How easily we share our triumphs and proudest moments. Facebook updates. Twitter exclamations. Instagram slices of time.
I post the funny things my boys say. I upload sweet photos of new sisters.
How easily we share our dreams and daily pleasures. Amazon wishlists. Spotify playlists. Pretty pinterest boards.
These are not the deeply rooted dreams, the ones planted in us from our very beginning. These are the daydreams that lie on the surface of our lives.
Here are a few of mine: chicken coops and vintage cookbooks, Irish poetry and organic gardening.
This is what I do not share: weakness. Also, failure.
There is no social media application for shame. Which is, itself, a shame.
Hiding our weakness, we hide the resurrection power within us. Because we know: “The body that is sown in weakness … is raised in power” (I Corinthians 15:43). Covering up our shame, we deny the One who told us “my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9).
I have PCOS, and the same broken hormones that always made it hard to get pregnant also make it impossible to feed my baby. And so the end looks like strange herbs and hours at the breast pump for me, bottles of formula for her.
Bottles to be grateful for, bottles to break your heart.
My baby girl is two weeks old, and I have come to the end of myself. It’s a very short road; the journey didn’t take very long.
But what comes after me? (Or, more precisely, Who?)
Do I believe the kingdom logic that my end is really the beginning? His beginning?
Looking ahead, the view is murky. I have no idea what’s there. I maintain my sanity by focusing on 12-hour blocks of time. The lactation consultant suggested 24. Even that felt like too much.
But, looking back … the view is very different.
Because, I have seen amazing things (Luke 5:26).
(this post prompted by Summer’s beautiful confession)
She was born on September 12 at 4:46 in the morning – two weeks before we expected her but not a moment too soon.
Here are the things I will never forget:
In a new home with no family or friends nearby, we were not alone. Not unprovided for. At eleven p.m. I admitted I might be in labor. The kids were all asleep (the three-year-old only just), and we called the one person we knew best in this new place: our realtor.
I wasn’t sure that this was really “it,” but I didn’t want to bother her at 3 a.m., so we called. She came. We worried some – what if the three-year-old woke up, and we were gone? What if he found a stranger in our room?
But what point is there in worry?
Jonathan said he had been reading the Bible that evening. These words from Psalm 121: “I lift up my eyes to the mountains – where does my help come from? My help comes from the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth. He will not let your foot slip – he who watches over you will not slumber; indeed, he who watches over Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.”
We knew then that he was with us. All night, he would be with us. And so we let go of worry and walked.
Too soon for the hospital, I thought, so we walked, up and down the drive, the milkyway just visible between the branches of so many old, old maple trees. We walked, I decided that yes, maybe this was real. Maybe it wasn’t too soon, and, at one a.m., we left for the hospital.
I felt foolish as we checked in. It’s still early! I’m just fine! And worry sometimes crept back in: will she be able to feed the kids breakfast? We have notes posted everywhere about our son’s allergies, but it’s complicated. What if? And will she be able to get them on the bus? And the three-year-old, will he panic? Cry for Dad to be there, making pancakes, as always?
But, we let it go again, and things moved fast and faster. The nurse said, “Just rest. Let me know if you need me.” Barely ten minutes later rest sounded ridiculous, and I yelled, “She’s coming!”
And she came. And she was beautiful. And we were stunned.
Jonathan left us an hour later, left us tucked into our room together, and he was home before anyone in the house woke up. Yes, he was there, making breakfast, when everyone came in, rubbing their eyes, to hear that they had a sister. That her name was Elsa Spring.
“Arise, my darling, my beautiful one, come with me. See! The winter is past; the rains are over and gone. Flowers appear on the earth; the season of singing has come.”
Most evenings, after dinner, you’ll find us piling into the car. We drive because it’s so beautiful here, we drive to put the three-year-old to sleep, we drive because we’re worn out and we want to fill the time between feeding and bathing in the easiest way.
I’ve never been very adept at keeping my mind tucked inside my body. It’s always floating off, connecting imagined dots somewhere up in the clouds, which makes me (I’m well aware) a real danger on the road. With Jonathan behind the wheel, I’m free to tell stories in my head, so I do. So many stories.
They’re meant for you; I’m sure of it. Someday (soon, I hope) I’ll share them. But for now … well, I’ve entered a kind of nine-months-pregnant tunnel.
It’s a strange, foggy place. Most of the things I normally value in life seem lost in the general grayness. Like writing for this blog or returning phone calls. Other seemingly unimportant things loom inexplicably large. Like painting my bedroom furniture.
Yes, the baby’s room is a mess of odds and ends, and the bassinet I recently ordered through the mail is still sitting in its unopened box exactly where the UPS man left it last week. But I can’t tell you how vitally, vitally important it has been to attack my bed with white paint.
Please, baby girl, just hold on till the paint dries.
I’m not sure if I’ll be in this space much before she arrives. I do promise I’ll be back before long.
There is so much here (in this new place and season) worth noticing, and I don’t think these things are meant only for me. Things like a full moon rising over a quilt-square patch of corn. Things like driving the same country road night after night until the night when one wrong (right?) turn takes you through a field of sunflowers.
Those things must mean something. They must be a part of some very good story.
I’ll be sure to let you know what I discover. Once the fog recedes.
Sissie and me, not long after our first shared "birth" day.
For fifteen years we celebrated our birthdays together.
Sometimes they were long-distance celebrations. Cards and phone calls. Sometimes a room full of people sang “Happy Birthday” to the two of us. Those years, we shared cakes and posed together for pictures. She entertained my friends with elaborate (and messy) party games.
She was our aunt, but we called her Sissie. I used to think the reason our relationship with her was special was because she had no children of her own. I’m sure now that it was really she who was special. I think she would have loved us that much even if she’d had a house full of her own kids.
Three days after my fifteenth birthday, she died on a long, straight stretch of country road. Twenty years ago.
Here’s the thing about losing someone you love (something I imagine most of you already know): it doesn’t hurt less, just differently. The pain doesn’t go away, but you do become accustomed to it.
Also, this: it grows.
Loss is not a one-time event. It reveals itself over time, becoming bigger and more unwieldy with each missed birthday, wedding, graduation, child’s birth.
I still enjoyed my birthdays after 15, it’s just that they felt lopsided. Too much me. Someone else always missing.
Thirteen unshared birthdays.
Until I turned 29. That day my son was born.
Me and Thaddeus. Our first birthday together.
This Saturday, we share our sixth birthday together.
I will celebrate my 35th birthday with a gluten-free, dairy-free cake. It will be decorated with Hot Wheels. I love butter, and I do not care for Hot Wheels, but I’m finally old enough to wonder whether Sissie really wanted to celebrate her birthday by orchestrating games of Chubby Bunny for twenty-two six-year-olds.
It’s not the wanting that matters (because, if I’m honest, I want a cake full of butter and wheat, I want a party attended by adults, and I want another shared birthday with Sissie). It’s the love that matters most. In this case, love looks like celebrating 35 with a Hot Wheels cake. Love means no time alone with my husband, just a date to see the latest Pixar movie with a six-year-old boy.
Small things that give me just a glimpse of a much, much bigger love.
Because love is a God who will one day restore all that has been lost (no matter how big that loss has become).
And love is a God who is always, every day, giving new gifts.
This is a familiar story (though I’ve never told it before). I’m sure you have your own version. It’s a story about how one song comes to represent something big: young love, say, or new parenthood, or that one particular summer when the weather just couldn’t be believed.
It actually was summer, and, yes, the weather couldn’t be believed. The coolest Chicago summer in a decade. I’ve never liked hot weather, but I was heavily pregnant and extra grateful for lake breezes.
I’d emerged from the long, dark tunnel of infertility. I’d survived the euphoria and illness of the first trimester. I was cocooned in the mellow hormones of the third trimester.
I’m sure it wasn’t all mellow dreaminess, but that’s how I remember it. The worst was behind. The earthquake that is a first baby was still to come. My husband and I took long walks. Went for long drives. Ate out in all our favorite restaurants.
That summer we could hardly turn on the car radio without hearing the song “Yellow” by Coldplay. Perhaps it only happened once, but when I think of that summer this is what I remember: a nighttime drive down the length of Chicago’s lakefront, overhead the city lights like glittery stars, windows rolled down, a baby girl filling me up, and “Yellow” playing on the radio.
That song and my firstborn: they’ve been tangled up in my mind ever since.
Which is a good thing.
Now when I hear that song, I’m taken right back to a place and a feeling it’s important never to forget. I hear the song, and I remember all of the joy and love and hope that a mother feels when her baby is tucked up inside, still unknown.
It can be difficult (often impossible) to hold on to those feelings through sleepless nights, temper tantrums, sibling fights, meltdowns over homework … well, all the ordinary awfulness of day to day life.
And my own mother-failures are the most awful of all.
But the ordinary awfulness is a distraction. It’s not the real thing. It doesn’t tell us who we really are. It tries to obscure the truth of who our child is.
More and more, I’m convinced that good parenting is learning to coast through the awfulness without losing my grip on the truth.
And the truth is this: life is magical, motherhood is an indescribably good gift, and my child (yours too) is more precious and beautiful than even the nighttime sky.
That is the truth, and this song helps me remember.
Just in time for Mother’s Day: a gorgeous cover of “Yellow” by Renee and Jeremy:
