Miracle happens

We recently renovated our lone full bathroom. The process of the renovation, like any project around the house, uncovered more issues needing to be resolved than I had planned on, which required more money to be put into the project than I had budgeted.

First, we found out we needed all new flooring. I was frustrated, but thankful that I knew the County Seat Decorating Center would do wonderful work.

The day a County Seat employee finished laying the floor, I walked into my bathroom and, to my surprise, started crying.

Having a floor I wasn’t afraid to walk on barefoot meant I could relax in my own bathroom, and maybe Lyla would relax enough to potty train better. Maybe it was the tears that set the next part in motion.

As I was thanking him, he ended up telling me the incredible story about the birth of his second son. It’s not my story to tell, but I stood in my dining room listening to this man tell the story of a miracle child and his own part in bringing that miracle into the world. I was speechless.

Here was this story that took my breath away just flowing out of him like a life-altering miracle was just an everyday occurrence.

I couldn’t help but remember the remarkably fortunate circumstances of my daughter’s birth. My story is nothing like his, but she’s an odds-beater. As he told his story I felt like part of me was nodding along, not with shock, but with understanding.

As much as that encounter alone could have taught me my lesson, something in the universe thought I really needed help getting this one. The next hitch in the renovation saga brought its own miracle story into my home.

My dad and husband blew a fuse trying to hang a light. The surge broke my dryer somehow (don’t ask me, I don’t get it, that’s why I called the repairman).

The man who came to fix it was very friendly, and in the course of chatting, I learned he has a son who, at age 2, was taken by Life-Flight to Colorado with congestive heart failure. His young boy’s life, too, is a miracle. For the second time in as many days, I stood listening to a story of the miracle of some child surviving against all odds.

Their stories are not mine to tell, but they reminded me of my own miracle child and I was ashamed as I began to realize how little I think about how lucky I got with my daughter anymore. It used to be all I thought about all the time.

Then came my third reminder, like the ghosts of “A Christmas Carol;” apparently big lessons come in threes.

I was getting things back where they belonged after all the work, when I uncovered something I couldn’t believe had become hidden.

It may sound morbid, but I have hung in a prominent place in my home a picture of a friend of mine who died in 2007. in a tragic plane crash at the age of 28. He had a 5-month-old son at the time, his first and only child, and the boy had been born with a deformity. His life, too, is a stunning miracle.

Somehow the photo had gotten covered, bit by bit. I can’t imagine how I didn’t notice; I am keenly aware of it when I walk past, even when I don’t look.

I’d placed it so it’s the first thing I see when I sit down at the end of the day with a cup of tea in my kitchen. Every time I see his face I stop and take one deep breath and say “thank you”.

I’m not thankful for his death, but I look at him and I know how ridiculously lucky I am. That sounds awful. But it’s true. Every time I look at my friend it’s all I can do not to rush in to Lyla’s room and squeeze her with all my strength.

And as I uncovered his face, all that thankfulness welled up within me.

I think I used to be afraid if I wasn’t vigilantly conscious of how undeserving I am of miracles, I’d lose the things I love the most. That’s why I kept that picture up there. But if listening to those men taught me anything, it’s that miracle happens, more often than we think and with no predictable pattern.

You can’t earn a miracle or work hard enough to prevent real tragedy. All you can do is be thankful every day for the day you have. It wasn’t owed to you, it’s worth its weight in gold, you might not get another one, but that doesn’t make the day at hand any less beautiful.

As published in the Marion County Record, April 20, 2011

The voice of silence

Those of you who know me (or have read anything I’ve written ever ... even a sticky note) know I am not one to struggle with finding enough words. In fact, if I can’t find the right ones, I sometimes I try them all just to see what feels right once it’s said — a practice that, by the way, works much better when drafting an e-mail or letter than in conversation.

My daughter, too, has the gift of being “highly verbal.” Just ask her. She’ll proceed to tell you, almost without stopping for breath for 20 minutes, anything and everything she has encountered in her brief 2 years that she thinks relates to the topic of conversation you’ve presented. And if you think you can simply sit and nod in response you haven’t met many verbal toddlers.

She will repeat key phrases, often at increasing volume or with growing urgency, until you respond in some way she deems sufficient.

“Mommy, you OK?” is a many-times-daily question in our house and if I don’t respond immediately with something longer than a “yup” this question becomes a shrill, panicked plea of “MOMMY, YOU OKAAAAAY?!?!?!”

“Yes Lyla, Mommy’s OK and Lyla’s OK and Daddy’s OK and the dogs are OK and everybody’s doing just fine.”

Add to this constant back-and-forth — which, yes, produces some of the most charmed moments of parenting for me, but also keeps me from being able to maintain any train of thought longer than 30 seconds — the frequent barking of my dogs, the beep of my cell phone with every e-mail and text message, the wail of an ambulance siren that sends all beings in my house under 3 feet tall into orbit, the buzz of my own mind thinking of all I have to get done that day, the voices in my head saying, “Stop that! You’re missing the good stuff!” and on and on, and the noise I deal with on a daily basis is nothing short of a torturous din.

So, imagine my delight when I learned that, following a recent dental procedure, talking would be a bit of a challenge the first 24 to 48 hours. Well, I thought, that will never do in my house, who else can holler above all the crazy? So, off the weebob went to Mimi’s house. And lo and behold I “forgot” to charge my cell phone Friday morning. And, somehow, the universe saw fit to bless me with two peaceful pups, napping away in the sunshine most of Friday.

It was then I encountered a dear, old, loving friend I have ached for for a couple of years now without being able to put my finger on what was missing — silence.

In college I had a wonderful soul-friend who introduced me to Frederick Buechner and read to me one evening some his thoughts on the importance of silence, which he has written about at great length.

I don’t remember the exact words she read that night, but I do remember I came away with a physical sensation of the weight, the gravity, of taking time for silence in one’s life.

Friday I awoke without an alarm to brilliant mid-morning sun on my bed and a breeze dancing in the curtains. True, it was some pretty serious dental pain that awoke me, but I was prepared.

I stayed in bed for a long time — listening. To the neighborhood. To the heartbeats of my own home (refrigerator, clock, etc.). To the birds and squirrels. To the wind breathing fresh air into my home. I inhaled deeply and exhaled slowly. It was the closest I’ve come to a meditation practice since my daughter was born.

Soon, the hour came when the birds were still, the passing cars were rare, and the appliances in the house were mum. True silence.

This was the friend I had missed. The kind of silence that is actively cultivated, the kind of nothing that fills a room with so much ... something. Space, but not in the way of lack of something, more like an abundance of opportunity for things that too easily hang in the background behind the daily din to emerge.

Usually what surfaces has a great deal more to do with what I actually need than whatever I’m busying my brain with, trying to keep life together.

In the days before motherhood (what we call B.C. — Before the Crazy) my heart almost didn’t know how to beat without this kind of time and space to listen.

Friday, I found a great deal of stillness, of quiet. I found room for things to move in my tired brain. And like air rushing to fill a great lung, I felt a great shhhhhh fill my person.

It is here my higher self finally has room to speak. Y’know, that part of you that is always there beneath the mishmash of trivialities that often bog us down? The part of you that sees down the corridor of years, knows the arc of your story, and is not shaken by circumstances. For me, it’s the part that has capacity for access to divine wisdom, which often presents in metaphor because the denotative meaning of everyday words cannot hold the truth it tries to speak.

I like to think of it as my inner Grandmother Willow and now you have proof, in print, that I’m a little nuts. The phrases I hear are not usually original to my own Grandmother Willow mind; they come from books I’ve read, music I’ve heard, advice of earth-bound saints, and other scraps of gold I’ve gathered throughout my life.

Friday, there was nothing. Not even a refrain or poem. Just the gentle sound of hush.

A lovely, quiet, peace. I bathed in it. Soaked it into my bones.

Until a lawn mower started up somewhere.

Later I pulled Buechner’s “Godric” from my shelf and found these words underlined in dark black ink:

“The voice of silence calls, ‘Be still and hear,’ poor dunce … The empty well within your heart calls too. It says, ‘Be full.’”

And full I was.

As published in the Marion County Record, April 13, 2011

Give truth a chance

I’ve written here before about my habit of staring out windows looking at stars. Apparently, my 2-year-old daughter either reads this column or is familiar with this habit of mine.

A few weeks ago we were in the car at night at a gas station and I was staring out the window. After a long silence, I heard her ask from the back seat, “Mommy, are you looking for stars?”

It was a simple question and I’m sure my answer made very little difference in her life, but I weighed several options before I spoke.

Before she was born I swore I would never be one of those parents who lied to their kids to keep some mystical fantasy childhood alive. If she asked if there was a Santa, I’d tell her the truth. Santa is an international symbol of the spirit of love and giving we celebrate at Christmastime.

Yeah, that didn’t last.

Still, I have tried to maintain as much of that original ideal as possible. I do think kids are lied to far more often than they need to be, because, I’ll admit, there are times it’s just easier. And most of the “lies” aren’t really malicious, they’re just the way we do things sometimes.

But somewhere back in my idealistic days I thought long and hard about it and decided, y’know, I think we don’t give kids enough credit. If we don’t at least give them the chance to understand the truth, how will we know what truths they are ready to hear? I think, in fact, there’s a pretty incredible failsafe in the fact that humans are wonderous creatures. If her little brain can’t wrap around something I’m telling her, it won’t and we’ll try a different approach. But if it can, how wonderful the things she might be able to contribute early on, when her brain is still flexible and firing all the time, if it’s not also trying to wrestle with (some) disillusionment.

All of this, of course, flashed through my brain much less eloquently as we sat at the gas station. I chose the simple, boring truth.

I hadn’t been looking for stars, I told her, but that sounded like a good idea and I asked her to join me.

In hindsight I wondered if I should have told her I had been. I think it’s perfectly lovely for her to believe any time we adults are staring off in the distance — zoning — we are looking for stars.

Then, this past week, I got another shot at it. On a particularly difficult day, her question resurfaced. She and I had locked horns all day and my husband was out of town. We sat at the dinner table and I stared out the window in our dining room, not touching my food, just ... thinking. Again my precious girl asked me, “Mommy, are you looking for stars?”

It was daylight out. There were no stars. But I didn’t take the time to explain all the technical blah blah of sunlight and the rotation of the earth, etc.

In fact, I told her “Yes, Lyla, I am.”

In some ways that was true. I was searching for points of light in an otherwise dark day so as to not feel discouraged. I knew we had a long evening ahead of us and I needed to reflect on the good things that had come my way that day if I was going get us back on course before bed.

“Do you like to look for stars?” I asked her.

She responded “Yeeeah. Mommy does, too!”

I smiled. “Yes, Mommy does too.”

That, also, is true in a deeper sense. I do like to look for stars. Much as my habit of searching for the points of light in the night sky is familiar practice for me, so is the habit of staring into the nothing and search for points of lightness, of hope, when darkness seems to be overshadowing my day. I have learned it is a good way to keep the darkness from having the final say in who I turn out to be.

So, maybe she doesn’t really grasp that deep deeperness of what I told her. She is, after all, only 2. But, now she has a solid foundation of truth for me to build on some day. When she’s ready.

By then I bet she’ll have become really good at finding stars in the night sky. The leap from there to the idea of always seeking points of light in times of darkness isn’t very far and I hope she’ll remember she has seen me do this her entire life. 

As published in the Marion County Record, April 6, 2011