Brother’s room wherein they shoot running around and I, from a supine position on the bed, heaven) rather than through musings on Instagram. Maybe it will stay this way, maybe not, but it’s the shape of life right now, and I want to fully live it.
When you’ve been on one path for awhile, that course is safe and familiar enough that any deviation feels dangerous, unwise. Until the moment you have to decide whether to replace it with something smoother, less worn, or whether to see the new twists and turns–the knots–as, maybe, part of the plan all along. The knots slowly settling themselves into our stories, these rearrangements becoming repositionings allowing for new vantage points, a slightly altered, different, but wider vista.
These are configurations designed by grace, shapes wrought into our stories by love. There is no other way. And instead of tying a knot onto the end of my rope and hanging on (because who has the strength for that these days?!), I just let go and am held, held underneath and all around by the twist that prevents me from sliding off altogether.
We got out of the car yesterday and they were enlisting me in a game I didn’t really want to play (it didn’t involve lying down, you see)–the “cheese touch” game and, apparently, I had the cheese touch–and they took off down the hill towards school ahead of me. I quickly snapped a photo (from behind–that’s some anonymity, right?), and, through my knots of tiredness, ran toward what was right in front of me.