All the Missing Pieces
If you are a parent or teacher or camp counselor, you know the forms I’m talking about.
One for each child. Name, birthdate, address. Mother’s cellphone and father’s cellphone. Mother’s email and father’s email.
It’s the final question that gives me trouble: EMERGENCY CONTACT PERSON. If the parents cannot be reached, who should we call?
For more than three years, I have left that line blank. On school forms and dance studio forms. On swim team forms and class field trip forms.
Empty. Blank. Missing.
There is no one to call.
We’ve never lived near family. Grandparents are once-or-twice-a-year treats. My children trade Christmas gifts with cousins they have yet to meet.
When we left Chicago, we said goodbye to more than our third-floor-lake-views-if-you-squint apartment. We said goodbye to neighbors who would knock on our door if our two-year-old escaped during the party and wandered down the stairs toward the front door and the busy street just beyond it. We said goodbye to the family in the basement apartment who could always take in our kids if an emergency came up. We said goodbye to all the friends on the blocks around us – friends whose children we had sheltered while their mothers and fathers welcomed new siblings at the downtown hospital, or, more terribly, said hospital goodbyes to siblings they would never bring home.
We left behind every one of our Emergency Contacts. Since then, I’ve learned you do not easily or quickly replace such things.
When our fourth baby arrived two weeks before grandma’s scheduled visit, we called our realtor. She was the only one who’d met our children or seen the inside of our home.
Yesterday, I filled out four more forms. The final blank lines felt a little blanker, a little emptier. They asked, not for an emergency contact, but for sponsors. These were baptismal forms. Later this summer, we’ll turn our church into a mini waterpark when we baptize four children all at once.
Even if I keep expectations low (this is a sponsor, after all, not necessarily a godparent or guardian), I wish someone could be there. A witness to our lives. Someone to stand in the crack. Someone who will always be there to remember with the firstborn. To tell the story to the fourth. Someone to make us all feel like nothing is missing.
Except, something is always missing. Something is always cracked and broken.
For a long time, I convinced myself that the most broken things and places were out there. Poverty and gun violence. Orphan crises and war. And, for the most part, this is true. There is a terrible darkness in this world, but it doesn’t live in my house. And if I have one goal in life, it’s to make sure that my home is a shelter for anyone looking for relief from the world’s dark places. We all need a place to rest before we head back out again, lights in hand.
However, I’m discovering that aloneness and disconnection are cracks that run just about everywhere. Through every heart. Every relationship. Every home and neighborhood and community. Even my own.
In our house, two sons share a room. With the volume turned low, it is storybook perfect. In real life, it is loud and late and lego-filled. But as much as I sometimes dream of sticking them in separate rooms so I can get a little peace and quiet at the end of the day, God-help-me, this sharing is a good thing. It is a good thing because they are never really alone.
And yet.
The older brother will fall asleep. Then, the little brother lies there, still awake, and it doesn’t matter that his brother’s head is two feet from his own. It doesn’t matter that his parents are right downstairs.
He feels alone, abandoned by a brother who would choose sleep over one more lego creation, and he weeps.
He cries himself to sleep.
The truth is we can be alone in a crowd. We can be alone even when our brother is within reach of our tiny four-year-old arm.
Some people might tell you it’s God or Jesus who fills in those cracks. They might say we’re chasing the wrong things when we look to fill our empty places, our blank lines with other people.
But I think they may be wrong.
The story of Adam and Eve and Eden might not tell us much about the science behind the world’s creation. I do think it tells us everything about these cracks and missing pieces. It tells me that in the beginning of our story we lost something precious. We lost the closeness (so close you might call it oneness) we once enjoyed with other people. We lost the closeness we once had with our Maker.
This story we’re living is all about recovering that precious thing.
I don’t know how to make the blanks and cracks and disconnections disappear. I do know that if we lean in to them – really pay attention to them – we might glimpse the end of our story. The beautiful end. Which will be, of course, a new beginning.
“With all wisdom and understanding, God made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ, to be put into effect when the times reach their fulfillment – to bring unity to all things in heaven and on earth under Christ.”
(Ephesians 1:8-10)
Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.
These Farmhouse Bookshelves
Here is one last peak at my bookshelves before summer.
I think one of these might be just the thing for that afternoon in the hammock, the long car trip, those sweaty hours between events at the swim meet.
I plan to read as much as possible these next few months. I’m imagining quiet afternoons with a sleeping baby and three kids with noses-in-books, but the reality is more likely to be me on my green sofa, one eye on the so-close-to-crawling baby and one on my book, while I try desperately to tune out the shrieks of three children running circles around the room. Yes, I’m trying to be realistic.
Either way, my plan is to bring These Farmhouse Bookshelves back in September with fresh recommendations.
One of my favorite writers (she is a master of the revelatory interior monologue) has a new book. Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life: A Novel
I was skeptical at first. Perhaps you remember my distaste for literary gimmicks? Atkinson’s latest is structured around a stunning gimmick, but this excellent novel doesn’t deserve that pejorative term.
The book’s heroine is Ursula Todd, an Englishwoman who lives (and dies) through the Great War, the Spanish Flu epidemic, World War II and the London Blitz, and all of the upheaval of early twentieth-century European history. She lives, and she dies, and then she is born again, always and, it seems, forever on the same snowy night in 1910.
That is the novel’s literary device, and though it seems to break so many rules (most importantly, the reader’s assumption that the very worst thing cannot befall a novel’s primary character), Atkinson uses it to brilliant effect.
Ursula’s many lives and deaths, and the fascinating ways in which her story changes or does not, add up to a compulsively readable novel (after moving slowly through the first third, I couldn’t put it down) and one that gives us so much to think about: from questions of history and personal fate to the God-like role of novelists themselves.
Life After Life is the coming-of-age novel writ large. Ursula is given chance after chance to live well. We are given only one. We can learn a great deal from a character who knows the depths of the adage that “practice makes perfect.” The important question is, in that tumultuous time and now, what constitutes a well-lived life? What does “perfect” really look like?
Sylvie’s knowledge … was random yet far-ranging, ‘The sign that one has acquired one’s learning from reading novels rather than an education …’
A Time to Keep: The Tasha Tudor Book of Holidays
Featuring Tudor’s beloved illustrations, this picture book shows us twelve months of celebration in a rural, New England family about a hundred years ago. Based on Tudor’s childhood memories, we have beautiful pictures and brief descriptions of a bonfire on New Year’s Eve, a syrup-making party in March, a dance around the Maypole, and a very special August birthday, to name just a few.
This is a book about the special rhythms of the seasons and of family life. It is sweetly nostalgic and inspiring. Enthralled by the book’s August birthday party, my daughter and I have decided that someday, somehow, we will float a candlelit birthday cake down a stream at twilight.
August brought your mother’s birthday which we celebrated at night by the river. The table was set with birch bark plates and gourd drinking cups.
I pulled this last book off my shelf last night and promised myself I’d reread it over the summer. Even the summer months deserve something of high literary value, but I find that short stories are easier to squeeze in between visits to the pool, park, and farmer’s market.
The Springs of Affection: Stories of Dublin
Born in Ireland, Brennan lived in New York from the age of 17, but the stories are each set in Dublin. These are stories about family and affection as well as the uglier emotions which can mar those relationships: emotions like grief, envy and even hatred.
These are stories in which each detail of a character’s dress and environment matters. They suggest that a writer’s primary task is observation. Writers, especially, appreciate Brennan’s work, but I think she has something to teach all of us. Whether we write or not, our lives are enriched when we pay close attention. To the arrangement of dishes on our kitchen shelf. To the face of a friend or child.
… you would think, looking at such an arrangement, that the boxes contained something of interest or of value. And what did they contain? Old bills marked paid thirty years before. Recipes for dinner she had never cooked, dinners so elaborate that she must have been dreaming of a vist from the king and queen of England when she cut the menus out of the magazines in which she had found them.
What do you plan to read this summer?
Acquainted With Grief
We wake again to the most terrible news.
Like many of you, I turn the radio off when my children stumble, sleepy-eyed, into the kitchen. In an hour, they will sit in their own elementary school classrooms, and I don’t have answers for the questions they will ask.
I pack lunches, and my own head pounds with questions. Old, old questions.
Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?
We are not the first to ask these questions, but they have grown more insistent over the years, not less. At one time, God walked among us. But we have seen so much trouble since those days. We have cried rivers of tears.
I sometimes think I have the answers. When Jesus, speaking of resurrection, says, “Do you believe?” I say, yes. I believe.
But belief is not the same thing as answers. Not, really. Belief cannot silence questions like Why and Where were you?
When Mary reached the place where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet and said, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”
Because I believe, I reach too quickly for answers. Because I write stories, I move too soon to imagine happy endings.
In other words, I do not follow the example of the One I profess to follow. It seems too hard to do what he did: to let myself be moved. To let myself be troubled.
To let the tears fall.
When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come along with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled. “Where have you laid him?” he asked. “Come and see, Lord,” they replied.
Jesus wept.
I don’t have answers for a day like this. How does anyone keep going after a two-mile-wide nightmare overtakes them?
I don’t know.
I hope – I can only hope – that when the time comes to stand up again and move, I will be there, cross in hand, following.
Following the suffering King.
The man of sorrows.
The one who stays and weeps and is moved by our questions.
Why? Why? Where were you?