Battle Scars

February 20, 2013 By

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I walked to the ring with a swagger, silk brushing against my skin as my ego staggered before me, a blur of crowd voices and cigarettes and the smell of sweat.  Before me fighters had come and gone, but this one was mine.

Let’s do this life thing because I am young and I am fierce.  

But I got sucker punched in the gut, and kicked in the face, and a string of a hits I didn’t expect.  I tried to remember all the training and practice rounds, and yet my coach’s words were grey and hazy.  All I could see coming was a left hook, a little too late it seems, and I found myself falling and slipping and heading for the mat with greasy sweat streaming from my pores. I lay face down while the crowds grew, my left eye swollen shut and my chest managing to heave in and out despite the blows.  I shut my eyes hard.

Please Lord, no.  I can’t bear to lose.

But the referee declared it, and the victor was announced, and all I could do was lay there in all that deafening noise.  The mouthpiece held my lips ajar and I could hear my own labored breaths.  I couldn’t break the pattern, for my body was surviving on oxygen alone.  I stared at the side of the ring for a long while, unable to move. My eyelids shut like curtains and I thought it was over.

I’d failed so miserably, and I’ll never be able to stand again.

But after a while I drew my legs close. I turned and raised up my back like a Halloween cat and hoisted myself to a knee.  I felt the drool and sweat and blood dripping, and when I raised my head I just saw the janitor in the stands, sweeping cigarette butts and popcorn kernels and picking up sticky beer cans.  We were alone, he and I, nothing but leftover smoke and spoils. I managed to stand on my shaky knees.  Fearful of the damage that had been caused.  Of the wounds that remained.

But somehow, miraculously, my legs found their footing.  I planted my feet apart and I raised my head.  I was alive and tall, and tears mixed with sweat as I raised my right arm above my head. The janitor stopped his sweeping and stared at the display, the loser standing in the middle of the ring, one arm raised, fist-pumping the sky with a crooked, bleeding smile.

I might have broken lips and battle scars.  I may nurse bruises and broken bones.  And yet I rose.  I stood.  I won.

It’s not the one who shows off for the crowds, or who drinks champagne at midnight, or who gets to display the trophy that counts.  It’s the one who rises, and regains footing, and manages to lift their head.  It’s the ability to make it out alive and fist-pump the dirty, rotten air.

This fight did not define me.  It did not break me.  And through the tears I walked off the rink, and past the janitor, who had laid down his broom.  He clapped, and I smiled, and I knew I wasn’t ruined.

Victory, as it turned out, was mine. 

—

Tough

Filed Under: Inspirational, My life, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,

Life isn’t fair

December 28, 2012 By

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Sometimes life’s a turncoat. If I had a sling shot I’d just shoot life right between the eyes because I’m David and small and yet this big old Goliath-life barges around like a bully.  I might have little value in this world but I’m a fighter, so someone please hand me a rock because my hands are shaking and I need to throw something.  Patience is a virtue, the Bible says.  It also says the meek inherit the earth and all kinds of other proverbs that are right and true but I’m so mad I could spit. Because the wicked win and the good folks lose and there is nothing I hate more than losing.

I’m not sure where I get the notion that fairness is a virtue, that we should all be getting halfzies and year-end bonuses and that our lives should always bear fruit.  Sometimes we water and tend and earn and then life just rips the apple from our hands before it touches our lips.  We lay down our life and praise Jesus and make tuna casseroles.  We light candles and light up the room and nurse our babies in the thin lamp of morning. We make love and war and fight for what’s right but in the end life turns on you like a liar.  Children are shot.  Marriages crumble.  Cancer invades.

So excuse me, patience, but you are weak and all I want to do is throw hard. 

In Psalm 73, Asaph believed that God surely loved the people of Israel.  But how come they were all sitting around starving and hurting while the wicked suffered no pain? Why are the bodies of the shooters and the sinners and the money launderers strong and well fed and immune from trouble when mommas are losing their babies to sick-headed teenagers with guns?  Why are some women abused and raped and the men get to drink whiskey and disappear? For the wicked do not suffer as other men do.  Asaph tells God, “Take a good look! This is what the wicked are like, those who always have it so easy and get richer and richer” as if God’s busy taking out the trash and can’t see that Donald Trump is eating caviar while the poor kid from Detroit has to sell crack to feed his own brothers. I could feel Asaph’s hand clasp around the rock.

Life is so not fair.

Asaph said that if he were to be honest and publicize his thoughts – if he were to admit that his own feet almost stumbled and he was envious of the wicked and that his “insides felt sharp pain” at this obvious disparity, that he would have betrayed his flock.  And yet we have the benefit of reading his blog entry from thousands of years ago where he wrestled with the same questions we are facing about fairness and justice and why bad things happen to good people.

But then, Asaph entered into God’s temple, and “understood the destiny of the wicked.”  It’s hard to explain this feeling, that God holds our right hand. That His presence is comforting and earthy pain isn’t forever.  “But as for me,” Asaph says, “God’s presence is all I need.  I have made the sovereign Lord my shelter.”  And just like that the grip is loosened.  The rock falls.  And fairness becomes just a whistling in the wind, insignificant and transitory.

Fairness is never guaranteed.  If you pray and give money to the poor and eat your vegetables, things should work out like magic and sparkles and you’d end up in castles with weddings.  At least that’s what my daughter thinks.  And yet it’s not.  Everywhere I look I’m struck with the unfairness of things.  People who did nothing wrong are struck with fate.  Hit by death.  Ravished with cancer.  Eaten away by evil and left broken and lost with shattered hearts and tear-stained faces.  It seems like the bad get the gold and the good are left with sheet metal.

And yet in the middle of the rubble, we rise.  We step over piles of hurt and pain and heartache, and through our shrieks of loss we keep on moving.  We drop our rocks and loosen our anger and instead cling to the hand of the Father.  Mother Teresa once said that “we cannot do great things on this earth, only small things with great love.”

Life isn’t fair.  Love anyway.

—

photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/toolmantim/3308320306/sizes/m/in/photostream/

Filed Under: Inspirational, Love, My life, Religion, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,

The man who saved the world

December 15, 2012 By

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News flash: some people smell.  They are dirty and have bad yellow rotten teeth and are downright creepy.  There is mental illness and instability and greed and lust and all kinds of nasty in the world.  People hurt.  People harm.  People leave damage in their wake.  Others cover up their scent by brushing their teeth and shopping at Nordstrom.  But on some level and in different ways, we all have dark sins raging.  We fail to trust and wait and submit. We are told to give up all our wealth and follow Jesus, and yet we balk and twitch.  No Superbowl Sunday?  Nuh-uh.  Crazy fool.

Even way back in Jesus’ day, there were men lying in fields who didn’t choose to lay with their wives and bounce children on their knees like respectable people.  They smelled the same as sheep because they lived with them.  They never cleaned behind their ears or washed out their mouths with soap and chose a dirty profession like animal wrangling over jail to escape the reality of doom that befell them in the real world.  There are always broken people that don’t fit well in the real world.

These people.  These shepherds.  These men without hope and women who sold their bodies and slaves who bore deep red marks of shame?

Jesus came for them.  On a dark night thousands of years ago, he came.  Jesus came for the f*#k-ups. 

Don’t be fooled that you have some sort of special place in line.  That by churching it up and having monogrammed napkins you earned a place.  You are just one of these dirty huddled masses.  God looks at the soul not the skin, so you can skip brushing your hair for Christmas Eve Service because it doesn’t much matter in the long run. Jesus wasn’t born in Upper-Middle-Class Suburbia, in a garden tub surrounded by the glow of an Orange-Vanilla Yankee candle.  I think it’s harder for us middle-class, brushing-teeth types to fall on our knees.  To drop it all and follow.  To hear the heavenly chorus.  We have surround sound, and microwaves, and our hearts are too plugged up to ache.  We have pills for that these days.

Shepherds didn’t ask for Jesus.  They didn’t pay for tickets.  They certainly didn’t earn the right to see him face-to-face.  And yet as they were lying by a smoking fire in the middle of nowhere, angels appeared.  Legions of them shrouded in golden light.  And these dirty travelers?  These jail dodgers and broken hearts? They dropped everything and ran to the child.  They followed the brilliant light to feel peace in the mere shadow of the prince.

Jesus came for the blind and deaf and weak.  The man who hates himself and loathes what he has done and feels inadequate with his life.  The screwed-up mess of a woman who is ripped and addicted and empty.  Jesus came in the night, piercing through clothes and expensive perfume and black mascara straight to broken, aching hearts.  He came for you.  And all at once, it all falls away.  A calm beyond words.  A peace beyond understanding.  The wings of angels cover, and you know.  Sweet Jesus.  There in the street and in the wallpapered hospital room and in the bathroom stall.  He comes to you where you are, smelly or not.

We don’t deserve such love.  And yet God reaches to the farthest corners of the world for us.  There is no field dark enough or prison wall thick enough.  He peers into the very essence of death and pulls out life.  All we have to do is leave the old and follow.  The light is blinding.  The angels are calling.  Jesus is whispering in the night, in dreams and visions and is saying our name right there in front of our bloody faces.  He is born!  Come, and follow.

Merry Christmas.  From one f*#k-up to another.  

—

photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/khrawlings/3805370725/sizes/m/in/photostream/

Filed Under: My life, Religion, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,

Rose-colored dreams

November 5, 2012 By

Sometimes I dream about silly things, meaningless combinations of people and daily routines and journeys to nowhere.  It’s like my brain can’t handle all the data and throws it together in perverted ways, going shopping for shoes while eating broccoli and meeting my husband for drinks without wearing pants.

Occasionally there is a peace that washes over my soul like blue waves.  I wake up softly, like on the shores of Maine, and flip over on the pillow with a sigh.  I thank God for coffee and warmth and softness, and it’s these moments I reach for him, lying beside me, to feel his touch.  These dreams are rich in color.  Green soothes my tattered nerves and Red rises up live lava from the underbelly of some great unknown.  Yellow bursts from clouds and Dark Violet erupts from the blackest of darkness.   Color is opera and it flows through my subconscious like a rich aria, and all I can do is be present in it, wallowing inside, basking in the glory.

And then the nightmares come.  Images that stain and bleed and cut so deeply I wake up gasping for breath.  I can’t shed the pictures and I end up churning and weeping and praying for my brain to un-pixilate the data.  It’s after these restless nights I wake alone in an empty bed with a dusty heart.  I want to shake these dreams free, angry at myself for conjuring up unwelcome images.  And yet they are all part of me, the waking and the sleeping and the living and the dead.  The sweet and the wholesome and the angry burning fire that consumes.

They all have their place, really.  The silly and the rich and the dark are all woven together to show what our minds are thinking while our bodies rest.  I had a dream once that a bomb landed in our home but didn’t detonate, and I went to the attic and clung to what I loved the most.  The very next day my life totally changed.  The bomb went off.  Pieces scattered.  I saw it coming.

I often lay in bed at night, wanting to find truth.  I pray and I read and mull over the day.  But truth is never evident in the twilight.  It’s only revealed after my subconscious repeats the day’s pattern a few thousand times.  When my body stops moving long enough to let God in.  And in the morning, things are clearer.  Not always more beautiful, mind you, but clearer.  Like a direction has been forged.

I don’t like the terror: I want to cling to the aria.  And yet we don’t get to choose these things.  We dream what we need to see in order to process life around us, and this is one thing we can’t control.  It’s a lesson to pay more attention to what your internal soul is trying to say.  To allow God a venue.  To hear the hard stuff.  Because it’s through the hard stuff that you grow, and change, and become stronger.

Dreams are not always rose-colored glasses.  Sometimes the rose turns dead and glasses break and we wake up hurting.  And yet there is hope that someday in the future we’ll wake up in Maine again.  That love will be there to hold onto.  That in time, the colors will return in waves, and we’ll smile in the knowledge that our souls are happy.  That we listened to truth.  And we’ll all dream about going to dinner without any pants while eating asparagus ice cream.

Oh my dear soul.  Let the silly come. 

—

Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/zigazou76/6855067667/sizes/m/in/photostream/

Filed Under: Love, My life Tagged With: , , , , ,

Herd Jumpers

October 3, 2012 By

Humans are inherently pack animals.  I think it’s bred into our souls to walk together in groups.  Hillary Clinton says it takes a village to raise a child, and even Jesus chose twelve disciples to hang with.  We all huddle together as families, and units, and choose folks that think and eat and pray like we do.  When we stray too far from the herd, we are weak and vulnerable.  Wolves surround us and start closing in.  It’s safer to stay hunkered down in the middle.

And yet safe is boring.  So I start breaking free. 

I’m writing at (in)courage today, an amazing place where faith and community collide.  You can check out the full article HERE.

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photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/horiavarlan/4833864060/sizes/m/in/photostream/

Filed Under: Friendships, Inspirational, My life, Religion, Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,

Dirt

September 21, 2012 By

It’s so nice to see my children playing with dirt and plants and rocks and sticks.  This what I wanted when I had children – to see them use their little imaginations and explore the world around them. No television for my kids.  Nosiree.  Let ‘em get their hands dirty.

I see my daughter hauling the new Britta pitcher from our kitchen to the front porch to make chocolate smoothies. She’s loading it up with dirt and rocks.  Wait just a minute.

Then my son begins to yank off all the blooms from the plumeria with glee, just ripping and pulling and throwing them all around with wild abandon.  One after another he yanks at them like he’s some sort of flower executioner.  The louder I yell, the more he plucks.

“For the salad! It’s for the salad!” he screams. I can’t do anything about it now, their little heads lying on our front walk like corpses.

I turn around to see my daughter creating salsa with rosemary leaves and sticks, and she somehow weaseled her way past me into the kitchen again for the pottery barn dishes to use as place settings.  How do they do all this so fast?  Do they have superpowers?

“This has gone too far,” I say.  I walk over to remove the plates and I hear my daughter yelling for her brother to stop.  He has turned on the water hose and is spraying her down, trying to aim his hose into the pitcher she’s holding in her hands.  By now my kids are sopping wet and dirty from head to toe and that t-shirt from Janie and Jack is now stained and beyond repair.

I force both of them to the porch and run inside to get the broom, but now that the smoothies are done they most certainly must be tested.  Suddenly they are pouring the goopy mess into little cups, runny mud oozing over the sides and on our front porch to be dried into concrete.  These are so chocolaty, they say.  You simply must have one. I strip them both down and make them take baths before dinner.

After baths, they sit watching Arthur and I’m so thankful for television and quiet and warm bubble baths that make things right again.

It all sounded so good at the time.

 

A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood.

-Rachel Carson,

Filed Under: Motherhood, My life, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,

Letting Go

September 20, 2012 By

my daughter, now six

—-

Being a writer is hard.  I love the feeling late at night when I finish an essay, like I crossed a finish line or finally caught a breath of mountain air.  I like getting positive feedback as a balm to my itchy insecurities.  And when I sent my novel – my baby child that stole nights and weekends and so many rivers of tears– off to my editor, I was grateful when she said it’s good.  It’s actually really good.  And yet agents email me saying “it’s not you, it’s us” and “we are so sorry for this rather impersonal rejection.”  It’s a literary black hole, and you have to hold onto the railing to keep from being swept under.

I wish I could roll up my sleeves and go have a meeting with someone.  I wish I could just go make something happen. I’d curl my hair and put on my heels and pound my fist on a desk.  Progress will be made.  Things will crawl off dead center because I know how to make people jump.  I got a job once by making an appointment with the CEO.  Somehow a job was created.  A job I dreamed up in my head and convinced them they needed.

And yet here I sit alone, eating pistachios and drinking coffee and reading other people’s words.  I try and let writers inspire me, and be thankful for their successes, and try and feed on the natural creativity that follows.  I tell myself that God is listening and my blog followers are listening and these things matter.  And yet my mind wanders off to bad places – dark caves where I’m nothing and my life is insignificant and my words are just cheap imitations.

I think about that time six years ago, when I lay in a hospital bed staring at the ceiling tile.  After a prolonged labor and emergency c-section she was finally given to me, this beautiful gift from God that I didn’t deserve.  She was so white and angelic and I wouldn’t let her go.  But days after arriving home with my first-born they came to take me away, on some damn stretcher that held heart victims and dead people.  There were doctors and surgeons and tests.  There were re-incisions and pains and organs being shut down.  I just kept looking at that ceiling tile, thinking God just wouldn’t do this to me and he couldn’t possibly let me die.  Not now.  Not like this.  I’ve worked so hard, remember, Lord?  I make things happen. Are you listening up there?

I asked for the breast pump, my body filled with drugs and steroids and horrible chemicals of all types, and forced that milk out through excruciating tears as each surge of the pump caused my scarred and infected abdomen to seize.  But I was a fighter, and this wouldn’t break me.

See, God?  This is what you’d be saving. 

One night, a nurse came in.  She looked right through me. You need to let go, she said.  You need to let God to take over. I was angry.  I was pissed off at her accusations.  Who the hell are you, all up in my business about faith?  Have you not seen how hard I’ve worked?  Have you not seen my tears and heard my prayers? I am dying here, woman, with the fever and the infection and the chills.  Can’t you see that I’m trying?  Can’t you see I’ve not seen my baby’s face for weeks and this just isn’t working like I planned and I’m so damn sick of this place?  Can’t you see that I have this tube in my throat and my husband isn’t eating and it just never ceases?  Can’t you see that I don’t want to see a picture of her, my perfect three-week-old daughter, because it fills me with rage and sadness? Isn’t this enough?

You have to let it go.

I think about that night when I get this way.  When I think I’m in charge.  When I keep pounding away on the keyboard like the surging breast pump.  When the devil whispers in my ear that my words don’t matter and a book deal is the brass ring and all this is just a big vat of wasted time.

Stand back, Devil. 

It all matters.  My words matter.  My life matters.  Whether it’s typing or living or birthing or dying, we all just have to let go.  We aren’t the one making things happen. God makes things happen. We are just the instruments of his peace.

Filed Under: Inspirational, Motherhood, My life, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,

The Devil’s in the Details

September 17, 2012 By

My very wrinkled sheets, hanging on the line

—

There’s so much chatter about making time for God.  Devotionals for the busy mom surround us like a thick hazy fog.  If you don’t have time to dedicate toward [the reason for your entire existence], nataproblem.  God can be compartmentalized for the overworked and overscheduled.  The frazzled and hectic.  Five minutes a day is all it takes to develop a long-lasting relationship and to start to see real change in your life.  Come on!  It comes with an audio CD!

The fact is that middle-class Americans just aren’t that damn busy.  I seriously know zero women who are strapped to the plow, or spend their days scrubbing shirts on a washboard and stripping cotton.

The other day I began to run down “all I do around here,” like I’ve been keeping up some chore scorecard.  There’s the laundry and the dishes and the cleaning.  The errands and pick-up and dental appointments.  I change sheets and answer work calls and put kids to bed every single night.  I was practically seething at the vision of poor little ol me doing all those horrible, wretched things all by my lonesome.  What kind of husband leaves his wife at home and runs off to earn a solid paycheck leaving her with THIS? I most certainly needed to wait through eleven cars at Starbucks and flip through the sale rack at Nordstrom.  I was so busy I thought I’d check facebook, and make apple muffins, and wander around cyberspace reading poetry.  Don’t ask me to pray, or seek truth, or devote time to prayer.  Don’t ask me to be grateful for the small things.  A house to clean.  A family to love.  A warm bubble bath to melt into.  Don’t ask me to verbalize thanks for a life filled with joy and second chances.

To be honest, I’m just too busy.

It’s struck me lately that my priorities are in the wrong places.  I was reminded by Sandra Heska King that thirty bucks spent on your daughter’s flashy Hello Kitty shoes is a month of Compassion ministries wasted.  And every thirty minutes spent on trashy television is time we don’t dedicate to something that really matters.  Like prayer.  Not for unknown people.  Not for generalities like world peace.  This kind of fluff creates a void whereby your brain starts wondering if you’re out of Oregano: you are making meatballs for dinner, right?  Did you use up that leftover chicken?

I’m starting to think of my life as one big Hoarder’s episode.   I’m asking God to start cutting out the fluff.  I want to see the waste around me like trash on the side of the highway.  Only then can I start pruning, and weeding, and getting those thorns out of my fertile soil.   Only then will God reveal the relationship that’s meant to flourish.

I am ripped open with shame that my husband works so hard and never complains.   I want to avert my eyes to that woman who is wrapped up in her own selfishness.  I don’t deserve mercy. I don’t deserve clean sheets.  I don’t do anything but fill up my life with static and yet I feel blessings pour down like warm summer rain when I am so dirty and ugly and don’t deserve the washing.

We all have time.  But the devil’s in the details.

Today is what is laid out before us. Today I will love, and forgive, and spend time being grateful.  Today is the day I start working harder, and pushing farther, and complaining less.   Today, I purge.   And tomorrow, when the sun comes up and light begins to emerge on the horizon, I’ll shed this mask of shame.  I will breathe in the soft smell of the after-rain.

Filed Under: Inspirational, My life, Religion Tagged With: , , ,

A letter to my former self

September 14, 2012 By

Amanda,

This is so odd writing to you, a tall clunky fourteen-year-old, with the benefit of knowing your future.  Here I sit at 37 after going to law school and birthing babies and drinking an Americano with three raw sugars, all wise and sage and dolling out advice.

And yet nothing I say about treasuring the moment and “you are beautiful even though you don’t know it yet” and all other forms of motherly wisdom will mean much to you now. The reality for you is today, not tomorrow, and no one heeds advice to treasure today.

So I’ll say this instead:

(1) Lose the damn Coca-Cola shirt.  I know they’re popular.  I know you begged for one.  I know that everyone is wearing it.  Well girlfriend, trust me they are the dorkiest thing that hit that century and you don’t want pictures loitering around in thirty years that will forever be hitting facebook.  Wear it for pajamas, if you must.  But no photos.  Got it?

(2) What is facebook, you ask?  Well the minute you hear that word in your future you invest gobs of money into it and screw the haters.

(3) Please for the love of bacon don’t get bangs.  If you ignore me on this and do get the wretched things, don’t hairspray them up five layers.  Can’t you just leave them alone? And when you end up at a cosmetology school because “it’s cheaper” and “no one will notice,” trust me.  They will.  Use your best negotiation skills to get your hair cut at a real salon.

(4) And speaking of salons, you march in this very minute and tell your mother that home permanents are unacceptable.

(5) Save your jewelry.  All those fun James Avery pieces will forever be lost and you’ll miss them someday.  Put that jewelry in a safe.  I’m pointing my finger at you from your future.

(6) Letter jackets are irrelevant and useless and ugly.  When you hit college no one ever cares about them, so don’t stress about whether it’s a varsity jacket or whether it has patches.  Seriously – waste-o-time.

(7)  Read more classics. If you take nothing else away from this little lecture, you at least need to spend more time buried in literature.  Jane Eyre aside, you are behind, girl.  In the future you’ll have to play catch up, but then you’ll have kids and a mortgage and would rather be at the beach.  Read like a crazy person.

(8)  Someday your prince will come.  He will be tall and handsome and will take your breath away.  Take comfort in it.

(9) When you think your mother is old-fashioned and ridiculously strict and is the most evil and naive person on the planet, you will someday turn into her. So you might want to bring her flowers once in a while.  She ain’t that bad.

(10) You will soon have the urge to sew a Guess jeans label onto a pair of Levi’s in an attempt to fit in with the cool crowd.  You will be very impressed with yourself in coming up with this strategy and feel no one will notice.  But the label will come unraveled and cause a certain girl to point at you when you stand up in class and you’ll forever be stained with the humiliation of this day.  So spare yourself.  Just rock the Levi’s.

So yes, yes.  You’re secretly beautiful and you make really smart decisions moving forward.  Treasure today and soak in the youth and blahbitty blah.  But I swear you need to start plucking your eyebrows and quit wearing gobs of mascara.  And those warts on your legs?  Sister, they will go away.

What remains after the warts and the letter jacket is a really happy person all these years later.  You will go through trials of many kinds, but you’ll be prepared.  Thank God every day.  You’ll need it for tomorrow.

Love,

Mwah

Filed Under: Inspirational, My life Tagged With: , ,

Slaying the dragon

September 6, 2012 By

I think of death more than most people.  It’s only natural when you come face-to-face with it so often. My cardiologist can’t explain why my heart rate plummets dangerously low.  My oncologist tells me I’m in the clear now, ten years since melanoma cropped up like a nuclear bomb in my eyeball.  It’s been six years since I was in the hospital with a raging abdominal infection and two years since my heart flat-lined on the table.  I’m good, considering.  But the collateral damage that results is that I’m always pondering the blackness, leaving little notes for my children, and love letters to my husband.  I can’t ever leave enough, like I need to stockpile memories and words and tiny little charms.

Imagining my own death is hardly painful – I trust in God and believe there is a better place looming.  But I am utterly paralyzed when imagining it all happening in a different order, that the offspring might pass before the maker.  The thought of burying my own is too heavy a cross to bear, and I cannot place myself in the position of the one viewing the wreckage.

For whatever reason lately I keep stumbling across stories involving this particular tragedy. It’s not like I sought out to read them.  I was looking for a new website designer and found Anna See’s blog, An Inch of Gray, and was immersed in her story of her lost son, and grief, and hope.  A high school friend of mine died before she reached her 40th birthday and her mother still posts little thoughts on her facebook page.  I am spending the weekend with your boys. I miss your smile. And my dear writer friend Melanie Haney wrote a wonderful post on life and loss this week in her blog, A Frozen Moon.

I wonder if it’s good to think such horrid thoughts.  Maybe one just shouldn’t go around borrowing trouble.   And yet it seems as if this topic is pushed in front of me, against my best efforts and my own will.  The other night I was so consumed with sadness that I fell on my knees and begged God to never let this come to pass.  I am not as strong as Job: I would be unable to simply pick up the pieces.  I am not Abraham, who walked his own son to the alter.   I’m not Jesus who can say forgive them, Father, they know not what they do.  I am afraid I could never forgive.  I am so utterly weak.  I can do great things, but not this.  Please dear Lord not this.

So I tried thinking of happy things.  I loaded the dishwasher, read my daughter a book, cleared my head.  But last night I had fitful dreams.  I tossed and turned and kept saying no to some imaginary dragon.  I was fighting all night long and I can’t exactly remember why.  I woke up exhausted and overwhelmed.  Maybe I was fighting the devil himself.

Today, when I picked my son up from preschool, I swept him up in my arms and held him like he had been restored from death.  I stood right there in the little room, crowded in blocks and caterpillars and mothers busy picking up their children, and sobbed.  I peppered his cheeks with kisses and squeezed his body tight.  I walked out fast so the teachers wouldn’t notice, but I’m sure it was futile.  As I put him in the car, he looked at me and said simply, “I sorry, mama.”  Because his beautiful two-year-old heart is filled with compassion, and he didn’t understand my tears.  It’s okay, son.  I just love you so.

I wonder if Satan and God have been having a discussion about me, like they did with Job.  She’ll crumble like a house of cards.  She won’t stay faithful.  Without those two children, she’ll falter.  Let me test her, I beg you. I wonder if God would have faith in me, as he did in Job.

Because honestly, I just don’t know how God could see his only son suffer.  I would die in his place.  I would run and scream and not be able to bear the weight of it.  I would pull out my hair and rip my clothes and crumble to nothing. And yet I am weak, and can’t see the rising.  For in Christ there is always rising.  Through the blackness and cries of disbelief and anger and sorrow, there is light burning.  God knew of this.  It’s okay, son.  I just love you so.

Despite my own weaknesses, the rooster crowing thrice at dawn, and my utter ridiculous failures, I will rest in that hope.   I pray that certain things never come to pass, but I cannot guarantee such a future. My husband is the beam to which I’m tethered.  My children are the brightness and lightness of my very being.  But God is my strength, and without him it all crumbles like a deck of cards.

Tonight in my dreams, I’ll slay that dragon.  I’ll plant kisses and seeds of joy and fight fire with fire.  I will love my family through the tantrums and the screaming.  I’ll keep loving when we don’t speak and when life is all stressed out and messy.  I will show the devil that he cannot take away this love, no matter hard he tries.  So if it’s ever ripped from me too soon, I can say with my whole heart that I did enough.  I loved enough.

God is enough.

Filed Under: Inspirational, Love, Motherhood, My life, Religion Tagged With: , , ,

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