Beautiful Things

When you found out today

That the spring blossoms would soon turn to green

You cried

Not silent, weepy tears

But the loud, wailing kind

I joined you in your lament

Isn't it sad, little one

That the blossoms we so enjoy

Will soon fade from view?

We sat together in sadness

Mourning the inevitable loss

The changing of the seasons

The impermanence of everything

And through your tears

You said it best

I just want beautiful things to stay

Me, too, I agreed

Me, too

Only I wasn't thinking of the trees 

I was thinking of the dimples that still cling to your elbows

A faint trace of the baby inside my little girl

And the way I will one day look to that spot

And see only the bone beneath your porcelain skin

Such fleeting changes, these

In both the child and the trees

I must pay attention, I remind myself

Pay attention

As if my willful watching will slow the pace of change

The summer leaves hold beauty, too,

We assured one another once the tears subsided

And the blossoms will return again 

Next year in their time

Same with you, sweet child

Each stage will hold a beauty of its own

And that pang of sadness you felt 

When you found out your beloved "purple tree"

Will soon turn green

Well, now you know 

The beautiful ache

Of motherhood

Of life

Of love

Me, too, precious child

Me, too

I just want beautiful things to stay

For Chuck

Does not every mighty oak tree 
Strong branches point to heaven above? 
All creation in Thine image
Is it not true of this one we love?

Creatures winged and water worthy 
Those who move on four legs all 
In their motion draw us to you 
Breath and life in big and small

How stillness aches when motion ceases 
Our hearts refined like gold in flame 
This glimpse of you through your creation 
This one we’ve loved and called by name

Now see we in a mirror dimly 
But in time’s fullness, pray we, Lord 
Giver of life, divine creator 
That all creation be restored 

Ode to an Old Friend

I do not know from whence you came, or of your short-lived past

You searched for a way out in vain, your prison - walls of glass.

You did not find your way to freedom, water, and fresh air

Instead you lay upon my dash and drew your last breath there.

And when at last I noticed you, I was too lazy, far

Too dust you off, dispose of you (I never clean my car).

And so the days turned into months, and months to nigh a year

And always you accompanied me, a constant presence here.

Some days I thought of you as George, and other times as Gus

My withered mascot on the dash all covered up in dust.

I’d think of all your ancestors caught in an amber trap

Their fate much prettier than yours, preserved in golden sap.

Your death was not illustrious; your life, a fragile state

You flew in never knowing that the door would seal your fate.

But in a twist of irony your death preserved you, see?

For how many mosquitoes dwell a year in one’s memory?

We’d never have been friends if you had tried to suck my blood

I surely would have swatted you and washed you off at once

But since you suffocated and your needle ne’er took root

You got to keep me company each day on my commute

And then at last, on this spring day, it finally was time

To clean my car, inside and out, get rid of all the grime.

I did not take it lightly as I held the vacuum up,

And saw you, fragile mascot, disappear with just one suck.

And then my car was clean at last, at least for a small while

But when I looked to where you lay I quickly lost my smile

I know that I will miss your presence laying on my dash

So goodbye, George, goodbye sweet Gus, you’re gone for good – alas!

Reposted from my previous blog, AmusingMyself.blogspot.com

Homesick

We're approaching the two-year mark since we've moved to our new home in Nashville.  Anyone who has talked to me since that time knows how much I love it here.  I have even described it as "my true hometown."  The sloping hills, the blossoms in spring, the leaves in fall, the almost year-round green grass, the concerts, the restaurants, the steeples that dot the landscape, the small-town feel.  It is easily the most beautiful place I've ever lived.  We've reconnected with some old friends and been blessed with wonderful new ones.  My favorite thing about living here has been how small our little world feels, how neatly all of our circles overlap.  Our church friends are our neighbors are our school friends are our soccer teammates - it's just a small world here in Nashville, and I'm a fan of knowing and being known.

But it's the knowing and being known that is also making me homesick for the first time since making that cross-country trek in our Penske truck nearly two years ago.  In some ways, making new friends is easy when you have children.  But it's really just the meeting people part that is easy.  You see other parents at soccer practice, in the carpool line, you make a playdate for your children, and therefore, yourselves.  But I've found that the actual process of getting to KNOW people has become more difficult in this season of our lives.  Gone are the days when we could plop down on a friend's couch and linger for hours just eating and talking.  Telling stories, listening to stories, learning the tapestry of someone's life and finding how we can become part of the thread that is woven through that tapestry, savoring the way that this new thread is being woven into our own.  I find that friendships are best forged in hours around the table, in late nights that turn into later nights because we just can't tear ourselves away.  

And then there are the children.  They are wonderful and beautiful and oh so loved, and it's hard to complete a blessed sentence when they are around - much less an entire story.  Mealtime with friends feels more harried and functional - counting out the number of bites that must be consumed before the children can be excused, and then hopping up from the table every few minutes once they have been excused to see what loud drama is unfolding in the other room as they play, to ensure that the crying of the visiting child hasn't been incited by some injustice on the part of my own child. The time that I long to linger on at the table and pour another glass of wine for my guests is the time that the children are pushing the limits of their energy and need to be tucked into bed, so we stretch it out just twenty more minutes in an effort to be with our guests - to get to know and to be known - and then the children have reached meltdown point and we still have the bedtime routine looming ahead of us after we wave our goodbyes.  I often replay the conversations of the evening once the children are sleeping and the kitchen is cleaned (or not), and so many times I realize I answered a question but, in my distracted state, didn't reciprocate the question.  Or it occurs to me that there were things I wanted to know about my friends - life events I wanted to check in on, deeper questions I wanted to ask, but I was called away from the table at that moment to get another glass of milk or assist a child in the restroom.  I'm not a believer in multi-tasking.  I can't do it well, and I don't think our brains were made to do it.  If I'm talking with someone, I want to sit down and TALK WITH THEM.  I want to look in their eyes and see their expressions, not just to listen but to hear, not just to talk but to actually say something.  Without distractions, I want to communicate to them their importance to me.  And then there are the children.  I realize this is a season of life, and it's a season I'm enjoying for so many reasons.  I absolutely adore being the mother of young children.  And yet, I find that it's a difficult season in which to forge new friendships.

And so I am homesick.  I'm homesick for the friends who already know me, the ones whose thread is already so beautifully woven into the tapestry of my life, whose presence has made it richer.  I'm homesick for the friends who already know my stories, so that when I have to get up from the table for the umpteenth time to help a precious child, there is still no gap in the knowing.  Things are already understood.  We are all already at home, no matter whose house we are in.  I'm homesick for the familiar and the traditions.  I'm homesick for my bookclub girls and our post-kid-bedtime conversations.  I'm homesick for the birthday celebrations.  I'm homesick for the standing date for the Oscar's party and the peanut M&Ms I inhale while we compete to guess the results.  I'm homesick for the soul-filling singing of my old church.  For parents and brothers who lived close enough to come for Sunday lunch.  I'm homesick for the life group friends we used to see each Sunday evening.  For the friends who share our history, who know our stories, who have walked beside us as life has unfolded.  The ones we logged hours with before the sweet interruptions of children, whose couches we helped to make a little saggier, whose sleep we stole without apology as we stayed just one more hour, and then just a few minutes more.  

I trust that in time, we will forge these same friendships in any place we call home.  We will find a way to log the hours and tell the stories and welcome new threads into our tapestries.  But for now, I will savor this ache inside, because it means that I have loved and been loved, have known and been known.  I love so many things about where we are now, but were I the owner of red glittery shoes, today you would find me clicking my heels. 

Teflon Mom

I place my lips upon her fevered brow
May I absorb her sickness all, somehow
Not to join, but to replace hers, see?
May all her pain come rather into me

I breathe a prayer, a mother's prayer

I will myself a Teflon mom to be
Her germs slip off rather than stick to me
So then I may continue to be there
With water cool, my hand upon her hair

I breathe a prayer, a mother's prayer

An honor to hold back her tender curls
As she her stomach swiftly empties out
For in this moment, I am emptied, too
As my mother was for me, and hers for her

And on and on it goes, throughout all time
I feel the strength of Mama's hand in mine
Then in my weary state, I am renewed
With courage and new strength I am imbued

Years from now and in the hours wee
My daughter may then find herself to be
Washing the back of one so young and fair
And holding back her tender curls of hair

And though I may be gone or far away
I will be there with her that tiresome day
My voice of comfort echo in her head
To calm the voice of fear, the sense of dread

And on and on it goes throughout all time
I breathe a prayer, a mother's prayer for this sweet child of mine

To My Daughter, On Her First Day of Kindergarten

Sweet Marin,

There are so many things I want to say to you right now.  I've done it in bits and pieces over the past five years and increasingly over the past few days, but since it embarrasses you when I gush over you, I'll just do it in this letter and trust that it finds its way into your heart.

First of all, you are ready.  You know your letters, sounds, and numbers, of course, but that's not what I'm talking about here.  You know how to notice when a friend is feeling sad or scared and are quick with a hug and a sympathetic word.  I love the way you are able to come up with a story to identify with just about any situation someone is facing.  At the age of five, you are able to put yourself in someone else's shoes and then walk alongside them as a friend with encouragement and tenderness. That's a gift, sweet girl, so thank you for using it.  You know how to get excited about life and how to bring others along with you into that excitement.

I think you know how very loved you are and how crazy I am about you.

There are also some things you probably don't know.  You don't know that I've been sneaking into your room at night when you're asleep and praying over you.  You don't know that I even prayed over your new school clothes as I took them from the dryer - imagining you in them and hoping you would feel safe and loved whatever you experience in them through the course of the coming days and months.  You don't know how scared I am to have so little control over what you will experience in this new setting - how you will be treated by those around you and how you will come to view yourself through those interactions, what you will hear and wonder about.  You don't know how absolutely terrified I am by the random school shootings that are happening across our nation and how I can barely breathe in the moments when I allow myself to consider the possibility that this type of terror could come to our neighborhood as well, how much I hate it that guns even exist.  [Side note for when you're older - if I had a time machine, I'd go back to the moment in time when someone set out to invent a gun, each time someone set out to do so, and I'd bring a warm batch of chocolate chips cookies and take that person to watch a sunset or listen to a symphony or dig their toes into the sand.]  You can't know how very proud I am of the person that you are and the raw emotions that mothers experience as their children experience them.  It's almost like E.T. and Elliott, another thing you don't yet know about. You don't know how desperately I want to really know you and be let into your world, how much I will really want to know when I ask you about what happened that day at school.  You don't know how deeply I am going to miss you every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, and how excited I am going to be to see your precious face again at the end of each day.  How I am going to long for the school holidays to roll around so I can have you with me again to run mundane errands and talk my ear off all day long with your wonderful ideas and scientific perspective on life.  How I am going to ache a little bit inside when I realize there is silence where your beautiful singing used to resound.  How I may even begin to miss the trail of clothes scattered across the floor from all of your costume changes.

Finally, a few things I want you to know.

I want you to know that you are beautiful.  Of course, you know what we always say is the most important thing about people: the way they treat others.  You know that we don't dwell on outward appearances much and that we talk about how people don't get to choose how they look and how little that actually matters.  You know that we value your kindness and sharp mind and sensitivity and sense of humor a lot more than we value how you look, and for that reason you may not even know that we think you are beautiful.  You just haven't heard us say it very often.  But despite our best intentions, you are going to want to feel beautiful because that's something that everyone wants for themselves, and so I want you to know that you are.  And here's something that's just as important to know: everyone else is beautiful, too.  Every single person you will encounter at school and everywhere else you go is just so stinkin beautiful.  Not because of what they are wearing or because of how their skin looks or the shape of their nose or the style of their hair or the size of their waist, but because they are the only person God created that looks the way they do.  Isn't that beautiful?  Let me let you in on a little secret: if you can figure out how to be comfortable with yourself, you can teach others to see themselves as beautiful, too.  That's another good gift you can give to the world.

I want you to know that you are not alone.  However you are feeling, I can guarantee you there is someone else who is feeling that, too.  Sometimes people are mean and they don't feel beautiful and they don't act beautiful and they unleash a bunch of ugly onto those around them.  It's not always their fault - and in the case of children, probably rarely is - but their ugly actions and words will hurt you the same whether or not we understand their true source.  When people hurt us, we have a tendency to harden, to turn our collars up against the cold wind, to shield ourselves in whatever way we know how, to close ourselves off so that it won't hurt so much the next time.  Please don't do that, precious daughter. Please stay open to life and to love and to people and to friendships.  There is so much beauty and hope and love to be found, so seek those things out and remember who you are.

I want you to know that I love you just because you are you.  You seem like the kind of kid who will apply yourself and make good grades, and unfortunately you have inherited a perfectionistic streak from both your father and me.  But even if you make good grades and achieve and succeed, we won't love you because of those things.  We won't require that you continue to perform at the same level all of the time, and we won't love you any less if you succeed in unconventional ways instead of conventional ones.  We just love you.  The real you.  The one who cries for a super long time when you get hurt, the one who experiences every aspect of life with great intensity, the one who has a song in your heart and a gleam in your eye.  Please keep being you, sweet girl.  Be you when it's easy and you when it's hard.  Whether or not it makes you popular and whether or not it measures up to whatever measuring stick people will try to hold up to you along the way.  [To hell with the measuring sticks!]  Just be you and remember how very loved you are and will always be.  No matter what.

Happy first day of school, sweetheart!

Love,
Mama

If You See Something, Say Something

Yesterday I took all three of my kids to Trader Joe's for the first time.  Let me rephrase that.  Yesterday I took all three of my kids to the grocery store for the first time.  We've been to Target countless times, of course, but what with Marin's preschool schedule this past year and the fact that I am married to a man who LOVES to go to the grocery store for us (for real), we just haven't ever braved the aisles of any grocery store en masse.  Until yesterday.  And Trader Joe's of all places.  Always busy, and there are KID CARTS.  The last time I went was when Soren was a newborn and Marin was in preschool. We would drop Marin off, wrap Soren up in the Moby for his morning nap, and Parker and I would have a little face time while she rode in the cart.  We would roam the aisles for sometimes two hours just singing to each other and shopping and being silly.  It was really a blast.  

But this time there was no preschool, no Moby nap to be had, and no more of Parker riding happily in the cart since she is now a big girl.  So.  We had a little family meeting before we left for the store and it went a little something like this:

We are going to need some serious teamwork, guys.  This is our first time to do this all together, and Mama needs you to be awesome helpers.  Wouldn't it be sad if there was fussing and it was a total disaster and Mama had to cry like this [dramatic fake crying] because it was too hard?  Nodding all around.  Yes, that would be sad.  And there are kid carts.  So what's our best bet?  Do you girls want to walk next to my cart or would you like to drive your own carts?  Yes, Mom, of course we both need to have our own kid carts.  Okay.  So Soren will be in the carrier and I am going to need you girls to be totally amazing so that we can pull this off.  Are we ready for this?  Yes.  We've got this.

So off we went with full bellies and a long list of items.  And it. was. a. miracle.  The kids were FABULOUS, just as we had planned.  They loaded up those little red carts like pros.  They didn't argue (for more than a few tiny seconds) over who got to carry what in whose cart.  They said "excuse me" to other customers as we passed and didn't even run into the back of my legs as we went caravan style up and down every aisle.  They smiled and were charming and helped unload their carts for the cashier.  I mean, totally miraculous.

As we left with our stickers and a cart full of brown bags, I felt like I was the most amazing parent in the world.  Picture a mom walking slo-mo through the automatic doors, a baby strapped to her front, pushing a cart with a dress-clad little girl holding on to either side - everyone SMILING.  I could almost hear "We Are The Champions" playing in the background.  At that moment an older couple coming into the store approached us in the parking lot, and the woman said, "You have three lovely children. And you deserve a star today, mom."  I can now die happy because I have achieved ultimate success.

That lady could have smiled and walked past us without saying anything.  But, in the wisdom of her years, she recognized that I had just completed a feat of strength and patience.  She, too, could hear the song playing as we exited the store.  So she took the trouble to totally make my day by acknowledging that I had been victorious.  It was so nice.  It was nice for me to hear, and it was nice for my children to be complimented on their grand behavior.  I was able to tell them, once we were all strapped into our seats and driving home, that they had made other people's hearts feel cozy by choosing good attitudes, by being kind to one another instead of arguing, by sharing their smiles in the store and by being so helpful to me.  It was one of those moments I will cherish forever because we were all feeling so darn proud of ourselves.

Here's the thing.  My first trip with all three kiddos to Trader Joe's was a success story.  But I can just about guarantee that we will have other days when not everyone decides to choose a good attitude and to share their smiles.  There will be days when I'm too tired to be as Pollyanna as is sometimes required to get everyone on the same page and usher them through the store without a hitch.  There will be days when the heartbreak of not getting to select the items for their carts will be too much and the tears will flow freely and loudly.  There will be days when the girls are fighting or someone's hungry or someone's shoes don't feel right and I will be rammed in the back of the legs with those little red carts as we navigate those crowded aisles.  There will be days when our parking lot theme song will be "I Will Survive" and even then it will be more of a farfetched hope than an anthem.  

And on those days, I don't expect that any sweet old ladies will be telling me my children are lovely or that I deserve a star.  But it will be those days that I will need a word of encouragement more than I did yesterday.  So here's what I think would be great, fellow customers and people of the world:  If you see something, say something.  If you see a mom who seems to have it all together and whose kids are all acting like model children, say something.  It may look easy on the surface, but it is not easy.  It's like what they say about ducks -  they appear from above the water to be gliding along smoothly but are paddling like hell below the water to make it happen.  That's pretty much how it is for us moms.  And that's why it's so very nice for you to take a moment and applaud our efforts.  You never know how much your encouragement will mean to the paddler.  

On the flip side, if you see a mom who is on the brink of tears, whose child is LOSING IT because she won't cave and buy that dumb toy or candy in the checkout lane (or because they're fighting or someone's hungry or someone's shoes don't feel right) say something.  Don't give advice here, just encourage.  I think something along the lines of, "I've been there, and you're doing great" would be appropriate.  I don't know.  Maybe some moms will feel like decking you for butting in.  But I'm guessing most would welcome at the very least a smile instead of a judgmental glare.  We're doing our best, people.  And our children really are charming and wonderful and OH HOW WE WISH YOU COULD SEE THEM WHEN THEY ARE ACTING LIKE IT instead of this small snippet of life you're privy to in the checkout lane.

If you see something, say something.  It will only take a moment, and your encouragement will echo for a very long time.  Paddle on.