But it has been full.  Full of quiet, and not-so-quiet; of sunshine bringing rivulets of sweat, and the cool breeze that makes me tighten my shoulders inward, curl into myself, and find that I’m always being curled into.

There was this ropes course, that was one thing.  And here’s what I can tell you:  balanced on a wire thirty five feet in the air, I am still me.  Thinking it all out, breathing to pace my brain, and though the birds sang me a song, and my face felt the cool shadow of the trees, though the muscles in my calves flexed this way and that to hold a firm pose, I crossed this high wire with my ever-thinking head.

Here’s some of the not-so-quiet:  this gang of ours knows how to shout and cheer and we did our loudest for Mark, dear ol’ daddy.  A runner since the day I met him, he has found his legs again chasing down backwoods trails in hot pursuit of nothing short of a personal best, and we all wait at the finish line counting minutes.  Cresting the hill, I recognize him immediately, because even at a distance I know that body, the gait of those legs, the posture of his torso thrown into the last strides, and he hears our voices too, knows our call to him, bringing him in, bringing him home.  Each one of us, littlest right up to biggest, then wears smiles long and wide, and that mud-caked daddy tells us his war stories of creek crossings and pricker bushes, and always of the chase.

There have been fevers, little bodies wrung out and hung out, when I’ve long thought this season of sick should be over.  There have been canceled plans, date nights in instead of out, games of t-ball that go on without us.  And then there have been adventures made only in the moment: to say yes without thought or regard, to answer the call to climb a tree, to swing higher and higher, to stay up a teeny weeny bit later.  And all hands on deck, together we built this year’s garden, lumber tacked down and just the right soil mixture and there is mud in all our fingernails for days after until those tiny sprouts of green life push out mightily through the dirt.  And that is just what we are doing here: imperceptible often, ambling toward the light.

And yes, we are full up. And here’s to spilling a little out, and saving some for later.

There is a lot to be said for getting back in the saddle, and here I am, back on this horse, and though I’m not sure what knocked me down or kicked me off (or maybe I just stepped off all on my own because that winding road of walking has beauty that the rider never sees), but I’m swinging my legs over that bare back, and pressing my weight into that spine.  I’m  gathering up that mane in my hands, and can feel it whipping at me in the breeze and I shout “Giddy Up!”

This, here, is the underneath.  This is the back side of that beautiful tapestry that we’re weaving, the sweep of rainbow glory of my life, my colorful breath, stitched and spun and taken up into a braid upon braid.  But right now?  Right now, it’s tangled and ugly.

But it’s the story that I’m humming to myself as I spin those tazmanian-devil-circles around my kitchen, cutting up food into bite-sized pieces and peeling another banana and picking up the water bottle from the floor for the umpteenth time.   I may have lost track of the narrative, and I may not remember which scene I’m in anymore.  I can’t remember who the good guys are, and where the ogres live.  Because honestly – the Littlest, who just wants his mama, cries when I have to put him down for the two seconds I need to cut the onion, or grab the bag of groceries from the car. (And I’ve almost learned how to chop an onion one handed, because sometimes it’s easier to hold him anyway since he moves at the speed of lightning, don’t you know, and has almost the same effect, too).  And I’m moving as fast as I can to just do the very next thing (and there’s always one more next thing) and I don’t even realize the knots I’ve made out of it all until the end of the day when I collapse on the couch.  (I’m pretty sure my eyes lids fall closed before the little ones’ do).  The underneath is not so pretty.

So while my challenge this year is to see the Story of it all – to hold it, to create it, to tell it, to teach it – right now the only story I can see  has no great character development.  It’s lacking  plot twists and a climax.  There is no great resolution.  But I know it’s only because I’m underneath it all, and I just can’t see it yet.  And it seems like too much work for me to even make some greater sense of this mess.  But, maybe, just maybe, at some point I’ll be able to turn this piece over, feel it’s weight, understand it’s breadth and it’s size.  I’ll get to see it’s edges.  And what about these knots?  The other side of this tangled web of my everyday mess, and theirs, and yours  – it’s all in there, too.  And it will be something to behold.

At home, around the dinner table, things were no different.  Most nights of my growing up, after the plates had been cleared and we pushed back our chairs from the table, my dad would call his Kitchen Patrol to order.  With his clear directive: “back to zero” we had just one task:  clean up. By this he meant that the kitchen, after a full day of three square meals and all the requisite mess that goes into making them, needed to glisten like it was brand new.  If all the day’s mess-making was added up cereal bowl plus butter dish in the equation, than this cleaning – the wiping and scrubbing and putting away – was the negative algebra necessary to balance it all out.  That, along with “completing the magic cycle,” which in his vernacular meant seeing to it that our dirty dishes ended up in the dishwasher instead of on the counter above it.

There was always camaraderie in the process.  When we were younger, my dad stuck around to make sure we got stuff done properly, but as we got older my sister and I were left on our own.  Of course we grumbled and made excuses – oh the homework! so much! really! – but we took up our dishtowels and stood in position.  If it was my arms and hands that turned red and raw from the hot water, it was hers that were at the ready with a towel, drying and reaching to the high cabinets to put dishes away.  And really, how else is one supposed to learn the art of snapping towels?  No child should be without this skill.

This language of completion, of cycles and clean slates, like anything with such childhood repetition, has stuck with me.  Standing in the kitchen now of my adulthood,  nary a night goes by that these refrains don’t chug like a train along those  railroads tracks deep in my brain, the ones that were laid a long, long time ago.  While my dad was teaching us about fair work, about responsibility, about the nitty-gritty of scrubbing pots and belonging to community, he was also teaching us about fresh starts.  Each day brings it’s own grime, and the dirt of living with each other stains us.  It takes diligent work, knowing how and when to say sorry, how to fix our mistakes, how to reach through to each other.  But each morning, we are “back to zero,” ready to face another day. Nourishing ourselves and one another is not without mess. In our house now, this means fresh starts whenever we ask for them.

My kids are still young yet for manning their own station as we strive to get “back to zero” every night in the kitchen, but they are learning their own small part in the process.  Each night when they set, and then later clear, the table, they see how they contribute to our family community.  And right now, the job for Mark and I  is to take up our station and do the work of scrubbing those dishes, completing the cycles, magic and otherwise, and putting glasses away, ready to start the next day new again.

This is part of a series that I  post occasionally about the  family sayings and folklore that are meaningful to me, especially in my family history, as a way to explore my own Story.  Similar posts can be found here: ‘near nough.  and here: it’s not that windy.  Tell me some of yours!

It is a battle I know too well, one that is more physically demanding than I ever think it will be.  On the surface it doesn’t sound that hard: Ok, kids, grab a jacket, and let’s head outside.  But the reality is much grittier. The basement, our point of departure, is full of all the things that a basement should be full of, including a furnace and water heater, and flotsam of former stages of life.  All this is naturally inviting for any explorer worth his salt, and this Littlest of mine is no exception.  His speed isn’t hampered until I get his boots on, and then he can barely stand upright anymore.  The bigger two kids are surprisingly helpful at finding jackets and hats, gloves and boots, but even their fortified desires for self-reliance crumbles at the thought of snow eeking into a potentially exposed crevice at the wrists.

Snow pants, boots, jackets, hats, gloves: check. I shooed the big kids outside, promising to meet them momentarily.

Though I don’t even have my jacket on yet, my body temperature has risen, and with it my blood pressure.  I’m frustrated at myself for being so frustrated.  I’m ready to cancel the whole endeavor, because I’m already sunk in the task of making it outside, and I can’t even begin to see how, once we’re out there, it’ll be any different.  Every 0.35 seconds I’ve scooped the Littlest away from untold danger and he’s using every morsel of strength he has to fight against putting his arm into his jacket.  After practically dislocating numerous joints, both his and mine, we head outside, desperately seeking that cold blast of air to cool me down.

And then the magic happens.  It’s like stepping through the back of the wardrobe into another realm entirely.   The brightness of the still-falling snow is almost blinding, and the corners of my mouth turn upwards instinctively.  My shoulders sink back away from my ears, releasing a tension I didn’t even know I was carrying.  The kids are spinning circles, dizzying themselves with their heads thrown back and pink tongues thrust out and lined with white dots of snow.  Any disappointment they had when I came out without the sleds has faded away and they have created a new game, rolling themselves like hot dogs down the hill.  Popping up out of the snow when they reach the bottom, the snow shakes off of their heads and their shoulders, and I’m struck by the sturdiness of their bodies racing each other back up the hill.  Layered up like a miniature abominably snowman, the Littlest can hardly stand in balance, let alone take carefully calculated steps, but he is content enough to make a snow angel or two.  Then, hoisted onto to my hip, he points me all around the yard as I become the battleship he steers, his voyage a mission to explore this white land.

The magic is there until it isn’t anymore.  The Middlest’s gloves just won’t stay on anymore, and now her wrists are cold and sticky-wet.  The Littlest has commanded this mother-ship around and around again, and is only frustrated that he can’t command his own body in the same way.  Now it’s the tug from the other pole: the hot chocolate and dry comfort that draws us back inside.  The wet mess of shedding layers is an exacting mirror of our earlier struggles to piece it all together.

And what I see is this: I see this pattern of sweat and struggle interspersed with beauty and magic in large and small ways.  The magic of life’s beautiful moments may be fleeting, but in order to see it at all, you have to be there.  You’ll never get the magic if you don’t show up.  Those few moments of pure joy, for both the kids and I, in the snow, showered by today’s sparkle, was hard-won.  It could’ve been easy, halfway into the hide-and-seek of mismatched gloves, to abandon the program all together.  But in pressing on, we had our hands open, palms up, the magic lighting on us the way the snow illuminated their tongues.  And it’s these glimpses of beauty that keep me pressing on, day after day.  Because so much of it is a struggle: it’s a struggle for bedtime, at the end of the day, each at the end of our shortening ropes, with the clock ticking off a world of crazy when all I’m seeking is quiet.  It’s the hard work of listening through the whining, the tears, and the tantrums to seek out what is underneath it all.  It’s a struggle to find time – carve it out, really, chiseling in to one thing or another – for all that is important.  It’s a struggle to learn, again and again, to love each other and do it well.

And this is what I need to remember, when I break out in a full body sweat in the middle of the struggle.  It’s effort; it’s work.  But that is where the magic is found.  This is the whisper that I want to sink deep into the wrinkles of my brain. Right there, in the middle of the struggle, there are moments of beauty – the magic of sleeping bodies, hearts and souls that connect, joy for joy’s sake, and laughter snorted through tears.  I only need to step out into the snow to see it.

The work of the world is common as mud.

This line is written on my tiny patch of chalkboard paint in my kitchen.  When we replaced our oven a few months back we had to rework some of the spacing of our cabinets and I was left with some odd wall space.  One wintry day, I claimed it for myself as a place to write out words so they can be a regular part of my visual landscape, even though I’m not quite hip enough to make it look stylish (and I’m okay with that).  The work of the world is common as mud, it says.  These words, from a gorgeous poem by Marge Piercy, have been following me around now for weeks.  They will not let me go.  (If you are my friend of Facebook, you know this, because I couldn’t keep these words to myself!)  My work these days in nothing if not common.  Like mud, the work of mothering is not unique to me, but is the work of families this wide world over, timeless and spaceless like little else.  Though my quest this year is to see the Story swirling around me, some days the only story I can hear is the one of dirty dishes teetering way-too-high in my sink.  These days it’s easy to feel the quicksand pull of this work,  hearing only the slurping sound of suction as I try to rise above it, futile in my resistance to it’s gravity.  The poem continues:

Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.

Some days my efforts feel like dust, crumbled and falling through my outstretched fingers.  Holding no shape, the work of my mind, the toil of my hands, only seems to tell the story of dirt pressed deep into my fingernails.   The common mud-work of dinner making, crumbling to nothing as the picky eaters of my table push their plates away, upturned noses wanting only peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I make dust through my own self-talk of patience, grasping for the right words in the middle of mind-battling the Eldest.  It is the stink of old mud, left brittle in the sun, when I am again revising sleeping arrangements, desperate to carve out a space of solace for myself, my husband, in this house too small and so full.  I scrub at my hands, and mostly my heart, all smeared with the day’s dirt and dust.  I’m looking for a cleaner version of myself, but the grime remains.  The end of each day finds me exhausted, over saturated with tiredness, and yet with a look back over the day I produce nothing to say: see, this, here.

But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.
-”To Be of Use” Marge Piercy

Here’s where I take solace: the amphoras that are now in museums, adored for their sensual shape and their glow of beauty, must also have sweat pressed into their clay.  They bear the invisible finger prints of someone so long ago who maybe didn’t think this vessel was beautiful at all.  It was simply useful.  And that is beautiful.

Like that pitcher, I cry out for work that is real.  Water, oil, wine — all poured out with significance in blessings, celebrations and renewal.  Even the kids, with little care in the world, create real work for themselves, out of nothing but mud. The trick is in seeing how real my work actually is. This work of raising people, teaching and tending, feeding and mending, bodies and souls, can be shapeless and formless, not so clean and evident. But maybe another way to look at it is this: “Work is love made visible,” says Kahlil Gilbran.  Today I may have trouble seeing how my work, with this particular color thread, will appear in the tapestry of my story.  Without a sense of the big picture, it can be hard to understand the importance of this daily, common work of mud.  I want to remember that this, above all else, is the thing worth doing well done.

It’s a story of longevity, and I’ve got time.  This type of beautification comes with age, and with wear.  I’m not ready for that high museum shelf yet.

This story begins on a crisp spring day more than thirty years ago.  My parents were young, younger than I am now (a fact that has me doing mental gymnastics to even consider).  They were married but my sister and I were only unspoken glimmers of hope for some time in the future.

In order to understand this story you need to know a few things: my dad, this humble pie guy on the outside, is pretty remarkable.  He’s the sort of guy that you could know for a while, and think you have a good sense of him.  I mean, he’s pretty straight forward.  He likes his coffee black.  He works hard, and plays hard. He’s never more at peace that when he’s in the woods.  But he’ll surprise you.  Casually, in conversation, talking about this episode of Amazing Race where they were skydiving, and all of a sudden he’s telling stories of jumping out of planes.  And what’s that? When did you do that, you say? Oh, when you were a Green Beret, right.  Because he had nothing else to do.  That’s my dad.

My renaissance man of a father at one point had his pilot’s license, my guess is as a result of his time in the army.  And when you are married with no kids, sometimes it’s fun to jump in a plane and fly around a bit.  Check out the scenery from a different vantage.  My folks were making plans to do just that on this spring day.  The dogwoods are beginning to bloom, and the air smells of fecund mud.  But there is a breeze, as most spring days have, and it’s this breeze that is a point of contention.

A breeze that is mild, like spring’s gentle kisses, while sipping coffee on the back deck, can, however, be difficult to predict and treacherous to navigate with a small plane and a mere hobbyist’s interest in flight.

“It’s not looking good to fly today” one of them says, watching the trees shake their budding branches against the pale blue sky.  “It’s windy out here.”

“What do you mean?” the other responds, surprised at the declaration.  And here it comes: the words that echoed, not just that day, bouncing around the air, picked up by the birds as they chatter to each other, but echoed through the years.  “It’s not that windy.”   The qualifier in that sentence is doing all the work.  A mere matter of a different perspective, perhaps, or a strong desire to hold fast to plans.  A simple conviction that one opinion is more right than another, or merely semantics arguing the same thing.  It doesn’t much matter, and I’m not sure either one of them knew.

I don’t think they ended up flying that day. I don’t know how they decided this, or who spoke loudest.  I don’t even know who was on what side of the discussion.  But I do know that the conversation escalated enough to highlight both the typical differences in perspective of my parents, and to become endeared to us family legacy.

With repetition, this vignette of a particular place and time has given us a vocabulary to use with each other.  “It’s not that windy.” It’s quipped and quoted from all sides of my family, including my married-into-the-family husband. This can be offered as reminder of perspective. Where is the line between sweet breeze and blustery storm?  And who gets to draw that line?  It can infuse lightness and humor into a potential escalation, and reminds us that we share this vocabulary.  It makes us insiders together, in on the joke, and helps us find a bond of togetherness, even if it’s only in that moment of this common story.  More often than not, it’s the jolt that I need to figure out which battles are worth fighting.  Because, you see, sometimes it is that windy.  And sometimes it’s not.

***

Pay attention to this: the 13 month old who grows like a fairy tale weed right before my eyes.  I can’t say he toddles so much any more because it’s more sturdy and sure than any toddle ought to be.   He finds ways to play his own games with me, games that tell me to pay attention, to him, right now.  He pushes the buttons on the dishwasher and then make those flirty eyes with  me.  He laughs, throwing his head back exposing that kissable neck, and runs away as fast as he can, daring me to catch him.  (Don’t worry, I do.)  Or he finds just the right laundry basket, because goodness knows there are plenty around.  But he finds the one that has all of the folded clothes inside.  And one by one, he takes them all out, making a display on the bedroom floor.  And when I push him in the direction of all the unsorted, unfolded, un-everything clothes at his disposal?  He lays his body full out on the ground, kicking his feet and offering up his best imitation tantrum.  If I’m honest, these baby tantrums turn me to mush, and I love him all the more dearly for his ambition.  So, yes, love, I’ll pay attention to you.

And this: see these bodies, unabashedly naked, small but not so tiny anymore.  Our bath times have become circus like, as you can imagine, all three kids in a regular ol’ bath tub.  The new trick last night was from the Littlest, who stood proudly sticking out his belly and patting it with such pride.  And then there’s the lemonade station (please, oh please just pretend yellow, right?)  in the corner where the Eldest is brewing and pouring and serving it up to anyone who will answer.  The Middlest is lost in her own world, which I can’t believe is even possible in this arrangement, but she is singing and humming and la-la-la-ing to herself, letting herself feel the water.  I’m slowing down, taking notice to this, because I know that it’ll be all too soon when everyone needs their own space, their own privacy.  Their bodies won’t be mine to marvel at, and we’ll be hustling them towards showers to move along to the next thing.

And there’s the Eldest learning to read; and the Middlest making friends.  There is the Littlest pushing furniture around and blowing kisses.  There are more arts and crafts projects that I ever could have imagined, and I worry that someday I will be help responsible for the number of trees we’ve used up. There are scraps of paper everywhere.  On good days, I pick them up and smile at the experiment of it all.  Other days, I grumble over the tedium – scraps, everywhere.  I’m paying attention, but maybe to the wrong thing.

Here’s the thing:  I don’t usually think of myself as the kind of person who needs to be reminded to slow down.  My gears are set pretty low.  I’m more of an ambler, a putz-er, a mull-er.  But then it happens:  the daily grind wears me down.  It’s like the game that Grant likes to play, outside at the swing set.  He spins the swing around and around, and it lifts higher and higher until he can’t crank it up any more.  Then: let it go and watch it fly.  The swing spins, uncontrollably, barreling around back down again, with no regard to anything in it’s way.  I can unravel carelessly, too.  If I’m not paying attention, mirrors break.  And sometimes that’s a good thing.

I know that I’m not unique in this.  I need to pull back and see the bigger picture.  I need to take the long view, and see the panorama.  Because without the bigger story, I can’t make sense of the baby tantrums, let alone the big ones.  But when my nose is stuck on one particular page, in one scene of the story, it’s easy to get careless and forget to notice.  Or worse yet, to notice the things that don’t matter (the unsorted laundry, the uneaten vegetables).

Tonight, Mark is picking up a new side view mirror for my car.  And if all goes well, I will have the full view by morning.

I have to admit that I have been taken by this work, too, and here’s why, I think:  I am captivated by the inch-by-inch, step-by-step work of watching this building be created.  This seems a bit ironic to me – after all I’m married to a carpenter, and this very type of work is our bread and butter.  He leaves his work boots behind, though, each night as he steps into the shower to wash the drywall dust out of his hair.  Around our dinner table, I hear about wall angle and ceiling grid; I know about the importance of 1/64th of an inch, especially when it’s stretched out over 100 feet or so.  But these words still end up being fuzzy pictures in my head, and the resolute concreteness of these things he builds stays with him at work.

So here are the kids and I, making up the names to the fancy work trucks and big construction rigs, oohing and aahing over the real progress that we see on our commute.  We’re watching steel beams hanging from big cranes being fished around by a guy sitting on another steel beam, and this structure keeps getting bigger and stronger.  Sometimes it takes seeing things with the kids, through their questions and their astonishment, to really see.  We’re puttering here, at a red light, watching a minute longer and I can’t shake the feeling that we’re witnessing something huge here.  I’m not just talking physically big, though that is undeniable, our station wagon turned ant-like by the mass of the dump trucks.  I mean something harder to name, an allusion to the bigger picture.

This is a view of Mark’s current work project.

I think I mean building a life; constructing a family, a marriage, a home.  I don’t know anything about welding, but I’m guessing that’s how those steel beams get connected to each other.  Then, in turn, these steel beams support this great big building.  I don’t know about all the intricacies that are hidden behind the finished sheet rock walls, but I know that there is a maze of electricity, tunnels of duct work and piping that are crucial to the finished product of this building.  It’s the veins and arteries for this structure.  In carpentry, it’s important to recognize when things are getting a little crookedy, and though it is disheartening, it’s knowing when to take a pieces apart and build it back up again.   In order for this structure to be useful – as an office, a warehouse, a grocery store, whatever – it first needs to be constructed well.  It needs to be built, piece by piece, no detail overlooked, no step hurried or skipped over.   And I know that this, too, is the story of my family, my marriage – my life.

Here’s the thing: just like I overlook the sawdust-creating process of constructing a building, I know that I fail to notice the gritty work of creating that which is far less tangible.  How many times do  you walk down the corridors of your office and contemplate the steel that holds you up?  Do you wonder about the insulation and the plumbing, the stones that hold it all in?  Similarly,  I know that I hardly ever give thought to the foundation, structure and diligent piece-by-piece life-building all around me.  It’s not so glamorous, is it?  Sometimes it looks like making dinner, every night, feeding their bellies, but so much more than that.  Sometimes it’s sitting at the kitchen table, running through the alphabet, the multiplication tables, the state capitals.  Sometimes it’s holding your tongue, offering grace and love and forgiveness.  Mostly, it’s about doing the work.  Just like these hard-hat clad guys show up and do the work, putting their time in and getting it right, there will be something to be show for it all in the end.  Unlike construction, though, in life it can take a while to see the bricks and mortar, the drywall and spackle, take real shape.

Mark spent many years working at the Philadelphia Airport, building what was at the time a brand new international terminal.  It was big project, and I know there were times when he thought the work would never come to an end.  I’ve been to the airport with him, since that time, and the terminal is beautiful (though I became painfully aware of how in-need of a face lift the rest of the airport was!)  Mark showed me around, winding me through corridors and pointing high to the ceilings, telling stories of his labor.  But there is this one place, right by the window down low, that stands out in my mind:  clear as day, if you’re looking in the right spot, are my initials carved teeny tiny into Mark’s handiwork.

And somehow, I know, that this is how we’re building our life together.

*

Grant has been asking lately, “Is this real?” and I’m not talking about  dragons or imaginary friends named Lacey.  He’s asking it when we’re driving to school, as he gazes out the window.  He’s asking it when we’re gathered around the table for dinner as he waits for me to finish cutting his carrots.  And I know just what he means.  Is this real?   I have a distinct memory, when I was about his age, feeling the same way.  I remember sitting in the car, watching the trees and the other cars, the shops and the traffic lights all pass us by.  But really we were moving past the scenery.  And I remember getting all twisted up in my head about what was real: was it myself in the car, seat belt on and singing along to Raffi?  Or was it the trees and the birds, the pavement and all that stuff outside?  What is real?  So I get what he means, and I’m sympathetic to my over-thinker, this dawning meta-awareness, and I know that he’ll never grow out of that.

*

The cold of this season has been bracing: the wind has pushed the wintry air into every crevice and crack of this house.  Each effort to leave the shored up warmth requires such work and yet, all it takes is a blown kiss from the north to reveal the open weave of the sweater I am wearing, the loose gap between my pant leg and sock.  By the end of the day the muscles in my back and neck are tense, my body hunched in on itself seeking inner warmth.  Maybe that’s why a fort of blankets and pillows looks so inviting.  I set the lid on the pot of chilli simmering on the stove and nestle my way into this movie retreat, too.  I feel my shoulders loosen, I let the little kid bodies mold around mine.  My cheeks flush with the moist warmth of breath, the child-like exhalations of rhythm.  This is real.

*

Later, when Griffin is awake, and I’ve pressed his cheeks into my heart so that he knows the beat of my love and I’ve smoothed back his hair, damp with nap-sweat, he’s loud and pointing to the family room, to his brother and sister, so we go.  We go, and we find the movie fort tweaked a bit, and now it has become a captain hook adventure and they are running on the coffee table (yes, this) and there is water and rescues and duels and Griffin gets right in on the action.   Just try to tell me that this isn’t real, folks.

The groundhog poked it’s head out this past weekend, yawned, blinked and stretched out, unimpressed with what he saw:  No shadow this year.  They say that means spring will come soon.

My reaction was immediate, and forceful.  My mouth opened, and what come out was a verbal spew: you’re only going to be set up for disappointment; I’m not perfect.  I’m nobody’s dream anything.  On and on it went – not in some display of lack of self-esteem, but almost the opposite.  Couldn’t he see how not-dream-like I was?  Didn’t he know that I am a terrible procrastinator?  Didn’t he know that I bore easily?  Change my mind quickly?  Didn’t he know that I was way too stubborn?  Too self-involved?  Clearly he was learning of my sardonic realism.  Poor Mark.  He had no idea what just happened.  In a moment of contentment he had simply let his lips proclaim what he was feeling to be true.  He was telling me of his love for me.  But I didn’t hear it.

We’ve grown miles and miles since those idealistic words.  We’ve battled hard through years of growing up together, growing in together.  Step by step we’ve been living out the hyperbolic vision that Mark had for us.  Because whether in actuality he knew his dream then or not, what has happened since is we’ve been building this dream.  Life is not lived in the grand gesture, but in many, many small ones.  When I listen to that claim now, what I can see with absolute clarity, is that yes, Mark saw me as the woman of his dreams – with an endlessly stubborn streak and erudite vocabulary.

In my women’s bible study we’ve spent the past year studying the book of Philippians.  We dance around a bit, take breaks here and there, but mostly are taking the slow and deliberate march through this letter from Paul.  Philippians 2:15 says, among other things, that I am to be pure and blameless as a child of God.  When I’ve read this verse before I’ve felt inadequate and overwhelmed.  Doesn’t God know who He is dealing with here?  He knows my need for Him.  But here’s what I learned this time ’round: of course God knows me.  Of course He knows all of my inadequacies.  But He has chosen to see me as pure and blameless, because of the work of the cross.  That’s who I am now.  A child of God.  And certainly I can put up barriers between me and God, I and might not feel so pure and blameless.  When Mark calls me the woman of his dreams, he’s telling me how he sees me, not how I am in my broken reality.  (Bear with the messy connection here, I’m not attempting theology.  Mark ≠ God, clearly).

Driving through the farmland, when Mark was telling me of his dreams, we were far enough along in our relationship for him to know, with certainty, how I was not a picture in a magazine. (how could he ever be confused?!) He was, in a way, speaking a blessing to me: a vision of how he sees me.  With all of my crazy, I am the woman of his dreams.  There’s this great line in Gone Girl: “Give me a man with a little fight in him, a man who calls me on my bullshit. (But who also kind of likes my bullshit.)”

You see, there’s something better-than-dreams in our reality, don’t you think?  There’s something about seeing the flaws in Mark, and about him knowing mine with such intensity and honesty, but still claiming dream status for us anyway.  It’s like that Shakespeare sonnet:

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red, than her lips red:
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound:
I grant I never saw a goddess go,
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
And yet by heaven, I think my love as rare,
As any she belied with false compare.

I, like the mistress in the sonnet, am much more mortal than any goddess living in dreamland.   But I don’t doubt that I’m living the dream.  And I have learned to swallow my snark, say “Thank you,” and give Mark a big ol’ kiss any time he tells me: “you’re the woman of my dreams.”