Pulse

One of the highest honors of my life is to be a daily witness of how each of my children navigates the world.  The interplay between how they see the world and how they are received by it so often seems divinely orchestrated.  It's like their very beings were made to nestle into the world just so.

And yet this carries with it not only ease but friction.  Because each of us, inevitably, will often encounter spaces in which we do not fit.  I am grateful in these moments that I am not merely observer of my children, but mother.  That God in His infinite mercy not only gave my children to me, but me to them.  To fall back on when they smack into one of life's glass windows like a bird, unawares.

I give my children the  gift of homeschooling both to enable and to protect.  To free and to limit.  To play to their strengths and provide for their weaknesses.  To allow us both to be surprised by what those are.

Because as mother, my hand is on their pulse.  My chest rises and falls with theirs.  I know when to push and when to pull back, when to immerse and when to dry off.  When to work, when to play, when to eat, when to rest.  It's both well thought out and completely intuitive.

While my children are young, I will sit behind the wheel and make the micro adjustments needed to stay safely on the road.  Someday they'll take their turns in the driver's seat.

Squabbles, yes.  Wrong turns, absolutely.

But we are headed somewhere worth going.

And worth going together.

Bricklaying

Early in my homeschooling journey, my two boys and I were perusing the local bookstore when a title caught my eye.  I purchased it, took it home, and put it on the top of my bubble bath book stack.

It was a book about education reform.  On the first page, it asked me to consider if school really was as pointless as most of us think it is when we are going through it.

He believed it is.  He said the big problem with our traditional public school system is that learning has become decontextualized.  That we think with each assignment, each lesson, each test, we are giving a child a brick.  The idea is that after they have enough bricks, they will have built a house.  The reality for far too many children, he claimed, was that instead of having a house at the end of their twelve years in school, all they have is a pile of bricks.  And they don’t have them for long.

It painted a pretty bleak picture, and yet it resonated with me.  I appreciated that he was willing to challenge assumptions, even at the risk of the reader’s discomfort or outright outrage.

He didn’t offend me.  He turned on a flashlight.

I worked hard to give my children not only bricks, but blueprints for how to build a house.  I was keenly aware that my example was that of master architect, and I was keenly aware of my every misstep.  I learned as I went along, with only the occasional brick thrown back in my face. 

After a few more years of homeschooling, however, I discovered something.  The purpose of these days with my children is not to help them build their houses.

We’re building something else entirely.  And I’m not the master architect.

Because they may not want or need a brick house when they turn 18.  It’s not my job to prescribe that for them.  There’s no crystal ball, no way to know what they’ll be asked to face ten, twenty, thirty years from now.  The world is changing too fast.

Then what are we doing here, day after day, brick after brick? 

We’re laying these bricks not for a house, but a path.

I don’t give my children bricks very often.  They find them everywhere.  They pick them up and come running, shouting, “Mom!  Look at this!  Is this a good one?”  My job is to show them that bricks are worth finding, lifting, and laying.  So I send them outside, I give them some mud, provide some trowels, and set to work myself.

It’s messy work, and snail-slow going.  But we’re on hands and knees together.  And I’ve noticed that they only grumble when I do.

Our path is a little longer now, and stretching toward green hills.  You can stare too long at the brick in your hands, and forget how far you’ve come.  You can sit, discouraged, on the path you've built and wonder why you're not getting anywhere.

Or you can go find another brick, and trust the process.  Sometimes there's sun, sometimes there's rain.  Sometimes you're hungry or tired.

And you think to yourself, "Well, if we're hungry, we'll stop to eat.  If we're tired, we'll take a rest."  And you keep on going tomorrow.

Your neighbor is riding an escalator into the clouds.  A passerby, or maybe even your child, asks why you're not.  "Oh," you say, "I suppose it's because that's not where we're trying to go."

"Why not?" he might say, curious now.

"Because," you answer.  "That's not where things grow."

One

The space between how I imagine I do things and how I actually do them is a wide one.  Since I shifted my focus from organization to time management, it narrowed a little.  When I returned to daily spiritual nourishment, it narrowed a lot.  My expectations slowly began to morph from frothy and untouchable to grounded and solid.

Like rocks, they've each had their journey, yet seem to have been here all along.  It's only a few steps from the path to the riverbed.  I am drawn toward it, feeling a distinct rightness at being there.  More stones than I could count, but it doesn’t occur to me to count them at all.  In the midst of endless supply, the only number that matters is one.  

It calls.  That smoothest, darkest one.  I answer, pick it up.  It’s cool against my skin, flat and plain and lovely.  I choose a direction, spend the energy, and let it fly.  It will be what it will be.  For a novice like me, I don’t expect it to skip.  But a plunk and a clean splash are satisfying enough that I pick up another.  Another.  No deadline, no metrics, no impositions.  I’ve stepped out of that world to live here, in the green and brown and velvet moss, where the air cleans my lungs and pumps my blood.  I can work in this space, happily, all my days.

The cloak of motherhood

My mother once wrote me a letter.  She told me, “You have donned the cloak of motherhood with ease and grace.” 

Those were not words I would forget. 

At the time, I wept with humility.  The words gave me strength to feign confidence I did not feel.

They were with me when I stepped on a plane with my newborn son to begin a chapter of life that would slice me open.

They were with me when I cradled my five-year-old's limp body as his eyes rolled back and his face gushed blood.

They were with me night after night after night with no daddy-came-home! reprieve.

I may have donned the cloak of motherhood with ease and grace, but there was little easy or graceful about motherhood.  So I gripped those words, squeezed them for one last ounce of strength, day in and day out.  They never ran dry, though I often did.

Her words come back to me now, nine years after their writing, with a new layer of meaning.  I wonder at her use of the word “cloak.”

She used to advise me: “Once you have kids, you always have kids."  "Wait as long as you can before you have kids."  "Once you have kids, you don’t exist anymore.”

Her words look harsh and jaded on the page, but they weren’t delivered that way.  She truly meant them as nothing but a service to me. 

As a new mother, I was determined to prove them false.  As a mother of two I thought I had.  When I hit rock bottom as a mother of four, I slumped my shoulders and admitted defeat. 

She is almost always right, after all.

I didn’t exist anymore.

And yet, employing this cloak imagery, she contradicted herself.  Because a cloak is something you can put on and take off at will.

Surely that couldn’t be the case with motherhood.  Could it? 

When I became a mother, I well understood and expected the sacrifice it would demand, and I paid it willingly.  What I was not the least bit prepared for, however, was how it would change my awareness of my identity. 

When a child is born, so is a mother.  Like a child, she follows her instincts, graceful and stumbling.  Like a child, she may cover her ears, but she’s always listening.

Like a child, she cries. 

Like a child, she grows hour by hour, as some unknown hand distils her life-grappling into fuel.

Like a child, she is beautiful without knowing.  And she came into this world with a self that belongs to her and her alone.

With each child I bear, I shed a skin of selfishness.  What’s underneath is new and pink and raw.  It will toughen over time.  But into what?

Am I my skin?  Or my raw, pink underside?

Or something deeper down than that?  

I am my core, unchangeable.  A girl who finds God in the rustle of leaves.  A girl who sees the one.  A girl who is lifted by lifting, who doesn’t know when to quit.

That’s always been me.  That will always exist.

Everything else is just skin.

Words from my mother

I write this with my left thumb, iPhone screen backlight as low as it can go.  My 20-month-old nurses on my left breast on the floor of her dark, white-noise-steeped room.

This week she started saying “mom” in that “But, Mom” tone of older children, who usually follow up the phrase with something like, “Why does he get more screen time when I don’t?”

And the mom says something tiresome and true like, “Because he’s littler than you and has different rules.”  Or even worse, something like, “Because I said so.”

I’m not sure when I became the “Because I said so” mom I never thought I’d be.  Somewhere around the third or fourth child, I think.  I wonder what the mother-of-one I used to be would think of me now.

One Child Me was awesome.  I didn’t feel awesome at the time, but looking back, I see that I was.

My son was weeks old, my pareneum still too swollen to look at, and I was sitting in a chair at the airport near the gate that would take me to a plane that would take me to my husband who was waiting for me in Arizona.  Moving one state away was not in my plans.  But it had been in his.  So it was in ours. 

A few minutes earlier I waved goodbye to my dad, who had waited at the security checkpoint and watched to make sure I got the car seat and stroller through the x-ray machine.  Did his heart break a little at only walking with me so far before he was forced to stop and watch me struggle on my own?  One Child Me me didn’t wonder.  Four Children Me suspects it did, and that after parenting seven children he was familiar with the feeling.

I found my gate and plopped into an unforgiving chair.  I had a few minutes before boarding, and remembered the letter from my mom tucked in the designer diaper bag my sister had gifted me at my baby shower.  My dad had given me the letter when he’d picked me up to take me to the airport.  It was more of a goodbye than I had expected from my mom.  She doesn’t do goodbyes.

I had no idea what it would say. 

I first took in the lovely, neat curves of the penmanship I’d always admired.  As a child snooping in old storage boxes under the house, I’d come across a stack of spiral bound notebooks littered with words in this handwriting.  They were words I knew but could make no sense of.  Poetry, maybe?  Notes from a college class I didn’t know she’d taken?  She was mom, that was all.  Except for this box of evidence to the contrary.  This box, wedged in between other boxes labeled “Susie, size 6,” “Susie, size 8,” “Susie, size 10,” alluded to a chapter in her life without me in it.  I never looked inside again; its existence has captivated, reassured, and haunted me to this day.

But there in the airport was her tidy script, this time on a page meant for me: “You have donned the cloak of motherhood with ease and grace.”

Spaces deep within me filled and emptied all at once.  At the thought that my mother approved of me—a vulnerable novice struggling to learn the ropes of a job she had done for so, so long.

I’m not sure who weeps more: a new baby or a new mother. 

Or an experienced mother. 

What made me get on the plane?  Was it my father’s blessing?  My mother’s confidence?  My commitment to my marriage, its most challenging test just beginning?

No.  What made me put one foot in front of the other toward a place I’d never choose were the big, anxious blue eyes of my newborn son.

I would walk through fire for them.   And I have.

I am guessing that if you are reading this, you have a child with eyes wide open too.  And something in that gaze has pierced you with conviction.  You have stewardship over another soul.  This truth is unmistakeable.  And you know it will lead you to places you never would have chosen.  That’s why you’re here.

And that’s why I’m here too.