What I Have Learned About Hospitality

Folding others into a welcoming space of genuine love and fellowship is the true hospitality to which I aspire. This cannot be achieved by sacrificing the very qualities of peace and order and attention that make such an atmosphere possible.  This means limiting choices that in the past, wishing to avoid seemingly arbitrary restrictions and refusals, I would permit others to make in our home: small choices that did no harm in their own right other than the cumulative damage of trending us away from discipline and harmony, toward pandemonium and conflict.

This lesson is hard-won, after a year of unstinted hospitality that left us depleted and scarred, and likely did less good to those we welcomed in than we would have hoped. 

Entering a new year, I am first revoking the standing consent that held too many doors open to our guests, thereby allowing chaos and predation to slink in alongside fellowship and compassion. Then I will work to restore a nourishing home atmosphere within my family. After this is reasonably established, I look forward to again flinging open the front door and welcoming. 

But this time I will vigilantly guard the homeostasis of what Sarah Vap calls our "family animal." And that homeostasis is preserved by foundational habits ( rules) of mind and body which encourage us towards virtue and health.  Hopefully I will be able to safeguard these habits with flexibility, warmth, and tact, which will prevent us from lapsing into rigid legalism.

Year's End in Minneapolis

 It was late afternoon of New Year's Eve 2021. I was pouring scalding hot cocoa into thermoses so we could prolong our planned sledding excursion despite the single digit cold, nagging the children into their snow gear. Jonathan, phone held up to his ear, motioned me to him and said in a low voice, "There is somebody hurt in the alley, don't let the kids outside. I will warm the car up." 

We didn't go sledding after all. A fifteen year old boy was killed that afternoon in our alley, his death the third homicide on the block in 2021. 

Yellow caution tape and flashing police cars barred the passage in and out of our drive. A red vehicle with deployed airbags was battered against a garage on one end of the alley, a lifeless body and a handful of bystanders and cops at the other. As we unbundled from our minivan, a woman's keening wail hung in the air for a long minute or two. Jonathan and I shared a wince and herded our crestfallen children into the backyard. 

We attempted to salvage the outing by starting a little fire in our yard, chatting with our neighbor over her fence, soaking up the scent of campfire and sipping the mugs of cocoa we'd packed while tiny snowflakes drifted in the failing daylight. 

The lights continued flickering blue and red against the neighbors' houses in the gloaming and long past nightfall. Bursts of automatic gunfire vied with fireworks deep into the night as the city turned into a new year.

So we find ourselves taking stock, the faces of our children and the faces of our neighbors cycling through our minds against the backdrop of gunshots, squealing tires, and neon lights.

Musings from Mount Moriah

You won't find this recorded in your birthday book your fourth year, though it was the biggest thing that happened to you. It was the week of Thanksgiving, ten days before your fifth birthday, that you finally said you were ready to tell us what was wrong. After a day of explosive rage. After you burst into tears in the hallway following yet another time out and wailed, "I feel sad!", first leaning into my bewildered embrace and then yanking away. After you kept demanding water, saying your tummy hurt, that you were so thirsty, punching whoever was within range of your little fist, unable to keep still. We were so proud that you found the courage to speak.

He was a daredevil nine-year-old who had been living with us for two and a half months. His nerf gun and football skills and cool kid mannerisms made your eyes shine. You couldn't wait for him to return home from school in the afternoon to play racecar games on his computer for you, or include you in a wild neighborhood game of catch, tag, or hide 'n seek. 

Your dad and I had begun to notice how your energy would increasingly surge into combativeness when he was around, how you veered between adoration and hostility in his presence. We supposed you were merely adopting his kinesics, imitating your turbulent hero. Hindsight is heartbreaking. 

The night we moved your abuser and his family out of our attic and into a hotel, you and your dad and little brother went upstairs to play good guys versus bad guys. You led the charge into their quarters, calling, "The most bad guys live in here!"

Aunt Emily tried some play therapy with you. She shared with us that in your pretend world your dad and I are superheroes who always know when something bad is happening. This was supposed to console us, and it did a little, but it also underscored my failure to realize that, in the small but numerous attention gaps that punctuated our home life, something very bad was happening to you. Even your superhero dad, who does 150 pushups five days a week, did not know you needed rescuing. 

Thanksgiving was the following day. Your Poppy and aunt with five of your cousins drove to our afflicted area of Minneapolis to visit. After dinner we decided on a trip to the nearest park.  It was bitter cold. Two underdressed kids, snickering unhappily, were stuffing a third child--mute and stiff--into a trashcan when we arrived. My niece told me she found vomit in the grass at the top of the hill. "I didn't touch it," she added. You fell hard from the top of the play equipment onto your back on the woodchips, sealing the end of a miserable outing. "Of course it had to be him, " your Dad shook his head, carrying you in his strong arms to the van.

But the fact is, my dear, you were better equipped to handle this than almost any child I could have picked at random in our neighborhood.  Better equipped than your abuser, who almost certainly was himself abused at a similarly tender age. Better equipped than the many other children within his circles, boys like him with absent or imprisoned fathers and working moms who barely manage to keep their children housed and fed. In a neighborhood of diseased family animals, ours was sleek and healthy, able to sustain this wound.

It was the beginning of Advent. For the first time I experienced how jarring and even offensive the lamppost wreathes and joymongering billboards could feel to a heart still venom-shocked by an evil thing. 

We marked your birthday with family members who understood that you were struggling with incoherent rage, who looked you kindly in the eye and played card games with you and made you feel seen and loved. You began to fall asleep every night wearing headphones, your birthday Walkman filling your mind with Jesus songs. 

We hung Christmas lights, set up the Jesse Tree with its felt ornaments. On the fourth day of Advent I found myself holding up the ram ornament and retelling to you and your siblings the story of Abraham's call to sacrifice Isaac on Mount Moriah. My memory flashed back to the moment in Aldi several months before when I was bagging my groceries and asking God if I should invite this homeless family into my home. A shout rang out behind me, raising the hair on my forearms : "DO NOT neglect to show hospitality to the strangers!" I thought it was the voice of God directly answering my question, His mouthpiece a preaching weekday shopper with dreads and sunglasses. 

As I cast my mind back on that moment, my heart twisted with Abraham's bewilderment, for had not following that Voice meant laying our beloved firstborn son on the altar of our obedience? And yet in my bafflement I kept holding onto the soft symbol, telling the rest of the supernatural story. And there was your childish face, sticky with jam, sleep in your eyes, listening to how God so loved the world.

I have been reciting Psalm 103 constantly in my heart since you told us about it. At first, sick with doubt and anger, muttering the words inwardly as one desperate for warmth would rub two dry sticks together. And here is the miracle, my love: those dead words have sparked to life. They have kindled this burden of sorrow on the altar of my heart.  The fire is overwhelming the darkness of doubt and bathing in warmth the bone-ache of anguish. It sends praise incense wafting heavenward.

He heals all your diseases. Your rages are less frequent, happy moments are multiplying. You are reclaiming calm. When your helper inquires during a therapy session if you ever feel angry or sad, you say, beaming and flapping your hands in the air, "Right now I feel really happy." Oh, He renews my youth like the eagle's. 

Earth has no sorrow that heaven cannnot heal. 

Merry Christmas, my firstborn son, the son that I love. 

Happy New Year.

Yesterday was Mother's Day. It hasn't yet been two weeks since the evening that I did not know I was both pregnant and bleeding internally, hours away from an emergency surgery and the end of that inner flicker of life. Before the revelation and the crisis, Jonathan brought our kids to my bedside to wish me goodnight. They sang me original lullabies embellished with elements from the latest chapter of "Prince Caspian," then rode to bed on their dad's shoulders. 

In all the pain and confusion and the little death that followed, the memory of that rambunctious parting kept filling my mind, a heartening memento vivere.

"But not you, to whom I need to talk"

In three weeks it will be the sixth anniversary of my firstborn's birth, the anniversary of the time my mom dropped everything and entrusted her life to a dicey vehicle the nine hour drive to Minneapolis. She, mother of eight, knew a woman craves her mother over those first exalted and miserable days; that I would need to be mothered a little too. She swaddled Florence, set her under a sunny window to cure a touch of jaundice, smiled and crooned to her staring little face, cleaned my fridge, baked rhubarb pie, hosted well-wishers on my behalf, reminisced comfortably, and chuckled over how much she'd forgotten of her own early parenting days.

This year it grieves me that the potted African violet on my coffee table is still abloom six years later as it was the week of that visit, but my mom has been transplanted beyond reach of all my senses, except memory.

I want you back, I want you here,
even though April’s loss brings on the flowers,
trees forming new buds along each branch.
But there’s no turning back for us,
whose calyx, pistil, ovary blooms in flesh.
And each tree has a different seed: wings, pods, cones.
It’s an old story, . . .replacement, a way back
as a grandchild wears your eyes, your chin, your mouth.
But it’s not you, to whom I need to talk.
I want to call you on the telephone.
A woman is her mother, but alone.
(Barbara Crooker)

Decade

As another year draws to a close, I sing this textured garment of life rubbing rubbing rubbing against our tender human skin. 

Ten years ago I was preparing to move back to my Michigan hometown from my college town in Tennessee. When I think of that time, my memory unravels a variegated yarn spun of daily moments compressed into vivid composites. My car's engine ticking behind me in the hospital parking ramp's oblique shadows. Scarfing down the day's unsold cafeteria fare on the winding drive up the mountain after work. Inhaling the tar scent of Incline Railway timbers on morning jogs beneath them. Mockingbird song from the Craven House's antebellum wooden porch. That one tight sun-struck curve on I-95. The breathtaking freefall into sky and city alongside Scenic Highway. Coffee steamer and barista banter blurring into white noise around my table while I scribble in my journal at Barnes & Noble. 

All of these memories and a thousand like them have a certain texture: solitary, inward, uninterrupted. They are notably devoid of technology, and contemporary me is staggered by its absence, and the consequent absence of politics and pop culture in my life at this time.  I had a company flip phone and a landline, and blogged and emailed on a big stuttering desktop. My unfolding romance livened these outdated channels with the thrill of waiting for a new email to load, of mustering guts to return the missed call blinking on the caller ID.  I kept in an oft-visited compartment in my mind the thought of my early December plane ticket to visit this guy from college I was getting to know. A decade later, a handful of songs from mixes he gave me then still usher me back to that mental chamber of possibilities that haloed my 2010 retreat with a gracious shimmer of newness and nerves. 

I packed my '87 Chevrolet Cavalier, settled my dog in the passenger seat, and drove. 

I had barely unpacked my bags in my childhood home before I was watching Jonathan's Toyota pull into sight through the snow-flecked gloom of MSP airport twilight. He squinted out a foggy windshield that his arm periodically wiped clear as he scanned the curb for the spot where I waited, shivering with cold and excitement. 

The ensuing week I toured rural and urban Minnesota on his arm. On the drive across stubbled fields to the Twineball Museum I giggled over Weird Al's "Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota." We chatted, building Legos, while Nirvana played beneath the alligator wallpaper of his childhood room. I eavesdropped from the church pews while he and the Christmas choir rehearsed their carols, attuning my ear to his voice's steady strain. My city memories are slightly different, less auditory, full of vapor and shine. Watching sunlight wink off the saliva escaping from the cloud of Jonathan's breath while he performatively hocked phlegm at the Mississippi River. Fog filling my glasses as we entered the Minneapolis Art Institute, where we shyly wandered through aisles of art before descending the vast front steps an hour later into winter's enormous sparkle and dark. Jonathan's chandelier-lit company Christmas party that weekend, when the season conspired to deliver a storm that shrank attendance and made for a memorable drive downtown. I can still see the lumberjack of a man who sauntered across our headlight beams in the middle of the street, his shovel spanning his shoulders under fluffy twirls of snow as we crawled along at the speed of his boots. 

Into this setting, a flurry of firsts filled in blanks of experience I hadn't known existed. First interactions with future in-laws and friends, first telling of now familiar anecdotes, first assembling and dining on the famous family enchiladas, first group listen to Peter Gabriel through the fine living room speakers. First Broadway Pizza chair across from Jonathan, first time he debuted a surprise mustache, first twining our fingers, first worship at his side, first sips of coffee together in the white morning glare that follows a night of snows. 

Though I didn't predict that these moments, their texture at this time exquisitely new to me, would eventually become the homespun of my life, I enjoyed wrapping myself in them during my unexpected overnight at the airport that weekend, and over the blizzard-prolonged return journey, the weeks of finding my footing back in Michigan. And they did indeed become my happy quotidian: three Decembers later on a glittery winter morning Jonathan and I were married. Seven Decembers and three children later, we still live in the same large Minneapolis home that welcomed us from our honeymoon. 

Now it is 2020, and I can't relate my love story without thinking of my dad, abruptly widowed after 33 years of marriage. I find myself imagining what it would mean, after being folded year by year into intimate habitude with another, to adjust to the texture of solitude again. The hair cloth rasp of it, symbolized by sackcloth in other times. The gauntlet of significant firsts that he is always facing do not merely fill a blank of life experience, they necessarily pose a stark negative to positives that precede them. 

The loss of my mom changes the texture of my days, too, coarsening and dulling areas that once held great comfort and color. I feel I am wearing cherished memories thin by compulsively reaching for them, swathing myself and my children in them over and over.  How she loved lighting candles, bargain hunting, and the look of snow spuming off the top of the rushing trains at night. Her alto voice strong with praise beside us in the pew. How her head would tilt back when she wheezed with laughter. The way her knuckles creased around the curve of her coffee mug. How her thick graying hair ran through my braiding teenage fingers. 

As another year draws to a close, I sing this earth that wears out like a garment, and all our experiences raveled within it.  

I sing this textured garment of life rubbing rubbing rubbing against our tender human skin. 

Snapshot of a million times a day

An interruption-needle so long and quick to the center-brains: the word mama.

That breaks all my concentration completely mama, I.

(Sarah Vap)

Limits of utilitarianism

if men get war, then I get abortion

This line from Sarah Vap's Winter: Effulgences and Devotions has inhabited my thoughts since the afternoon when, quelling my innate prejudice--for I believe the Golden Rule extends to intellectual hospitality--I cautiously invited it in.

Vap makes a bid here for the right to gamble her future using abortion, as men do with war.  I would like to take this appeal as a launching pad to explore the reasons people contend for such tarnished prerogatives. I would like to make my case against all but a few of them. But my appraisal of means and ends will always be as persuasive as the convictions that guide it. Such conversations yield at best a gallery of irreconcilable worldviews, at worst, confusion and bitterness.

Taking that approach also bypasses two concepts which, combined, equip us to make the seemingly impossible refusal to gamble our own destiny at all. 

First: that our choices yield outcomes, but the outcomes are unpredictable. Selected in the mercurial darkness of the present, our choices exert a wayward catalyzing energy of their own upon the choices faced by others, even as the choices of others keep forming our own potentialities. If this is true, then choosing for our idea of an outcome--however innocently or even nobly intended--will always be a gamble. To choose using the currency of one or many unyielded human lives raises the stakes, often in ways we are incapable of fathoming. Arguing the prudence of such a wager is difficult, and ought to be. It does not take much imagination to see ourselves, our loved ones, on someone else's table.  

Second: that whatever else our choices beget, we will be the byproduct. When I look back at the many decisions that I have made, I see the truth about my character coming into focus. What I choose will always reveal who I am. This is where the power of volition can be harnessed towards an achievable destiny. My choices cannot incarnate my desires, but they will always incarnate my true self. 

Both these concepts offer freedom: from the futile striving to wrest outcomes out of a universe that doesn't submit to our edicts, and from the moral bewilderment that sets in as we grapple with how little our choices seem to matter. 

Wars and abortions would be much reduced if we trained ourselves and our children to understand the limits of choice, to wield its vast power appropriately. Not only because fewer people would avail themselves of these extreme prerogatives, but because more people would have the wisdom to reject the millions of small but self-disclosing moral failures that beget such extreme situations.

At the very least, such training allows us to transcend the power dynamics with which Vap herself resigns to participate. 

Sparklers - Barbara Crooker

We’re writing our names with sizzles of light

to celebrate the fourth. I use the loops of cursive,

make a big B like the sloping hills on the west side

of the lake. The rest, little a, r, one small b,

spit and fizz as they scratch the night. On the side

of the shack where we bought them, a handmade sign:

Trailer Full of Sparkles Ahead, and I imagine crazy

chrysanthemums, wheels of fire, glitter bouncing

off metal walls. Here, we keep tracing in tiny

pyrotechnics the letters we were given at birth,

branding them on the air. And though my mother’s

name has been erased now, I write it, too:

a big swooping I, a little hissing s, an a that sighs

like her last breath, and then I ring

belle, belle, belle in the sulphuric smoky dark.

I’m remembering the feeling of getting that lit sparkler in your hand as a child, the sudden pressure you feel to use it meaningfully somehow before it’s gone, how the burning hiss of it adds audio to your urgency. You try to get a whole word out before the first letter vanishes or scratch out a sentence or you lose your head and race around the yard squiggling it wildly before it is smoke and fumes, leaving you panting and dissatisfied.

Two years ago, when we were gathered as an extended family out on the front porch lighting our own fourth of July sparklers, I remembered this poem and shared it with you, Mom. I was thinking then of your mom, my Oma, sweetly missed on these occasions. I scrawled Oma with my sparkler in the dusk, then Mom, and Abby, and a series of messy childish hearts all swirled together. It felt at once meaningful, playful, and silly.

It didn't feel like a foreshadowing, but now that memory looms portentous and strange. I would never have thought only a year later your sparkle would be out.  The smoke you left behind is recent and thick, swirling in the air, burning my nose, and stinging my eyes.

How panicked and dissatisfied I would be, if the universe was simply this: a dazzlingly chaotic Trailer Full of Sparkles, each a vivid flash that could never make the sense it should. But I believe, as you did, that this massive locked trailer full of crazy, wheeling, bouncing, glittering sparkles matters and makes sense. And I believe that each human spark will be found to have written in some glorious way, with or without trying, the same great Name that kindled it for that very purpose.

When I reflect on your life, Mom,  I love to see how vividly you wrote that Name, in all its forms, over and over again in this dark world. How you taught us all the worthiness of making that our life's obsession: to learn the names of God and write them using the light He kindled within us, with ever greater clarity and beauty.

The best part is knowing that your spark, extinguished here, is blazing eternally in the presence of the God we both love to name.

I'll keep practicing my penmanship here. See you soon!

How the sadness of
a single human life
compounds with time.

How in a generation, maybe two if we are lucky--

the way our mouths wrinkle into
laughter, the way we can't remember
which dishes go where for the
thousandth time, the way our bodies
have pulsed with rage over small
injustices, the way we cannot hold our
liquor, hold our excitement, hold our
children long enough--

everything is annihilated with the
delicate memories of our loved-ones.

-Paul Cheney

Snapshot #6

Jonathan: "What will you do when you grow up, Florence?"
Florence: "Drink beer and wine...and push buttons on my computer!"

Snapshot #4

Out of the mouth of Bubs:

"Don't you wanna pway jumping scutes upstairs with me?" (An invented name for an invented game involving plastic rings hurled skillfully at the far wall.)

"MOM! Can I hold your hand!" (in a panic whenever we are out walking)

"Here's your pwesent." (singsong voice, proffering a toy wrapped in a towel or blanket or paper)

"My shadow looks like a gwown-up!"

"Let's do our singing books, Fwowence." (each night as they begin the ritual of "singing" through the huge pile of children's books on their bedside table)

"Yeah! We're on the path of LIFE!" (shouted from his bed as I descend the staircase after commending the children for their obedience before tucking them in)

"Cheese-a-most-a-veetos!" (chanted loudly, often, and for no apparent reason)

Snapshot #3

Florence is late in her fourth year of life, my long-legged worrier, my firstborn. Her cheeks react to any exposure to sunshine, even insipid winter light, with a burst of freckles. She and her best pretend friend, Loya, have long conversations while she uses the bathroom these days, and Loya often sleeps in the bathtub, so Florence considerately scrubs the walls during her evening bath to make it nice. Her favorite toy is Baby Babette, who is often sickly, or feeling shy. When it comes to art, Florence prefers to narrate a story while she scribbles densely with various colors. If she does attempt to draw people they emerge as colorful humped ghosts with cicada eyes and, occasionally, hands.  She often murmurs, "I wish I was you, Mom" or "Mom, I wish I was baby Reid" when she sees something enviable in our behavior (checking email, doing dishes...getting a diaper changed). She is drawn to shy, reserved personalities. I think her idea of paradise is a sing-along with her favorite people, or perhaps it's the moments she and her dad sit together at the piano and play "their song" together.

Snapshots #2

After almost two full weeks away from us, Willa and Ruthie were greeted this morning by the snowmen in our front yard holding a crude cardboard Welcome Back sign taped to the handle of our red shovel. No time for breakfast until after everyone had been introduced to the Christmas toys and had an icebreaking quarrel or two over them. A new game was invented involving the three new inflated rubber cows and a colorful half-dozen of children's bowling pins. Three children would straddle their cows and, giggling and shrieking, bounce across the attic floor as fast as possible, racing toward the row of pins set up by the odd kid out. First to crash through the pins won, and surrendered his steed to the pin-setter for the next round. Later on, this wild but organized pastime devolved to the barbaric practice of catapulting the cows over the attic railing and down the steep attic stairs. By the end of the day, however, the cows were dressed adorably in infant hats and fancy scarves, a teacup beneath each snout, and consigned to comfortably watch one of the innumerable shows the older girls like to put on for whatever audience they can muster.

The day was so warm for January that we were able to spend two long stints of it outside, stockpiling and pitching snowballs, constructing snow forts, and trudging around the block and back and forth from front to back yard under the supervision of calling crows and unseasonably frisky squirrels.

Cobbling the pizzas together for our traditional Friday movie night while the older children whined and quibbled underfoot, I did not notice my youngest strewing leftover popcorn across the floors until it was too late.  Having already mopped up two large milk spills from the same party over the course of the day, I knew it was no use crying over this either.

Snapshots #1

There are two snowmen in the yard. Their eyes, blueberries squirted into finger-pokes, have stained the surrounding area a disquieting magenta. Fragments of pine needles and streaks of dirt blight the lumpy contours of their snowy dermis.

If you could have witnessed their creation, the sparkly-eyed concentration invested on them by two earnest children, you might feel the same tenderness I feel as I peek through my window curtains at their grotesque forms.

32

"May our God 
make you worthy of his calling
and fulfill every resolve for good 
and every work of faith by his power,
so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you,
and you in him,
according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ."

2 Thessalonians 1:11-12

Reconciliation

My two year old son confessed to his father at the first opportunity.

"Dad! I almost killed Reid today!" he shouted by way of greeting, my harsh rebuke from hours earlier turned into the day's big headline as he leaped toward my husband's approaching figure.

I recalled hearing my baby's harsh wails from the bathroom just after lunch, racing outside in a panic at their unfamiliar tone, seeing him flailing on the pavement a foot and a half beneath the ledge of the cement stair. I registered Abbott's fleeing form from my periphery as I scooped his brother up. "Did you push him? On purpose?" I demanded, and he answered boldly, "Yeah! I did!"

Fear and fury propelled me across the yard, and I seized Abbott's arm and yanked him back into the house. He began to scream and pull away, and our passionate tangle somehow landed us in the kitchen. "No more backyard time till after nap," I snarled, dropping the offender roughly on the kitchen floor and turning my back on him.  "Oh you sweet boy. You okay, buddy?" I crooned softly into the baby's ear.

He was limp and pale now, a goose egg beginning to form on his scraped forehead, a thin paste of blood and gravel under his nose. I checked his eyes for signs of dilation, eased his head into the crook of my arm, and backslid into breastfeeding after a week's effort to wean him.  As he suckled, his eyes fixed on mine. Their clarity and stillness communicated themselves to me. "You're okay, aren't you?" I breathed, reassured. "You're just fine."

In the kitchen, Abbott continued to weep inconsolably. I let my head fall back against the couch cushion and inhaled deeply, willing myself to calm, beginning to feel the familiar pang of regret at how I'd allowed my fury to overcome me.

"Bubs, honey, can you come here?" I called. It took a few efforts, but he slowly dragged over to my side, his siren sobs growing deafening at he approached. I took his hand in mine.

"Shhh, hey, shhhh. It's all right, Bubs. Shhh, I know. You know what? He is going to be okay. He is. Even though you could have killed him, doing that. You must NEVER ever push him that way again. Do you understand? You almost killed him!" My words twisted into rebuke, then accusation, as the memory washed over me again, the knowledge of how easily this could have been a tragedy. I cut myself off, studying the stubborn face, then squeezed the little hand and kissed it. It occurred to me that Reid's wellbeing was not uppermost in Abbott's self-absorbed toddler heart anyway. "You feel bad, don't you, son?"

"I want to go in the backyard," was the only response he could muster, his voice shaking. I understood it to mean, I want this not to have happened.

"I know. After nap, you may again." I cupped his cheek in my palm and smiled. "I promise."

The violence I'd done him hung in the air as palpably as the violence he'd done Reid. I found I needed to go further. "I am so sorry I was rough with you, and mean. It is wrong when mama is rough and mean, just like it is wrong when you are. I'm sorry, Bubs."

He sniffed. "Oh." But he snuggled nearer into the curve of my other arm, and the stubbornness began to seep out of his expression.

I always expected that I'd be ready to forgive my children seventy times seven times. What I didn't foresee was that I would need their mercy so often, too. When I overreach in insisting upon my own way. When I am impatient, unkind, irritable, and resentful. When it seems as though my love does have conditions, obscure to myself as well as to them. My children lack the perspective to view a conflict through my eyes, but I am able to view it through theirs if I try. The effort reveals that my mothering is too often hypocritical, unpredictable, and harsh. So I find myself asking their forgiveness, again and again and again.

And now again.

It is too late to return to the backyard and do it better. Instead, as the outraged adrenaline of conflict ebbs away, I fold them close to me. Our sobered silence dissipates gently into the relief of smiles and then the silliness that in its lack of inhibition is the surest sign to me of our covenant being fully restored.

I hope this unspoken affirmation of covenantal wholeness permeates them in this moment, that it reinforces all such moments from our past, lays the groundwork for all such moments in the future. I hope that they absorb the worthiness of forgiveness, every time, whether they have wronged or been wronged or (in most cases) a little of both.

Wherever this is sought of you in your future life, I pray you give it generously.

Wherever you seek this in your future life, I pray you find it generously given.

Homemaker

Naptime has cast its spell over this Minneapolis home. Firm September breezes comb through the curtains. Between their strokes, sunlight stripes the furniture and the pendulum flickers lightly in its glass case. A goldfinch perches on the feeder through the kitchen window, then flashes its white tailfeathers as it lifts up and away. The crickets are insistent in the weedy side yard at my back.

I have coffee, warm in its stainless steel container though it was brewed shortly after dawn with the children's eggs and toast. It sits on a highchair in the debris of the baby's lunch: stiffening noodles, a puddle of milk flecked by zucchini bread crumbles and cubes of cantaloupe. On the floor the recycling bin has been emptied and disassembled, and a rolling pin crusted with mottled blue and pink playdough leans against a similarly crusted chair leg. A pair of snap-up blue jeans, size 12 month, tangles with the power cord of my laptop nearby, and a lone toddler sandal waits on the coffee table. A thicket of stencils and pencils has overgrown the dining table. Blades of grass and garden scraps leave a trail from the back entry to the counter, where my daughter left a pail of under-ripe cherry tomatoes she'd plucked after breakfast.

Today I attend to this all, but not in the usual way of sweeping and wiping, folding and gathering and re-ordering.

It is autumn. The yellow buses again haul their cargo down our street as the naptime hour nears its end. I am in my fourth year of motherhood. I need reminding that paying attention is a way of desiring, a form of prayer. So I wait on the truth of my life here, where my children are absent yet present, and what I have made in this home has found its fulfillment in being unmade. My love for them remembers itself, flickers over every mess with tenderness.

The baby has begun to fuss. Now I am ready to stand, gather him in my rested arms, and begin again.

Embryo

You are trained to look ahead:
Picture bright eyes blinking morning light,
The body soft and warm against your own.

When was the last time you thought of your self
Before you were a ‘he’ or ‘she’
Before your body looked like what you see when you think “Human”,
When you lived cocooned within your mother?

They are everywhere in summertime:
Otherworldly larval things, tadpoles, caterpillars.
You, too, were once as foreign to yourself as they will be.

Now it lives inside of you: a sexless grub-like embryo
that twitches and pulses.
Its body is not like what you see when you think “Human”
But your body, too, once twitched and pulsed,
A sexless, grub-like embryo

Cocooned within your mother as it is cocooned within you.

The Smiling Host

Their feet are freshly scrubbed, and now

Their bellies will be filled--we know how

they feel, those quarrelsome disciples

gathered around the meal.

But what must it have signified to You,

Their humble host, on brink of sacrifice?

A foretaste of what You would win

Your view within the room that night.

To hold each foot, fouled and rough,

And make the reeking flesh come clean.

To watch them chew the broken loaf,

Their bushy beards amassing crumbs,

And cheer their spirits with the wine

That stained their wagging tongues.

The Love that animated Your travail

Must have rejoiced to see them eat their fill.

Now, having as well been purified,

I join my fractious family at Your board.

In remembrance of You we sip, divide

The loaf. Oh let me not be inattentive, Lord,

Nor abstract this full-bodied rite to empty rote.

I begin to see there is no better place

Than here, where by Your favor I am brought.
Here my clean soul can feast upon your grace.
Here I can feel my Savior's smiling face.