Almighty Alliteration

 

    He came to change out our Internet service provider, but something went wrong.  "Is he inventing the Internet out there?" I might have wondered, as Bill and the installer were troubleshooting each persnickety problem after the next: signal strength, router placement, blocked signals.  He was here so long, I forgot he was here at all.  It didn't help that his English was not proficient and Bill's Spanish is even less.  

    We got on the line with a guy back at headquarters who started translating.  He told me that Faust is on a six-month work Visa from Argentina and is one of their best guys, but something about our house was proving to be especially challenging.

    That's when I noticed how young Faust looked, how worn-out, and possibly how under appreciated for his tenacity to get this right in the face of frustrating challenges that went on for hours.

    When it finally looked like our Internet was restored and clicking along at the promised speeds of light? sound? so fast we could have every device in the house tapped in and never see delays? we were all so relieved.

    Without stopping to think what I would serve I announced recklessly, "Well, Faust, you spend all day and night at my house, you're part of the family now and staying for dinner.  I insist."

Wait, what?  It felt like a younger, more spontaneous version of myself showed up and reminded me of days when more options felt possible. 

    Luckily, raviolis and left-over cooked sausage and peppers were in the fridge.  I cobbled together some kind of toddler-class charcuterie with apple slices and peanut butter instead of prosciutto and figs.  I had chips and salsa.  Cheese slices and crackers.  Water or milk.  It was all basic and uncohesive, but I spread it out on the table and Faust asked if he could take a picture of it.  I still can't decide why.

    But we start eating and drinking with Faust and in that uncanny way it only does when I'm around fluent speakers, my Spanish comes back enough to hold a conversation. Cobbled together like my toddler-class charcuterie, but it works.  

    He drops the whole, "I can't trouble you," initial protest and digs in like the hungry man he is, getting seconds of everything.  I feel sad I waited so long to offer.  

    "I'm only here for six months, and I can't really afford to go and come back during that time, but I'm sad because my brother died last month," he tells us in Spanish with no preamble.  He's showing us pictures of his smiling 19-year-old brother.  I'm definitely pulling out my translator app and making sure I'm getting this right.  He died?  Died??  You can't go home, you missed his funeral, it happened so fast you never saw it coming?!    

    I realize why I hadn't noticed how young he was.  This kind of grief is like a heavy cloak, snuffing out the lighthearted vibes of youth.  He's weary and sad and just trying to get through this once grand plan to earn money that may very well not put them ahead, but only serve to help bring them back to square one after funeral and hospital expenses.

  We cried together.  We told him we'd pray for him and his family.  He gave Bill a hug as he was leaving and was too respectful to ask for one from me.  "From your mama" I said as I gave him one anyway.  "We needed to be like family tonight."

    I thought that was it.  A brief path overlap with a hurting brother who just needed some kindness and people who could hold his pain with him, even for an hour.

    But my "fast as the rays of the sun" internet is anything but.  It buffers on video.  I can watch pages load like a polaroid developing.  Horizontal bars to show loading  progress appear and take me back a couple decades as they stutter forward in unpredictable spurts.

    I remember Faust. I realize that the delay is what is causing me to think of him at all.  It occurs to me that for this season, my internet's speed is exactly what it is meant to be.  We said we'd pray for him.  But we are so easily distracted and unavailable these days.  This is how much God loves Faust: it's as though he says to me, I will slow you down, sister, so that you can make good on a promise to pray for one of my hurting beloveds.  

    So his name becomes a prayer while my video buffers.  While my email page loads.  While I click around to do my what I thought was my actual work.  Faust.  God, please protect and be near the brokenhearted.  Comfort and restore.

    It will sound ridiculous to some, but I don't think we'll be calling another internet technician to "diagnose" our internet speed problems.  Before my impatient brain remembered Faust, I complained out loud to everyone in my family.  Baffled, each of them told me, "It's working just fine for me." 

Ok, God.  For Faust.   In a mystery I have yet to untangle, somehow, you want us to beseech You on behalf of each other.  And sometimes for the fainthearted and less faithful, you even go so far as to get quirky and creative so that we will.  My internet does not run fast so I will remember to pray for Faust.  I see what you did there, God. If you're going to such lengths to tap into my distracted prayers, I can only believe Faust really needs them.  Holy Spirit, please be the partner that fills in the gaps for everything else Faust needs.  I'm just sayin' his name while the pages load.

  

anniversary gift

 Today, (May 1) marks the day three years ago that my mom died.  At least, her body died.  She left. She went home to wait for us stragglers to catch up with her later.   As sad as that sounds, this post isn’t about grief.  I want to tell you about the gift. I wasn’t looking for one, or even hoping for one, and yet, today, one turned up.   Two years ago, I shared how God dropped a little message into my lap on this day, and it comforted me even while I marveled in gratitude.  Last year, I don’t remember any such thing happening.  Which brings us to today.

Let me tell you what happened. Well, that would be a straight-forward account of how I helped a woman load some books into her car during my library shift.  That happened.  But the gift, my friends, is how it was completely saturated with meaning that only I would notice.  

I met a lady unafraid to wear head-to-toe red-complete with a chic hat and some kind of wild, knitted scarf that she managed to pull off without looking silly.  She was riding a motorized scooter and needed help bagging up about a dozen audio books.  “I’d rather be listening to something than watch a movie,” she noted.  “I just love to have something on all the time.” As it turned out, the scooter had no real place to load all these books, so we went down the elevator together and I offered to help her to her car.  Before we did, her daughter called to check in on her.  When I heard the ringtone, it startled me and I reflexively went looking for my phone, because it was the exact same ringtone from the phone my mom gave me a year before she died.  The lady had one of those conversations that older people do….putting the caller on speaker, talking a little louder than strictly necessary.  “Mom, how are you, is everything ok?” I heard her daughter ask.   “Oh, yes.  I’m having a fine time.  I’m great. I’m at the library.  Just getting more stuff to listen to.”  “Ok, I’ll see you soon, then.”  “Well, it won’t be as soon as you think, because I’m not at the library you’re thinking of, but I’ll see you soon.”  “Ok, I love you…be careful, bye.”  “I love you, too.  Bye”. 

She looked up at me and smiled. “That’s my daughter, she said.  “She’s 66 years old and you would think she’s the mother and I’m the daughter.  I tell her not to mother me, but what can you do?”

“Well, at least we know you won’t be trying to ride that scooter down the stairs now that she told you to be careful!” I joked with her. We laughed in the elevator.  She was smart and quirky and funny.  And I knew all these things for having hung out with her for only 10 minutes.  She also wore the largest, prettiest square diamond ring I have ever seen.  It took all my restraint to not say anything, because it looked like something royalty would wear.  It was, like the ringtone on the phone, startling to me, and I couldn’t place why.

When we got outside, the scooter was going painfully slow, like it was out of charge.  We joked some more about it being like a turtle, but she showed me how it was on maximum power.  “Thank you for helping me.  It was a real pleasure to get to be with you today,” she said so kindly.  “You’ve been a delight,” I told her sincerely.  She had made me feel like we were old, old friends, coconspirators, even.  

Now I have worked in library services for over ten years, and I have never not once ridden on a motorized scooter on the job.  But that is what I found myself doing to return it to our building. Just as I got on that thing, the “maximum power” part must have kicked in and I lurched forward like a girl on a bronco.  And then stopped.  And then lurched.  I looked ridiculous.  And my new friend thought so too because she started laughing.  Because she was funny and liked funny things, she teased, “There yah go.  You’ve got it!  You’re a natural.”   I started to ham it up just a bit because, why not? It was our moment to share. So there I found myself, in the midst of a day of heavy sadness, grinning my face off.  A true, wide grin with only one word popping unexpectedly into my mind: Mom.  

I suddenly remembered my smart, funny, quirky mom who got on a motorized wheelchair thing and made us all laugh.  We “be careful!-ed her like crazy…her legs frail from cancer, her muscles seemingly not as strong.  But she was hammy and funny and daring and bold.  Whizzing around with this goofy aviator hat on in a way that only she could pull off.  I remembered how she looked hard (and found) the good in every one and every situation. She could shape the reality of her declining mobility into a hilarious day at the park.  

I thought of my mom who was always listening to something. Ahead of her time, she listened to radio before podcasts.  I thought of the way she became a hat and scarf aficionado after the cancer hit…turning the drag of hair loss into a whimsical exploration of turbans, hats and scarves. I thought of my mom, who sent me diamonds two years ago, whose phone sounded just like this lady’s, and who might tell me if she could, that she would see me soon, but not too soon.

Do I think the lady with the flower in her hat was an angel? No, not really.  I don’t think she usually has wings and lives in Heaven and that she was on some kind of mission to bring my mom closer.

But do I believe that God, who knows every detail of my life, every memory my brain has ever stored, every association I would be apt to make—do I believe that he sent a convergence of details into this day to bring my mom closer?  Yes.  I do.

Into this ordinary day, that didn’t have margin to remember her well, he brought this lady with her hat and scarf, her affection for audio, her ringtone, her diamond, her self-deprecating humor, her good-nature in her affliction, her spazzy scooter, and her loving conversation with and about her daughter right into my workplace and let me remember my mom with a smile.

You Are my Sunshine

Today in urgent care I watched my little guy try to stay still as they stuck a needle in his wound (near his eye) to numb it. Doesn't that sentence make you cringe?
I wanted to. But I also didn't want him to see me cringe, so I didn't.

Tattooed on the arm of the nurse who was helping hold him was, "You are my sunshine."  Lovely black script running down her forearm. THIS SONG was my mom's top pick lullaby of my childhood, my toddlerhood, and probably my infancy as well.

Missing my mom, it turns out, never goes away. It is imbedded into every moment of my life like a new rhythm of my heartbeat. So when I saw that song title, and thought of my mom, it calmed me in a moment when I was supposed to step up and be the adult. No casting about for support on this one: I've got a kiddo whose wide eyes are seeking mine and he's looking for something sure. Something steady. Somebody who can assure him that he can get through this scary thing. Micah was a super trooper. He always is on the big stuff. As he enjoyed pointing out afterward, "I've had more medical attention than my brother and sister combined."

Afterward, the PA said to me out of the blue, "You're a good mom. We can always tell when the kids can stay calm it's because their parents are calm. That helps a lot."

It wasn't me, I wanted to tell him. My mom could make me feel that I was as welcome as sunshine. As important as sunshine. As cherished as sunshine. A love like that still steadies me long after she's gone away.

The Summer We Joined the Underground Railroad

“So are we helping fund a modern-day Underground Railroad?” my eight-year-old asked.  

“Well, no.  Wait. Maybe.”  and then the implications really hit me and I had to agree, yes.  Yes, in fact, we are helping fund an Underground Railroad and a modern-day Harriet Tubman. And then I started to cry.

This was a conversation we had last summer when my whole family (and extended family) signed up to walk a barefoot mile to raise awareness and funds to fight human trafficking. It was a local event put on by Joy International and its founder, Jeff Brodsky. 

June 10 was a hot and beautiful day for a walk. We joined the crowd who entirely encircled  Clement “Lake”, and we felt part of something big, meaningful, and important. Afterward, as we sat on the grass in the shade, we celebrated coming together for a cause we cared about.  It felt great.

But life has a way of rolling us right on down the road, doesn’t it?  One month later we made the startling (to us) decision to move, and that sent us on a trajectory that was every bit as stressful as anybody has ever even hinted that it could be.  When Fall came around and we had finally landed in a new house, I was spent.  Exhausted. Just needing time to settle down and settle into a new life we were building. The horrors of global slavery faded into the distance.

Let’s fast forward some.

 I remember the day in March I called Bill in the middle of the day to tell him the idea that I HAD to share with him.  (I try to limit midday calls to Bill because he’s a teacher) I was so excited, I had to call him, even if I just left a voicemail.  “Let’s turn our basement into an Escape Room that we run as a fundraiser for Joy International!  We can say, ‘I escaped for fun to fund REAL freedom’ and all the money can go to fight human trafficking.  What do you think?!?”

If you know my husband, you know that he’s an introvert.  He’s a scholar.  His favorite bonus of this new house may be that it has a small room he lined with bookshelves and filled with his books.  He prefers a few close friends over big crowds almost every time.  And he’s not usually hoping to fill his free time in the company of strangers traipsing through his house playing some kind of puzzle game that his wife is weirdly enamored with.

But this is what he said that day, “Jodi, you are not going to believe what I prayed this morning on my way to work.  I was thanking God for this house, and all the ways it is such a huge blessing to us. I asked Him to show us how to use it for something in His kingdom.  I asked Him to show us how we could bless others with this gift He’s given us. Just this morning.  This is what I prayed.  I think He just answered my prayer.”

I was so surprised and delighted and excited!  Because I can cast a vision in rainbow glitter and sparkly lights with the best of ‘em, all I could see was how much fun it was all going to be.  How much money we could raise.  How awesome it would be to get to enjoy all our friends playing the game at our house AND be raising money for an important cause.  All I could see was win/win wonderful.

So here we are three months later.  The room goes live tomorrow.  The journey here has had some glittery moments—absolutely—and God definitely has cast some sparkly lights of encouragement along the path.  But what it has really been is a lot of work.  A lot of realizing that I didn’t know the first thing about designing a room that would keep groups of people entertained for a whole hour.  And a whole lot of realizing that I had jumped into the deep end of an audacious idea with a huge “whee!” of glee and I wasn’t even sure if I could swim.

I enrolled in my own “culled-from-every-free-source-I-can-think-of” university of Escape Game design.  I listened to podcasts and watched professors online.  I read blogs. I read from books and articles.  I played a few point-and-click escape games online (I’m not even a gamer!) and I started following the Escape Room Enthusiast fb group. Then my friends threw me a buoy when one engineer-wizard said, “I’ll design one of the puzzles.  That’s a cause I care about.”  (Whaaht?! Somebody throw some glitter!!) and his wife said, “I’m good at Publisher.  I’ll knock out this graphic design nightmare for you.”  Yippee!  A shooting star called Getting-Things-Done shot through my dark. Another friend turned me on to Sign-up Genius.  Still another rounded up beta-testers for me.  Then my sister offered to do the thank-you gifts…see the theme? People got behind this and said, “Go. For. It.”   But still I rode a wheel of self-doubt, hopefulness, fear, optimism, fun, discouragement, and on and on.  Around and around, and anytime I just wanted to hop off and say, forget it!  This is ridiculous!  My husband would say, “Keep going.  You probably have something here,” and my good friend would say, “Press on.  You’re never gonna know unless you try.”

But here’s the thing—I've wanted to KNOW.  I've wanted to know that this whole enterprise wasn’t just going to be a “good try.”  I've wanted to know that I wasn’t going to embarrass myself, waste my time and resources, and feel kind of ridiculous at the end.  The whole thing feels like a risk.

Even right now.  The night before we go “live.”  No more beta testers (read: dear friends who go gently). Tomorrow people I have never met will come play our Escape Game and hopefully decide they had enough fun to pay ten dollars to Joy International.

And it leads me all back to the conversation that started this blog post to begin with.  The one where my kiddo compares fighting against human trafficking as being part of the Underground Railroad.  Last year, I cried because I thought about the slaves.  This year, I cry because I think about the rebels—the normal, ordinary people willing to commit a felony, suffer huge punishments, (including sometimes death) to help slaves get to freedom.  I picture the farmwife, with her kids playing in the yard, kneading her bread til kingdom come, listening to the bark of a slave catcher’s dog, knowing she’s got a few slaves in her cellar.  I picture the farmer, lying awake at night, hoping that his family won’t pay for the mercy he showed the slave.  What will happen to them if they take him off to jail? Should he have looked after his own better?  These were ordinary, every-day people.  I don’t even know any of their names.  And yet, when slaves came knocking on their door, they risked quite a lot to help rescue them. 

I feel humbled. Whatever “risk” I may have thought I was taking to try something new for a fundraiser doesn’t compare. These folks on the Underground Railroad, they didn’t even know if the slaves they sheltered would really make it all the way to freedom. They just did what they believed was right.   I can donate funds to a proven nonprofit, one who reports all the time about how they have worked with local law enforcement to rescue people.  I can read about the ways they offer support and rehabilitation to the rescued.  I can read about all the results, in numbers and in personal stories.  I don’t have to wonder if the funds get spent well, or if they are making a difference.

With all that danger, uncertainty, and personal sacrifice, the people of the Underground Railroad fought against slavery by hiding slaves in their cellars, in their haylofts, in their sheds.  

I can be brave enough to invite you to come play a fun game for an hour in my basement. J

We’re just gonna hitch my house up to the Underground Railroad and see where this train goes.

   

Of Shattered Vases that Lead to Light

 "Bad news," my husband tells me upon my return from work.  (Isn't that always a favorite way to be greeted?) " The kids broke the vase that held your mom's marbles."  I wonder if years prior I would have made a funny quip about losing my marbles.  But loss doesn't hold humor anymore, and when it comes to stuff associated with my mom, it's particularly painful.  Why did I imagine I could have a glass vase anywhere in proximity of my kids?

We make the ill-considered decision to go to the thrift store as a family to see if we could replace it.  We also find some things for my newest venture (another day, a different story) and get those in the cart as well.  When I find a couple of vases to replace the broken one, I balance them precariously near the top of our cart, because.....I have no idea why I did that.

It's a half-off day at the store so the line to check out is very long.  I get in line with the kids and like a squirrel, I wander a few feet from the cart to look at something.  There is a terrible crash and clatter and Vivian is screaming.  I look to see that the entire cart toppled on it's side right on top of her. Also, both the vases spilled out, shattered, and left broken glass all around her.  On top of that, she is barefoot because she removed her shoes for mysterious reasons.  It's a horrible moment: the loaded cart, the glass, Vivian crying and pinned down under it.  I swoop to try to fix it.  I feel a dozen eyes on me-none feel friendly.  We have made a spectacle.  Is she ok?  Where are her shoes?! How did this happen?  It feels bad and embarrassing and I so want to be out of this line of strangers frowning at me with a look of scorn and--is that contempt?  Wow.  This does feel bad.

One of the cashiers comes over with a broom and trash and I beg him to let me do it.  Don't give these people any more reason to be annoyed.  Please just go and keep checking them out, I plead.  Bill moves ahead with the kids and our cart.  I keep sweeping up glass.  So. much. glass. But then, this story gets worse.  Just as I'm almost done, I ask Landon to return a white board I don't want anymore. As  he quickly removes it from the cart, the remains of the two vases (that Bill had put there without my noticing) get flung out of the cart again and shatter.  Again!  This is not the 7 pieces of broken pottery you dropped on tile.  This is a hundred thousand glints and bits of glass flung across a wide circle, even flying up on the feet of the woman waiting in line behind us.  She mutters.  I moan.  "This is a nightmare," I say out loud, because I can't believe how this is playing out.

Bill gets the cart and the kids checked out.  And still I'm sweeping. Under the clothes rack. By the jewelry case. This mess is in the way of people trying to come into the store.  Some pass without remark, but others stop to watch and "helpfully" point out specks and sparkles I have missed.  Did I put helpful in quotes? I'm sure they were being helpful, but I think I was too mortified to feel it.  The fright of seeing Vivian under the cart, the shame of my parental neglect, the drama of glass flying through the air and shattering into shards bent on colonizing this entire store....

I am weary.  It was meant to be a simple validation that though my mom is not with us here, our memories remain, intact and cherished, like marbles in a lovely vase.

Instead, the whole thing served to suggest that my life is chaotic and humiliating. That nothing lasts, and loss is permanent.  And all those shards of glass? Just the pieces of my broken heart that I'm sweeping up in front of strangers who don't seem all that kind...

Yes.  Sometimes when I'm sad I jump from sad to full-blown melodrama.  (But even when I'm being melodramatic the pain is still real)

So then we go to church the next day.  And isn't Jesus kind?  THIS is the song that brought me to tears:

Wound? What happens to the light when our heart shatters?  I think sometimes we just have to sit in the light, though it is painfully bright and we feel raw and weary.  He could sweep up all my parts and pieces.  God calls himself a potter.  I can trust that he can fashion me into something stronger, useful and beautiful---these shards now will be the sparkle later.  And that's where His light will shine through me.

When Grief Leaves You Dry

Last night, I ran into a friend I haven't seen in a long time. In our conversation, she mentioned how much she loves to read my blog, and complimented it generously.

Blog? What blog?  I don't write here with any regularity anymore.  It seems all my words have run dry.  I logged into it this morning, just to see how the old gal was holding up, you know, nothing more.  I found an unfinished post among the many unpublished drafts that helps me understand why.  I didn't write it to try to explain why this blog has seemingly withered, but sometimes I think the answer appears even when we didn't know the question.

So here's the draft that got me thinking:

We went to Arizona for Thanksgiving.  It was our first extended road trip with all five of us, and long enough (14 hours one way, by car) for all my kids to think we were headed to a new country.

They asked funny questions like what language would people speak there, and what food would we eat. When we got to Arizona and saw many of the same fast food restaurants and big box stores that they know from Colorado, they were startled and disappointed.  We had driven ALL day, fortified by snacks and audio books and music and, and, and!  I have to admit, I shared their disappointment.  I mean, I knew that Phoenix wouldn't be a moonscape of unfamiliar wonders, but I did want to feel like I had left my backyard.

The cacti saved it.  We don't have cacti growing along the highway in Colorado.  We don't landscape everywhere with it.  Darkness had fallen; the novelty of travel had faded.  We needed something to get us through that last 20 minutes.  When I started pointing out cactus with the enthusiasm I usually reserve for Christmas lights, the kids caught the wonder and started enjoying it, too.  

As we approached the city I felt compelled to give my rowdy bunch some pointers. Please don't rough house near the cactus.  If you fall into one of those, it will hurt. For a long time. The spikes are real. And sharp. These are not friendly plants.

Later we learned that a cactus can go for two years without water.  It's remarkable, don't you think? The forbidding spikes protect its internal source of water from animals.  I also learned that some species will even cut off parts of their own root system if the ground around it becomes too dry.  It will actually absorb all the available water and then shrivel up its roots to avoid losing any water back to the soil.  

You know I'm a big fan of a good metaphor.  I can't help but think that the cactus is a very concrete picture of what happens when we operate in scarcity. When I feel like there is not going to be enough (of anything--time, patience, money, love,) I start trying to protect my own supply.  I get prickly. Self-protective. Downright forbidding.  Maybe I lock myself in my room so that my family can't ask one more thing of me that I don't think I can provide. Maybe I don't put that family-nourishing outing on the calendar because I don't think I'll have the patience to do it.  Maybe I don't reach out to my friend who is struggling because I don't believe I'll have the compassion to listen without feeling sapped. I get sharp and irritable with the people closest to me because my soul is thirsty for living water.

And then this roots thing? Do I ever just cut myself off from who I am, my past, my sources of strength?  Instead of going deeper with God do I pull away and imagine

(that's where it ended and I'm going to pick up now)


 Instead of going deeper with God do I pull away and imagine that it's better to just conserve what I have instead of tapping into a never-ending supply? I forget that there is a never-ending supply.  Or sometimes, I just can't believe there is a never-ending supply.

When my mom died, a beautiful stream dried up in my life.  She was refreshing and nourishing in so many ways.  She was wisdom, and acceptance, and graciousness and kindness.  She was someone who knew me better than anyone (except Bill), and loved me more than many combined. In short, I knew Jesus a little better because I knew her.  

Since she has been gone, I have been in a conservation mode of sorts.  I'm not sure if/when more is coming, so it's risky to share.  More what?  Anything.  Emotional resiliency. Patience.  Joy.  

I miss my mom so, so much. In my grief, I think I have drifted farther from the true stream of living water than I realized.  I've been in a scarcity mode these two years, and as I've attempted to conserve, I've grown more prickly and self-protecting.  (Ask anyone who has been close to me; they'll confirm)

I don't think we're meant to be like the cactus.  Psalm 1 says the person who delights in the law of the Lord is like a tree planted by streams of water, yielding fruit in season, whose leaf does not wither.  I don't think we are meant to be in a constant mentality of conservation, but of abundance.  Generosity.  Flow.  Like my friend who can generously compliment a blog I haven't added to for ages, like my husband who can generously offer me grace for the umpteenth time my spikes are scratching him, like my friends who generously show up with pizza and smiles when I think I don't have the energy to be among people.  People planted closer to God are generous.  People free-wheeling in the desert have to conserve.

And here's the point at which I just have the abandon the metaphor and draw my own conclusion. Cactus can't just replant next to a stream of living water.  But I can.  I can draw closer to God and let his love flow through my life.  I don't have to wait for the rainfall of a Sunday service, the watering cans of love that my friends and family share, or even the stream that was my mom's enduring presence.

I just admit, I've been wandering around in some dry places.  
It's time to settle in closer to the river of life.

I'd like to be more like a fruit-bearing tree and less like a prickly, self-protecting cactus.

I think Spring is the perfect season to make the move, don't you?

No Rescue

 Ever have something small at work shine a spotlight on something much bigger and important to you?

The other day at the library, I found myself talking to a woman sharing new research about a disease she had been beating the odds of for years--even while it exacted its cruel toll daily.  She was passionately intense, hopeful and heartbroken at the same time.  Why did she want to dive into the deep end with me, a stranger, about a difficult topic, possibly an uncomfortable one?

I'm not sure.  But I think when people sit with ongoing grief or suffering, sometimes the broken bits can sit right on the surface like shards of glass--making them prickly and difficult-- or sometimes, blindingly beautiful.  But one thing I've noticed, they don't waste a lot of time on small talk.  And for that, I love them.  People who share pain make me feel part of a larger story of our humanity: the way we all suffer, feel lost, betrayed, broken.  The way we all long for redemption, beauty, belonging.

So there I was, completely engrossed.  There weren't any other patrons in line, or even politely hovering in proximity-- waiting to be noticed but not wanting to commit to queuing up.  There weren't any materials needing to be shelved.  There was just this woman, our shared desk, and her profound wish to be heard.  Oh, and then a phone ringing.  How pesky.  I looked around for my colleague to catch it since I was occupied, but she must have been busy too, because I couldn't see her anywhere.

The persistent ringing demanded my response so I picked up,  preparing to ask the caller to wait a moment so I could properly conclude with the lady in front of me.

Instead, it was my colleague, calling from a back office with the equivalent of a "rescue call."  She might have even used that word.  Something about noticing I had been talking to this lady for awhile (five minutes? eight?!) and did I need to be rescued?

Did I need to be rescued?

From what?

Suddenly, strangely, I simply felt old.  Like I had stepped out of the past and into our present pace and perspective I can no longer match.  In a world where Facebook Likes (and sad faces, hearts and wow faces) is a standard form of connection, did my extended conversation seem like a lavish indulgence to my colleague?  She had good intentions of helping me, but I wondered why she thought I was too meek or passive to wrap up the conversation in a gracious way.

Maybe it goes back to what I've already said about suffering and shards of glass.  Maybe she just didn't want anything too messy at the workplace.  It's a fair wish.

The other night I went to dinner with two friends.  The food was secondary to getting a few hours of uninterrupted conversation.  It was a late night, one that we knew we'd pay for in the morning.  But we were investing in other important things.  We might each have felt a little scratched up from spending so much time with two fellow sufferers, but if we did, I think even that was worth it.  When I sit with true pain, it is hard.  Well, it is painful.  But when I stop trying to spin my life in best-case-scenario glimpses and show what a broken mess I really am, well, that's when the light gets in.  Then that light bounces around all my broken bits and shines back to someone else who needs it, too. And quite remarkably, though nothing is fixed, or even better, three friends feel a little more hope.  A little more love.  A little more sense that God isn't finished with us yet.

I wasn't once hoping for a rescue text or call from all that.

Sometimes, when we shed the small talk in spaces large enough to hold what comes next, the beauty of Real is what we feared and needed all along.

This is not Theology. This is the Mystery.

I have wanted to write for so long.

I have wished I had the bandwidth, the vulnerability, the courage and the energy to write.

But these things are never mine on the same day. So maybe I will have to try while I'm still stretched a little too thin, feeling guarded, scared and weary.  And maybe I will hit publish, and maybe I will just try.


I've never been one to believe in receiving "signs" from people who have passed away.  Neither did my mom. In an odd conversation that left us both wondering if we had seriously just agreed to this, I remember her telling me how she wasn't a big believer in signs from the other side, either. "But if you can send one, will you?" I asked. "If I can, I will, but I don't think I will be able to, so don't spend too much time looking."


When the calendar rolled back around to the day my mom died a year ago, I knew I didn't want the day to be like every other. But I didn't know how I wanted it to look differently.  It wasn't a celebration. It wasn't a memorial. The kids and I ended up meeting my dad at the cemetery. It didn't bring comfort. Seeing the years of her birth and death carved into stone was a visual reminder of the finality of her time with us here.  People use the phrase, "Nothing's carved in stone" to suggest options remain. When you stand before the stone, and it is carved, you are reminded that no options remain.  We remembered her, and missed her, and sat with the heavy absence and the heavier weight of grief. And there wasn't much to say or do, just be.

I planned for us to go across the street afterward to a park to find a geocache. I didn't know how we would do at the cemetery and I suspected we'd want to end on a different note than the one I thought the visit might evoke. I still had my three kids with me, after all.

We found the cache and my dad had the wits and patience to figure out exactly how it had to be shaken to guide a key out of this complex internal maze and out a tube to unlock it.  It was so clever.  So tricky. I really doubt we ever would have gotten it open without his clear thinking. I would have just kept shaking it, hoping for dumb luck, and just as I may have figured it out, don't you know one of my kids would have insisted it was their turn?

Larger geocaches come with all kinds of trinkets-stickers, little balls, happy meal prizes, little plastic toys.  Usually there's nothing of value, or even of interest to my kids.  We've seen all of it before. But on that day, there was a silver key chain with a single silver die, studded with diamond rhinestones.

Now to most of you reading this, a die with fake, but sparkly gems where the numbers should be doesn't lead you to much.  For me, it was a profound moment of recognition.  It was her sign.

My mom was an avid Farkle player. (a game in which you roll six dice for combinations like Yahtzee and Bunco).  She collected all kinds of novelty dice and little containers to put them in.  If a new player rolled a particularly rare combination, or won by a stunning amount, or seemed to enjoy the game even a little, she'd pull out her collection and urge them to pick their own set of dice and the container to store it.  She had little boxes from around the world, vases, handmade pottery jars, leather pouches, miniature suitcases.  She had dice as small as an eraser head, dice as large as walnuts.  She had wooden dice, marble dice, hollow plastic dice with dice inside them...the girl loved her dice.  But it was more than that. When something really pleased my mom, she just couldn't help but share it.

So back to the geocache and the sparkly, silver dice.  To me, it was like my mom's insider way of saying, "Things are good. Oh, and all that stuff about streets lined with gold?  Yeah, that's kind of real. Things are so stellar here, even the Farkle dice are studded with diamonds. Diamonds! Can you believe this? And I'd love to share it, but I can't right now so I'll just arrange with the higher ups to put a mock-up in a container I know you'll love. And you can work together and shake it out and  marvel at the mystery of how it ended up there one year to the day since I've been gone."


We remembered her, and missed her, and sat with the heavy absence and the heavier weight of grief, but it was a good day.

When I Think of the Refugee

She didn't want her family to see her uncovered head.  I doubt she very much wanted me, a foreign stranger, to see it either, but life had flung her far from anyone who would know how to help her with her thick, black hair, and landed her in a suburban bathroom complete with an unfamiliar hair dryer and running water.

We made our best attempts to understand one another, but the bridge between us stretched so far, we couldn't find understanding in the middle.  As she moved her garments around to lean her head into the sink, I saw the scars.  Lines on her back and shoulder that suggested something brutal had happened to her.

She is a refugee.  Her country suffered a civil war and she ended up on the wrong side of the the power. Her gorgeous, regal features were despised for whatever ancestry they suggested to the oppressors.  She fled her country and resettled in a neighboring one--into a camp that was beset with almost as many dangers as the war zone she left behind.  She had more children at the camp.  Her older children died there, too. Family members went permanently "missing."  After seven years of living in limbo, her family finally made it to the United States.  They made it through the long vetting process and passed all the requirements to become refugees here--many hoops to jump through before landing among us.  How she and I ended up in this position of vulnerable need is another story altogether, but when I think of the refugee, I see those scars.

I remember that bereaved mother, her improbably optimistic husband, her five resilient children.  I remember how they had to adjust to a new kind of exile from their homeland, with all the comforts of its language, food, culture and community, and scrabble for a new normal with a new kind of poverty.  Theirs was the poverty of being without wheels in a metro area with highways instead of paths.  Theirs was the poverty of being without style in a culture so overclothed that the distinctions are based on the kind, cut and creator of clothes.  Theirs was the poverty of being without community in a culture that saw their head coverings as a suspicious affront, their language as an obscure hassle to translate, and their intellect as somehow diminished for not having been shaped by exposure to modern technology.

My family was part of their transition team for six months.  Six months of watching our toddlers speak an international language of giggles, our boys, the international language of LEGOS.  Six months of sporadic visits, generous food, few words, lots of smiles.  Six months of memories--the infamous zoo trip, playing Uno and other games, helping them register for school, introducing them to the budget-saving wonders of thrift stores.

I read that our country has halted all refugees entry for four months.  I can't pretend to be an informed citizen into all the reasons behind that decision.  I know it's a big, complex issue.  I haven't felt in danger from refugees, and I don't feel safer now knowing that none are coming for four months.

When I think of refugees, I remember a woman, my age exactly, who has been through more than I can understand or imagine.  I wonder what her back would look like if she had been asked to wait four more months.  I wonder if we would have met even fewer of her kids.  I wonder what enemy intent on our harm would go through such a long, arduous process, of wait lists and medical examinations and years of life in an overcrowded camp to get to the top of a refugee list, when there are faster and more efficient ways to get here.

And I wonder why we are so quick to want to trust that our multi-billion dollar government can create any program at all to ensure our safety, to weed out every threat, to encase us in a bubble of secure comfort.  How many people's suffering is it ok to ignore to raise our own safety by small percents?

Fine, Fine, Found

Micah was flying out of the library happy as only a 3-year-old can really be when, BAM! Full faceplant on the concrete, his forehead smacking hard. Like a lightning storm, I see it first and then, two beats later hear his this-hurts-so-bad-I'm-not-just-seeking-attention wail. I run and scoop him up and he caves into me before I can assess the damage.

Fast forward a few hours when Landon wants to read one of the new library books, and even though it's past his bedtime, I'm willing to consider it because, confession: I want to read it, too.

The only trouble is, our loaded bag of 20+ books is not here. At all. I don't need advanced math skills to figure out that I just left upwards of $400 worth of books in the middle of a sidewalk.

Sigh. You can picture what happened, right? Micah so rarely cries like that that when I heard it I must have dropped everything to get to him. Amid the blood from his mouth and forehead, and the swelling, and determining if we were at DefCon 5 or just a good dose of ice, and getting Vivi secured....well. I forgot all about the books.

The BOOKS! The books I specifically requested and didn't want sent back all over the district. The books that were mostly brand-new because I'm a picture book junkie and order the new ones when insomnia strikes. Books we would have been the first to read. And now, the first (and only) to pay for.

My head hurt just thinking about it. Micah's head hurt just thinking about it. He started crying; I started calling. I think Bill started praying. (probably for some patience for his scatterbrained wife)

And this is the happy ending we've all been hoping for: Iza (the dear, sweet, wonderful librarian who got my call) left her library (down a flight of stairs) and went outside looking all about for this bag of forgotten books-- and found them. Right by the book drop. Placed there, I can only imagine, by Mother Theresa's distant cousin who was visiting Colorado because she had a hankering for homemade honey. You can come back for them whenever you want, Iza graciously assured me. We'll have them waiting for you.

So is it a story about Life with Boys? Or I Love Librarians? Or Practice Random Acts of Kindness?

It's all those things. It's the reminder that even if it feels like we're getting a head smacking, there are still friends and colleagues, and even strangers, who will step alongside with very little fanfare and extend a bit of kindness. A bit of integrity. A bit of ice-no-questions-asked. A bit of help.  

And it all adds up to a great deal, indeed.

Two Clouds

When I lost the phone that held the recording of my firstborn's heartbeat--that very first one we heard while he was still  a dream-come-true in utero--I cried. 

Today, when I mentioned it to the phone guy to explain why maybe a smart phone with "a cloud" to back everything up could be a good idea for me, he agreed.

"I know where you're coming from," he said.
"DO you?" I asked pointedly, surprising myself by sounding incredulous.
"Yes.  For me, it was a voicemail."

Because he was sort of walking into an emotional landmine.  Me with my mom's old phone she had just given me for my birthday. The one that still had her apps and pictures and ringtones on it.  The one that I didn't want to change at all because it was my mom's, but still wanted to use because, well, she had given it to me.

And then this stylish, self-assured, tech-savvy guy half my age looked straight at me and said sincerely,   "It's really rough.  And I really get it."

Suddenly he wasn't just some cool-guy salesperson and I some lady who stepped off the wagon train wanting to join the modern world.

We were also two humans who know part of the story.  The story of love, loss, and things we never get back and people we'll have always.

I cried.  Just a little.  And his eyes glassed up-just a little. (because he was also still the cool-guy).

"Thanks for meeting me right where I was tonight," I told him.  "You're headed great places because you get people even better than phones.  And I really appreciate that."

"Anytime," he said, and I realized he meant it as he locked the door behind me because I had stayed past closing.

I sat in my car and thought about heartbeats gone, and three amazing kids still with us today.  I thought about a virtual cloud full of pictures, and a great cloud of witnesses that surrounds us.

I sat in the story of love and loss and things we never get back and people we'll have always:

Here, there, or in the air.

"Thank you for this phone," I called to tell my mom.  "Of course,"  she said.  "Maybe it will give you a few more tools at your disposal."

Tools and treasures.  In my pocket.  In the cloud.  Here, there and in the air.

So you can keep me
Inside the pocket
Of your ripped jeans
Holdin' me closer 
'Til our eyes meet
You won't ever be alone.
Wait for me to come home.

~ Photograph, by Ed Sheeran

 

A Pineapple for Mother's Day

This is what I read to my family when I gave the moms in it pineapples today for Mother's Day.  Maybe you'd like to read why I would want to give one to you, too.


A pineapple doesn't seem like a typical Mother's Day gift, but then, there are no books to tell you what is just the right thing.

What is just the right thing for my mom whose job has fewer years ahead of her than behind her?
What do I get for the mom whose life intersects mine because the men we each love are father and son?
What gift honors my older sister, the mom who blazes the motherhood trail in this family and leaves a path anyone would be proud to follow?
What's the perfect gift for my younger sister, the mom whose next child doesn't grow inside her womb, but in her heart?
 What would be the perfect gift for you?

Maybe a pineapple is as good as anything else.  I think a pineapple can be a little picture of our lives.

The pineapple has its sharp parts. When the  grocery checker moved it along she exclaimed, "Ouch! That really hurts!"
And so does life.

The pineapple is sweet.  Sometimes, surprisingly so.
And so are our lives.

The pineapple follows a plan written into its very design--the Fibonacci sequence.  Its parts and pieces are arranged in a beautifully designed way.
And so are our lives.   (even if we can't see it right away)

I recently learned that the pineapple has an interesting history as the international symbol of hospitality.  It represents generous welcome.
And isn't that how we want to live our lives? When we are open, honest and vulnerable with others--when we strip away our prickly self-protections, isn't that when the sweetest things happen?

So moms,
this is what I know.

Life is hard.  It really hurts.
Life is sweet.  It's really good.
Life is wild, but it is ordered by a creative God.

May God bless you in this hard, painful, sweet, wild, God-led life as a mom, today and always.

Out the Door in Five

I woke up to find a little boy soundly sleeping next to me.

That's sweet, I thought in my fog, since the phrase "woke up" is rather generous to describe how I start almost every morning.

Maybe half a dozen snooze-button pushes later it finally entered my brain that today is a school day.

Today is a school day!

Don't confuse the exclamation point for happy excitement.  It is meant to express that panicky feeling you get in dreams when something big is crashing down around you.

Finally, reality sinks in and a shot of adrenaline spikes me vertical and I realize we are supposed to be out the door in five minutes.  Landon is still sound asleep and Micah is upstairs telling his crib noisy stories.

We lasted two whole months.  Two months of timely, reasonably calm school mornings where I felt like I was rocking it...in spite of the fact that I took numerous trips through the carpool with bedhead and teeth I hadn't brushed yet.  But overall, no tardies for a girl not known for her punctuality felt like victory.

Well, let's do this thing, Landon.  This won't be great, but I think we can salvage it.
Up.  Out.  Just wear what you have on.

I throw on yoga pants and slip on shoes.  Meet you in the car.  I have breakfast bars.  And the soggy-bottomed baby who needs a diaper change.  (bless his amiable heart)

Landon comes out carrying his shoes and looking a year younger in that sleepy-eyed, soft way he holds onto when he just wakes.

Can you kinda comb your fingers through your hair?  See if you can settle it down in the back.

My foot is growing too heavy and I try to lighten up on the gas as I contemplate how lame it would be to get a speeding ticket on the way to something like kindergarten.  

This is not urgent, remind myself, but I'm convinced that Landon's equilibrium will be totally thrown if he has to come into class late after everyone else has followed the peaceful protocol of lining up with the teacher and marching in as a happy little group.

Suddenly, like rounding the corner and discovering a double rainbow, I realize we are going to make it.  We will be just fine.  Dad will be disappointed that we all ate crumbly breakfast bars in the newly clean van, and Landon will have to fill his water bottle at school, but he will be in line with the group.  Rumpled, sleep in his eyes, with a few crumbs clinging to his mouth, but just fine.

I exhale.  Landon pipes up from the back,

"I'm not as hungry as you think, Mom.  I had breakfast with Daddy.  So it will be ok that all I had was that nola bar."

Breakfast with Daddy?!  Bill eats while it is still dark, long before I get up.

It all clicks.  How he ended up in my bed.  Why he couldn't be woken.  Why he is not fussing about the disruption of our luxurious routine.

I drive home behind a responsible citizen who seems like they are driving painfully slow, following the speed limit.  I need to re-calibrate

I knew this day was coming.  The one where decades of chaotic mornings catch up to me and claim a piece of the order and calm I have been working so hard to create for Landon's school experience.  I knew the leaf would turn back over, accompanied by the well-worn mantras of "Come on!  Let's GO! We're going to be late."

And for a moment, the rut of all that feels smooth and deep and in danger of closing in over my van, becoming the tunnel we'll be destined to live in.  It starts to feel like once you hop on the Frantic-Late-Ones train there is No.Getting.Off. until it pulls into the station.  Late, of course.

Mark Sylvester

Bet we have managed to stay off that train for two and a half months, I tell myself.  And what we can do one day, we can do again.

So I take the soggy-bottomed baby in the house.  And I do the next thing.  As I change his diaper I resolve to get us all in bed a half hour earlier tonight.

We have some track jumping to do tomorrow.

Not My Cookie Cutter Batch of Kids

Picture by Chance Agrella

For our second born, I thought I knew what kind of kid we'd be getting.  As though our DNA could only whip up one batch of great cookie dough, and all our kids would differ in appearance but not essential nature.  And then out pops the second born and he is as different from the first as pizza is from pumpkin soup.  This is not just another cookie with a few decorative differences.  Here is a whole new amazing person to discover and delight in at his own pace.

And so we do.  I try really hard to not compare, though I catch myself doing it all the time.  Not because I think one is better than the other, but mostly because I can't stop marveling that they really are *that* different.  Endlessly.  

I struggle to even think of how to show you how different they are.

If one is an onion we discover in sequential ways, the other is a pomegranate full of  unexpected complexity we aren't aware of right away.

How can you even compare an onion to a pomegranate?  Exactly.  They are that different.

But one thing is the same about these little people who call me mom:

Their ability to surprise me all the time.

Tonight my second born who still calls both Bill and I "mom", whose known word count falls below the average measures some experts have charted for his age, who often seems more prone to injury than insight at this stage of his life, yes, this one,

He goes outside and points up to the lovely half moon and says,  "Moon."

Simplest little syllable of no earth-shattering consequence to anybody but me, but I'm truly left to wonder, how did he know that?

His other accomplishments of the day include getting completely naked in his crib before I came and got him this morning, slamming his thumb in the waffle maker he managed to pull out of the cupboard twice, getting on Landon's bike by himself and precariously balancing on it, naming the letter Y by what seems to be sheer crazy luck, singing rather tunelessly at the top of his lungs in the car without saying a single word, and straddling the toilet fully dressed while saying "poo."  I can only surmise he has ambitions to be an early potty trainer.

So there's my little second born unwilling to go back inside the house until I acknowledge the beautiful moon.  

Keep pointing, my little man.  I kinda suspect there's a lot more out there you'll want us to discover with you.

Even if we're sometimes cringing at the perilous path you take to find it.

Colorado is a Girl in Love

Colorado is a girl in love.  Her boyfriend has been dressing her up in gold accents lately and like every newly infatuated, she gets a little ahead of herself and starts dreaming wedding.

So this morning she giddily traipses off to some celestial bridal shop and can't help herself--she's trying on a bit of white just to dream a bit.  You can almost hear her giggling to herself as she slips on a gorgeous white veil.  "Don't I look pretty in this?!"

She has enough restraint to not go full-on, snow-white gown of glittering extravagance, but you know she wants to.

So we wake up to this dusted veil of snow and have to agree, "You do look pretty, Colorado.  But without wanting to sound like a party pooper, wouldn't you like to slow it down a bit and still enjoy a whole season of all your awesome red party dress dates first?  The gold has been nice, but you still have a whole lot of red, russet, scarlet and even brown before you're ready to wear white, don't you think?

But if you've known Colorado for awhile, you know she's nothing if not fickle.  You may think she's all ready to settle down with Winter, but wait a few days.  I bet she'll be pulling out the floral prints and smashing blue skies with white cloud scarves billowing about again soon.

Because even for a girl in love, I doubt she'll be willing to skip that many fabulous fashion opportunities before she dons white.

Colorado is beginning to dream of white

My Favorite Gift So Far

Of all the gifts my son has given me, a renewed sense of wonder in the world may be my favorite.

Somewhere along the way, my sense of wonder faded.  It was like a glow stick that is rather magical in the beginning and completely nonessential in the end.  Much of the time my wonder was inactive and superfluous.
I didn't really miss it.  I had mostly forgotten how it felt.

Then we met Landon, lighting up our lives with more wonder than a hundred glow sticks could contain.  Each year we got to live life anew through his eyes, and there was so much to see.

There was so much to hear.  To taste. To smell.  The world cracked open again and the exploration of it with someone experiencing it for the first time is one of the best parts of parenthood.

I used to point out everything I could to him.  I didn't want him to miss one butterfly wing or double rainbow or dandelion puff.  I didn't want to miss his discovering these things for the first time.  I wanted to see his expression when the sandpaper tongue of a kitten licked his hand, when he heard the haunting notes of a cello, when he rode a carousal.  All of it brand new, all of it ageless, all of it full of wonder for us both.

I thought I was giving him these gifts, wrapped in my renewed interest and enthusiasm. Look at this!  Did you hear that?!  Have you ever seen anything so lovely?  Have you noticed this?  And maybe a little bit, I was.  I wanted to tag the whole world as his--to explore and cherish.

But in the end, he has given it back to me, more beautiful and mysterious than I ever remember it being before.  He asks his questions and increasingly, they are about things I have never once considered.  He fuels my own curiosity the way I once thought I was nurturing his.

This is what I mean:

We have started learning about the human body, beginning with the circulatory system.  I love, love love this topic, and Landon does, too.

"What will you want to learn about the circulatory system?" I ask him after several overview-giving conversations.

He mentioned some stuff.  A few days later he told me, "Mom, what I'm really wondering about, though, is if
the deox-a-nated (deoxygenated) blood is blue, how come I've never seen any blue blood come out of my body?  Why don't I see blue blood?

I sat there silently pondering this.  I felt dumbstruck.  My mind has never wandered there, but it seems like such a reasonable and interesting question.  I find myself admitting (as I am doing more regularly these days) that I'm as curious as he is, that I don't really know, and I'll need to do some research before I can answer the question.  I pose a guess that maybe when it hits the air it gets oxygen then?

Google mocks me.

As it turns out, we don't have blue blood running through our veins. It is, in fact, all about how light is reflected through the surface of our skin and is kind of a trick of the eye.  Even though I read several articles, I was never really able to get my mind entirely around it.  Except to understand that there is no blue blood, with or without oxygen.

Those circulatory charts sure do stick in your mind, though, don't they?

That's what I mean when I say Landon fuels my curiosity as much as I think I'm nurturing his.  Maybe my brain was like a kite and his is like a submarine, because he takes me places I never once considered.

My favorite part is that everywhere we go, the world is full of wonder.

I'd like to trade in my "wonder-as-a-glow-stick" paradigm for a new one.  As a parent, I'll trade it in for a Wonder Colander, able to collect and share wonder with equal ease and unprecedented joy.

So if you see us spinning and grinning in a field of green under a great big sky of blue and billowy clouds, look closer.  I'll be holding my invisible Wonder Colander--my favorite gift my son has given me so far.