The Present of Presence and the Electric Slide

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.

• The Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder
• The Penderwicks and sequels
• Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH
• the Ramona books
• the Henry Huggins books
• Redwall
• The Wingfeather Saga
• The Mysterious Benedict Society
• The Cricket in Times Square
• 100 Cupboards
• Caddie Woodlawn
• The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe
• Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
• The 39 Clues The Maze of Bones
• The Jesus Storybook Bible
• Melendy Family Series
• Gone Away Lake
• Trixie Beldon and the Secret of the Mansion
• Masterpiece
• The Invention of Hugo Cabret
• The Incorrigible Children of Asheton Place 
• The Tale of Despereaux

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!

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.

In the afternoon on the last day of 2011, I cleared out a corner of our foyer that was a little tired. I vacuumed the herd of dust bunnies that had collected around the bins where we keep our scarves and gloves, barely touched this mild winter. I took down most of what hung on the walls, on their freshness placed Christmas gifts: the quilt square our niece made from fabrics she collected or wore in her autumn in India, and a painting by one of our art room friends at Triune, given to me by John and the boys.  I put back up the photograph of the quilter I took at Hagood Mill. She’s no relation but her bent head and careful stitches feel like a page torn from my history. I re-framed my first Etsy purchase, from 2007, that profile that still pauses me, when I really look.

That is the way of January, isn’t it, though I’m late to add my voice? Holly and ivy are swept away and the sweeping feels right, making clear cool open spaces on which to project the months to come. I love the wide swath of the living room floor and the silvery winter windows, but what’s tugging at my sleeves in these weeks are the corners, the forgotten spaces in the house, in my life and heart and mind. How they can be dusty and shabby, cluttered with cast-offs or unexpected, curated spaces of care and beauty.

In my days I’m trying to find the pockets of time that slip away unheeded, but added together can be powerful, for making wholesome food from scratch, for caring for my body, for the sort of home management that doesn’t trumpet itself, but rather makes the relationships within the focus.  In those corners of found time, there is space for hospitality, creativity, better self-care and care for my loved ones.

In my heart I’ve emerged from the crucible of the holiday season, and from the very emotional and difficult year our family experienced in 2011. I’m trying to shine a light into the areas where I’ve reacted as opposed to responding. My unfortunate reactions often come out of the shadows of past hurts and resentments, stored and forgotten until they come snarling out of hiding when provoked. I’d like to open the windows and air out those spaces, and remind myself that deep breaths and time are great helpers to giving a loving response.

In my mind, the corners often feel overstuffed, boxes and bags spilling their contents everywhere. And yet I know that to ponder, to learn something fully, to reflect and then to write or make out of that reflection takes margin. I need more white space, more elbow room. MIT Professor Sherry Turkle said it this way:

“There really are important things you cannot think about unless it’s still and you’re only thinking about one thing at a time. There are just some things that are not amenable to being thought about in conjunction with 15 other things.”

In 2012, I want to think deeply about many of the seeds God planted in 2011. I want to read well, and consider well what I read. When I engage with an issue, I want to engage it with my whole self. And of course, when I listen to my children and my husband and my friends, I want to listen with my full presence. There is no way around it, that this has to mean less and more careful media consumption. Just as too much “inspiration” equals less actual making, too many ideas for me results in a jumbled muddle, with no clear conclusions or convictions. This is a step beyond only doing well one thing at a time. This is an admission that I need spaces in my mind to synthesize, to percolate, to delight, and to weave together.

Standing in my new corner, fingers on glass and paint and cloth, I know I want to feel more awe and wonder in 2012. I want to embrace the shape of the words “I don’t know” and “I’m not sure yet.”  I want to love the pause more than the need to blurt out a hurried word. I want to make peace with the fact that as I pour less in, many words and images will pass me by, but I want to trust that the ones I need will find me in the wide river of ideas and art.

This new year means a little more elbow room, and always the sifting of good and good and great and best. How is 2012 looking, from your corner?

Contrary to all appearances here on the blog, my word for 2012 is not “silent.” I’ve got some notes for new posts, and in keeping with January’s vibe, I’ve got some plans. But I’ve long ago accepted my head can only successfully hold and process so many things at once, and blogging hasn’t found a corner in the last couple of weeks.

Thanks to Ann’s Joy Dare, and my daily photo approach to Project Life, I’m still finding the true and the beautiful in the margins of these days, so even in the stillness here, I’m staying limber out there.

“Draw close. Hold hands. Life is short. God is good.”

                                    Jan Karon

Everything was created through Him;
nothing—not one thing!—
came into being without Him.
What came into existence was Life,
and the Life was Light to live by.
The Life-Light blazed out of the darkness;
the darkness couldn’t put it out.

John 1:3-5 The Message

Merry Christmas!

A rain of light, by Sam Kemp, age 8                                 

The house is wrapped in mist and fog this morning. It is far too warm for this short day, too warm for four days before Christmas. But I’ve moved out of planning and collecting and culling, and into setting my feet in this day, so I’ll do that, and leave off the wool socks. The cold will come with the new year.

Yesterday my eight year old commandeered the camera on its tripod and shot frame after frame of the Christmas tree, moving the tripod lever up and down as he pressed the shutter. The result were ribbons of light, the trails of the colored Christmas bulbs, dragged glowing across time and motion. We gasped in delight at the strange yet beautiful images he made. And I was let into one of the compensations of my boys growing older at lightening speed: I don’t have to be the one who makes all the magic.

On another evening I sat in our sanctuary as two artists worked quietly. One played Christmas carols on a piano, notes dropping familiar and poignant into the dim room. Another worked on a canvas taller than he was, at the altar, lit from above, and in under an hour, working out color and light and darkness, painted Mary gazing lovingly at her newborn Jesus. All I had to do was show up.

In this season, in which my hands have surely been very busy, God has also slipped in, giving me gifts I only had to be present to receive. A meal brought in by friends and an evening of laughter. Music poured out over our family as we opened our ears wide. Light and dark in paint and pixels. Boys’ helping hands in the kitchen. Friends north of here offering table and bed and welcome. All gifts, and they keep coming.

As the last few days of anticipation unfold, may you receive comfort and joy from the Giver of all good gifts.Regular home work goes on, but I am shedding extra things from all my lists, stilling my doing hands to rest and to receive.

Somehow it always catches me by surprise, the way the days shorten so quickly. This afternoon I found myself, peering around like a mole in my dim kitchen at four thirty.  But we’ve lit one more candle on the wreath this week, predicting morelight and life coming.

It has been quiet here at the blog, while my hands have been busy making things I can’t share here, that are steadily being wrapped and tucked beneath the tree.  There’s been Christmas music and the creak of a needle, slipping in and out of tightly stretched fabric. And when the work is laid aside, there have been big, full moons and the muted kaleidoscope of the colored lights I’m glad we said yes to, soft on the ceiling.

For the first time ever, I shared my heart from the pulpit of our church home, encouraged us to sing of a true Christmas, of a God with us Whose story is told over and over in acts of love. I watched my older boy play an angel in that place a week later, and marveled at the gift of a place where we know and are known. The mornings and evenings we’ve spent there have reawakened my wonder in Advent.

As the boys’ school break draws closer, I am hopefully moving from a place of preparation to presence. This means letting go of many things, including my own vision of a perfect me, who has made it all and decorated it all and baked it all and, yes, prayed and contemplated and proclaimed it all. Even adding together the two women I am in these December days, you can’t come up with one like that!  There’s just me, a little more in touch with her limitations that usual.

But creeping in, even in the low light of these short days, is something better than perfection, something new this year. It is a sense of enough-ness, and, as the fingers loosen and let go, a breath of freedom instead of failure. Soup and bread, candles and greenery, peace and hope. The light is coming, and the darkness will not overcome it.