The holidays are over. Now we’re here
amidst the candle stubs and bits of ribbon.
Perhaps this stillness is a new career.
–“January Song”, Catherine Abbey Hodges

Little Brother and I kicked off our week by falling down the stairs together first thing Monday morning.

As is customary during catastrophes (from what I’ve heard), those milliseconds contain all the time in the world for a series of thoughts. Mine were: What the hell happened to my feet? They were JUST UNDERNEATH ME. What’s going to happen next? How long before we stop falling? Then we did stop, LB bumping his head against a stair and my left side bearing the brunt of the collision, flesh on wood, and both of us screaming. I was thrilled to find that, in a moment of utter fear, my arm didn’t betray its load and I didn’t drop my child. But at the same time…really? This is how we’re going to start the week?

This period of time–the weeks from just after Christmas until spring hints at its arrival in bursts of warm weather and extended sunniness–feel like a party where the booze has run out. So, not a party at all. While the Christmas season leaves me longer-tempered and more joyful than typical, the Advent-less time after it exacts that price in spades, my temper whittled down to almost nothing and darkness, real and imagined, nipping at my heels.

It’s rough. It feels like a wasteland. Every year, The Husband will turn to me or text me or call me with a familiar refrain: “San Diego? Let’s do it.” And I inform him that while he may wish they all could be California girls, he married one who will never be, #sorrynotsorry. I’ve always felt a need to pay for the goodnesses I receive–see the first three decades of my life and its enslavement to religion–that has lately turned more into an enjoyment of life’s million little transitions from dark to light, difficult to…well, less difficult, broken to healing. Our journey with The Kid has been my trial by fire into a grace that plays itself out in long days and dark nights that lead to glorious sunrises, cycles repeated over and over so that the gifts become the refrain, always returned to, always with a source who is faithful. That faithfulness is the song that seasons sing, the death that leads to life that is an echo of grace’s narrative.

Doesn’t make winter shorter, but it makes it more beautiful for damn sure.

Sure, this is the time of year that makes us victims of bad weather calls and colds, of chills and struggling to put kids in coats and pull carseat buckles shut. Everything takes longer. Everything feels harder. But…

It’s also the time of year that brought TK’s surgery, which has brought him here: this level-headed (literally) boy who’s coming into himself every day–even the gray ones. It brings runs that start out bitter, with only a tiny flame of warmth burning from within, but that flame grows outward and has fueled my two good races and a hundred smaller distances that all lead to the warmth of home. This time of year brought a hospital and a halo but also healing. It’s brought the church calendar’s Scripture passage to my favorite one, which is an echo of an earlier one, so that it was preached this past week–horizontal mic drop and all–so that the echoes and the returns home continue. These are the gifts of winter that keep me from writing off the gray and cold.

And then there’s this–and the fact that there’s even a word for it, this recognition of the beauties of winter, the incomparable closeness and warmth that it gives? It just feels like another gift, another refrain of grace through the chill.

I drop TK off at school one particularly cold morning, LB bundled in the backseat, and it’s one of those mornings that just feels too hard–a lifetime before 9 am. Who can say whether it’s too little sleep, or too low of temperatures, or all of the above and more, but I feel the tears revisit, the fears that echo through my heart over this whole parenting thing, the harsh words spoken and short fuse blown. But in the cold stillness I can hear better, and every echo of mine is answered with a louder echo of truth: I hurt him. I HEAL HIM. I mess up. I REDEEM. I suck. I SAVE. And as LB and I head down the road of leafless trees, I think about how much more I can see through the branches now. About how, later when LB and TK and I are on a walk and summit a hill, the view is so much clearer than it is when it’s warm outside, and the colors sprayed by the dipping sun are somehow more beautiful now than ever, stark and real.

Walking is big at our house right now.

Little Brother is, at fifteen months, just starting to get his sea legs–effectively shredding my theory that The Kid’s late-walking status was due only to his neck troubles. No, apparently we just have kids who walk late. And who have huge heads. Which, come to think of it, may be related…but the point is, LB is pushing his walker around like a flash, manhandling it around corners, and walking pretty steadily while holding one of our hands. Which means we’ve been racking up steps together, doing circles around the house. Then there’s TK, who at four has decided he’s pretty much over the stroller. So we’ve struck a deal: he sits in there for the duration of our walk (my exercise), and I release him from the cage when we return to our street, at which point he struts along the curb and glances back up at me every few seconds, grinning with pride at his newfound independence.

Which is what I’m finding much of motherhood to be: fostering this independence; preparing them to, one day, leave me and make it in the world on their own. My job is to carry them, then hold their hands, then walk beside them, then release them. All the while, I rue either their lack of independence–wishing they would do more on their own already–or their growing and natural separation from me. The ambivalence of parenthood, searing and constant.

We took the boys to childcare at the gym over the weekend, as we do every Saturday, where the ladies have known them for a year now. And every week for over a month now we’ve regaled them with TK’s latest trick: each visit replete with a new word or phrase, met with their cheering. (He has a way of racking up the fans.) This past weekend he strode into the room where only one other little girl was playing and plopped down at the Lego table, getting to work on a project only he could see. We told the ladies about his newest phrase–“Close the door”–and he dutifully repeated us, tossing the words over his shoulder with a grin. The women clapped, we beamed, and then that little bitch giggled and said, “But it doesn’t even sound like he’s saying that!”

Her innocence was a given of her age (though that didn’t stop me from dropkicking her out the window), but it ripped open that wound in my heart that never fully heals, fed as it is by present stings and future fears: my sensitivity to his feelings, to the certainty that he, like all children, will be made fun of, but with the added bonus of the challenges that could make him an easier target. “He’s working on it!” I said, smiling through gritted teeth, and The Husband and I walked outside, where he made a joke and I laughed along. Then I started my run, during which I cried and prayed and may have plotted the tiny girl’s demise.

“I’m laughin’ in the face of casualties and sorrow/For the first time, I’m thinkin’ past tomorrow,” sang the voice in my ear, and the parental ambivalence that dogs me, that has always felt like a call to split personalities or sign of mental disarray–it began to look more like health. Less like denial and more like truth. The idea that I can laugh through my tears struck me as my feet pounded the pavement and I began to wonder if this is actually the secret to it all: this confluence of emotions always nipping at my heels as I try to outrun it when maybe it’s time to jump in. To embrace it all–the sadness, the joy, the struggle, the victory–because this is what it is meant to look like: a thousand different facets of the same thing, each reflecting its own beam of light. I stopped threatening the little girl in my head and thought about where we are, where TK is, now compared to just weeks ago. The sorrow didn’t disappear, but I laughed anyway. And ran faster, in what felt like, finally, the right direction–the current pulling me where I’m meant to go.

Yesterday I walked out of the office on my last official day of working. I’ll be staying home for awhile, but not before I’ve watched them build out a new space for another dentist to fill. I’ve watched the walls go from bare to painted, the floors get stripped and redone, the walls move. I inhabited the space for a day, then said goodbye…and came home to my boys. I’m watching now as they grow and change and I prepare them to need me less every day, which seems like the craziest job in the world to have–especially considering I have no idea how to do it: this job of walking beside them that reminds me constantly of how much I am held.

I don’t remember how old I was when I first saw Star Wars: A New Hope. The film came out the year I was born, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t catch it at the theater. All I remember is an image from my early childhood, a procession of characters down an aisle toward a princess on our TV screen. Even though they didn’t give Chewie a medal, and despite (or maybe because of–I’m still deciding) the existence of Ewoks, I was hooked on these stories populated by characters who were at once iconic and accessible: a peerless warrior packaged as an insecure loner with daddy (and sister) issues. A princess who kicks ass. Or–perhaps my favorite, save old Chewie–a sarcastic smuggler with a beating heart buried underneath all that cynicism (and carbonite). I found something of myself in each of these people. Plus: the music.

felicityWhen I heard that J.J. Abrams would be directing Episode VII, I’m pretty sure I teared up. I’ve been a fan of his work since Felicity, a television drama so poignant that most of my college roommates refused to join my viewing parties because “it’s so hard to watch when she just embarrasses herself every week.” I nodded in faux agreement, knowing I would remain loyal as long as the show aired because I was Felicity: that awkward coed looking for love and coming up empty-handed so much of the time. As far as I was concerned, J.J. Abrams could do no wrong. (Even when Felicity time traveled. Ouch.)

My husband and I saw The Force Awakens on December 26–historically, the most depressing day of the year for me. We ventured to a new outdoor shopping center named First World Utopia or something–the kind of place with music gently playing from artfully hidden eco-speakers and fragrances wafting out of storefronts. It felt like a polished alter-ego of our lazy Sunday mornings in New York, when we’d hit our neighborhood bagel shop and watch a half-priced flick at the local theater. In this version, though, there was no poop on the sidewalk (that would be waiting for us at home with the kids); there were no panhandlers asking for change. All the grit had been scrubbed away in favor of Anthropologie, J Crew, and a theater with leather recliners. For us, two kids in and months devoid of movie outings, it was so much easier than real life.

I’d heard about the character of Finn prior to seeing the film and was already intrigued by the idea of a renegade Storm Trooper. What I didn’t expect was that we would actually witness his transformation on screen. I also didn’t expect him to be the character with whom I identified most.

Read the rest over at Mockingbird!

This is not a moment, it’s the movement.

I don’t want to be this way anymore.

I think this all the time; well, too much of the time, anyway. Every time I want to scream or punch a pillow or just run away more than I want to be where I am. Every time I feel something so deeply it’s uncomfortable. Every time I can’t shake a sad story I heard. Every time I feel the shortness of my temper, the fraying of my nerves, the lapping edges of my anxiety.

Then the temper or emotion or anxiety recedes and I realize that what I’m saying in those moments is that I don’t want to be me.

The only time I’d ever heard the phrase before recently was as profanity, or an expression of godless frustration at the least: Christ have mercy. Which made it jarring when I heard it for the first time as an expression of faith, of lament. I learned that it’s a part of the ancient liturgy, with which I’m still (and forever) becoming familiar–and it became beautiful. From profane to beautiful–not a bad journey.

So I’ve thought of it as I take my seat on the floor of the bathroom for another attempt at potty-training. I utter it silently, or not silently, as I check him and race him to the toilet and wait there beside him, tired of this stool, of this view; my urge for this to just be easier–even as he starts trying to talk in sentences. I always focus on the thing that’s not there, though.

I don’t want to be this way anymore.

The Husband and I head out for a date night that I’m giddy for like a kid: the symphony is performing the score to Home Alone while the movie plays on a screen. We go to dinner before, the last half of our drive brought to a crawling mess by traffic, and by the time we step into the restaurant we’re already late. We explain to the waiter that we’ll be quick, but apparently the kitchen doesn’t accept notes, and at the time we’re supposed to leave, we still haven’t gotten our food.

“I’m so anxious,” I tell TH through gritted teeth, as I try not to remind myself that he’s the one who picked this restaurant, as I try (and fail) not to cast blame inwardly. My back tightens and I want to punch the table.

I don’t want to be this way anymore.

We end up getting the food in boxes and eating it in the parking deck–hoovering this fine meal in under three minutes–and now that we’re here, now that we’re not going to miss the opening notes (or a trip to the bar), I relax and think of what I had read to the boys earlier in the day:

From there to here, from here to there, funny things are everywhere.

I wish I could relax before everything’s okay. I wish I could laugh from the floor every trip to the can. I’m not there yet. But I think of the quote, and I laugh. I tell TH, “You know I’m going to have to write about this.”

I don’t want to be some ways anymore. But I’m starting to think it’s not all a wash.

I think of all the things I never wanted: to be this way. To learn like this. To draw this card from the pile. And I realize that the truth underneath it all, the thing I never knew I was saying, is that I never wanted to love this much. Not when this kind of love–this knowing the person across the table so well, this having to teach a child how to fend for himself–is so damn inconvenient. And not the kind of inconvenient that Carrie Bradshaw talked about–oh no honey, we’re way past that. You don’t get to wear heels to this party, and avoid the designer labels too because your clothes will just be a napkin for human waste. I’m talking about the kind that demands more of you than you’d ever thought you could give–willingness aside–because you never even knew it was within you to give. The kind that exhausts, that incites rage and empathy and laughter and tears and all of the feelings–often in the same moment. The kind that requires forgiveness–for you and them. The kind that rebuilds you. The kind that uncovers who you were meant to be–so painfully.

Old Man Marley picks Kevin off the hanger and places him on the ground. “Come,” he tells him. “I’m taking you home.”

The next day at church I wait in line for the bread and wine and am suddenly so overcome by my undeservedness that I feel tears spring to my eyes. Well this is embarrassing. Except it’s not. I receive the elements in my empty hands. It’s my week to go get the boys, and I walk across the hallway toward them with tears now overflowing. My not deserving this is what makes it all a gift. And in that moment–that moment of gearing up for resumed parenthood, for taking care of someone else, that moment that occurs unconsciously, of my anxiety rising, of fear kicking in–what if I don’t get this parenting thing right?–I hear the voice in my heart:

You don’t save you. I save you.

And I struggle to breathe, because I know what else this means.

You don’t save them either.

This is not bootstraps faith, it’s not new year’s resolutions, it’s not a checklist of self-improvement. This is the empty-handed, on-the-floor, not-wanting-to-be-this-way intersection of me and grace. It’s the grace of anxiety and fart jokes and shit stains and buttoned-up orchestras that break into playful song for a room full of adults watching a “kid” movie. The grace that keeps my heart alive and that never lets me venture too far into bitterness, into cynicism, before bringing me back. That redeems my shortcomings and anoints my talents. The grace that loves me while I’m this way but lets me be so many others. The grace that always gives, that takes all of me, and says, “Come. I’m taking you home.”

Grace has mercy. Christ has mercy.