Category Archives: mother

fragile

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While fully in the trenches of healing crises, there isn’t a whole lot of psychic space for terror to lodge. The tasks of diagnosing and triage take center stage.

But now, now that Jameson is home and convalescing the awareness of vulnerability is immense.

Who knows where he picked up the virus that is taking his body hostage? Who knows what sort of calumny lingers for us each? Who knows?

A gifted healer friend offered to come over last night to offer healing for Jameson. He agreed that it would be good. Unable to be there, I asked her afterward how she experienced Jameson.

She said this: “He is a boy/man going through his first health crisis. (He is) learning to take it seriously and appreciating the support of family, faith and friends.”

What a prayer, those words.

We are, each one of us, experiencing the incredible vulnerability of living in bodies that sometimes falter. We sometimes take that seriously. If we are wise, we live gratitude for the support of family, faith and friends.

This gift of life is so very fragile.

God grant us wisdom, grace, and reverence for the living of these days.

well

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It’s my birthday.

I live in love.

My son is in the hospital.

His sisters, his step-Coop, his dad, his mom, his step-sibs and his partner have hearts so full of love for him and we are not alone in that.

He’s surrounded by skilled diagnosticians, is Jameson.

He is patient and dear and sick and this being witness as his body seeks its wisdom is hard heart work.

And, he lives in love.

And all manner of things shall be well.

vigil keeping

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“Life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans”. John Lennon

In the thread-the-needle that is daily life scheduling, this summer was planned oh so carefully.

And then life happened.

Having just come out of the Boundary Waters with a group of youth I received a text: Son Jameson was in the emergency room with unspecified misery.

The drive home was endless. He was discharged. He was brought back the next day with more howling pain and admitted to the hospital and is yet at home recovering.

This on top of the death of my nephew has stuttered my life-cramming ways.

I was supposed to attend a conference in southern Wisconsin. I had looked forward to it all summer.

I didn’t go. I stayed home and kept vigil and thanked God for the opportunity to be present to my son and to the needs of my heart.

Really. Conferences and calendar cramming will all pass away.

People do too.

Having witnessed the searing pain of son loss, I got to son tend.

Life happens.

Advent 18

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My mom is coming for Christmas.

It’s a seemingly simple sentence dense in power.

We are, we two, not unlike lots of moms and daughters.  We have spent the 55 years of my life clashing wills and life views.

My mother is a woman who knows with certainty what is seemly and what is not and her surety has extended to the needful state of cupboards (pristine!) and planned menus for each meal.

Her daughter?  Not so much.  For some reason my mother was presented with a girl-child who resisted blacks and whites and rebelled against imposed order.

We have lived, we two, a challenge.

I don’t know what it is about mothers and daughters.  The desire to protect, the temptation to create in our own image or the image of what we wish we had been able to able to call our own; so many things swirl beneath the surface of this elemental heart dance.

What I know is that my relationship with my mother affects my daughters and will affect their daughters.  If there is work to do, running from it robs not only me and my mom but the generations that follow.

So we have worked.  When it might have made sense to let it go and play it safe, we have engaged with each other and risked the hurt and vulnerability of letting each other know that it matters.  Our honest hearts won’t let go of each other.

My mom is coming for Christmas.  She will be in the midst of the feasting and the laughter and I know full well that she will bite back comments about how things might be better organized and I know full well that sometimes those comments will slip their way out of her mouth and into my ear.

But they don’t have to take up space in my heart.

What takes up space in my heart is profound admiration for the mighty mite that is my mom.  She has endured much, lived much, and loved much.  She has not let go of me.

Gathering for Christmas means readying our hearts.  We will mourn those absent, mark in our hearts the shifts and losses and remember years gone past when things were different.

But oh, the chance to be present to the wonder of the Word Made Flesh in our midst is stunning gift.  We get to learn what it is to love.

My mom is coming for Christmas.

Thanks be to God.

 

miracle

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Tomorrow my eldest turns 28.

I was 28 when she happened into my heart.

I look at her face and savor her being and realize gratitude so exquisite it pains my heart.

Leah’s was a scary delivery.  Not too many details, I promise, but by the time they had decided it was time to deliver her via surgery her vitals were compromised and as they put me under in the midst of great consternation all I could do was pray.

When I awoke there was this baby.  A girl baby healthy, blond-fuzzed, inquisitive and somehow grounded and she was alive alive alive and my heart has not ceased its gratitude song since.

Parenting is a most holy act of stewardship.  Our days are marked with the unfolding of miracle celebrated in the mundane: smiles and steps and words and hugs.  Small hands held in our own grow to reach out into the world touching in ways powerful and unique.

This morning I shared birthday brunch with my three babies and the birthday girl’s beloved.  Leah’s posse basked in her beauty and celebrated her being.

Following the feast, Leah and I went shopping for suitable clothes for a woman newly hired in a job tailor-made for her (she is working for Woman Venture, an organization that provides support for women starting businesses).

As we walked together on an amazingly fine October morning, she put her hand in mine.

Oh, for a thousands tongues to sing.

strength

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Spirit is a nebulous and visceral thing.

My mother is now home.  In less than two weeks she has gone from the ICU to a regular hospital room to a transitional care facility to home.

Today, one day after returning home, she motored herself up to her church for her regular volunteering gig.  It was Thursday.  That’s what she does.  Of course.

I find myself celebrating the grit of the woman.  She is tiny of stature and humongous of will.

There are still diagnostic questions to be answered.  She is aware of that.  And, she will drive the discovery when she feels it is time.

In the meantime, we who claim her as mom and love are taking deep and grateful breaths.  Mom is out in the world.  We each encounter our days with a deeper sense of ground.

And this daughter is thinking plenty about how it is such strength got planted deep into the soul of Barbara Jane Fawcett Macaulay Forrest.

I thank God for that strength and for her ability to wield it.

All is right in the world.

My mom is in it.

 

tender

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I got the phone call on Saturday.

My mom had been admitted to intensive care in Duluth.

I got in the car.  With me was my eldest daughter, Leah.  After explaining to her bosses at the wondrous bakery where she works what the need was, they sent her on her way with a bag full of cookies and hearts full of concern.  Both travelled well with us.

We got to the hospital and there was my tiny mother hooked up to many things.  Her medical issues were many; the presenting chief among them was pneumonia.

There was church to do the next morning.  The culmination of a new thing – a spring stewardship focus – was on the docket.

I needed to stay in Duluth.  My heart could not imagine leaving.  So I called a good and tender man who agreed to preach, leaving me free to be daughter and sister and mom.

My mother was moved the next morning to a regular room.  This is good.  They are seeking to understand how her health got so fritsy and what those spots on her liver are and there are questions that need answering and plans to be made but this I know:

Tenderness is an exquisite thing.

I feel it holding me and my mother and our family and while seeing She Who Must Be Obeyed hooked up and weakened is the stuff of child angst, I know her to be wise and strong and she will encounter this as she has the rest of her life: with surety and grace.

And we who are her children will live as we have been taught.  We are led by a woman who taught skating lessons for years.  And when we fell really hard and she saw it, she did not come swooping up to hold us in our pain.  She was present from across the rink, assessing our ability to get up and skate on.

She believed in our strength.

With surety and grace we will learn our way.