“. . . Tell them you know the truth.
Ideas can’t be trapped in tiny bubbles.. . “
I’ve been stewing, a public school mamma with her boys bowed with the preparation and windup for and countdown to federally mandated, state administered standardized tests, looming next week.
So when I read this, well, it was deeply satisfying. Please click the link for the whole poem.
. . . because yoga pants are washable
. . . because the sun slides up quickly into the day
. . . because spring unfurls fast,
like this heart,
uncurling into warmth and light.
Last week, when I accepted Jill’s gift to my forties, I knew I needed to sit in it for awhile. As much as I was tempted to write a prescription for my birthday malaise in the form of a to do list, the hammered words reminded me that an open and whole heart has more to do with asking questions than ticking off an agenda.
And yet, and yet. . . If we are to live authentically, at some point our deepest intentions and values must meet the clock, the calendar, the wallet. The rhythm of our days plays out what is true on our lives, not what we wish to be true or say to be true. If I am going to head into this decade honestly living out vulnerability, bravery in love, creativity, peaceful presence, health, and growth in grace, that desire has implications not just for head and heart, but hands and feet.
This weekend, a few moments spent on my belly in the front yard gave me an inkling about how to wrap myself around this truth. We’d taken a Sabbath at home, to rest and be unhurried, to be outdoors together. Seeing our ajuga in full bloom, I’d gone inside for my camera, with my old friend the 50 mm 1.8 lens connected to it. The gorgeous purple blossoms grow only a few inches high, so to immerse myself in their royal richness, I flopped down on the new grass and the walkway.
I saw him as I pressed the shutter halfway down to focus. He was working that stand of flowers like nobody’s business, never hurried, but never completely still. And he was completely unconcerned about me, and my desire to take his picture.
There seem to be lessons on whole hearted practice on either side of the lens, if I tune in to them. The bee was about his business, undistracted as he pursued what he was there to do. And I got to bear witness because I was willing to be there. Willing to stop another task to go in and get the camera, willing to get down to where I needed to be to focus. Willing to accept the additional gift of capturing nature at work and not just pretty petals. And willing to be still, to be in the background of the action for the time it took.
I’m going to be considering what practices I’ll pursue to train the muscles of my whole heart. What repeated actions will help me grow in depth of presence, in undistracted industry, in creativity and creation, in love and strength? How do I guard from those actions becoming ends in themselves?
Really, it comes down to my insides matching my outsides.
Or another way of putting it, how do I keep my belly on the ground but my finger on the shutter?
More to come. . .
Yesterday was my fortieth birthday. This perhaps explains my restlessness and vague melancholy over the last few weeks. A quiet alarm at four decades gone, mingled with frustration that at forty years into life, almost a dozen into mothering, I’m still skinning my knees and asking elementary questions and chasing my tail around some of the same trees.
I’m finding that a milestone birthday is acting on me a lot like New Year’s Day or the beginning of the school year. There is the urge to make a list and DO, DO, DO. An exercise schedule, a writing schedule. Whipping into shape everything within range of busy hands. Inside my chest there’s an inner coach who looks a lot like me, whistle around her neck, barking, “Let’s make something HAPPEN people.”
But there’s another voice, softer but more insistent, saying that this is not the way, this is not what to make of these emotional and reflective days. Last week I dove again into the humor and wisdom and relentless faith of Anne Lamott, who assured me that help is always on the way.
I’ve found it to be true.
Yesterday my friend Jill took me out for coffee for my birthday. Time with her is always gift, with good conversation and laughter and lots to think about afterward. Yesterday was no exception. It helps that she shares my ambivalence about this particular number of candles on the birthday cake, and it helps that she asks good questions of her life and is making peace with waiting for the answers to emerge.
When I unwrapped my birthday package from her, she gave me more than she planned to. She knew I loved the lockets Liz Lamoreux makes, with messages, reminders, precious words pounded into them. Her thoughtfulness in remembering something I’d mentioned in passing and tracking it down in the wonders of etsy touched this often-bruised heart.
But as I wore the locket yesterday, I knew she’d given me more than a token of our friendship. She had given me an answer to what to do with this moment in life that feels precipitous, that feels like a weighted new beginning. Or rather, the right question to ask.
Inside the old brass are the words “whole heart.” We’d watched Brene Brown’s TED talk together, and I’d felt stirring a desire for that kind of bravery, that really could give up the nursing of old hurts and insecurities and shame for the open-handedness of living vulnerable and free.
Jill’s gift has me taking a deep breath. In asking “What’s next, please?” I’m really asking, “What would it look like to live my forties with my whole heart?”
Love with my whole heart?
Mother with my whole heart?
Be daughter, sister, friend, with my whole heart?
Serve with my whole heart?
Create and write with my whole heart?
This is only a different way of asking the questions I’m always asking, about living the one-piece life. About how to be all real all here, looking and writing through the lens of a redemptive story without slapping a trite homily over pain and loss and grief. Remembering that faith requires, well, faith. Resisting the urge to jump to the “right” answers when what I need to do is to sit in the questions.
So I’m asking?
What does it look like to dwell in and live from, my whole heart?
After church on Sunday, a bright afternoon, and enough minutes until lunch for backyard play, then for balance gained and lost and a fall and a crack and tears. My husband sped off to the ER with our eleven year old’s broken right forearm iced, his face grey with pain.
It was nearly dark when they got back, with a splint and a sling and a promise of a cast, with pain medication and a shaky boy, just beginning to figure out all the things he would not be doing for the next month or so. I’d stayed home with our eight year old, coloring get well signs for his brother and cleaning the kitchen like our lives, like mending and healing and knitting together depended on it, prayers in our scrubbing. Coming in the door, weariness and waiting and seeing our child in pain was written on my husband’s face.
For a bad and painful break, the prognosis is good. No surgery, cast when the swelling goes down, guarding the splint, managing the pain. The last couple of days have been strange, foggy with broken sleep, edges blurred with sympathy for our busy, independent son, so still and sedentary, so touchingly needing us to be his second hand.
And yet there have been a few moments of sharp clarity born out of that need. Yesterday morning, I knelt before Joshua to help him put on his socks, as he maneuvered with sling and good hand braced on the edge of the bed. I worked the white cotton over his foot and glanced up into his face, straight into his clear, honest eyes. I was undone. Time swirled and doubled back on itself in ribbon-candy curls as I smiled at him. I wondered how many thousands of times I’d helped him on with socks and shoes, when he was small and those feet were soft and plump. I wondered when the last time was. And there on the floor, I was so sorry for his pain and for the month of wrestling through the ordinary that lies ahead for him, but so profoundly grateful to have this moment of caring for him, not made indistinct by the seemingly endless repetition of the toddler years. As he waited for his socks and his Nikes, as he smiled back and thanked me, I was granted that pause of real, deep seeing that serving another gives.
This is my boy, over half grown now, dear and funny, kind and bright. He is training up for eating us out of house and home. Those feet I socked and shod are almost the same size as mine. I can almost feel him growing in his sleep, like am electric hum in the air of the night house. In his daylight calm and competence the baby and toddler he was are like photographs and dreams.
The truth of it is that I’m sometimes nostalgic for those days, for chubby knees and time measured out with snacks and blown bubbles and naptime. The other truth is that those days were often exhausting and isolating and as messy and conflicted as they were beautiful. I remind myself that though they seemed fleeting, I was very present in them. The haze that surrounds them now is as much a product of sleep deprivation as a mom who was sometimes too focused on what was next.
The out-of-time moment of sweeping love and joy in my son that I experienced yesterday morning was not the product of a dogged determination to be fully blissfully present to him. When I knelt to put on those socks, I was exhausted and needing a shower, and just doing the next good thing that needed doing. The breath of clarity and grace, the real vision, came as all gift. There was a flash of connection, of present and past, a pair of smiling faces. Then, before I knew it, he was standing up, moving on.
All gift. I open my hands.
This Valentine’s Day, I’m sharing a repost from last year. It’s interesting, reading my own words a year later, to see how differently our hearts can be impressed by the same event. Last year this post was all about showing up, about being imperfect and being there anyway. Good words, good lessons I’m still learning. But as I read it today, it seems to me that there’s a pretty good definition of love in there too, that my son showed me in that fluorescent gym. To be seen, to be known, and called and claimed and named and held anyway, in all your clumsy and silly and sad and true– that is love.
It’s Valentine’s Day and I’m in a gym full of second graders, and they’re shrilling and spinning in anticipation of the cookies and cupcakes and candy hearts they know are waiting. And I’m behind that black box, behind that lens trained on my own seven year old as he steps and shuffles with his friends, behind that magic machine that is my shield and my pass in these situations.
And then they want the parents to join their kids for the Electric Slide.
I know, I know, it is the easiest of dances, the staple of wedding receptions, but whatever kind of coordination or grace or alchemy that lets you look at what someone else’s hands and feet are doing, and do it too, well, I don’t have that. I try to watch the teacher nearest me and copy his steps, and let me tell you, he has some serious moves on this polished floor and I am really really bad. I go left as the group shifts right, forward to their back, and I am in a time machine back to my own awkward school days and is that a spotlight?
But somehow I hear that voice I too often ignore. “It’s not about you.”
And what do you know? It isn’t.
It is about this seven year old guy beside me, in his tie dyed t shirt, smiling up at me. He’s just happy I’m here. And I laugh and shrug and do my best and since life is not a movie, I continue to dance badly to the end. And then it is time for the parents to leave their dancing kids and go set up the sugar-fest in the classroom, fill the plates on the desks with the Valentine boxes, ready to be stuffed with superheroes and Pokemon and princesses.
Behind me I hear Sam, nudging one of his buddies, “Hey, that’s my mom!”
What a Valentine for me, to hear the heart of the Father in the words of my child! Still in the afterglow of my clumsiness, my near-gracelessness, he names me and claims me. He singles me out as his. The only steps he remembers are the ones that carried me down the hall and in the door to be with him, to see his friends, to pass out pretzels and pour juice and be present.
There is a celebration just because I showed up. I’m so glad I didn’t miss it, looking down at my toes.
I thought I’d follow up my read aloud post with a list of some of the many books we’ve shared as a family, and a few more words on the approach we’ve taken to choosing what we read.
Some parents who are passionate about reading to their kids have strong feelings about choosing only the best of literature to read aloud. I get this. Reading aloud is a great investment of time and energy, and a compelling argument can be made for only expending those resources on what will teach and edify. However, I have discovered that I treat our read-aloud choices a lot like I treat our diet. The backbone of our home library are books with solid “nutritional” value– powerful language, meaningful themes and strong characters. And then there are the occasional treats, the Junie B Jones that makes us laugh so hard we can’t see the page, or the Bad Kitty book brought home from the library and read dramatically, with a wary eye toward our own sleeping feline.
These are the bit of chocolate now and then, and they are fun.
These kinds of decisions, about what to read and how to regulate the tone of the overall “book diet” are as individual as so many other family choices. My boys are fine with the suspense in the 39 Clues books and the danger of the Wingfeather saga, but they do not want me to read them a book where a beloved dog (or other animal) dies at the end.
We have begun books only to abandon them, unfinished, when we were not engaged with story or characters. We’ve found wonderful surprises in books we did not expect to like, and discovered that a book can be great devoured alone but a lackluster read aloud. And in times of stress or sadness, there are a few books we return to and read aloud again for the comforting atmosphere they create.
I wish I’d kept a list of every read aloud we’ve enjoyed, with the boys’ reviews, but all I have are our own bookshelves and some jotted titles of the many library books we’ve enjoyed. Below is my list, but I’m always looking for our next great shared story.
This list is clearly incomplete, (picture me slapping my forehead repeatedly over the rest of the day, remembering titles I’ve not included), and in no particular order. When a book is the first of several, we have usually read the whole series, with the exception of Harry Potter and the 39 Clues, which the boys have gone on to complete on their own. Other books the boys have loved (I’m looking at your blue spines, Hardy Boys) do not make stellar read-alouds.
But these are the ones that have stayed with me, that rise with their talking mice and mysterious doors and wooded paths and windswept prairies in my mind’s eye like old friends. But better even than these transporting images are the ones I’ve peered over their pages toward– my boys; faces, alive to story.
Happy reading!
I’m joining in wonderful Emerging Mummy Sarah’s Practices of Parenting Carnival today. Sarah has done a series on her own practices in the journey of mothering her “tinies.” She has been gracious and generous with her words, offering ideas that have worked for her in the dailiness of nourishing and nurturing. And now she has invited us to join in.
Of course I read to my babies, in this book-rich house, read Sandra Boynton and Dr. Seuss and Chicka Chicka Boom Boom. And with my preschool sons I delved into longer stories, pioneering the West with the Ingalls family and laughing and groaning as Ramona filled the sink with toothpaste. But inwardly, without thinking about it very much, I thought of reading as something that I’d hand off to my kids; when my boys learned to read on their own, that’s how reading would happen for them in our house.
But then I read Jim Trelease’s Read Aloud Handbook, and my vision of sharing books was changed forever. I was wowed by Trelease’s research that showed how reading aloud to our children, and continuing to read aloud long after they become fluent readers themselves. deepens and enhances their love for books and family connection. Spending time and energy reading together communicates louder than any lecture the value and strength of reading.
But what wins my heart, over and over, what keeps me searching for the next read aloud and opening it in the pre-dawn before school and over the emptied plates after supper is not the compelling research. It’s not even that I now have two boys who are ardent readers, though I credit our many read-aloud hours for their love of books.
There is power in sharing story, in the immediacy in sharing it at the same time. We laugh at humor and absurdity and root for the characters we love. We wait together, breath held, to resolve cliffhangers. They’ve had to wait for me to pull it together, overcome by the emotion of a passage. I’ve stretched myself, sometimes at the end of a tiring day, to bring a tale to them with all the voices and inflection and passion it deserves. And always, always, it gives back more energy than it takes.
Keeping reading aloud together as part of our family time keeps us discovering forgotten places together, keeps us all vicariously experiencing some of the same adventures and dreaming the same dreams. As my boys, now eight and eleven, grow into more discovery of themselves, their Maker and Creation, we have as companions characters who are doing the same, characters we get to know alongside one another.
Finally, reading aloud together slows us down. It is gloriously inefficient, and the better we are at it, the longer the dishes sit in the evening, and the longer, in the summer, we sprawl in pajamas into the mid-morning hours. It cannot be hurried, and I’ve come to value those things that cannot be hurried. As it slows time to the cadence of language and the turn of a page, this simple, simple practice deepens it too. We are all here, in the moments we share in the grip of a good story, and we keep coming back for more.
That’s the thing about opening up your smallest, darkest, most fearful places– wrench open the painted-shut window, force the rusted hinges to work and everyone who peers in can see your quaking misgivings and old old hurts. But air comes in, too, and light, and through my comment box and the lips of my family, love.
So it was that you were with me in the vinyl chair, with the projected letters and the tests and numbers. My kind and compassionate doctor looked and looked again, and calculated, and asked questions and made notes, and said, “We’re going to get everything for you we can.” He never once made me feel either a curiosity or a failure. I left with my prescription and weary eyes I could close while John drove me home.
Along with the relief that flooded in was the old familiar sadness, that my condition just does not get better, that the best we can do is about the same as my current prescription, and that healing for me is a weaving of acceptance of my situation and a matrix of magnifiers and coping mechanisms.
But the thing about telling your truth, as plain as you can, and letting light and love into the dark places you’ve given up hiding or trying to pretend away, is that even in the sadness, I’m not alone. I, who struggle to see, am seen. By my Maker, my husband, my children and those friends close-up and far off, and that recognition makes all the difference.
I have an exam tomorrow. I’ve taken this exam over and over, since I was five years old. The test administrators have peered at me from their squeaky rolling stools, and their faces change, but the questions are always the same, the material never alters. . .
and yet this is a test I feel I always fail.
Tomorrow, long overdue, I go for my eye exam.
The condition that rendered me legally blind is ocular albinism. Before I carried my own name I carried it, twisted and broken in my optic nerve even in the sightless semidarkness of the womb.
The sort I have is a double-recessive trait. There is nothing of blame or censure that my parents both carried this gene, unknowing. And thus I have borne two eagle-eyed sons. For this I am grateful.
Most of the time I am entirely rational about my condition. I hold my books and needlework close to my bifocaled face. I enlarge font sizes and bless the late Steve Jobs for the 27 inch screen of this imac. On a deeper spiritual level I have come to even feel gratitude in how my visual limitations have shaped our family life, landing us in a home-centric, wide-margin existence. I experience wonder and worship when I cannot account for the images my camera and I produce.
But the moments I spend in that exam chair, when the lights are dimmed and the spotlight shines on that chart I’ve struggled to read since I learned the alphabet itself, these ordinary truths of our life, the reassurances of both my own mind and my loving, servant-hearted husband, fall away. The despair of never having accurate answers to what lies in the hazy distance, and the panic as I try to detect acuity between choices of new lenses make me again that bewildered kindergarten girl, a thousand stories in her head but unable to recognize her teacher’s face across the room.
In those moments I am flooded with all the images I’ll never see clearly, the soccer practices and piano lessons I’m never going to drive our sons to, the Saturdays consumed by errands and what will be my lifelong dependence on others. I imagine resentment my beloveds do not feel, myself a burden hung heavy on their freer lives.
But in the morning, in the creak of the vinyl chair and all my guesses and wrong answers, I’m going to try to remember that this is always the lie– that our particular brand of brokenness makes us unlovable. That without our defects and flaws we would somehow be more worthy.
I can’t see those little letters, all the way across the room. But I can see John’s smile over our morning coffee cups, Sam’s art and Joshua’s wide, earnest eyes. I can see the mist fly up at the base of the waterfall, and the velvet of moss carpeting a fallen tree. I can see the path of my life beyond that dim chair and a slip of paper with a set of numbers. Those aren’t me. But the wide world the Maker has given and the love lavished on me help me remember who and Whose I am.
And those are the notes I need to be studying, to prepare for my test tomorrow.
