I really wanted to walk him to school this morning because I enjoy the conversation that fresh air and exercise unwrap, but here I am, alone, sitting in our car, far away from the mess I left inside.
This morning we have bent and twisted around words like, “hate” and “can’t handle” and “hurry,” and all that time passing has not given me a boy ready for school.
All that time passing has not offered much honor this day.
I have followed him around every room, reminding him of what’s left to do, and at every turn he found distraction instead of my get-ready expectation. Those hairs he saved from the bathtub that he wants to examine under his microscope when he gets home from school today, and he just wants to make sure they’re still on the side of the bathtub where he left them. Those books in the library-turned-bedroom, where he emptied a whole shelf and only put back half last night because he got too tired to finish, and he thinks maybe now would be a good time to organize it. Those socks, unmatched, and why can’t he find socks that match with pulling every single white one from his drawer and then putting them back in, one by time-consuming one?
I bark out my commands, “Put away your blanket.” “Your pajamas. Don’t leave them on the floor, please.” “Brush your teeth now,” and I can feel the panic embracing the frustration because his distractions hide themselves in books and little brothers and stuffed animals and every random thought in his 7-year-old head, those science experiments he’d like to do (because he can’t tell me about them while he’s packing up his backpack) and those books he’d like to get around to reading (because he can’t put his pajamas in the hamper while he’s trying to compile the list in his head) and those stories he’d like to write and record in his journal.
And it’s not an honoring way to speak, this barking, and this communication, with its always nagging, always ordering, always hurrying, holds no love for another. The problem is I feel the clock, shackled to my ankle, and everywhere I follow him, it follows me, and I count down the minutes until he should be ready like it’s a death sentence.
Because it is.
Because I expect 7:15 a.m. Because here it is, and he’s not ready and it’s time to leave, now, and we must hurry, hurry, hurry.
It’s not the mismatched socks or the no-free-time-left or even the no-lunch-today-if-you-don’t-put-your-lunchbox-in-your-backpack declaration that does it, it’s the “no books today for your book box because you weren’t ready in time” that does. He collapses, liquid like the tears in his eyes, even though he knows this is the consequence, even though we’ve talked about it, even though we remind him every.single.day because this hurry happens every.single.day, and he starts throwing “punishment” around like I’ve been throwing “hurry” around, and I just cannot take one more minute because I’m sick, sick, sick of my tone and my face and my heart, none of them saying I honor you or I love you.
Hurry holds no honor.
Hurry races love, and unless we pull the reins, slow it all down, hurry will be the victor, and love will be ash-dust we trample back to the starting line.
“You have to burn to be fragrant. To scent the whole house you have to burn to the ground,” says the poet Rumi, and this is what is happening today. I am burning to the ground, and it must be the good burning, the kind of burning that turns everything toward love and honor.
Will I make it the good burning?
I walk through the fire, choking on the smoke of that old nature, stirring up the ashes lying around my feet, and my throat feels closed tight and my eyes flame with tears because I am dying, and it’s a little one who is doing it.
It’s a little one, a child, causing this self-death.
“Desperation, let me always know how to welcome you—and put in your hands the torch to burn down the house,” Rumi says, and it is desperation that is burning this house of expected perfection, this house of get-ready-in-the-time-I-give-you, this house of must-do and get-done and what’s next. Every single day it’s a war, another fire to burn my house down, because my brain is spinning round, logging that milk and the bowls of yogurt that must be cleared, quickly, from the table before curious twins go exploring and dump it all out on the living room floor, like they did last week; charting the minutes left between breakfast and leaving and all the 7-year-old must do between; registering, down in the depths, those taxes that must be filed before mid-month, just to get them off my plate.
Hurry, hurry, hurry, before it’s too late.
Desperation grips me in a head-lock, rips away those pieces that care too much what others think, that find too much identity in meeting those time deadlines, that scratch and claw and punch when expectations go unmet.
The clock, tick-tocking, and this house of self, burning. Desperation begins the fire, because there’s got to be more than this.
There is more than this.
Hurry makes it hard to see, but it’s there all the same, and once the house is burned to the ground, when those old places in me become ashes of hope, when all the smoke clears, I can see it clear.
Halfway through the day, his daddy takes up a cookie, packed in a container I forgot to put in his lunchbox this morning. In it is a note. He will pull it out and read it, maybe smiling at those little chocolate smudges on white. He will read about how a mama’s love will never run out, just like God’s, how a mama loves no matter what, how a mama can argue and argue and fight and fight with her boy and still she’ll love him just as much as she ever did before.
Because love doesn’t tally wrongs.
Because love puts up with everything and anything that comes along.
Because love endures, no matter what.
He will read about how a mama regrets the hurry and hopes tomorrow will be another try, if her boy will forgive. And in the place of that hurry house, another house builds, every time I choose honor and love over hurry, and this one will stand on brick and stone, and no fire will ever, ever, ever burn it to the ground.
Day by day, moment by moment, we build.
This is an excerpt from Family on Purpose Episode 2: We Honor God. Each Other. All People. To find out more about Family on Purpose or to sign up for the notification list so you’ll receive an email each time a new episode releases, visit the project landing page.
In this episode, Rachel discusses two charming middle grade novels, a helpful business book, slowing down on word counts and a new old indie pop duo The Bird and the Bee.
5-year-old: Mama! I have something really important to tell you.
Me: Well, I’m working.
5-year-old: Just real quick.
Me: Ok.
5-year-old [singing]: Batman’s in the kitchen, Robin’s in the hall, Joker’s in the bathroom, peeing on the wall!”
Me:
5-year-old:
Me:
5-year-old: What? He’s a bad guy.
6-year-old: Dear God, thank you for the day and for my baby brother I love so much, and please help us stop tooting, because it really smells. Amen.
Me:
6-year-old:
Me: I second that.
[Kids losing their minds.]
Husband: Why can’t we just have fun at Family Time?
9-year-old: Because we talk too much.
Husband:
9-year-old:
Husband: I’m glad you’re so smart.
Me: Are you having another glass of wine?
Husband: Just a little more.
6-year-old: It looks like you’re turning drunk.
Me:
Husband:
6-year-old: What does drunk mean?
9-year-old: Mama, if there was a boy who lied all the time in an orphanage and there was me, who would you choose?
Me: Is this a trick question?
9-year-old: No.
Me: Well, of course I would choose you.
9-year-old: Ha.
[5 minutes later, singing the same song he’s been singing all afternoon.]
Me: Wait, can I change my answer?
Husband: Alright, tonight’s Advent activity is to tell Zadok why you love him.
6-year-old: I love Zadok, because he’s easy to take down.
Husband: That’s not exactly–
9-year-old: I love him because he’s a good punching bag.
Husband: Wait–
5-year-old: I love him because he’s so annoying.
Husband:
Me:
Husband:
Me: Well, we’ve come a long way since last year. At least there’s that.
A few days last week I felt really invisible. My stuff wasn’t really getting shared, and people weren’t all that excited about visiting my site and reading the words I shaped into stories every week, and sometimes, when we feel invisible, we can forget all the value that lives in our writing. Because it’s not necessary, not like business tools or parenting techniques or “7 meals to cook in 15 minutes.” It’s art.
And then I started going back through some of the blogs I wrote last year, which I’m turning into a book, and I texted my husband. “This stuff is really good,” I wrote. “Even better than I remember” (writers don’t say that about everything).
We have a hard time seeing what value lies in our writing, because it’s artistic and it’s entertaining and it’s a fun story, not an I’ll-die-if-I-don’t-get-this kind of thing. But let’s just think about this for a minute. What kind of life is a life without art? What kind of world is a world without the beauty of words turned stories? What kind of society would this be without poetry?
It’s not an easy seeing. I know. I’ve been launching pieces of myself out into the literary world, and it’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever done (besides raising children), because it means I have to toot my own horn a little. I have to tell people there’s value in my work. I have to be its champion, and you know what? I would MUCH RATHER have someone else do that. I’d much rather have someone else tell the world that my products have value. I’d rather have someone else claim that lives will be better for my words.
But something I’ve had to come to understand is that there is value in what I do. There is value in the words I spend twenty-five hours on every single week. There is value in the books I write and compile and then release. There is value in my offerings, in my talent, in my entertainment. My art fills a hole in the world, and it may not be a hole we can see surely and point to without question, but it’s a hole that is there all the same, and people are changed when art fills in their holes.
It doesn’t matter if we don’t have a five-step takeaway for every product we launch into the world. It just matters that we are looking for holes and we are filling them.
There isn’t a whole lot out there about selling entertainment and how to do it, because most of what’s written from the business perspective is about selling value, and when we’re in the entertainment realm with our parenting humor blog or our thriller novels or our kid-lit poems, the line between value and non value is a little blurred to those in the business world. They don’t often see the value in a person, bent nearly to breaking, reading the words of another who has been broken and finding strength and courage enough to say, “Me too. Let’s carry on together.” They don’t often see the value in words that grant hope and peace. They don’t often see the value in abstract things like poetry and music and stories.
But that doesn’t mean that we can’t take business principles and mold them to fit our entertainment offerings so that we can become even better at what we do. The first way I did that was by finding my “value propositions” for my different platforms.
A value proposition is a short phrase that states what value you bring to the world. It can be easier to craft a value proposition when we’re doing things like teaching writing or selling courses or meeting a real, tangible need in the writer world. We’re going to have to work a little harder when we’re not.
One of the holes I most like to fill with my nonfiction is the hole that says “I am alone.” I write honestly about life with six boys, and I turn it into a humorous, lighthearted offering on my parenting humor blog. I write about serious issues like anxiety and body image and depression and loss, and I help people feel less alone in their struggles. People find solidarity, and they are encouraged, and this is a valuable thing.
So, in crafting our value proposition, we have to think about what our art will do for the world. Will it encourage? Will it entertain? Will it offer humor to a dark world? Will it tell the whole truth?
Without a value proposition, we can get lost in weeks of invisibility. No one seems to care what we’re doing, and we start to wonder why we’re doing it. But value propositions can remind us that there really is a reason.
4 Steps to Creating Your Own Value Proposition
1. Define who you are.
Are you a storyteller? Are you a truth teller? Are you a fellow traveler? A sage? A muse? What makes you unique? Come up with who you are to your “tribe,” and you’re well on your way.
2. Determine who your audience is.
You’ll hear it all over the place, and it’s true: The wider your audience, the less influence you have. If we can narrow things down a little, we’ll be able to reach a wider audience, which doesn’t really make sense in the math of it, but it does, a little, in the marketing sense of it. Lots of people say they’re for everyone. Not a lot of people are saying they’re writing a humor parenting column for moms who only have boys. Niching down is scary. I know. It was for me. But sometimes it’s the best thing we can do. I felt much more focused when I niched down This Writer Life to be parents who are time starved and still trying to pursue a writing career.
Who is going to listen to you? Who do you most want to help. If you say, “Everyone,” you will help no one.
3. Figure out what you will help people do.
This could be anything as abstract as providing a new insight to readers or invoking a laugh to something more tangible, like learning how to use WordPress or self publish a blog post or write effective copy. Sometimes it’s hard to see what we will help people do when we’re on the entertainment, novel-writing side of it, but if we look closely enough, it’s possible. There is something unique that we bring to this world, and no one else can do it like we can. People can buy transformation they hope will happen in their life just as surely as they can buy a course on writing faster.
What unique thing do you have to offer in the world of entertainment?
4. Put it all together.
My value propositions for my platforms look like this:
Fiction writing/Wing Chair Musings blog:
I am a storyteller. I help readers who are curious, open-minded and seeking authenticity grasp new insights on life, love and family so they can remember and embrace the truth that already lives inside them.
Crash Test Parents (humor blog):
I am a mom of six boys. I help boy moms understand that the best way to survive life with boys is with a sense of humor, so that they can fully embrace the wildlings they’ve been given.
This Writer Life:
I am a parent writer. I provide productivity, publishing and writing advice to time-starved parents so that they can pursue a writing career in the margins of their parent life.
By far, the easiest one of those to write was This Writer Life, because it has more tangible benefits. But entertainment can have value propositions, too, and it’s worth it to do this work.
These aren’t perfect value propositions. They will probably shift and change over the years. But they’re a good start.We can do a whole lot with a good start.
Value propositions help you get clear on who you want to be and what you need to do to get there. Put yours together, and watch your focus completely change.
“The hardest part of being a Mother is when they become adults and cut your heart to pieces.” “Wait until they’re teenagers. Then you’ll have something to complain about.” “Oh, please. Mothering isn’t hard until they get to the teens.” -I Have it Worst
Dear I Have it Worst: I know I’m not a parent of a young adult yet. I know I don’t have to figure out hormones and girlfriends and how to handle broken curfews. I know my little people are way easier to control than the big people they will one day be. But have you ever tried to wrestle a plunger that just went swimming in poo from four 3-year-old hands, and as soon as you finally peel those 20 fingers from the stick and turn around to put the (still-dripping) plunger somewhere they can’t reach it, one of those four hands dips into the brown water to finish the job it wanted to do in the first place? Have you ever tried to stop an 8-year-old from digging out the old pacifiers from the trash can because he thinks they can be recycled into something new? Have you ever tried to convince a 5-year-old that horizontal stripes don’t really match vertical stripes?
I know, I know. The answer is probably “I’ve done things much harder than that.” I’m just trying to get you to practice this little amazing communication secret called “empathy,” which means “to remember how it felt when your 3-year-old drew all over his brand new organic cotton sheets with a permanent marker you didn’t know he had and you wanted to murder him.” I bet you thought it was dang hard, too.
(This isn’t a competition. Stop making it one.)
“A mother simply propagates a virus upon the earth. They all need to be destroyed.” —Violently Yours
Dear Violently Yours: Let’s just use a little logic here. “A mother simply propagates a virus.” For anything to propagate a virus upon the earth, that means it must have been a virus, too. I’ve been called a lot of things, but this one is new. A virus? That sounds intriguing. Like a mum flu or a mothebola virus. I sure wish that’s what I were, because there are a lot of women in my life who would really like to have a baby. If I could infect them, you bet I would.
I know you meant your comment to be something far worse but I feel like I have to thank you for the compliment. I’ll remind you that a virus is so small it can only be seen with a microscope. Now. I’ve had six kids, including twins. There is no part of my body small enough to only be detected by a microscope. Maybe my brain. I can’t seem to remember anything anymore. So I appreciate the vote of confidence in my ability to shrink back to regular (or nearly nonexistent) size after six children, but I assure you, we’re not anywhere close.
Try again.
“I’ve met some really shitty mothers.” -What’s Your Point
Dear What’s Your Point: Welp, I’m not one of them. I actually rock at being a mother. The only thing I have in common with your comment is what I do most mornings at about 9 a.m., give or take a few.
“Sounds like whining to me and she has a husband to boot. I am a single mom and I don’t feel this way. Thank God. There are some days when I want my son to leave me alone for 5 min but it’s not hard. Suck it up butter cup!” “SHUT THE HELL UP! You are a mother now grow up. She seems like a spoiled little brat who wants her single life with kids back again. Can’t go back so look forward and be positive!” -Parenting is Super Easy
Dear Parenting is Super Easy: I like this world you live in. How did you get there? May I please come, too? Because I live in a world where parenting is stinking hard, and it’s not because I’m not a good mom or because I never should have had kids or because I want my single life back. It’s just that I now live in a world where one of my kids will bust into my room in the middle of the night to tell me he feels like he needs to puke two seconds before he actually does, all over my comfy comforter that requires a bath in the tub and a stint out on the back porch to get clean. Now I have six boys who like to climb the walls like Spider-Man and put gigantic spitballs on the ceiling and leave LEGOs all over the floor so the baby is constantly in danger of choking on one of them. That doesn’t mean I’d trade my life today for my no-kids one. IT JUST MEANS THAT IT’S HARD. It just means it’s not perfect. It just means there are days I feel like tapping out, for just a second or a minute or a whole afternoon.
Scratch that. I’m totally lying. The real reason it feels hard is because all I really want to do is lie on the couch and read the latest George R.R. Martin novel and sip on a little red wine so it dulls my senses and I don’t have to hear the kids losing their minds about wanting dinner and why don’t they ever have food and who’s going to pour them milk. Why do kids have to be so dang hard?
“Are they all yours? My God.” -Tactless
Dear Tactless: What’s a number you’d be comfortable with? One? Two? Maybe three? Well, then, that’s how many are mine. The rest are strays who just thought we looked like better parents than the ones they had. And hey. What’s a few more when you already have three?
What? They all look like me? Huh. That’s weird. I guess I get around.
“You have enough for a basketball team. With a sub!” -Sports Analogies Are the Best
Dear Sports Analogies Are the Best: You smart thing. How did you guess? That’s exactly what we were trying to do. We got married and, 18 months later, looked at each other and said, “WE SHOULD START A TOALSON BASKETBALL TEAM, because that would be really cool!” And now here we are. It’s a really good thing we went for that sub, because a few of them can’t dribble a ball without breaking their nose. I think we probably need a couple more, just to be safe.
“Are you done yet?” -Just Call Me Nosy
Dear Just Call Me Nosy: Nope. We’re not done until we beat the Duggars and get our own television show. Because that’s the whole point of having babies, isn’t it? Breaking the record for how many babies a body can produce in 25 years and snagging your own sitcom? I still have 10 or 15 good years of childbearing left, and you better believe we are going to use them.
“You were trying for a girl, weren’t you.” -Big Mouth
Dear Big Mouth: No. I’ve wanted six boys since I was a little girl, and that’s exactly what happened. Lucky me.
Also, what’s wrong with boys? What’s wrong with wanting more boys?
“Stop using your choice to have six kids as an excuse to do nothing else.” -Supermom
Dear Supermom: Gosh, I admire you. I’m sure you have a perfectly manicured yard and your homemade bread never caves in the middle and all your kids’ shoes match and are on the right feet every morning. And your kids probably never turn in a school paper late. And you never yell when the 3-year-old sneaks out of bed and hoards all the toothbrushes in the blue cup for God knows what reason, even though he’s been told and told and told not to wander and especially not to hoard toothbrushes because you’re tired of buying toothbrushes. And you throw the most spectacular birthday parties on the block. I wish I could be you. I really do.
But, alas, the only thing I do all day is lie on the couch and watch my hoodlums tear up my house around me so I have a reason to blame them for everything. I can’t clean house, because I have six kids. I can’t cook dinner, because I have six kids. I’ve been wearing the same workout pants for four days, because I have six kids.
The gulf between you and me is light years apart, so I give. You keep being your awesome super mom self, and I’ll keep being my despicable lazy mom self.
Thanks for commenting! If you have any personal issue with any of my answers, please email idontcare@babymakingfactory.com. And I’m sure I’ll see you around again soon!
Last night I dressed my 10-month-old in Star Wars pajamas and set him in a little kid chair, and I snapped a picture of him, because he was so happy and it was so stinking cute. And then I posted the picture on my social media sites today, because, like I said, it was cute, and everybody loves cute photos of babies,and sometimes all we need to feel like we’re on top of a Monday is to see the smiling face of a happy baby. But all was not as it should have been.
I did not check the picture for surprise appendages. Maybe it’s because I’ve gotten so used to ignoring the naked parts that go flying around my house. I live with a tribe of boys, after all, who would, hands down, prefer no clothes to clothes any hour of any day. After so much of all that nakedness, you just become immune to it.
Another boy mom noticed and sent me a message saying I had an unintended addition in the corner of the picture. So I took it down, cropped it and put it back up. Because it really was a great picture.
(This is the cropped version. See? Doesn’t that just make you want to smile?)
It probably goes without saying that I cannot “just snap” a picture in my home, because there is always a little boy running straight out of the bathroom without the pants he had on two seconds ago. I can’t “just take” a quick video of my boys dancing to “Whip It Nae Nae,” because one of them will get too hot and strip down to nothing but his birthday suit. I can’t just open the door to see who rang the bell, because it’s guaranteed that someone will peek around the corner, even though I told him to stay in his seat, showing more parts than he should.
Lately we’ve been the hub of the neighborhood. Kids just like to come to our house, because we’re super cool parents. Actually, it’s more likely because we have a trampoline in our backyard and a swing set and we let the kids be unless someone is dying. But this becoming a hub also means that at all hours of the day we have kids knocking on our door, asking to play.
On Saturday, I opened the door to find a little curly-haired girl. “I came over to play,” she said, walking right in before I could stop her. Problem is, we’d just gotten up, and when boys have just gotten up, there’s no guarantee that they are dressed in anything at all, because there is some sort of clothes bandit that keeps stealing into our house and stealing out of it with the pajamas they were wearing when we kissed them goodnight. I couldn’t be sure what exactly the situation was as I peered from the living room into the kitchen, because they were all wrapped in their blankets, since it was a cold morning. But then the 9-year-old stood up to go to the bathroom, dropping the wrapped-around-him blanket, and all he had on was fluorescent green boxers. At least he had something on, I guess.
But that little girl saw more than she probably should have. (Well. You probably shouldn’t ring our doorbell at 7 a.m. on a Saturday. So. Lesson learned. Hopefully.)
Will I ever get to a place where I can “just snap” a picture or “just take a quick video” and “just answer the door?” I don’t know. I do know that I have had to put some rules in place that I never, ever thought I would have to put in place back before I became a boy mom.
They sound a little like this:
Anyone who doesn’t at least have underwear at the table doesn’t get any food. No, you may not got outside in your underwear (even in the fenced backyard). Do not dance naked through the living room.
Because, you know, sometimes people knock on the door, and they don’t want to see your pride and joy. And sometimes people are out mowing their lawn while you’re jumping on the trampoline in your Captain America butt huggers, and they don’t want to see an accidental slip. And sometimes we forget to close the blinds, and people don’t want to see a streaker when they’ve only just woken up.
And, more importantly, sometimes Mama just wants to take a picture. For the love, go put on some underpants.
The text came hard and fast and early, just before my world would explode into a frenzy of action, kids needing a walk to school, work needing doing. And though the noise did not falter, because my boys brushed teeth and scooted chairs and closed doors and opened them again and turned plates and zipped backpacks and asked what was for breakfast, my world grew silent on the heels of a monster. On the heels of death.
It is not so very long ago that my brother and his wife had to say goodbye to twin boys, on Father’s Day that year, and now here we are, in the smack dab middle of the holidays, in the sacred stretch of waiting in expectation, in the Advent season when a girl-child awaited a divine baby, and there is another baby lost.
Another baby lost. Another little girl we will not know this side of glory. This one a niece.
My sister-in-law wrote in those early morning hours, about a labor they couldn’t stop, about the pains she thought were just normal pains, because they were two days from the safe-er date, and to have it all go wrong now, to have a baby come and not be saved NOW would be too cruel, too awful, too hard to bear.
And yet she came, two days before her make-it date.
Callie Diane, a cousin and niece my boys and I prayed for every night since knowing of her tiny life inside my sister-in-law’s womb, praying without ceasing after that first text came flying across the miles almost seven weeks ago: “My water broke.” We had hoped and begged and cried and begged and whispered and begged. And the God who has the power to give and take away chose miracle after miracle, keeping this baby safe and healthy and alive for forty-one days in a womb with no water.
And then, when they were almost there, he chose to take away.
What kind of God?
///
I got the call about my beloved grandmother one morning just after feeding my toddler. Memaw had always been special to me, the rock who took us in when my mother left my father and needed a place to climb back to her feet, a generous woman who opened the doors of her home, again, the summer I finished my freshman year of college, because she knew Houston had greater job opportunities than my hometown. And she did it again the summer I graduated college and worked for the Houston Chronicle while I waited for a wedding that would bind me to San Antonio.
She’d had a stroke, my mother said. She had fallen. Something had pierced her belly and no one knew it. No one thought to check for internal bleeding before they injected blood thinners into her body. No one checked after all that, either, and she stretched out on a hospital bed and lost every ounce of blood to a wound no one could see.
She died.
And then they brought her back to life, once they’d realized their mistake, pumping massive units of blood into her, and she woke up. She lived. Except she didn’t live. Not really. She could breathe, yes. Sort of. She could see and hear and process, mostly. We didn’t really know how much of her was left. What we did know is that we were not ready to let her go. She had only lived 74 years of life, after all, not nearly enough.
I drove all that way to the hospital where she lay, and I went into the room, by myself, to see her. She was strapped to a machine that measured the rhythmic beating of her heart and the oxygen level blown from a mask and her blood pressure, which was always the problem, but not here, when medicine was injected into veins instead of forgotten in a pillbox she never opened. I looked at the tubes coming out of her, every which way, and at the mask covering half her face, and I bent over her and took her hand, and she looked right at me, and I didn’t even have to try. The words just came pouring out, words to a God who could work miracles, a God who could heal, a God who is Jehovah Rapha.
I called his name. I prayed for half an hour. I squeezed her hand. And when I was done, I asked her a question.
“You won’t give up, will you, Memaw?” I said.
And this woman who hadn’t talked since her fall, said, “No.”
“You’re going to be okay,” I said.
“Yes,” she said.
“You’re going to live,” I said.
“Yes,” she said.
They didn’t think she would talk again. There was so much brain damage, so much that couldn’t be repaired with just the giving of blood. It would have to be the giving of a brain, because this one was ruined by three minutes without oxygen and three strokes counted up over a lifetime. And yet she was talking.
It wasn’t time for her death, Jehovah Rapha said. And I believed him.
I kissed her cheek, knocking the mask a little askew, and then I fixed it, and after that I said, “I’ll be back to see you soon,” because I knew she would be up and about, defying all the doctors’ predictions, before I could make the drive to this place again. Hope walked out the door with me, warming all the places fear had chilled.
She would make it. Of course she would. Because we had prayed. Because he had answered.
And then she didn’t. She got worse and worse and worse, and it wasn’t a peaceful dying, either, it was a rough, hold on kind of dying. It was traumatic and hard and undignified, and I couldn’t believe it. I could not believe that I had been stupid enough to think that Jehovah Rapha would answer this prayer, ever.
My grandmother did not live, though we had prayed and believed.
What kind of God?
///
This morning I stood in the kitchen, listening to my boys talk about their dreams last night, and I didn’t hear a single word they were saying, because all I could think about was this baby and my brother and sister-in-law and how in the world I could tell my boys that the baby we’d prayed so earnestly for had died anyway.
And then my sister-in-law texted a picture of her perfect little girl with bruises on her face where they had tried to resuscitate her. I could not look at it without crying. Because she was perfect and because she was my niece and because she should have lived.
My boys didn’t notice, too intent on eating their breakfast, so I turned to them, and I laid it all out blunt and angry, because what did it matter about dreams when there was a brother and a woman who is a sister reeling from the death of another child?
“You know the baby we prayed for, your little cousin Aunt Sarah was carrying?” I said. They all looked at me and nodded. “She was born yesterday. And she died.”
My voice broke right in the middle of it, because who ever, ever, ever wants to say those ugly, awful, heartbreaking words about a tiny little miracle? I couldn’t say more. I could only shake my head and turn away.
And the second-oldest said, “Just like our sister,” and the table got all quiet.
They did not know their sister. But they know of her. They know of the girl we prayed for and wanted and imagined in the lineup of our family because she was made to be there. They know of the girl who died.
This pack of boys, who hear the comments people make everywhere we go, “You were trying for a girl, weren’t you?” and “All boys for you? No girls?” and “It’s too bad you didn’t get a daughter in all of those boys,” they may not understand just how cruel the taking is, but they do know that there is someone missing. Someone they might have loved. Someone who might have lived, if God had said so.
There are babies who die and babies who never come and lovers shot down in the streets and friends who take their lives and cities that are bombed bloody and fathers who fall off the wagon and grandmothers who die in a way we will never, ever forget, writhing and shaking on a bed. There are prayers answered and prayers left unheard, it seems, and we are powerless to change any of it. There is only one who holds this power.
What kind of God?
///
We didn’t expect to lose a baby. No one ever does, of course, but for us, it had always come easy, the conceiving, the carrying, the bearing. And when we learned of our fourth baby, we did not consider that it would be any different. Except it was, and suddenly I was in a place I never even knew existed, a silent place of grieving for a baby we never had the opportunity to know but who lived in our home all the same.
For three years her big brother had been praying for a sister. It’s unclear why exactly he wanted a sister, just that he was tired of welcoming brother after brother after brother. He was so excited to know that we were going to add another baby to the family, because he knew this one would be his sister. And he was right.
I took him with me to my second prenatal appointment, so he could hear the heartbeat I’d heard at the first one. And there was no heartbeat.
He sat in a corner of the doctor’s office while the nurse practitioner searched and then the obstetrician came in and searched, and he was still there, waiting to hear the rhythm, when my OB said, “These things happen sometimes” and I collapsed into a messy pile of sobs.
He was there to walk me out of the doctor’s office and he was there to try to cheer me up, though there was no cheering up from a tragedy like this one. He was there to tell his daddy,” The baby lost her heartbeat” when I could not say the words. He was only 3.
It wasn’t until later that we found out she was a daughter. It wasn’t until later that I met her in my dreams. It wasn’t until later that the silent cry slid deep into my heart, to be brought out in a great wave of rage another day, another day that was four years, five months and three days after that one. Another day that was yesterday, when another little girl died.
What kind of God?
///
They did everything they could, she said. All those doctors. All those men of science. They did EVERYTHING there was to do so they could keep a baby alive, raise her heart rhythm above 50 beats per minute, but in the end, all they could really do was place my niece in her mama’s arms and let her die. And so, in the same hospital where, 18 months ago, she watched her twin boys die, she held another baby, another promised one, another prayed-for one, and watched the breath stop in a tiny mouth and watched the color fade from a tiny face and watched the life leak from a tiny body. One pound, seven ounces, 12.5 inches of miracle, a little girl who had fought so hard to stay alive, even after she came into the world too many weeks too early.
She was blue and beautiful and alive, for only moments, and then she was forever gone.
What kind of God?
They did everything they could. It was up to God.
“My rainbow. My answered prayer. Washed away so quickly,” my sister-in-law wrote later that day.
“I’m truly sorry my body failed you, couldn’t keep you safe,” she wrote to her daughter this morning.
Three perfect babies denied them. Three babies covered in prayer and longing and hope. Three babies carried halfway, moving within, holding on to heartbeats, and then, at the very moment their parents finally get to hold them, they breathe their last breath. Given and then immediately taken.
WHAT KIND OF GOD?
I am angry. So very angry. It’s not fair. It’s not fair that it comes so easily for some and so difficult for others, this thing we call life, this thing that is really, mostly, like an every-day living war. It’s not fair that some get to have so many kids and some have so few or none at all. It’s not fair that every day my sister-in-law, a neonatal nurse, sees girls twisting in labor, girls who never wanted babies, girls who will give those babies away in the end, and she will deliver them and hold them and place them in the arms of a mother who never wanted them, and she will remember the weight of her own gone ones.
It’s just not fair.
No one ever said it would be easy, but no one said it would be this hard, either. No one said it would be this torturous, this excruciating, this traumatic. No one ever said how hard it would be to hold on to hope, because God works all things for good, and God doesn’t give us more than we can handle and through God all things are possible.
Except he doesn’t. And he does. And it’s not.
At least that’s what it feels like in a place like this one.
And of course I know the truth, deep down, because I grew up on truth, but that doesn’t change the truth of moments like these, either, when it feels like the only thing that is left for us is a tiny little god who didn’t care one bit about the tender, broken hearts of his people. Who waves his cruel little hand at tragedy and doles it out flippantly like it’s something everyone should want. Who thought it would be just the right plan to play with my brother and sister-in-law for forty-one days after her water broke, give them hope that making it this far meant they’d make it all the way this time, and then take a prayed-for, desperate-for baby two days from the we-made-it point.
What kind of God is this?
I know what kind of God he feels like right now, in times like this. But I also know that hope and faith and love are mysterious things. They hold on even in the strongest of winds, even in the deepest of waters, even in the fiercest of fires. I have been down to the bottom of the world, and I have stood back up again. I have been blasted into a pile of ash, and my dry bones have found life again.
I don’t really have the answers. Sometimes there are no answers, no matter how hard we search to find them. There are no answers to why one baby survives and another doesn’t. There are no answers to why some get everything they want and some only get asphalt and hunger and shame. There are no answers to why some die and others live.
It’s not easy to see and hear and feel God in a place as ruined as this one. It doesn’t seem like we will ever see or hear or feel him again.
But I know he is still here. I know he is peering over my shoulder, watching my every word, reading the texts I send to my beautiful sister-in-law, aiming the light so it shimmers around the corner of this dark room, still. Forging the way through and out and to the other side so it opens up like a morning glory.
So it ends its twisting, jagged path right in the lap of love. Eventually.
In this episode, Rachel shares about another spooky middle grade novel, a parenting book, how biographies can trip her up and the TV series Once Upon a Time.
6-year-old: Sometimes I can’t get my poop out of my…uhhhh….
5-year-old: Booty crack?
6-year-old: No, my uhhhh….
Me: Colon?
6-year-old: No. My…uhhh…oh! My sphincter!
3-year-old: Daddy, you have a penis.
Husband: Yeah.
3-year-old: I have a penis.
Husband: Yes.
3-year-old: My brothers have a penis.
Husband: Yes they do.
3-year-old: Mama doesn’t have a penis. She has a booty.
Husband:
3-year-old:
Husband: Yes. Exactly.
3-year-old: I have a booty, too.
Husband:
3-year-old:
Husband: Well, I guess not exactly.
6-year-old: I came out of your belly first.
5-year-old: And then I came next.
9-year-old: Actually, I came first.
Me: You didn’t actually come out of my belly. The correct term is uterus.
6-year-old: So we came out your uterus?
Me: Well, no, you came out of my vaginal passage.
6-year-old: Where is your vaginal passage?
Me: It’s attached to my vagina.
6-year-old: Wait. You have a China?
Me:
6-year-old:
Me: Maybe we should wait until you’re older.
6-year-old: Yeah. I agree.
6-year-old: I held a worm today. And I ate a gummy worm.
Me: Would you ever eat a real worm?
6-year-old: No way.
9-year-old: Not unless someone paid me 5,000 dollars.
Me: Would you do it for 5 dollars?
9-year-old: No. I would at least need to be able to buy some new Pokemon cards. So 6 dollars.
Me:
9-year-old:
Me: Nope.
Some people in the writing world think it’s hardest to get started. And it’s true that it’s hard to get started. But it’s also true that it’s hard to stay started, especially if you’re a parent.
I go through these cycles where I think about how my boys are just growing up so fast. Husband and I just moved the baby, who is nine months old, to his crib, and he’s our last one, so we sat in our bed getting all teary-eyed, because he’s the last baby we will ever have in our room, forever, and that feels significant and sad. And of course then I started thinking about how I’m using so many moments when I’m with the boys to work on email lists and to edit submissions and to edit other books, and maybe I should be spending that time playing and looking into their eyes and just enjoying who they are today without tomorrow and business and expectations stealing them from me.
When we’re parents, we can start to feel some guilt for pursuing a dream in all the spaces, because shouldn’t the spaces be reserved for our children?
But what I circle back to every time these thoughts start haunting me is that life and a dream are interconnected. When we are living life from the pursuit of our dream, we are living a real, authentic life. When we are pursuing a dream in the spaces of our lives, whatever that may look like right now, we are serving our dream. They both inform each other, and they’re both tangled around each other. They cannot be separated.
If I were to quit pursuing my writing dream tomorrow, I would not be a pleasant person to live with. I write to make my world clear, to preserve my most sacred memories, to make sense of my frustrating and joyful and disheartening and victorious experiences. If I didn’t have that outlet, my family—my children—would know. In fact, they did, for several years before I made my dream-pursuit a real possibility after I grew tired of watching it wave at me as it flew on by. I’m a much different person when I’m pursuing my creative interests. I’m a better wife, a more patient mother, a more whole person because of my writing.
So we can talk about balance all day long, but what it really comes down to is integration. How can we integrate our creative pursuits with our lives? How can we integrate our lives with our creative pursuits?
How can we become a more whole person?
You’re the only one who can answer those questions, because it looks so very differently for all of us. But it’s worth answering them. For our families and for us.
Here are some ways we can find integration in our art and our lives:
1. Create with our families.
Maybe this looks like sitting around a table every night and writing in journals together. Maybe it looks like incorporating storytelling into our everyday life. Maybe it looks like brainstorming with children when we’re stuck on a plot line, because other people (especially children) have really great ideas, if we’re willing to dig down to those diamonds and really listen. Maybe it looks like writing a picture book together.
This summer my boys and I wrote pictures books together. My boys are still working on the pictures, but, eventually, they will finish, and we will publish, and they will have books published at the ages of 8, 6 and 5. That’s a pretty powerful experience for children—to know that their art matters.
Our family life can become our dream-pursuit life, too, even if it’s just in a casual way for now and someday becomes something more serious.
2. Find the spaces and give some of them (not all of them) to dream pursuit.
Our lives are better lived when we are pursuing a dream in some of the spaces. Children need some of our space, of course, because they are growing and we are their parents, and we will want to give them time and attention, since we know that our writing is richer for the life experiences we collect on a daily basis. But we cannot give every space to our regular life (especially things like laundry and dishes and cleaning bathrooms, since procrastination often lives in those things), just like we cannot give every space to our dreams. When I worked full-time and decided to write a book, my house didn’t get cleaned for a whole year. I gave myself permission to exist in a dirty (but not unsanitary) house, because the dream was waiting to be pursued.
3. Talk about our dreams with the people who share our lives.
Kids are great dreamers, and it’s worthwhile to talk to them about our dreams. Sometimes they are incredibly generous and will come up with things like, “I’ll take care of my brothers while we’re watching a movie if you want to work on a project,” like my 8-year-old did the other day. It was generous of him to offer his time to watch his brothers (even if I didn’t take him up on it—because he’s only 8), but as they get older, they get to enter into this dream with us and try to figure out ways they can help us shape it into the spaces.
If our kids never know what we’re trying to do, they will never know how they can help. And if they never know we’re dreaming in the first place, they will never know it’s okay to have their own dreams. We talk about our dreams regularly with our children, because it’s so important to our family life. We do Dream Sessions once a quarter to make sure our children know what dreams are and how important they are to a life.
4. Understand that there are seasons.
Sometimes there are season where life takes all the spaces. And sometimes there are seasons when writing demands all the spaces. Right now I’m working on deadline to finish a memoir by the end of the year, which means that I am working diligently during Family Movie Night to finish it. But there’s also an end date to that arrangement. The arrangement only stands until the memoir is finished. After that, I will be able to sit beside my boys and watch a movie with them.
There was a season, about a year ago, when our oldest was struggling with some anxiety issues, and I found myself unable and unwilling to write until we could sort through things with him and get to the very bottom of it, because my boy needed me. And then I had to write to sort out all my own feelings about what had happened. And then I had to spend more time with him. And then I had to write again.
So the seasons come and go. As long as we keep in mind that they are not forever, that this time we have or don’t have to create is not forever, we will be able to move and flow with the seasons of life.
5. Let go of the guilt.
Easier said than done, I know. Especially in the beginning, we will feel a lot of guilt about how we’re trying to pursue writing when our children are still waiting to be raised. Is it selfish? Is it ridiculous? Is it irresponsible?
No. We are writing to become whole, and this ALWAYS serves our children. We are doing what is best for all of us. And that’s worthy. It’s enough.
