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Little Beaches Everywhere

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pierSometimes I wonder if any of us are cut out for the lives we lead. –Rebecca Wells, Little Altars Everywhere

I always find my way back to the beach.

I grew up on these shores, the bottom of Alabama and the panhandle of Florida, the Gulf water chasing me into the sand then enveloping me into its warmth, rocking me into its rhythm. I remember late nights on my grandparents’ balcony, early mornings in youth group cabins, waning afternoons at the sand bar with red Solo cups, varying amounts of fitting in and feeling adrift, and it’s only in looking back that I know how unmoored I was. How the waves, always returning, loosened the grip of loneliness and made me feel a part of something bigger. The way New York and its skyline did. The way my family does.

But sometimes you can feel like you’re drowning in something bigger.

It’s easy to forget in the day-to-dryness of it, that we weren’t here first. That the something bigger isn’t me, isn’t my plan or my expectations or my lists. The Husband and I take a night for ourselves, and we head east toward my promised land: the shore where we were married; the simplicity of sand, sun, and salt. I wonder, once we hit construction and have to turn around to find our way back, whose idea it first was to build this road. Two numbers and a letter that have become a resting place, a home, a meeting point. 30A. It’s on bumper stickers now, but there was a time when trucks were just paving it, before towns were named or restaurants built, when it was just hot asphalt waiting to be more.

It had to be built up–ripped dirt and liquid rock looking more like a tearing down–before it could ever become.

We pass a sign in front of a church, and these marquees usually make me groan, but I read this one–Same God, same plan–and feel the gentle reminder, that our routes are a divine mixture of chosen and ordained.

I arrived down here frayed and jittery; six hours in the car with two little ones will do that, not to mention nearly four years of parenthood. I had felt like I was drowning, which is less alarming and maybe a little too accepted when it’s become a rhythmic and familiar thing, a sensation returned to every so often thanks to tiredness and hormones and…just life. There are herbs and counselors and prayers and other counteracting agents. And then sometimes you just need a vacation. This one had arrived at exactly the right time–funny how that happens–the days and my temper feeling shorter, the monotony making me restless. The weight of two young boys–pushing them up hills in a stroller, throwing them into a cart at Target, explaining things over and over–can leave one breathless. The wonderful weight of it all feeling overbearing, the guilt from that feeling threatening to undo me.

I needed some air. Sea air.

The repetition involved in raising young kids–especially one who is struggling to talk and deals with motor planning issues, therefore needs that repetition in a way most of us will never understand–can be painful. Annoying. Exhausting. Unless, of course, you’re Mother Teresa reincarnated, in which case I have two things to say: 1) What the hell are you doing on my blog? and 2) No you’re not. Even Ma T would have lost it, I think, some days with some diapers. I find that it’s the constant doing over and over again that drives me to the brink of insanity most days. Then I realize that it’s how Little Brother and TK grow and learn. And that, for TK, it’s even more: like the rhythmic waves on the shore, it loosens his anxiety, dilutes it and even washes some away. It’s a rhythm that brings assurance. It calms and steadies him.

Could it do the same for me?

While we were away, I walked out on the dock one morning after a run. The bay was quiet and smooth, and I turned to walk home toward the sun. I considered that I’ve had it all wrong for so long: that the wooden boards nailed together beneath me are not, in fact, a gangplank leading to my death. But that they could be a pier leading to the kind of grace that walks on water, beckoning me out for a spin. Because there’s this, that Francis Frangipane said: “Rescue is the constant pattern of God’s activity.” There were so many (let’s not kid ourselves–ARE so many) situations I looked around at and then looked up from, awaiting my airlift out, and nothing happened. Happens. Maybe because everything around me is my rescue. I think about the repetitive nature of grace, all the works of it that begin with the “re” prefix, the doing over and over again: rescue. Re-creation. Redemption. All of it, reenactments of the grace that beget us all.

Grace never just happens once.

And this one: reconciliation. In The Rabbi’s Heartbeat, Brennan Manning slays me yet again:

Those who wear bulletproof vests to protect themselves from failure, shipwreck, and heartbreak will never know what love is. The unwounded life bears no resemblance to the Rabbi…The reconciled heart says that everything that has happened to me had to happen to make me who I am–without exception.

I’m being reconciled: to this life, this building-up, this over-and-over-ness of grace that makes me learn it by heart. The first time I took TK to horse therapy, my map told me to go a route that it has never repeated. But I’ve kept going that way, because it leads by a gleaming body of water. TK and I stare out the window at it. Sadly, it’s not a bay or ocean, but a water treatment plant. Still–it’ll do for now. We gaze in silence at the still water for the five seconds we get it each week from our windows, where it waits for us and our rhythmic return, this beach we always come back to.

Taking Notes

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boys The weapon was a blood pressure cuff, but it may as well have been a loaded syringe. Same with the scale before it, and the stethescope. But who am I to judge anyone for letting fear turn their shadows into monsters? Who’s to say I didn’t even teach him that?

The nurse fastened the Velcro and began pumping. The Kid kicked and screamed in my arms. I launched into “Old McDonald,” the notes deposited directly from my mouth into his ear, the chaos continuing around us.

“You have a good singing voice, Mom,” she told me, which is the point at which, if I knew her better (at all), I would have laughed and said she was full of shit. So I just laughed. The cuff came off and TK calmed down, back from 60 to zero in two seconds. In a few minutes we’d see the neurologist, who would again give his professional version of a shrug: no new findings, maybe some more blood work, it’s a mystery. He’s a mystery.

Tell me something I don’t know.

Even the answers, the charts with his name on them, the codes attached to his diagnoses, they all come with question marks attached. Which makes them less than answers and more like…guesses? Nothing quite fits. On a good day, this is good news: the idea that it’s not all figured out can carry hope. On a bad day, in a bad moment, it pierces my core: that ultimate discomfort with all things mysterious and uncertain, that feeling of being a victim or, worse, a target. Unloved. Uncared for.

Yet I’m told the opposite is true.

And the trenches of parenting–these dark moments in clinical settings, the mundane middle-of-the-night disturbances, all of it—are opening me up painfully, but undeniably, to the possibility of that truth being real. Being…well, true. Because if I can hold him down while both of us cry, believing that there’s a purpose that outweighs our tears? Then maybe I know more about love and grace than I think I do.

He’s started music therapy, and like all new things it’s taking him awhile to warm up to it. But I catch him listening in that way he does, the way that looks like he’s not paying attention at all until he hums the exact tune that was playing, and later he pulls my hand and we go to the piano, where he plays each note with a turn to me, asking me to name them. What if I hadn’t taken those God-forsaken piano classes twenty-something years ago, the ones that kept me in a closed room for thirty minutes a week, that forced me onto a stage where I sweated and fumbled and, finally, played? But I did, and now I know the name of each note, of each key, so that I have an answer for him when he asks. “C, D, E,” I say, then sing, to him, and after awhile he stops asking and just plays.

Later that day he laughs when I grab onto the tree branch and throw my legs up too, hanging there like a goof…or maybe like a child, like I haven’t in twenty-something years, because I don’t trust many things to hold me these days. But it makes him laugh, so I trust, and it holds, and there we are: he’s watching and laughing, and I’m hanging.

The voices get louder later in the day, after the sun has gone down and I’m bone-tired and lying there beside him in his bed, where he wants me to rub his back and arms, and it’s hard to do the dutiful thing: feel thankful. See it as blessing. Trust I am held. He grabs my hand again, and sometimes it’s the little things that make me feel like I’m going crazy, not the clinical but the mundane moments that threaten to undo me as my head becomes a playground for shadows that sound like monsters. He’s drifting off to sleep and I’m crying. “Why are you so cruel?” I ask God. “Why would you make it so hard for him? Why are you doing this to us?” I get no answers, just the even breathing of the boy beside me, and between that and the fact that I know I haven’t been left, but listened to, I feel an odd peace. A peace that coexists with question marks, with anger, with frustration and joy and all of it. A grace that allows my yelling and ambivalence and all-over-the-place-ness because it is bigger than all those things and will hold me while the questions marks unfurl into periods. Into a story.

Mystery is the hardest thing for me. And yet I know that it’s the language of grace. The language of TK.

The next day I have a good run for the first time in weeks. I think about how there are no songs made of just one note, and how the most beautiful tunes are the fullest ones—how they resonate in a place beyond my ordered exterior and into the depths of me, where fear and shame reside alongside breathless wonder. I think about how grace makes for a love that hears my cry and doesn’t run away, but stays. And I run, feeling lighter than I have in awhile. The music in my ears plays, and I swear I can hear every single note.

In the Zone

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boyss“I feel like…I’m in the wrong place.”

Last week I parked the car and headed toward an elementary school for which we are not zoned, toward a meeting which was not listed in any of the child-rearing books I read. I had not prayed over this from the glider in The Kid’s nursery or written it on any wish lists. But on this gray morning, I was buzzed through the entrance, where I slapped a Visitor sticker to my chest and headed down the hall toward TK’s classroom, a classroom he shares with five other students and three teachers. A classroom designed for kids with special needs (now there’s a phrase I didn’t plan on).

TK’s teacher went through his pre-set goals with me, and I remembered them from the May meeting that The Husband and I had…shall we say, endured? The one that occurred after multiple evaluations, demands placed upon him that he balked at, misunderstanding engendered as I watched and felt helpless. “We don’t belong here!” I wanted to scream. “You don’t get him!”

He has crushed every last one of his goals, by the way. In case you were wondering. IN CASE ANYONE WANTS TO KNOW.

She ended the meeting I hadn’t called for with this, as tears sprung to my eyes: “And I don’t mind telling you: he is the sweetest boy in my class.” The goals and the data and the charts–relics from my own childhood, measures of worth–faded into the background, replaced with this new information, and one of his other teachers popped her head in. When she saw me, she added: “James is so wonderful. He is truly such a kind, kind little boy.”

I left the school I wasn’t zoned for with my eyes welling over and a grin on my face.

How do we reconcile the twin and not-as-mutually-exclusive-as-I-thought truths of “I didn’t plan this” and “this is exactly where we were meant to be”? How do we make peace with the discomfort of being settled into a purpose we didn’t bargain for?

The night before, I had finally, for the first time after seven months, attended our church’s monthly women’s group. New social settings unnerve me from top to bottom, and I approach them sweaty-palmed, graceful as a giraffe in high heels, but shorter, and slightly more awkward. I navigate rooms full of people as though I’m standing in quicksand, content to sink rather than engage in small talk, just knowing that everyone can see through me to the insecurities that reside at my core.

A friend sat beside me. A story was told that felt like it could be mine. It turned out that the sinking ship was a life raft.

There are these occurrences that land us where we never thought we’d be: pregnancy tests, diagnoses, personal failures, news reports. And I’ve been the expert at railing against them, at saying “NO” to everything that wasn’t inscribed in my planner, to discomfort.

I almost didn’t go to the small group in New York City that led directly to The Husband. At least, that’s how I remember it. But would grace have really let me miss it? I almost didn’t write, didn’t send, the post that led to a new community, which led to a new church. Or didn’t I? Didn’t grace take me by the hand when I didn’t even feel its clasp, walking me right to my new name?

The dad in our carpool line bears the battle scars, and I can see them, this shell-shocked look of bewilderment and defeat, that “how did this happen to us?” refusal to believe. I know that look. I battle it daily. And when we talked, and I told him our same struggles, I could see him relax. He asked what I’d read about it–“the prognosis? With apraxia? Do they ever talk?”–and I quoted, reassured, hedged, and just shared. A story that was his too. At the end, he said that we should all get a glass of wine–he, and I, and TH, and his wife, who had told me about the horse therapy. And it sounded damn good.

Mary Karr writes about the elements of memoir, of story, that matter to a reader. She calls it “your life between ass-whippings.” And I feel as though I’ve got plenty to say about that. Then I wonder whether the ass-whippings will turn out to be surgeries that saved my life, moments when I woke up on the operating table during the procedure and complained about the doctor’s technique as he sliced off the cancer that would have killed me.

So there’s that.

And this report from TK’s teachers? That he’s the kindest and sweetest? I think about how these descriptors weren’t on my list either, how they were pushed over for qualities like “well-behaved,” and how I will never stop being chased by grace to go ahead and put down the Law already. How he is becoming exactly who he is meant to be, despite and along with me.

“I feel like I’m in the wrong place,” she said, and the three of us definitely didn’t fit in: our sense of humor borders on–okay, delves deep into–not-family-friendly territory; the wine wasn’t flowing fast enough; we were supposed to work in groups. With people we didn’t know. This mystery dinner event was turning into more liability than fun. When a perfectly friendly-looking girl saw the pink-colored paper at my place setting and informed me our group would be working on our song after Act 2, I nodded and smiled politely until she walked away, then looked at the two of them. “We have to get out of here.”

There are moments when you have to stay to find your place, and moments when you have to leave. I think we usually know which it is, even before we’re ready to admit it. On this night, we grabbed our coats and ran to a bar that served the three of us, where we talked late into the night, telling the stories we already knew anyway that had gotten us right where we belonged: here.

Will Write for Attention

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parisI have dinner to make, and I’m not thrilled about it.

TGIF, of course, but it’s been a long day: two therapy appointments for our older son, a visit to Santa for him and the baby (and all the bribery and maneuverings required to make that annual picture happen), a trip to the playground (and all the bribery and maneuverings required to get them home). My husband takes the kids downstairs to play so I can throw dinner together, my back aching over the kitchen counter and my inner monologue verging on martyrdom. You know–the usual.

I waver between turning on Christmas music and the news, then settle on the news.

I hear a familiar voice in an unfamiliar time slot. I glance at the clock. I turn back to the TV. That’s when this one begins.

Read the rest over at The Wheelhouse Review.

He Ain’t Heavy

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broI remember the first time I walked into my counselor’s office, all bruised heart, frayed edges, and performance anxiety. He wanted to open up by talking about one of my least favorite subjects: me. An initial topic was birth order, which sounded like some kind of hippie nonsense–what would that have to do with anything? I wanted practical advice on how to make my life better, how to get what I was missing. Instead I found myself talking about my chronological location within my family.

It mattered, of course. It still matters. Oldest children tend to share many of the same traits: tendencies toward perfectionism and being tightly wound (WHO ARE YOU CALLING TIGHTLY WOUND??!!!), a drive toward achievement and taking on responsibilities. This is all a nice way of describing Type A control freaks, of which I am chief.

But there’s also the relationship it granted me with my 13-months-younger sister: I don’t carry a growing-up memory that doesn’t have her in or around it. From protectiveness on the school bus to a multi-media rehearsal-dinner toast involving provocative childhood bath time photos, I have always been aware of my (often self-appointed) role of overseer, of protector. During the years between The Kid’s birth and Little Brother’s gestation, I imagined a family unit in which TK would have that same role I did, a younger sibling to help define his place in our family and the world.

Their first meeting, in the hospital, was anticlimactic: TK’s palpable relief upon seeing that his parents had not abandoned him after all was countered by his total disinterest in the tiny baby resting on my lap. Once we brought LB home, though, something shifted. TK would sneak moments with him, often when we weren’t looking, grabbing a socked foot and holding it against his cheek, patting a still-closing skull while I sucked in my breath, handing over toys to an unconscious, swaddled ball of warmth. Contrary to my fears, he seldom showed signs of jealousy, of his spot being usurped in our kingdom; instead, he mostly ignored LB or showed such tenderness that my hormonally-ravaged heart flew out of my chest. He seemed to intuit what he was unable to express himself (an ongoing talent of his): this new occupant of our home was bound by blood, not going anywhere, and had shuttled TK into the position of older brother.

Sometimes, though, hierarchies don’t perform the way they’re designed to. Sometimes positions shuffle, traits deviate, circumstances don’t bend to the expected order. Like when my bitch sister got married five years before I did then stole my thunder by birthing the first grandchild. Just as an example.

Or when we encourage TK to vocalize the sounds we’re working on, urge him to give us a “mama” or “bye bye” and he looks back at us, all “I ain’t no parrot,” then returns to identifying numbers and letters and LB calls out “mama!” from across the room, a pleased grin on his mug, this action so simple and reflective for him, carrying none of the difficulties and hurdles that TK faces. I voiced this to a friend yesterday whose son faces some of the same challenges, how watching LB meet his milestones is bittersweet: the joy of seeing these steps achieved countered by the sorrow over knowing how challenging they still are for TK.

“What do you think it was that finally helped him speak?” I asked my friend, and without hesitation she replied that it was his big sister. And I considered it, how LB is on his way to talk before TK does, and how the little brother may end up being the teacher of the older. I think about how I imagined their relationship: a little bit me and The Sis, a little bit Harry and Wills, back-and-forth banter and hijinks and sniping and affection, and I watch as a story that is like that but also very, very different plays out.

TK arranges his cars into a perfect line and LB tosses his food off of his highchair tray like confetti in a parade, sprays of disorder upsetting the natural order of things. Or maybe revealing the intended plan. I am all about a preconceived idea of what should be, and every day my kids both meet and defy that idea. Every day grace both meets and defies that idea. It answers the mystery that it creates, roles and personalities and meaning taking shape day after day. Like how my younger sister, who is supposed to take my advice, gives the best advice herself. To me.

TK and LB have recently taken a new interest in each other, TK rolling a ball across the floor for LB to fetch and bring back to him. A baby hand patting the head of a preschooler, who dissolves into giggles and signs for more while his younger brother says words. Then they get into a fight. And I can only imagine, though I will underestimate as I always do, how their relationship will grow and change over the years, how they will become themselves both independently and because of each other. How we all do, growing into ourselves and our places both apart from and with each other, shapes blending and fitting and becoming, following a path ordained by a grace that operates outside our hierarchies.

Pardon the Interruptions

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footWe were talking about cancer. Because someone close to her has it. Then she mentioned The Kid, so speech delays came up. Not your typical over-the-elliptical gym conversation. So you can’t blame the woman next to us for taking notice.

“Don’t worry,” she said, looking me straight in the eyes while her ponytail bobbed up and down in rhythm with the machine. “Don’t you worry one little bit. It’s all going to be okay.”

I’ve heard this before, this reprise of one of several songs: “They Talk When They’re Ready”; “One Day He Just Spoke in Full Sentences”; “I Didn’t Talk Until I Was Three”. And the tunes can be encouraging, except that he is three, almost four, and by “not talking” most people mean “not carrying on a conversation”. And what I mean is, we do not have any words. So many people, in trying valiantly to help, are really tossing a Band-Aid onto a gaping wound.

But her words had heft. They came from a deeper place, I could tell. So I kept listening.

And there in the early-morning life of the gym, machines humming and cable news buzzing in the background, she told me her story–her son’s story. How he had no words when he turned four. How the comparisons show up at your door (and on Facebook, and at birthday parties) and it’s so hard not to invite them in. How, when people ask now how they communicated with him, she can’t even remember–except to say that they did. That she knows they did, remembers not the mechanics of it but that they understood him, and he them. She told me how he loved music and words with rhythm, like Dr. Seuss. About how they knew he was smart, even then. She told me their story, and in doing that she told me ours.

I felt known in the cardio room.

He’s applying for college now, she said, with Emory a top contender, and he speaks three languages. He wrote his essay about his love for language, about how, even though he doesn’t remember now the struggle he had with words, the fact that it’s a part of his story is what brokered his eventual passion.

Oh, and he wasn’t potty-trained when he turned four, either.

She offered advice, and encouragement, but what she really offered was kinship. And as I thanked her again, walking away, she said it one more time: “Don’t you worry. He’s going to be just fine.”

I had almost gone to a spin class that morning instead.

The last week has been rough, with vaccinations and flu shots, viruses and fevers. Yesterday I felt we were all finally on the mend, but it was rainy and gross outside, and I strapped them into their seats and went on a drive. TK alternately cried out and whined in the backseat, and Little Brother let out some protests too, and the traffic was thick. I felt my blood pressure and anxiety rise together, those bastard twins, and wondered how long I could keep the frustration at bay, the sanity in check. We were almost home. Could I make it?

TK let out a piercing screech.

I didn’t know what he wanted. I hate the not knowing–it digs in deeper than I realize, burrowing a nest inside my heart where it nurses fear and guilt, creates a home for them. It threatens to take root and make me forget everything I believe, make me renounce what’s true for illusions like control and pursuit of perfection and ease. It tells me I’m not enough, that all of this is my fault, that it will never get better. It laughs at admonitions not to worry. It scoffs at the idea I am loved.

Sometimes I listen.

And I feel I should be clear on this point, because I talk here about anger issues and temper lengths and there is room for misinterpretation: the number of times I have raised my voice at my children could be counted on one hand (SO FAR), with most occurring during the newborn period. But there in the car, with the screeching and the traffic and the inner gnawing, I raised my voice at TK.

“STOP WHINING.”

A pause of silence, a trembling lip, then the tears: fat ones rolling down tiny cheeks. And I am gutted, gutted. There at the light, I turn in my seat and reach out to him, hold his hand. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

Here’s the thing: the yelling usually happens inside. And it’s not like that’s brave, or better. Because for all the times it fails to erupt, it’s being heard somewhere else, and keeping a bad thing quelled isn’t a virtue when it’s born of fear and pride–that’s just a discipline. And grace doesn’t want my discipline; it wants my surrender. It wants my yes. It wants my assent to the possibility of beauty in the moment even when I don’t see it. It wants an altogether different kind of heart. One that doesn’t fight to keep the bad voices at bay, but rests in the sound of the only one that matters.

Brennan Manning talks about his early-life penchant for keeping rules but not knowing love, saying, “I studied hard, scored excellent grades, won a scholarship in high school, and was stalked every moment by the terror of abandonment and the sense that nobody was there for me…I never felt loved.” But grace didn’t leave him there. “But finally…I came to understand that I was truly loved…I began sobbing. As I drained the cup of grief, a remarkable thing happened: In the distance I heard music and dancing. I was the prodigal son limping home, not a spectator but a participant.”

In the car, I hold his hand, tell him I was wrong, that I love him. He holds my hand back, looks at me. Forgives me. One day, I will remember that we spoke without words.

Just before this eruption, I had been praying The Prayer: HELP. “Where are you?” not so much any more as accusation of absence but growing to be an expectation of presence. After the eruption, after our tears and the holding and the quieting, the traffic moved and I told him we were going to the dry cleaners. He grinned, pointed right at the building in the distance. He hears everything, knows so much. We communicate. These piercing screeches that punctuate the seeming peace, these breakdowns in the car, they are not interruptions. They are becoming clearer and clearer to me as invitations into deeper grace, deeper peace–into knowing how I am loved, and how to love. Spectator to participant.

Later I watch as a TV tour guide explains how inside the Vatican, because of all the lit candles (each corresponding to a prayer) and their smoke, paintings cannot be hung. They’d be destroyed. This calls for a different kind of art. So mosaics were born, each with thousands of tiny colored fragments that come together to form a picture. To form art. How long does it take them before they’re finished? I wonder, as LB leans against me, burying his head in my arm, and TK drives his car over my leg, laughing as I do at how it tickles. These moments–quiet and loud, messy and clean, bidden and not–falling like fragments into their places.

Filling Up

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fullWe sat across from each other with full mugs of hot tea on a cold morning. For only our second time to meet in person, we had much to discuss: Serial, anxiety, our kids’ neuroanatomy. We lobbed theories back and forth about whether Adnan was guilty, if preservatives could be affecting our children’s behavior, what to do when you peeked into their future and got scared. We talked about our writing–like, where to put it. It struck me later that we were trying to find places for things: for our worries, and our words. We were on common ground staring in the same direction with so much unknown staring back at us.

The time filled, and Little Brother woke up. We said goodbye.

Later, I listened to the CDs she had made, the ones with titles like “Waiting” and “Hope.” On the way to work, I took a break from celebrity interview podcasts and let my car fill with notes, the words riding atop them and piercing me:

I’m beginning to learn where to find the words to the song that emptiness sings.

I remember when The Mom gifted The Kid a Spiderman water bottle with a straw, how that pierced me too. I wavered between seeing it as a promise, a beacon of hope: one day things will be easier, cups will be lifted to lips without thought or struggle. But now? Now we talk about things like motor planning and other issues I never knew existed, and there is one cup that he uses because it is familiar and it fits, and new things are mountains to be summited. The cup remains empty. But there’s this: the tricycle that sat on a shelf in the garage now parks in the yard, where he climbs astride it and laughs. There is a horse that he rides without tears. And these are promises too, beacons of hope in moments that could have felt empty.

And now I’ve just gotten a call saying there was a mix-up with the lab and a test didn’t get run and the sample is too old so we’ll need to get more vials filled with his blood, and I’d like the number of someone I can call to scream at because a vial sits empty somewhere, waiting for part of him, but the words order and test and requisition, they are full of weariness and crying and pain and I put my head in my hands at my desk at work and just let the tears flow. Everything feels so hard, and I need to know that it’s going somewhere good. I need to believe it–believe it more–to keep going myself, and I need to have it to give to my children. I need to be full of it.

I think back to a moment in my counselor’s office so long ago, when I looked within and just felt full of anger and frustration and disappointment and, well, shit so much of the time, and how I had told him I wanted to be different. Warmer. More loving. And he talked about these things I was experiencing, that they were doing that. I hadn’t believed it.

I believe it now.

Because I have finally realized that I’m never not waiting for something, that the waiting will never cease: waiting for a husband turns into waiting for children and then the waiting really kicks in: waiting for them to sleep, waiting for them to drink from the cup, waiting for them to speak. Waiting to know that everything will be okay. And I can see, in the moments when grace changes my lenses, that in the waiting I am being filled. Against all odds, I have become more loving. Warmer. One boy climbs me like a jungle gym while I wipe the other one’s ass and I’m not screaming at the injustice–so there’s that, and that ain’t nothing. And in the pre-dawn dark of the next morning, after a night full of wake-ups and empty of sleep, I hold them both on the rocking chair and read, and their sleepy warmth fills me. I am weary, and I need coffee. But I’m not empty.

And the tune resonates in the open space to show us how emptiness sings.

She had talked about having these experiences, these words, and not knowing what to do with them, where to put them. I had wondered if maybe, sometimes, the answer could be to make a space for it all and just wait to find out where it all goes, what fits where. That it might all make sense one day. Maybe I could believe that myself?

Later in the afternoon, TK turns to me and he’s at his beloved toy parking deck, and he’s grinning. I see how he’s holding the gas pump up to the car, filling it. I showed him that weeks ago, not knowing he was even paying attention. He’s grinning at me, and I’m laughing, and that Sunday we’re waiting for communion, where we’ll “practice” him walking up front with us in rehearsal for LB’s baptism next week. I’m whispering into his ear, filling it with words of preparation, and I know he’s listening. I can tell now. His hand in mine, we walk to TH in a room full of people who are getting to really know us. In a room where we’ve found a place for ourselves. My hand is full of his as we walk to the front, and in line, TK gets antsy. He presses one arm into the backside of the children’s minister, who turns and sees TK and takes his other hand for a minute, an act of recognition that nearly knocks me over with gratitude. We get to the front where I am called by name, where my other hand is filled with the bread and the bread is dipped into and filled with the wine from the cup that is never empty.

We the People

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horseLove has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement; for nothing can be sole or whole that has not been rent. –W.B. Yeats

I’m sitting beside a bucket that, in the very recent past, was almost certainly stuffed with horse shit. Since emptied but not cleaned, its surface now buzzes with flies. And the smell. Oh, God, the smell. Every time the wind blows I gag a little.

But it’s worth it.

Because I’m also sitting in the autumn sun, the kind that toasts shoulders, which are covered by a light pullover to keep out the cool. I’m alternately reading Anne Lamott and watching The Kid as he and his horse, Ladybug, circle the ring while three women encircle them. One of them, his therapist, walks over to me.

“I see what you mean about the IEP,” she begins, and I remember our initial email exchange, when she asked if he had one and I haltingly admitted that he did, but if she wanted to see it I needed to explain some things first. Provide a preamble to that shitty constitution, the report written by a psychologist who showed up an hour and a half late, rushed and sweaty, and conducted an evaluation that was interrupted by a fire drill, which resulted in him being carted away from us twice and taken into unfamiliar territory to be tested. But yeah, let’s allow THAT to be the summary of who he is, of his abilities. Not that I’m bitter or anything.

“His comprehension is amazing,” she continues, and it’s hard to sit still, to not break into a fountain dance, at this full-circle journey that has taken place so many times now: I explain him, the other person indulges my clearly delusional maternal report with smiles and nods while doubting everything I say, a few sessions go by, and that same person looks at me differently. Looks at him differently. Knows him. It’s getting to be a repetitive trip, but I’ll take it every time.

“He definitely has sensory processing issues,” she goes on. “But I don’t see autism. I don’t even see developmental delays. He’s progressing so rapidly–he gets everything,” she says, and I feel a certain hope threaten to lift me away like a balloon even as I pray to remain grounded in my real hope, in whatever grace has for us, whether it’s that outcome or another, that diagnosis or its absence. Because he is three, and we have time for the answers to unfurl, even though I tap my foot impatiently every day. The story, though–it deserves time for each page to turn, each word to be told.

Still, we both skip to the car.

And who would have ever guessed that this would be one of our places, that these would be our people? The ones hosing the horses down, mucking out stalls, and bringing kittens to my son while he and I both squirm because eww, cats. Who would have guessed that a teacher would be telling me about how he’s approaching more of the sensory tables except the rice one–he does NOT like the rice one–and that I’d glow with joy over how he’s met his goals, how well he takes turns? I would have expected him to wait his turn, I would have asked you, “What goals?” I would have carried around my sense of entitlement along with the Wet Ones and water bottle in my bag, because I had a plan and dammit, it better unfold on time.

I meet my friend in the lobby of the children’s hospital, where I’ve come to pick up a copy of one of TK’s scans to mail out to California because why wouldn’t our neurosurgeon be there, thousands of miles away? We sit by the coffee stand and her baby is upstairs and it all just really sucks sometimes, how we weren’t even asked if we wanted to join this club, our names added to the list without our permission. Kids roll by in wagons like the one TK rode in almost two years ago, IV attached, and I want to throw up a little at this pain. “They keep trying to act like this is a happy place. It’s not a happy place.” My exhaustion and frustration and ambivalence about this place mirrored back, and I think about the cost of calling a spade a spade, of being able to cut through bullshit, of not suffering veneers, and it is high–but it binds us together. It makes us members of another club, of the one she’s a member of when I go for my every-five-months appointment over washing and drying, how a first anniversary is coming up and turns out marriage can be effing hard, who knew?! It’s the club that meets in his school lobby, the site of tears and victory any given day. It’s the club in the comments section, which can be a dumping site or–this just in–a bench where we all sit together. It’s the club of a Wednesday afternoon small-group email chain that reflects a larger (but still small) community who, when I talk to a couple of its leaders about how I’d like for TK to be up there with us during LB’s baptism even though it might turn into a bit of a scene, meet me with only understanding. With “You know us. You’re one of us.” And like CS Lewis wrote, we all look around and say, “What! You too? I thought that no one but myself…” This identification is so costly, it may even be worth it.

For someone without all the answers, I look around and see that I have a few: that everything sad will become untrue. That this can’t be anything but love. And that this is a hell of a way to find our people–but finding them we are.

It’s amazing, what you can see when you really look. It’s amazing that I know that because he, TK, has partnered with grace to teach me to really see: me, the one who famously forgets every detail but for the headline, and now I find myself pointing things out to him even when I’m alone in the car. Seeing the details. And Little Brother, he sees too, as I hold him and he grasps with his tiny fingers my necklace–the one with three circles on it, each bearing the letter with which their names begin: TH, TK, and LB’s first initial, hanging on my neck, just above my heart. My people.

I ran the risk of being intimate with my brokenness/I was given a gift of hope and a thousand finger prints on the surfaces of who I am

Will Write for Attention

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best2Here’s how I know God exists: he ruined my life. Multiple times. The guy can’t seem to nail my happy ending!

In my late twenties, I had finally finished my doctorate, summiting my professional goals–and I was ready for my personal happy ending: perfect man, two kids, beautiful home. Instead, my third roommate in a row became engaged while I didn’t even have a date to my little sister’s wedding. I dutifully prayed with one eye glaring at God, wondering why he was ruining my painstakingly constructed life. I had a schedule to keep!

Up to that point, I had curated an image of God based on best-selling Christian tomes and self-help disguised as sermons: I prayer-of-Jabezed my way through most of my twenties, constantly on the lookout for enlarged territory and increasingly confused over how the Lord missed the memo that I was entitled to a pain-free existence. Didn’t we have a deal?!

Read the rest over at Mockingbird!