Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks

It’s early Monday morning and we’re headed north at a new time. He sobs in the backseat, and I want to scream. Summer has begun.

This change in schedule, and route, has rendered us both a mess. I get it, but I still want to eject myself from the car and parachute away. It’s the beginning of the summer. Heat and potty-training and togetherness loom on the horizon and I have a hard time appreciating any of it, weeks stretching ahead with time to fill. Oh, I’ve made lists: skills to master, activities to accomplish, appointments to keep. But around and between and within those lists lurks the anxiety that threatens, always, to steal the joy. The fear that deletes the moment, the now, by making it one of a million, reducing it to a hurdle that must be crossed.

It’s 8:30 am and I’m exhausted.

By the time he’s on the horse, the tears have disappeared and he’s grinning at me from across the ring. The next afternoon we try another something new. “Let’s go karate!” he says to me in an echo of what I’ve been telling him for days now, the preparation for our viewing of a class and a meeting with one of the instructors. The Kid willingly follows the instructor into a private studio and imitates some moves but mostly checks the place out and grins at me: “Karate.” I’m told what I knew I would be–that they start at five and he should wait until then, but he’ll be ready because he’s willing. I think about the music class two summers ago, Little Brother distending my belly and adding to the discomfort I was navigating due to TK’s unwillingness. We’ve come so far. We head across to the other studio to watch a class but within minutes it’s clear that TK isn’t going to abide the rule of silence. We get a look from the sensai that is perfectly innocuous but by the time we’re in the car I’m a kid again and I’ve been sent to the principal’s office, or I’ve failed a test, or not been picked for the team, and as TK chatters (!) happily in the backseat, I’m in quiet tears before we’ve left the parking lot.

I know it’s ridiculous–I know that the chances they would have broken a rule and let him start early, that he would have pulled a Karate Kid the second we walked in, were nonexistent. I know that we weren’t getting in trouble when we got the look. But something tells me not to brush off the tears, not to pretend the sadness isn’t there. Something tells me to feel it, ridiculous or not, because this may be the only way past it and into where we need to be–this honoring of the complexity of emotions that reside within me, and–I’m beginning to see–him. I’m no longer the kid who thinks the only choice is embarrassment, that I’m just a silly weirdo who needs to be fixed before I’m validated. And because I’m not the kid who thought that, I know The Kid won’t be either, because the grace that is living and active in and more powerful than me will not skip a generation. And it’s bigger than how I feel: big enough to let me feel it, and meet me in it, and walk me through it. So I cry, even if it’s stupid, because as I cry, the tears wash the lies away so that the truth becomes clearer, gently flowing in as the fear ebbs. I still feel sad, but it’s a hopeful sad. Soon it will just be hopeful. I’ve come so far.

The next day, because I have apparently decided to front-load this first week of summer with all the hardest shit, The Husband and I dress TK in his swim gear and head to the aquatic center for an evaluation. This instructor is trained to help kids with sensory issues, and she’s great–but that doesn’t stop TK from losing his mind as she gently leads him to the water. As she moves around the pool with him and the tears roll down his face, I mirror him from the bench. TH holds my hand as I ugly cry: “It’s just so hard.” In my mind I waver again over whether we’re doing the right thing to teach him this skill that could save his life, and I know it’s ridiculous–I even laugh a little at it, at myself–but let the tears flow anyway. Within minutes, it’s over and TK is happy in the backseat. I’m getting there.

Another morning a friend of mine brings a friend of TK’s and we say it: “I just wish it would be easier sometimes.” And just like that, we’re not alone. It’s not easier, but we’re not alone. Later in the day I head downstairs to participate with the therapist in TK’s potty training, and while I wonder how long he’ll be in pull-ups and rue this over-a-year-long-so-far process, TK shoots me the widest grin from the toilet. I make a silly face and he laughs. I wanted to cry, and now I’m laughing too.

The next night we’re at dinner with friends, sans kids, and I go to the bathroom. There’s a line. Through the speakers a song plays and immediately the hair band transports me back to sixth grade and I’m the awkward kid who just wanted someone to ask her to dance, wishing she belonged somewhere, A million feelings rush through me while I’m waiting to pee. For God’s sake, I think–even a chorus from a Chicago song can leave me a wreck. This can’t be healthy. “Look away,” the voice echoes through the stalls, and I can’t get over how ridiculous it is, this barrage of emotions always knocking at my door. I wish it would just be easier. Then I realize that if it were, I wouldn’t be me. And TK wouldn’t be TK.

The next week we’re in the car again at the new time that is getting less new, and no one is crying. We’re singing about the Schuyler sisters, and soon he’s on the horse grinning. As they circle the ring, his therapist calls out to me: “He’s finally realizing the power of his voice!” I smile and nod, and remember what someone had said recently on some podcast, or maybe it was Chicago, about shadows. How there must be light for them to exist. I’m sitting in the shade, in the shadows, and the heat’s not as bad here. Underneath the ease of the moment, my smile and his, there is a current of emotion, always, sometimes so strong I can barely breathe. But underneath that? Is another current, truer than any feeling that would threaten to undo me. A river full of living water that carries me home.

A few years ago I received a comment on my personal blog appraising my writing as too “depressing.” People were starting to talk, according to the commenter–an acquaintance brave enough to, ahem, virtually step forward. The message, enveloped in faux concern, delivered an insidious warning: you’re not saying the right stuff. P.S. Keep it up, and you can’t sit with us. I remember wavering between amusement at the projective nature of the opinion and rage at the idea that I could spend an afternoon writing a thousand heartfelt words only to have the verbal equivalent of a bag of flaming dog poop left right underneath them. That was the day I learned that Salt-n-Pepa were right about opinions and assholes–and that the internet has a distinctive way of summoning both. Myself included.

The situation defused rather than becoming a major conflagration…outwardly, at least. Inside, I seethed for awhile. The comment left a scar partially due to its hurtfulness, but more because of a sense of violation, much like the time my branch of the post office in Manhattan refused to hand over the DVDs my sister sent of The Office because she had addressed them using my nickname. My freedom felt curtailed; what had been rightfully mine–words, a box set of DVDs–was being (mis)handled by others. I didn’t like it.

And it wasn’t the first or last time I would be accused of being, much like Lin Manuel Miranda’s version of Angelica Schuyler, intense…

Read the rest over at Mockingbird!

“…hopefully, under that pressure, you leave behind all of the false You’s–the imitative You, the too-clever You, the Avoiding You–and settle into that (sometimes, at first, disappointing) beast, Real You…Real You is all you have, and all other paths are false.” –George Saunders

Breakfast used to be my favorite meal.

This was, of course, when breakfast was called brunch and occurred around noon and included fries for the table and bottomless mimosas. Trendy music played in the background and someone both brought my plate to the table and took it away.

I distinctly remember that, no matter how poorly behaved we were, no one threw their food to the floor or shat their pants.

Breakfast now is a temptation for me to believe in karma–am I being punished for all the times I ruined my own parents’ meals, or for the time I was mean to that bouncer who wouldn’t let me into Bungalow 8 (YES I’M OLD)? These being the only mistakes I’ve ever made, you see. It’s just hard to believe in grace, that this is love and not punishment, when Little Brother tosses his melamine plate to the floor in glee, or The Kid repeatedly sets off a timer that inches me toward a panic attack. In these moments I do not feel grateful for the life I lead. In these moments I want to check into a mental hospital for much-needed treatment and rest.

Did I mention that our duvet comforter, purchased a month before LB arrived, is white? Or at least it used to be? Fuck me, I guess, for being the idiot with two small children who thought THAT was a wise investment, but that doesn’t take the sting away from the fact that its beautiful linen is now dappled with boogers and dried snot, products of a four-year-old who sleeps half the night between us during cold and allergy season. “Uh oh,” he said the other morning, pointing at his contribution to our master bedroom decor. He wore a look of disgust. I think he inherited it from me.

Speaking of seasons? It is, apparently, Major Life Change Season! I’ve attended one wedding, a Field Day, a pre-K graduation, and two baby showers in the past few weeks. And nothing makes me feel more deserving of a SAG card than the performances I turn in on these occasions. I was prepared yesterday to write about it and didn’t realize–until a dear friend wrote a heartfelt post herself–how incomplete my assessment would have been: a self-affixed “Cynic” label and brief joke about celebrating mediocrity now that preschool graduations are mandatory. Then TK’s therapist cancelled and LB refused to nap and I was forced into the ugly portions of my psyche and, with the help of grace (and, later, a tall glass of wine) I unearthed some truths. And they aren’t that simple, which is kind of the point.

There’s a reason why, when I sit at a wedding and hear people make glowing promises, I turn to The Husband and whisper, “They are going to break these vows ALL THE TIME.” There’s a reason why, when I’m at a baby shower, I have to bite my lip to keep from shouting, “THIS IS ALL VERY PRETTY BUT DO YOU REALIZE THAT YOUR LIFE IS ABOUT TO LITERALLY BE DRENCHED IN SHIT AND FILLED WITH CRYING? AND IS THERE MORE CHAMPAGNE PLEASE?” There’s a reason why, at Field Day, I want to kick the DJ churning out wildly inappropriate (and shockingly loud) pop hits in the nuts and why, later, I make jokes about it being like a nightclub without booze. There’s a reason why, before “Pomp and Circumstance: Preschool Edition” begins, I turn to The Sister and ask her how many of these kids she thinks will end up in jail.

And the reason is not as simple as my being a cynic. Because here’s the thing: the reason also has to include why the vows, in all their impossibility (good luck with fighting fair!), remind me of the rainbow at my own wedding and make me smile. It has to include why the baby showers make me remember when TK and LB were tiny enough to fit in newborn onesies and smelled like milk. It has to include why Field Day makes me remember last year and how hard it was, compare it to this year which is still hard, but be grateful for the difference even as I’m sad about the still-there struggles. It has to include why, when The Niece (who was not told about my attendance) sees me and LB in the aisle, her face lights up and she won’t stop waving and all of a sudden I’m the asshole whooping and crying in the last row with the baby who yells, “YAY!”

Here’s what I am besides a cynic: I’m an irritatingly deep feeler in desperate and constant need of grace, often with a side/in the form of Xanax, who resonates not with the one-note reduction of life events into polished, perfect representations but with the infinitely-layered, erratically-emotioned conveyances of life as it really is. I’m talking about confusion over the Chewbacca mask. Laughter at funerals. Imperfect Instagrams. Emotional outbursts. Questioning everything instead of toeing the (perceived) company line–I’M LOOKING AT YOU, RELIGIOUS ESTABLISHMENT–that at the end of the day, we’re supposed to be one thing: happy. I can’t be one thing. I don’t want to be. Because if I am, then I don’t get to feel everything. And as painful as Everything can be, as so NOT power-of-positive-thinking and not-crowd-pleasing it may be? It’s still more. And in its disquieting discomfort, it jams me ALL UP INTO some grace I wouldn’t know otherwise.

This is why I get cynically irritated whenever someone tells me I’m a good mom: because I am. And I’m not. And what I need to hear more than some passing recognition of my winning moments is an unconditional acceptance of my bad ones, and the assurance that it will all be okay anyway. I need a bigger foundational truth than my own adept parenting (or law-keeping, or career-succeeding) because if there’s not something/One bigger than my ability to parent well? WE’RE ALL SCREWED. I need something that takes my light AND dark. I need a spirit that moves over my hopes to teach my kids to swim and be potty-trained over the summer and meets me in August whether they’re still running from the water in Pull-Ups and breathes life into my complete incompleteness. I need someone who keeps the promises I don’t.

I finally figured out why TK has been calling me Happy Mommy. On the way to school, I pray with the boys (“pray with” = I race through some sincere but brief utterances while one screams and the other begs for More Song) and when I get to the part where I pray for myself, I ask that TK and LB would know how happy I am to be their mommy. The other day, TK said it right after I did: “Happy mommy.” Maybe he sees me being happy sometimes. But I do know that it isn’t apparent when I’m on the kitchen floor, seething over Cheerios crumbles in too-familiar anger. I’m sure I could display it more, embody it more, be more of a LIGHT TO THE WORLD or whatever cherry-picked phrase we’re clinging to these days, but right now? Right now he hears it, daily, in the form of a prayer. A prayer for help.

And God have mercy, I am so okay with that.

During a 1995 interview with NPR’s Terry Gross, Pat Conroy related a story about his father, Don, that epitomized the patriarch’s delusional view of identity. The two men were discussing why Pat’s mother left Don when the elder Conroy broke down sobbing. Thinking that Don had finally realized the error of the ways, Pat quoted the ensuing conversation to Gross: “‘Dad, do you understand what you did wrong?’ And Dad said, ‘Yes.’ And I said, ‘What is it, Dad? What did you do wrong?’ And my father said, ‘I was too good. I didn’t crack down hard enough. I was too easy on your mother and my children.’” Pat was able to laugh at the preposterousness of this conclusion–Don had been a horribly abusive father and husband–because of the passage of time and work of redemption. He and Gross laughed over the memory, and so did I, until I stopped short, realizing how often I embody the elder Conroy’s self-deception when it comes to who I secretly think I am.

Lying to ourselves is so easy.

Read the rest over at Mockingbird!

The audio from my breakout session at the Mockingbird conference is up! Take a listen if you have a half hour to hear me say “um” a lot, drop the F-bomb, and discuss finding grace in shit.

Since I’m a parent of two small children, I watch a lot of crap TV. (This is, to be clear, different from the crap TV I used to watch of my own volition. See left.) And by “watch,” I mean, “check my phone/read while the kids watch.” But recently a plot point of an episode of Octonauts caught my attention. Please stay with me–I promise at least the potential of relatability.

The animal adventurers (I guess there’s a submarine? And they’re in some version of the Navy? Or something?) stumbled upon their twice-per-episode sea creature, and this particular example was a fish remarkable for getting trapped in tight spots when scared. As my head jerked up and my eyes glued to the screen, I thought, “I know that fish. I am that fish.”

Read the rest over at Mockingbird!

I’ve discovered the formula for public speaking: vomit until you don’t care + shit until you’re empty = give a decent talk.

This past weekend was a study in extremes.

The theme of the conference was relief, and I had no idea how much I’d be praying for just that by the time our trip was over. Every time we go to New York, I dig deep into ambivalence: I’m put in touch with how I felt when I lived there six (!) years ago, with all the highs and lows of day-to-day life on that tiny yet huge island. I was so single, and then permanently not; I was lost and found; I was poor yet comfortable. I was happy yet restless, at home but adrift. It was a landing place that became a launching pad, to where I am now: truly, home. On this earth, anyway. But when my feet hit that concrete, a part of me is home there, back to the home of its noisy streets and overpowering smells and steady hum of existence. I miss it, and I don’t. It’s complicated.

This time, it was even more complicated.

We always kick things off, after check-in, with a trip to the Burger Joint. “To go,” we tell them, and haul our bounty up to the rooftop pool, where we add on drinks and a couple of hours of reading and relaxing. This time something wasn’t sitting right. And it wasn’t that burgers and Prosecco don’t mix–believe me, they do. I felt achy, exhausted, and nauseated. I thought I had escaped the The Kid and Little Brother’s virus. I prayed that I had, even while feeling as though I was standing in front of a firing squad.

A few minutes into dinner, the shots rang out.

If you’ve ever had the pleasure of dining in a Manhattan restaurant, you know that many of them boast tiny, often single and therefore unisex bathrooms, located usually about five feet from a table or the bar or–in our case, on this night–both. So when I ventured into that bathroom to empty the contents of my digestive system, my privacy allotment was…lower than ideal. After several trips there, I was tempted to be humiliated yet too sick to care. Our evening’s plan–the musical Hamilton–loomed ahead, more like a threat of future regret than the promise it had been hours before. The Husband asked what I thought. “Let’s just go,” I said. “They have bathrooms there.”

So we went. And I made it through without any accidents, a miracle I believe to be on par with the Red Sea parting and Lazarus’ resurrection. Not only a miracle, but a supreme act of mercy, because this show was everything. To have missed it…well, I would have survived. Obviously. But I would have cried. A lot. And to quote one of my heroes:

Sickness kicked back in overnight, shedding any pretension I carried of this being one of those famous twenty-minute bugs. I awoke the next morning to no relief and spent hours in bed. Called my doctor, got some pills called in. Took some OTC pills for kicks while I waited. And waited. Finally, I couldn’t wait any more. We headed downtown to prep.

I had prayed, between trips to the bathroom and for weeks before, that I would be moved out of the way during this talk. Because I trusted the message, loved what I had to say (it was, after all, mostly about TK; what’s not to love?), but knew that my own anxiety–the kind even my dear Xanax can’t reach–could undo me. Could be the thing that wrecked this whole endeavor and kept it from reaching anyone. Could be what reduced me to a sweating, shaking, red-faced mess who raced through the words and ran away from the whole thing. Well, my prayers were answered. And what an answer it was.

Though now it seems almost poetic: my talk, titled “Grace Stinks,” covered the messes of life in which grace shows up. There was an entire section on–I kid you not–horse shit. And that is what God emptied me of, in response to my prayer, in preparation for the words, in fulfillment of a plan: he emptied me of all my shit until the only thing left was my heart, laid bare in the lights on the stage of a sanctuary on 16th and 3rd.

I had finally gotten to the point where I wasn’t nervous. But what a shitty way of getting there. And what a beautiful way of getting there.

The next day I still suffered: one highlight was when TH and I visited the restaurant we love, the place where last year I was so hungover I puked in their (single, unisex) bathroom sink. Well, this year I sharted at the table. You’re welcome, ladies and gentlemen: if you stopped by this blog for propriety, or for a simply-Scripture-filled way of approaching life without the aid of meds, then feel free not to share this one with your friends, because I AM A MESS. I am also not the hero of this story. I’m the girl who gets hungover, who shits her pants at the brunch table, who needs so much help that God sent a debilitating virus to clear her of everything but him. If you can relate to that, though, then come sit by me. Just wear a mask for the next three or so days.

But the next day I also saw mercy: one of my bests showing up at the hotel, turning the corner so that I first saw the flowers he was carrying. He even let me taste his drink. (B, you still okay?) And the last moments of the conference echoed the last words of my talk as we sang the hymn I had mentioned, the one that still sets me free. How did they know?!

O Joy that seekest me through pain,
I cannot close my heart to thee;
I trace the rainbow through the rain,
And feel the promise is not vain,
That morn shall tearless be.

The next morn was not tearless. I was still praying for relief. And I didn’t get it, not until two days later when I finally woke up feeling like a human being. But I was able to see the refuge I’d been given, that is its own relief: the way I had shed all the things that I thought were true in favor of what actually is: something bigger than me. The places that I used to find refuge in the city–walking on the streets, running in the park–replaced by new refuges: the inside of a theater, the pews of a church. The center of a stage.

And yesterday, taking TK to horse therapy, fighting off nausea while sitting on that bench where I used to be alone–but since being given the chance to share our story, I was able to take a few more with me, if only in my heart: that tiny bench just filled to overflowing with all of us who know the relief of grace.

Pat Conroy died a couple of weeks ago. If you aren’t familiar with the name, then you’ve probably heard of at least one of his novels–most likely The Prince of Tides, which was made into a movie in 1991, starring Nick Nolte and Barbra Streisand. (Three other books of his were also made movies, but to less fanfare and star wattage.) As far as celebrity deaths go–literary celebrity deaths, at least–this one hit me pretty hard.

Read the rest over at Mockingbird!

I dread my kids getting sick–and not just because I hate to see them suffer. So much for empathy, right?

Our latest cavalcade of illnesses–recurrent ear infections, nasty colds, and a violent stomach virus–coincided with the wrapping-up of the series Downton Abbey. And don’t think for a second that the deep cosmic significance of that timing is lost on me. I’ve been a fan of the show since summer of 2011, when I tuned in via Netflix from the couch and fought off waves of morning (and afternoon, and evening) sickness by escaping to early-20th century England. I gasped at the machinations of Thomas and O’Brien, rued the endless personal toll of the Titanic’s sinking, teared up at Mr. Bates’s leg trouble, and guffawed at Violet’s unfailing zingers.

Read the rest over at Mockingbird!

Every Saturday, the four of us bound–or hobble–through the threshold of our gym’s childcare building, and she greets us: “Hello, beautiful family!” Usually I have to bite my lip to keep a bitter laugh from escaping. “Beautiful?” I want to reply. “I was a failure at this before eight am. And it’s the weekend.”

My counselor (well, the one here in town–YES I HAVE MULTIPLE COUNSELORS IN MULTIPLE STATES) hadn’t flinched when I said the words, one in particular: that the clawing and the grabbing and the poking, it can all start to feel like…a violation. She had just nodded, a matter-of-fact yet kind acknowledgement that, yes, this is hard. This season of complete dependence, and so much of it falling on me, so much of it channeling through and leaning on me, from the moment they were conceived? The fact that I’m an introvert, that I crave–nay, require–personal space, and boundaries, and that that space and those boundaries are constantly intruded upon, even ignored? All of that combining to make me feel crazy, it doesn’t make me crazy. It makes me normal.

We’re not really allowed to feel that, are we? I remember a blog post floating around social media a few years ago, with a title something like “You Don’t Get to Complain about This Since You Asked for It,” or a similar graceless proclamation, and how I’d read with my constant companion–Guilt–and learned that there is only one feeling allowed, one place where we’re permitted to remain without exit: gratitude.

Forgive me for thinking that this is a journey. That we’re not perfect. That complexity is allowed. That the article was bullshit.

Forgive me for all that…and God have mercy on me for being one of the worst perpetrators.

She had asked me if there was an inner voice, a monologue, and I had thought, Only a million of them. But that yes, there is, and I’m just now understanding that this voice of judgment is actually me. How the anger, and the frustration, they are both natural and a reflection of the impossible standard to which I hold myself, and I assign them faces of people so that I can fight back, but really? For all my own proclamations of grace, I’m the one failing to practice it.

And there’s this idea…that maybe I’d see things differently if I talked to myself differently.

Maybe if I acknowledged to myself that, yes, getting pissed on in the face is not a fun way to spend a Saturday morning–that there is room and time for gratitude but some things just plain suck. Maybe all this isn’t so much a character flaw as it is an indication that we are made for more, for better, for gardens and cities eternal and beautiful. Maybe this place where we reside between here and there, between what is and what should be, where we grit our teeth and deal by shutting down or lashing out or kicking trash cans–maybe that tension of between-ness that makes us feel crazy is actually the mark on us that makes us real.

Because I also know this: that the more I know of grace, the more I know of my own failings. Yet this is not meant to be a source of flagellation or hopelessness; it is somehow designed that way to drive me deeper into that grace. Closer to the home for which I’m meant.

Why did I ever think that this kind of love would be simple–or, at least, just simple? Because there is the simplicity that comes with primality, of being their defender and protector; but there is more. Always. There is the taxation of body and heart, there is the weariness of repetition, and all these underpinnings that are so hard but also channels of grace. There is a journey permitted–why do I beat myself up for not having arrived? Why would I reduce the mystery into one solved answer when it is allowed to be a prism beyond understanding?

I love my kids. Being a mom makes me feel crazy. It’s all allowed to be true. Beautiful and ugly in a never-ending mix.

It’s the end of the day, and the four of us climb the stairs together. The Kid likes to narrate lately: “Up. Down. Up. Down.” It slows us down and drives me crazy and it’s the best sound I’ve ever heard. Little Brother is already a climber, and he takes his sweet-ass time as well, one step at a time. I want to scream, and be more like him. We arrive at the top together, not a perfect specimen but a motley crew of asshats–forgiven and redeemed asshats–and head toward bath and bed, tired and broken, sinful and irritable, wounded and healing. No audience waiting to greet us, but no judge ready to condemn us, just grace waiting with arms open to enfold us and call us not crazy, but by name.

Maybe I’ll be better tomorrow:
My voice will be softer
my touch gentler
my words kinder.
Maybe my husband will hear and see that I’m still glad it’s us
Doing this.
Maybe I won’t leave it unsaid,
How I love him even more than before, when it was easy.
Maybe my children won’t doubt how wanted they are,
How long was our wait,
How joyful their arrival.
Maybe I’ll be better with myself:
I’ll stop making excuses,
and stop cutting myself down.
Maybe I’ll remember to breathe more
and clench less.
Maybe I’ll be better tomorrow.
“Or maybe you won’t,” I hear, the voice taunting.
“You won’t,” comes another, louder yet softer and gentler–
“But I will. And I’m not leaving.”
So maybe I’ll be better tomorrow,
Or maybe I’ll still be me.
But that’s all right–
because he’ll still be him.