{this moment}

{this moment} – A Friday ritual. A single photo – no words – capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor and remember. ~inspired by SouleMama

washed with tears

I’m fearful of writing these days, afraid of what might slip out.  Fearful of what I might uncover if I just let my fingers do the typing and let the filter off of my words.  Truth isn’t always beautiful.  It can be hard and piercing, and I don’t want to admit that I’m being broken, chipped apart and punctured. But then there’s the mending.  The light that shines through my wounds, the thread that stitches me up with brilliance.

Things just have not been adding up for our family and it’s a tightrope daily to keep my eyes forward.  Crushing blows, and I’m too tired, and too spent, and the little things then look like big things with monster heads and beady eyes. Yesterday, you see, had been one of those days.  Except that it had been many of those days in a row.  Patience and tolerance have been pounded paper thin, and all that remained clung to the bottom of boots, marched through the dense woods  of the day.

But then it’s these mirror eyes looking back at me, with mercy and love.  The Littlest is on his back, staring up at me, his hero, his mother.  His tiny lips curl up into a smile as our eyes meet and he coos; it melts me.  He twists and turns to show me his new moves, to surprise me with his strength.  He doesn’t know about this hard time we’re having.  All he knows is this moment, right now, with his feet stomping into my belly, his voice singing healing prayers over me.  I lean forward, bow into him, tip myself until I’m undone, and wash his cheeks with my tears.  I’ve been stuck in the thickness of my own struggle, not sure what to do next, when all he wants is me.  Feeling like I have nothing left to give, I forget that sometimes all I have to do is be: broken, messy, troublesome, imperfect me.  My voice to echo his; my cheek pressed to his.  My finger to be grasped in his; my warm body to nuzzle around his.

Later in the evening, I cried a barely audible breathy “you have no idea” goodnight on the phone to Mark while enduring the last and worst bits of the day.  All was quiet at the time, and the Littles all sounded pleasant for their father, but this could not be said of moments just prior.  Parenting the better (or worst) part of the day alone, I’m tired at the sound of my own voice, stern and repetitive, demanding order out of this impossible chaos.  The Littles were all crying, and I can’t say that I wasn’t, too.  Struggle begot struggle: The plastic dixie cup of medicine was met with pursed lips and a battle that ended when it was kicked out of my hand, purple syrup now streaking down the white wainscoted walls of the bathroom, threatening to stain the bath mat.  My anxious spirit consumed with this fever lasting too long, my Middles all out of sorts.  The sadness born of grief and loss, and missing a daddy at times needed most.  The daily battle of wills, heads and horns locked fiercely with each other, with myself.

My brave face shriveled in that phone conversation, wrinkling with arrogance and impatience, weariness written on my brow.  My words didn’t say much.  My body crumbled forward, clasping the Middlest collapsed in fevered fatigue between my legs, sprawled in my lap.  My hair pooled on the flushed skin of her sweaty face.  My shoulders shook with the weight of all these things to bear, and as they did the Eldest tiptoed off of the rocking chair and enveloped me with his arms too small.  He rubbed my arm, patted my shoulders, tender touches that only God can send, and from Him only I could receive.  I hung up the phone, embarrassed and humbled, snapped out of my selfishness, and the tears baptized our night.  We prayed right there together, the Eldest, Middlest and I, broken together, mended together.  I owned my weakness right there with the Littles as my witnesses, and gave words to my fears.  Offering up my everything right there in that darkened bedroom, I touched holy ground, or maybe it touched me.

As I tucked the Eldest into bed that night, his demeanor had changed from a sassed-out, argumentative arm-crosser to a tender-hearted, compassionate hugger.  We had a sweet and peaceful bedtime together, which in this house is few and far between.  We vowed fresh starts for each other in the morning.

Micha Boyett wrote this today: “Parenting should always be changing my view of God and my understanding of mercy. When I’m willing to see it, my children’s sin inevitably points back to my own.”  I’m breaking. I’m losing my ever-loving mind.  But maybe that’s a good thing.

“The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. ”The Lord is my portion,” says my soul,”therefore I will hope in him.”  Lamentations 3:22-24

{this moment}

{this moment} – A Friday ritual. A single photo – no words – capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor and remember. ~inspired by SouleMama

the little tree that could

There is this spindly little tree about a third of the way up the hill of our backyard.  It started from nothing, less than nothing, but in nature’s own way sprouted in the middle of the steep bank outside our back door, much too close to the house.  Mark took notice of it from the beginning, but honestly, I never thought it would grow.  Our dense, rocky soil, and strange sun patterns, along with the abundance of weeds, seem unlikely to encourage growth.

Yet, grow it did.  Poking, pointy, bristling through the underbrush, it reached for the sun, made space for the air.  It only took a few months, and truly, it demanded we begin to pay attention.  Mark did.  He continued to tell me of this little miracle, but I didn’t believe that it had any chance.

If it was going to survive it needed to be moved.  It was much too close to the house, and Mark had this vision of it growing tall and strong like the others that border our yard.  He dug up that tiny tree, tried to make a ball of its roots, and tenderly made a home for it thirty feet up the hill.  He did this without giving much thought to the season or growth of the tree, and neither one of us are studied green-thumbers. Even as I write this, I can’t claim to know the right time for transplanting, though I do recall that this was not it.  It went dormant as fall gave way to winter, shedding its leaves like the rest of the landscape, and as it turned brown and shriveled, I was convinced that this tree was dying a small death at our hands.

It was with complete disbelief, then, that as the sun stayed a bit longer during these spring days, green buds popping on old weathered trees, that I watched this tiny tree of ours offer its own green promise.  I called Mark to the window; pointed dramatically to his faithfulness.  He smiled.  Three or four weeks now this tree has been stretching skyward with green shoots and it isn’t stopping.  Standing taller than me, it still needs to thicken up, gain strength in the middle, and though it is still a fraction of the size of the two pear trees that keep it company, I harbor nothing but respect for its innate push to grow.  Even my doubt and skepticism, our lack of common horticultural knowledge, couldn’t squelch that.

This is how our yard is: rag tag success and bag-of-tricks surprises.  Hardly a traditional lawn, our green is made up of a wide range of common weeds and moss. This week the Littles threw themselves into this mess and gloried in picking flowers to bring inside, shoved into jars of water, and adorning every window sill.  Don’t tell them that these purple beauties are just weeds, that these yellow balls of brilliance are just common dandelions.  To us, it is all part of God’s painstaking handiwork — a reflection of how he grows us, too, weeds and all.

grandpop

We lost an important member of our family this week.  Mark couldn’t manage to choke out the words, but we squeezed hands and held our hearts as I  told our Little Ones the news: Grandpop had died.  After a sudden and unexpected illness and three weeks of fighting in the hospital, Mark’s dad found peace in passing.

It was a delicate balance, with these Littles, of offering information. Enough to be straightforward and honest, but not so much as to scare or worry them needlessly.  The last thing I wanted was to add to the burden that the Eldest sometimes carries — he doesn’t need to be afraid that the next time he catches a cold or gets a fever that he is being called Home.  He, of course, is highly tuned into the frequency of energy that buzzes around him, so for a bit now, I had been fielding questions about Grandpop’s stay in the hospital.  He is inquisitive and sensitive, and I had to face into the truth and urgency with him.  And surprisingly, my little worrier didn’t worry: he insisted on prayer.  So, we bowed our heads and lifted high all of our sadness and sorrow.  The Middlest, with her spunk and humor, told us how the angels picked Grandpop up and took him to the parking lot, so that he could go home.  These Littles teach us much.

There is something so ordinary about death.  It happens to everyone, and it affects us all.  We are all touched by the passing of life, just as we all are affected by a life coming into being.  Yet these are momentous things — weighty and life-changing.   But the dishes still need to be loaded into the dishwasher, Littles need to eat. The trash needs to go out.  The bed needs to be made.  We do the next thing.

We can honor Grandpop in the way we keep him alive: in our memories.  We have a responsibility to tell these stories.  The stories about how he helped us grow, and the wisdom he offered.  We tell the stories about the humor and smile he infused in the everyday.  We will let these stories soak into the life of the Littlest, who won’t have these memories on his own. He will know his Grandpop by the stories we tell. We tell the stories of his life because they are the stories of our lives, too.  And we learn about each other, too, in this sharing — I’m finding out new things  about this family of mine as I listen to these stories being told.  And isn’t that what it’s about?  I have a story, and you have a story, and as we let these stories leak out over a lifetime, we count on those who have been part of our story to turn these into folklore when we are gone — into family history.  It’s these stories that connect us to each other, here and now, and to those before us, and after us, creating this family.

So we do the next thing.  We pick up the dry cleaning, we make a dentist appointment.  Another memory is sparked, another story to share.  That’s not to say that it’s not hard.  It is.  There is a person missing from this earth today — a husband, father, friend, brother, grandpop.  Our lives are richer, better, stronger  because he was there.  We love you, Grandpop.