gianna soderstrom

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  • taking a break

    taking a break

    You can’t rush spring. That much has been painfully, frigidly obvious since mid-March. You can’t rush the flowers that somehow know when it’s safe to poke their heads up. You can’t rush the tiny glistening shoots growing off the rose stems or the brilliant spear-shaped leaves misting the lilac bush in green. They’ll come when they’re ready no matter how often you stroll around the yard, socks wedged between your toes by the strap of your flip flops, squatting unsteadily by each plant and poking around under last year’s leaves in case you’ve missed something. They’ll come up, placid and glorious, exactly when they planned to. A wizard is never late, nor is he early. You can’t rush spring.

    I don’t like taking breaks, and I’ve had to take a break lately. It’s very annoying. Breaks are when you’re not working. If you’re not working, you’re not getting closer to your goals. If you’re not working, there are probably things that need doing. If you’re not working, you can start to feel a bit aimless and unsettled and angsty. Breaks aren’t very comfortable. Ask anybody who’s been relieved to get a fifteen minute break from the desk only to sit uncomfortably in the lunch room or their car, scrolling aimlessly, waiting for the clock to start again. Awkward, I know. 

    But if you believe God or mental-health experts, taking breaks is apparently a good thing. It’s the reset, recharge, refuel moments that make going back possible, or even enjoyable. Breaks make you productive, weirdly enough. If you want to do your best work, you’ve got to step away for a minute sometimes. You need good sleep and some quiet evenings and a pint with friends, or a walk in the woods, a hammock in your garden. Even just a can of sparkling water sipped in the sunshine on the back steps, looking at all the dirt that will hopefully be a yard by the end of the summer (sparkling water is great for adding a splash of vodka.)

    Breaks are all well and fine when you choose them, like a carefully planned vacation. I haven’t heard anybody complain about their vacation in Hawaii or a backpacking trip through the Colorado Rockies. The harder breaks are the ones you didn’t sign up for. The sick days, the cancelled projects you were excited about. When you have to set down a hobby in order to work an extra job, or take a break from school to earn money for the next semester. When you have to take a break from living on your own and move back in with your parents for a month or three during a transition. (I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with your parents. You know what I mean.)

    That’s the type of break I’m talking about. The type where your doctor asks how you plan to relax over the next months, and lines up a row of supplements for you to take home. The type where nothing’s wrong that time and a little rest won’t fix, but time and rest are as challenging a prescription to fill as any. 

    I don’t think any of us believe that breaks really aren’t important, but sometimes the lie creeps in that if we take a break now, we won’t get going again later. You worry that if you don’t take this opportunity to run a half marathon, you’ll lose momentum in your training. Or if you set down the writing project half-finished, you’ll never pick it up again. What if this tale also disappears into the dark abyss of stories-never-finished? If I postpone climbing mountains now, will I ever start hiking again? If I don’t plant tulip bulbs this year, will I ever start a garden? I know how it goes. The narrative gets fatalistic fast. If I stop now, I’ve stopped forever. 

    Only, that isn’t how it works. I know it doesn’t work that way because I’ve stopped writing half a dozen times now. I stopped in college, I stopped after I moved to Colorado, I stopped after my first baby was born and again after my second. Lots of stops. But I always find my way back to it because writing is what I love. It’s not just important, it’s a form of breathing. Inhale, exhale, string words together. I have been shaping stories in my head since I was a kid, hiking and fishing and biking with my family. I created worlds a half hour at a time on my breaks from schoolwork. I sculpted careful sentences word by word while I stirred pasta for Mac’n’cheese or pushed a stroller down the sidewalk or scrubbed the dinner dishes. Taking a break from writing feels fatal and permanent and awful, even when I’m so tired it’s all I can do to sit on the back steps with sparkling water and hope the grass seed takes, but even a long and necessary break isn’t meant to last forever. 

    Winter isn’t forever either you know. Sometime in the fall you trim back the dead foliage in your garden and rake leaves over the beds. You turn off the sprinkler and empty out the hose and winterize the lawn mower. And then a few months later you rake off the garden beds and discover tiny green shoots. You squat down in your socks-and-sandals and grin at the miracle of it. The daffodils came back, just like they always do. Turns out they just needed a little break.

    The writing comes back. It always comes back. I always find a way to set a new pattern or rhythm for writing – the nap-times, the mornings. The moment I get back from my after-dinner walk. This is the thing I’m reminding you because I need to hear it so desperately myself: breaks don’t last forever. We sleep for eight hours and wake up with the kind of energy you don’t find pulling an all-nighter. Breaks are like that too: you go away, you come back better. You come back with perspective and fresh ideas and a new project tingling in your fingertips because somehow, even when you’d rather be prescribed a cup or two of afternoon coffee with just a swirl of cream, a break is what you needed after all. 

  • the accidental coffee hour

    the accidental coffee hour

    I’m not sure if it is worse to forget a dentist appointment, or to remember it a week early. Either way, I’d gotten a baby-sitter for little Em, and somehow presented our dentist visit to Erik with the right balance of enthusiasm and bribery to convince him it would be ok. And then the receptionist looked at me sympathetically and said, “Oh, I’d love to get you in today – we even have an opening! But your insurance…” and we all know insurance usually has the last word. We walked back out into the wind and sunshine and I decided that if Erik hadn’t earned his treat, I’d at least feel better if I had mine. And so we landed at a coffee shop, with one extra-large bar of blueberry crisp on a saucer and a small cup of coffee with cream. 

    Sitting in a coffee shop isn’t Erik’s ideal world. I find this forgivable in a three-year-old. We discovered the saving grace of a Little Free Library inside, complete with childrens books and a few toys. So we read. We counted the wooden blocks that he pushed up and over the curled wire frame of the toy. We took a bite of the blueberry crisp; then he decided he was done, and I took several more bites. He climbed on and off his chair and I watched him flip through the books and talk about the people around us and I took a picture because sometimes I forget to just sit with him and listen. 

    Yesterday we went for a walk, Em in the stroller and him on his little strider bike. And then half way through I saw the way he was crouching and I offered to raise the seat. I forgot for a moment how much he’d grown; how eighteen months ago when his sister was born, he wasn’t tall enough to even sit on the seat at its lowest. Here he is now riding a mile around the neighborhood. 

    We could go back further; once upon a time in my first springtime with him, we walked miles and miles with the stroller, or him in the baby carrier on my back, twisting around side to side trying to touch the trees and almost making me lose my balance. There was a summer that he learned to ride the tricycle and every time we went to the park after that I had to push him back up the almost imperceptible hill before our house. I was pregnant, no less, but he was cute and it was worth it. We spent a lot of those pregnant days playing on the footbridge across from the park. Peek-a-boo and chasing games, letting him run downhill and walk back up over and over. Climbing the bridge rails and holding his shirt to keep him safe while he leaned over and threw leaves into the water.

    It’s been years and years since he was born. A million maybe. Almost four really. That’s how motherhood is. You love so big it could fill eternity but there it is all crammed into a body the size of a not-quite-toddler-anymore. It makes the time pass, and it doesn’t. Life as a parent goes by those contraries, and I forget sometimes to stop and look at the tiny boy who came out fighting on a quiet June morning. 

    But here he is in front of me, asking me to read the book we found in the little library one more time, and reiterating that he really doesn’t want even a tiny bite of the blueberry crisp. So I put my phone away and help him count the blocks as they go up and around, over and over. The Zebra striped square. The orange circle. The green triangle. And I read about the Monkey Marimba at the zoo. I take a bite of crisp and hold my coffee steady as he climbs in and out of my lap, and I take the time we didn’t spend at the dentist to be with my boy again.

    Hey there – you know there’s a whole host of stories and essays I publish only by email? That’s also the place where you can really write back – join the conversation. Drop your email address right here. Let’s be friends.

  • an unfinished house

    an unfinished house

    There is a lot about my house that is unfinished. The dining room floor needs to be sanded and stained and part of the living room needs to be re-stained. A significant number of transition strips between floors need to be purchased or created and installed. There are two rooms that need flooring and three that need trim and four that the Lord truly… well anyway. 

    It will be a long time before there are no more boxes in the house and maybe longer before I feel settled. At this rate it could be forever before this place is home. But that’s a pessimistic and unfortunate view of everything packed or unpacked, and I don’t choose it. I choose to just keep swimming (hello Dory, I see you there.) 

    Keeping on doesn’t look big, which is a bummer. Sometimes it feels bigger than it looks, which is helpful. Today I moved eight paint cans out of the corner of a room and laid down a small braided rug and arranged a delicate heap of six pillows. I found two old quilts of mine, one that I made and one that my aunt made for me. My toddler and I counted the star pattern squares in the quilt I’d made (there are nine, if you were wondering) and then we folded the quilts next to the corner and now one more part of the house is closer to finished, ready, unpacked, home. I did it, the keeping on, this morning. It didn’t look big, especially since I had to move a large TV screen from one unfinished room into another just to try to finish that corner. It felt like rearranging work without making any progress. But the pillows were progress. I pulled them out of a large black garbage bag and dug the blankets out of a trunk in my bedroom and now one corner of the house has been transformed. What used to be temporary storage for a rotating fan and some paint is now a reading nook under a window, and even if hanging the curtains has to wait another day or month or two, we’ve made progress. 

    Part of the reason that keeping on looks so little and feels so big is that a lot of it is outlet and light switch covers that I need to put back on in rooms that we painted. You’d think there’s nothing easier and you’d be mostly right, except that apparently the motivation required to move eight paint cans, one rotating fan and a large-screen TV is less than what’s required to take the outlet cover from the mantel and fasten it to the outlet two feet to the right. I may not be the brightest and best with math but there’s something unbalanced about that equation. 

    But now it’s afternoon and afternoons are for baby naps and then long walks with the toddler, and I don’t have the energy on top of planning dinner to reattach outlet covers. This is why there is a choice; it’s not a choice so much of what happens, because four out of four people in this house need to eat before bed tonight. It’s an attitude choice. I get to look around at the unsanded dining room floor and the outlet covers that are beginning to get mismatched and moved around, and I just get to choose one small thing to do, and then choose joy. 

    Joy is shy. She’s always coming to the door but Dissatisfaction knocks louder. Use the peep-hole, or the doorbell camera if you’ve got one. Dissatisfaction will pelt you with the outlet covers until you have square-shaped bruises, but Joy will wink at them and ask if you’re serving ice cream or chocolate cake for dessert, because that pile of brightly colored pillows needs to be celebrated. Joy will pull up the window shades and ignore the dirty dishes and let the kids play outside barefoot in January because they’re having fun and really, it’s just mud. Joy will painstakingly count the nine patchwork stars on that old lap-quilt you made a dozen and a half years ago even though it’s already past naptime, because the three-year-old loves his new star-blanket and Joy wants to witness it. 

    Lean in. Choose joy. Keep on keeping on one paint can, one throw pillow, one patchwork star at a time. It’s worth it, because a home isn’t made by choosing the perfect trim and deciding yesterday which floor to lay in the bathroom. Home lives in the outlet covers that float around on the mantel while you create a reading corner for your babes, in the mud you brush off their shoes after they’ve played outside in the warm afternoon. It’s in the cup of coffee you enjoy while they nap and the friends who eat around the table even while the floor under them is rough around the edges. Home is not the finished house that’s kept you awake at night working, but the unfinished house you’ve really lived in. Live in it, darling, and watch the house become a home around you.

  • birthday wishes

    birthday wishes

    Here is something very important that I’m not very good at remembering: the age you are today is the best time to learn that thing. I don’t care what thing exactly, I just mean the thing that you wish you’d learned years ago. The boundaries or the confidence or the ways of enjoying vegetables so that you eat them more often. Whatever it is you’re learning now and wish you’d learned a long time ago. That thing. Right now is the best possible time to learn it.

    Here’s how I know this: regret. It is easy to look at myself in high school or college and wonder why that version of me didn’t enjoy working out consistently or eat a little bit less breakfast cereal and a little more protein. Why she didn’t have more confidence or, for goodness sake, stop wearing oversized t-shirts with baggy jeans (do not go stalk my old Facebook photos, now is not the time). But the truth is she was doing her best. Past me and past you – they can’t fix anything now. It’s happened. That story has been written and there aren’t any backspace keys. You did what you could with what you had. That’s what matters.

    Today is my birthday. Birthdays are important to me. I’ve always loved them. And having a January birthday is hard in the midwest where I grew up, because snowstorms and blizzards are just too popular there. But Colorado is coming in clutch with that sunshine and I’m sitting by an open window listening to the birds right now, no snow in the forecast all week. I’ve learned a lot this year. It was sort of the J-term none of us wanted, yeah? 2020 was the school happening when there shouldn’t be school and none of us had much choice besides adjusting to the pressure somehow, and if we didn’t learn it all this year, we’ve got time to unpack it going forward. But it was a year meant to teach and test, maybe over and over again like the nine months of a school year (may summer break come quickly, amen.) But birthdays are not just fantastic, they’re a fantastic time to reflect and reflecting tends to remind me of all the things I wish I’d known earlier. Never mind the whys and hows of how I could have learned them earlier, or the things I was learning earlier. I just wish, you know?

    But here’s the thing about birthdays and wishes: those wishes aren’t meant to be spent on regrets. You take those wishes and aim them forward, pull back all the way like you did when you borrowed your brother’s slingshot and flung bits of gravel across the yard. Pull back and close one eye and aim forward. Point those wishes towards learning new things, not regretting old things. You did what you could. You made it through. You’re here now. We’re taking this birthday and this sunshine and this big set of wishes and we’re taking one step forward at a time. This is no time to be looking over your shoulder. 

    What’s important, what’s really going to make the difference this time, is that you’re more aware. Odds are you weren’t able to learn this particular thing way back when. You were still laying a foundation in those days. You had to learn why vegetables were important and also how to cook before you could feel at home messing around in your kitchen, whipping up healthy meals day after day. And sometimes it takes years of trying to become a runner before you recognize that running is your arch-nemesis and those twenty-five minute cardio-strength circuits on YouTube were made with you in mind. Not everybody can run half-marathons. My sister can and I call her from my couch after she’s gone home and showered to tell her she’s amazing. Not everybody can make a great salad from scratch, guided by the subtle touch of intuition and a shared genetic code with Gordon Ramsey. But damn if I can’t season my sauteed veggies like nobody’s business. And you’ll never see me on the Great British Baking Show (partially because I’m not British), but my kitchen has still seen its share of chocolate cakes, and chocolate covers a multitude of ills. (To most people; not Paul Hollywood, but whatever.)

    So eyes forward, darling. Accept that there were foundations and layers of bricks that had to be laid down in order for you to get here. You’re not behind. You. Are. Not. Behind. Look up and walk forward, one foot in front of the other, because there are wishes to be made on candles this year. There are new things for you to learn and baby this is the absolute best time for you to learn them.

  • a dichotomy of boxes

    a dichotomy of boxes

    A note of context: I wrote this before Christmas so it’s about Christmas, but it’s still true because there are still boxes everywhere. *shrug* Enjoy!

    There are a lot of boxes in my living room right now. Some are under the tree. Wrapped and taped, and tied with twine or ribbon or that shiny ribbon-like stuff that only appears at Christmas because it’s easy to curl when you run the blade of a scissors down one side. There are also costco boxes. And diaper boxes. Hello Fresh boxes (I don’t subscribe but thank goodness my friend Michelle does: I needed those boxes.) We moved a month ago. Almost exactly, actually. I’ve unpacked just enough to find the ribbons and ribbon-like-things and to realize that we ran out of wrapping paper. And because all seasonal things were in the garage, I found the Christmas ornaments faster than I found Wuthering Heights buried in a box in the basement – which is currently a catch-all box. But the tree is up and at least half of the boxes in the room are intentionally placed under it. The other half I’m still unpacking. 

    It’s a weird dichotomy. Christmas decorations are probably the single most homey thing I would name. You plug in the string lights and hang the ornaments and it creates an entire atmosphere. Old Christmas songs, hunting down scotch tape and tissue paper for a cozy gift-wrapping session on the floor of your bedroom. Hot chocolate, snowmen rolled out of sticky, misshapen snow, sitting by the fire after you come inside. The smile on your brother’s or sister’s or toddler’s face when you got a gift just right. All it takes is a tree to fill my head with happy thoughts. And a single half-empty moving box with packing paper spilling out one corner is enough to make me feel unsettled, not at home. 

    I haven’t really lived through Christmas in this odd sort of tension before. Sure, I’ve moved plenty of times and celebrated Christmas on a yearly basis, as one does, but I haven’t been just-moved-in and celebrating Christmas all at once until now, and it’s unnerving. Against one wall is the tree all lit up and piled with gifts for babies and siblings and parents and friends, one big beacon of hominess topped with a sparkling gold star. Against the other wall is a box of pictures I haven’t hung and knick-knacks from the catch-all counter at our last home that I still haven’t found space for. No scotch tape; I checked. There’s a box upstairs in my daughter’s closet with all my high heels and combat boots (yes, I wear both and no, I don’t think I’m crazy. Thanks for asking.) There’s another box in the master bedroom full of bathroom things, and about fifty-eight thousand boxes in my son’s room that are all full of cars. The odd train or dinosaur tossed in for good measure. He has a toy preference, I can tell you. 

    The boxes declare that we are new here. That our things are new here. That we and our things haven’t figured out how to belong yet. And if you asked me how I plan to arrange the living room, you’d agree with the boxes. I haven’t figured out how to belong in this space yet. Oh I’ve got curtains hung and there’s a certain step in the back yard that lends itself to gazing dreamily at the mountains. I have the kitchen mostly arranged, although there is some dispute about where the silverware truly belongs. But generally, we’re still new here. We’re still unpacking. We still don’t know what stories these walls are going to tell in ten years or twenty years, or in two months. The story of settling, unpacking, belonging, I hope. And until then I just look across the room at the Christmas tree. 

    When I sat down this evening to ponder the types of boxes and their purposes in this house, I began to realize that this is the reality of advent. It is a dichotomy – we celebrate a God who came a long time ago, and we’re celebrating while we’re still waiting for him to come back again. God, the shining, light-filled tree that makes a home anywhere he is, and God who’s moved into the world through us, however awkwardly we do it. God who invites us to belong in His space when we couldn’t ever figure it out on our own. God who says to the half-empty boxes of our past life that the true, unboxed gift of Jesus is the one that matters most; more than the diaper box full of old pens, an empty water bottle and a half-used notebook. 

    It’s true, I sometimes think if I have to look at the Hello Fresh box with its crinkly insulation one more day, I might toss it out, contents and all. But when I sit in the armchair that may or may not stay in the corner, when I sit there and look at the tree instead, there’s a sort of home-atmosphere that comes in despite everything else, silverware be damned. We’re leaving to celebrate with family in a week, and there’s no way I can unpack probably even one more box by then. But maybe that’s ok. Maybe I will sink into the tension of home and not yet, and let it remind me of the not-yet I’ll move to when this life is all said and done. Maybe a dichotomy of boxes isn’t just my unsettled new home; maybe this is the place where Jesus lives too.

  • a laughter a day

    a laughter a day

    I think nearly everybody comes to the same conclusion as they get older: time goes quickly. When you look back from a far enough distance, everything is foreshortened. The long twelve months of the year 2020. The everlasting nights when you woke up every two hours to feed a baby. The ninth month of pregnancy. Or the days between knowing you get to adopt and then taking that beloved human home for the first night. Grad school. High school even. The never-ending night after you broke up with your first girlfriend or boyfriend. Things lose their length in hindsight. Things in the mirror are closer than they appear.

    But we say this about parenting more than anything else. Enjoy every moment. The years fly by. Blink and it’s over. One day they’re babies and the next they’re going off to college. It might all be as true as Moses but that doesn’t help the days that feel everlasting right here, right now, washing out this poopy underwear or biting your tongue because having “helpers” in the kitchen is the misnomer of the year, or maybe the century. 

    However fast the years may be going for the mom-turned-grandma, they’re slow for me. And maybe there’s actually an enchanted blink you make sometime and bam, they’re literally in high school a second later. I have not discovered this. In the meantime, the seconds are long and the minutes are long and the days are long. Hindsight shortens but the present lengthens enough to balance it out, apparently. And no matter how delightful or funny or obedient or enjoyable my two babes are for much of the time, there’s still much that’s otherwise. Enjoying every moment sounds helpful and typical and trite and it sounds impossible. It is impossible. So I have learned to set my sights on a different goal.

    We don’t enjoy every moment. But we do try to laugh every day. I remember when I was mama to a baby just trying out laughter, him just beginning to understand bubbly joy and the glimmerings of humor. He laughed when we swung him up in the air. He laughed when we played peek-a-boo. He laughed when we jumped up and down or danced around the kitchen or tipped him upside down. And I began to try to find all the ways I could to make him laugh, because they were fleeting. Shaking the Pooh rattle one day was just right and a week later he’d want nothing to do with it. Singing in a silly voice at bedtime was funny for a while, and later it was jumping jacks when I did my exercise, or crawling around on the floor with him, or letting him try to hold a door closed against me. 

    But day by day, the laughs stacked up. We moved from silly movements and mimes to running in circles together or tickling his nose with aspen leaves in the fall. We swooped his booted toes into the snow through the winter and tickled his cheeks when he sat in the swing at the park. Now we make silly faces and race our Hotwheels cars around the roads printed on a play mat in his room. We crash old tonka trucks into each other and mimic each other’s silly faces. I tickle his nose with the pompom of his winter hat. He says “hotdog-uh” in a funny voice. A well-timed tickle on his collarbones still doubles him over with giggles, and when I get the hiccups, he says, “Mommy, are you… are you.. Are you hiking up?” and we both begin to laugh. I’m not the only one trying to bring out the giggles anymore. But our laughter is still piling up. One memory at a time. Each day I hunt it down, that moment of joy, of unrestrained mirth. 

    I do it because there is freedom in laughter. There is joy in laughter. There is relationship and humor and comfort and restoration and reconciliation. These are the things I want for my babies. I want to have a bond within which we can laugh, over and over and over. I want us to be comfortable with each other. I want to find joy with them, humor with them, restoration, enjoyment, a life-long series of good times together with which we can weather the bad. 

    We don’t laugh all day, every day. Sometimes it’s a real struggle. I’m in a mood. He’s in a mood. Baby Girl might even be in a mood. The way she holds a piece of plum or pie or potato out over the floor and prepares to drop it while she stares me dead in the eye would try the patience of a saint. But most days, even with the whining or the food-dropping or the days when I’ve just barely gotten any sleep and we’re running from the grocery store to the play-date and back again for naps – even then we can find a moment to laugh. Maybe it’s the sheer joy of spotting a train when we were playing I Spy. Maybe it’s the nose-wrinkling way Baby Girl grinned when we babbled at her that brings me and the toddler a laugh. Maybe it’s a tickle war or wrestling or crashing the toy cars gleefully over and over until a finger gets pinched. Somehow. An opportunity rises, and if it doesn’t I create one, and if even that feels like a stretch I help him to create one. Laughter matters like that. No matter how quickly the years might just fly by or pass in that one wild blink, no matter that we’ll always be told to enjoy every moment and we’ll never be able to achieve it – no matter. We have laughter, and we have a lot of it.

  • crows

    crows

    A few years ago we lived in a neighborhood next to a golf course. The lawns were green and sparkling. The sidewalks were flat and maintained. The houses were craftsman style and beautiful, and shaded by old trees that grew in avenues of towering green. Everybody had a garden and almost nobody had weeds. I loved living in that home. Anywhere we walked was beautiful. I can remember only one corner where an old twisted tree had pushed a piece of the sidewalk into jagged shapes. I liked it because it was different, and because the rest of the smooth sidewalks made it easy to walk to. Every street was polished and beautiful. I could live in the middle of a city, I thought, if I could live in a place like this – perfect and beautiful. Peonies in this yard as the spring grew to summer and roses across the street when summer got older. Magnolia next to the purple house, blooming in the springtime and a lilac hedge anywhere you look. 

    Our new neighborhood isn’t exactly new anymore, either to life or to us. It’s not a golf-course neighborhood. The sidewalks are cracked in most places and crumbling in some. Sometimes the curb slopes down to the street and sometimes it’s like a mile-high drop, though maybe that only matters to people with stiff knees and those like me who are trying to get a stroller across the street. The trees are well enough old but you’ll see untrimmed dead branches striking brown through the thick summer foliage. And there are crows here. Every time we visit our family in Minnesota I see the finches and hear the robins and Mom points out with enthusiastic energy every time she sees a bluebird. But here there are squirrels and crows – it’s not to the exclusion of other birds but when I’m out walking the chipped sidewalks in the evening cool, it’s the crows I see and hear, flying sometimes ominously and sometimes beautifully through the particular sunset gold. 

    A steam of crows flies overhead one evening while I walk; I hear them above me and stare at them with a fascination I don’t exactly understand. The collective noun for crows is murder: a murder of crows. They did not feel like murder on this night. They were so low I heard their wings rushing like hurried breaths in the night air. The first word to mind was phalanx. Syllables that rise and fall and breathe, rapid like wings. Phalanx. Is that the collective noun for swans? I wonder if I would rather see swans this evening. 

    I have been walking with urgency – tired and almost discontent with the chipped paint, with the overgrown and untamed quality of our neighborhood. A long week of parenting and staying in to avoid the rain, of wanting to write and not writing, has made me unable or unwilling to look for the silver linings. Bright dahlias big as small melons, alpine sunflowers growing riot in every second yard. Green things poking up undaunted between pieces of a sidewalk. The way morning sunlight filters into everything even when you see it through the shadows. Some days it all becomes just an excuse to miss the quiet shady green of the golf-course neighborhood streets with the level sidewalks and the perfect craftsman houses in their white trim. 

    But it’s the same in that moment with the large black fluttering as it is when, on an endless weary day, I walk under the whispering silver maples or see the composite sumac leaves like double vision and always feel a particular sort of joy that is more like satisfaction in the rightness of things. The crows and their wingbeats and their shining thick black feathers against the gray sky couldn’t belong anywhere else but that moment above the street and in a second I recognized that I couldn’t belong anywhere else either. These sidewalks and the houses are both a little chipped but the imperfect flowerbeds are still blooming and wild, and the glow from the sun in the fold of the mountains still sits in the air above us like an early promise of tomorrow’s sunrise.

    I don’t suppose that we’ll always live in this faded network of streets; there’s a budget growing to the size of a down payment and we talk how long a daily commute would be from this or that part of town, whether we’d be close enough to our church and how long the drive up to the mountains would take. But maybe the crows will live there too, wherever there is. I’ll still have the streets and sidewalks for walking in, cracked or crumbled or perfect, and in all hope and likelihood the sun will still float out a golden evening haze from a fold in the western mountains. But until then. Until. I’ve still got these old chipped paths to walk on and still those crows that fly in a long phalanx, black and glorious and misnamed against the blue or gold or gray sky with a rush of wings like even breaths.

  • making pearls

    making pearls

    Here is a hard thing that needs to be said. 

    Even those who love you may not understand everything you do. And that’s ok. 

    Oh, it’s hard. It can feel like a sucker punch the first time somebody who’s always been supportive, no-questions-asked, always got your back suddenly looks at you funny and says Why? or even I wouldn’t do that. It can feel like the rug’s been pulled right out from under you. This was the person you’ve always agreed with. They’ve always supported and agreed with you. They’ve always been the cheerleader. And then in the one second when they don’t, you wonder suddenly if you’re crazy, if you’re the one off-base, if you’re running wildly in the wrong direction. 

    It might be a little thing. You choose to nurse your baby to sleep when they’re teething or you let them crawl into bed with you once. You didn’t potty train by a certain age or you let your two kids sleep in the same bedroom. It seems to be the littlest things that wiggle into close relationships like sand in the heel of your shoe. 

    I have experienced this. It starts with a single comment between friends and then suddenly you go to bed wondering and wake up insecure and a little niggling distance grows while you stare existentially into your morning coffee (and then also your afternoon coffee and your evening wine. It escalates quickly.) 

    Anyway. I don’t have grand solutions for you. This is a hard situation. But I just want you to know you’re not the only one who’s accidentally let an off-hand comment or difference in parenting methods or exercise habits or even the way you grill your chicken work like sharp grit into a relationship that used to be smooth sailing. It happens to everybody. It usually happens pretty often. But it doesn’t have to escalate. You can let the sand work into your heel and give you a blister, or you can make like an oyster and cover it in softness until it becomes a pearl. I’m not just being poetic: this is a choice we get to make. You let blisters rise on your soul or you let God-in-you grow small sharp things into large beautiful things. Pearls are magnified sand, you know. Pain coated and coated until it becomes a round globe of beauty. That is what redemption does. 

    It will sting at first. I know that much. I wouldn’t be saying all this if it didn’t: it stings and it’s ok to feel the sting. The sting points to something important. Hard words hurt more when they come from somebody we care about. But after you brood over your morning coffee, pray over your breakfast. Ponder over your lunch. Pray some more through your afternoon coffee. Forgive over your dinner and if you can’t quite get that far, then at least exhale all that anger out before you go to bed, and remind yourself that when you pour the next morning’s cuppa you’ll be praying out the angst again. Step by step, baby. Don’t worry about how long it takes. We’re in this life and this becoming-like-God stuff for the long haul. Don’t give up when it takes a lot of morning coffee before something that used to be sharp doesn’t hurt anymore. It will come. Just don’t let the sharpness breed a callus. Take your sand and make a pearl one prayer, one sip, one ounce of forgiveness at a time.

  • of throw pillows and washing dishes

    of throw pillows and washing dishes

    Every night after I tuck my littles into bed but before I sit down with a glass of wine, my husband and I blitz-clean our house. I wash the dishes. He picks up the throw pillows (too-aptly named) and the teething toys. I scan the living room for plates and juice cups left out all afternoon. He vacuums under the toddler’s place at the table. I pick up the dirty socks and onesies that got tossed in the general direction of the clothes hamper and put the diaper rash cream back on its shelf. He wipes the counter and measures out the grounds for tomorrow’s coffee. And then we look at each other, and sigh and let our shoulders droop a little, and he mixes up a simple cocktail while I pour some cheap red, and we go sit in our respective armchairs. 

    And the only reason I don’t blitz the house before dinner or during naptime is because there are other things to blitz while the sun shines. Picking up this puzzle before we can get that one out. Putting away the crayons when we want to go for a walk. Wiping up spilled milk without crying, and teaching a three-year-old to brush his teeth after breakfast. Reading, and reminding one child not to throw the books while I keep the other from putting them into her mouth. Sometimes we remember to say “Sorry Mommy,” and sometimes we remember a little better after there’s been a natural consequence. Sometimes we remember best when we’re not also hangry, or just up from a disorienting nap. 

    There’s a hiking trail to blitz, or a Starbucks run or a doctor’s appointment or the dentist. A workout, a playdate, a phone call to this or that favorite auntie. And sometimes there are so many things that I sink into a cozy chair at naptime, hungry for a late lunch, and realize I haven’t really sat down since I climbed the stairs to get the kiddos up at 7 am. And after they wake, I won’t have nothing-to-do until after they’re in bed again, and I’ve blitzed the house just clean enough to relax for an hour or so before I brush my teeth again and set my wine glass in the sink as a precursor for tomorrow’s breakfast dishes. 

    I don’t bring up the blitzing to complain about it. Everybody has work. These people have more work and those have less. These stay home with children all day and those don’t. I stay home. And this season is different than it will be later. One day they’ll take themselves to the bathroom and I won’t even think of diapers, or even of wiping their bottoms when they’re all done. One day they’ll be able to reach the bread and the toaster and the butter knife all by themselves and I won’t spend most of snack time saying Yes, I’m coming – just a minute over and over while I try to remember toast with honey and milk in the purple cup, not the green. One day. Not today. Today I spend a solid six hours in work and busyness before lunch and if I’m lucky only another six after naps. 

    I understand that this is the way it is. I don’t need it to change before it’s time; kids will grow at their own pace and there’s nothing I can do to change that, nor would I. Except maybe I would fast forward through some of the vegetable battles we have at dinner. I digress. I am not bemoaning the hard and constant work that comes with parenting. But even while I willingly, wearily place one foot in front of the other, I sometimes wonder what’s the point? 

    What good is there in picking up throw pillows and arranging them on the couch, or putting away rubbery teething toys and shiny rattles if we’re going to pull them out again in the morning? What’s the point in picking up every Hot Wheels car and Tonka car and Playmobil figure and lego person if they’re going to be all over the floor again in ten hours? Why sweep up the peas under the high chair every day if I’m only going to set more peas on the tray in front of my baby tomorrow? 

    And I know. I know. The place would be a mess if we didn’t. Cars and peas and pillows everywhere – books thrown and chewed and bent. Shelves probably stacked with more sippy cups and empty toddler plates than books or toys. So we pick up and we teach our children to pick up. The dirty table napkins and the onesies and the muddy t-shirts and socks all make it to the laundry basket eventually, sometimes in several migratory tosses as I encounter them in the house and throw them somewhat in the right direction. The three-year-old brings his plate to the counter after dinner, and some days he pretends to wash the dishes in his little play kitchen while I scrub away at “Mommy’s sink”. 

    And sometimes, in the middle of picking up another puzzle piece we missed under the edge of the couch or setting down my evening glass of wine to put away some laundry I missed – sometimes I am able to reach briefly beyond just the step-by-step mundanity of maintaining a home and realize that maybe, these are the little things we must be faithful in before we can have the big things. Maybe the scrubbed dishes and the peas we swept up again today and yesterday and the day before, the poopy onesies that we scrubbed out and the sippy cups we filled with milk and found soured somewhere in the living room and washed to fill again – maybe these moments are building in us the faithfulness for the much that God promises to those who are faithful in little. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe it builds character, as your mother might say, or lays a foundation. After all, if you can faithfully do the dishes three times a day for three hundred and sixty-five days every year, or even faithfully teach the littles as they get older how to do those same dishes in their turn – you can probably be trusted with big things. And maybe in the middle of the repetition and plodding and mundanity, here and there, when the boy puts the books away unprompted or remembers to wipe his hands after dinner – here and there you might even find a moment of glory.

  • how to level up – a story

    how to level up – a story

    One morning this week, I pulled out my phone to check the forecast. Ninety degrees. Ew. Not abnormal for our city, but when we’re used to spending the summers up in the mountains at camp, it feels abnormal. And gross. I scrolled over to the next day’s forecast. Ninety-one degrees. More ew. I tapped on the “10 Day Forecast” tab, hopeful and a little bit desperate. More nines and zeros. Some nines paired with other numbers, not zeros. Numbers like four and five. 

    And in my attempt to leave the house while avoiding the heat while also not walking around Target spending unnecessary money – I determined to go for a hike. We were headed up in the canyon, one of those hot, winding roads where you wonder if vehicles are supposed to make this sort of noise. I packed up two water bottles and a baby-carrier for my back. I threw a toddler’s camouflage hat into the diaper bag because we lost the regular hat, threw in some protein bars to snack on, and in the sudden realization of what I was hoping to do, ate a big piece of chocolate while I loaded a three-year-old into his car-seat with cheerful promises of “a special adventure walk”. Seriously though – who expects a toddler to cheerfully climb a mountain, even if it’s a nice, moderate eighty-five degrees and there’s a cool bridge to cross?

    I was not expecting much. We would happily eat the protein bars. That was a guarantee. (We ate them in the car, on the way. I can’t seem to hold out on snacks.) We could enjoy the drive up the canyon, since nobody is prone to car sickness and it’s a pretty, twisting little road. We might make it up the first one hundred feet of the trail to the bridge. We might not. I tried to prepare myself to be ok with this. I’m a vigorous hiker – usually I pass people more often than I am passed myself. Slowing down takes a bit of mental preparation. 

    We made it to the trail head, and the parking lot was full. Maybe it’s a sign. Maybe we shouldn’t even be doing this. I could be ok with just taking a drive this morning. And then I caught myself. I hadn’t put in all this work to turn around and go home. Maybe there’s a pullout ahead. There was a pull out. I ignored the steep, hiking access point from the pull out – it connected with another trail, no bridges guaranteed. We walked cautiously down the narrow busy road. I kept the toddler on the outside, hoping he wouldn’t choose this moment to fight my hand-holding policies.

    And then we found our trail, and we started hiking. It was hotter than I expected. The trail was exposed and we took pretty frequent water breaks – Erik squatting on the gravel while I both refused to him sit too long, or to drink while he walked, wandering distractedly close to the edge of the steep trail. He took breaks to climb on exposed tree roots. I tried to explain that the purple flowers were called Showy Daisies and that the wild raspberries along the trail would be ripe in just a few weeks. To my surprise, we passed the bridge in mere minutes, and Erik took off running up the trail ahead of me. We hiked and climbed and scrambled and stopped in the shade and walked some more. He never complained. After about half a mile, we turned around. I was in awe of us. Emily was napping sweatily on my back and Erik’s face was red with heat despite his hat and frequent water stops, but we’d actually done it. We’d gone hiking together. 

    The mental battle to prepare for disappointment was over, and then suddenly when we reached our truck again I wondered Why haven’t I done this before? If hiking was going to go so well, why wait this long at all? Maybe I should have been out hiking for months before now. And I nearly let this thought begin to bother me, warm and sticky with the truck’s AC spitting out hot air before the cool. But then I stopped. No, no that’s the wrong question to be asking. And slowly the answer grew out of the questioning as we wound back down the canyon. I didn’t do this before because the before was preparing me for the now. 

    Before – all the months of effort learning first how to leave the house with two children and then how not to be late, and then learning how to plan time for a coffee stop – these were the moments that prepared me to go hiking all alone with two littles. The days of barely making out of our pajamas before 10 and the days of getting up and ready, stopping to get my coffee and a second cup for a friend, the days showing up with two kids and two coffees still five minutes early were the days that built into me what I needed to finally make it out and away for a morning of hiking. Sub in protein bars for the coffee and trade out the weight of pushing a stroller for the baby carrier backpack and the too-eager toddler running uphill on a hot day; I wasn’t catching up on lost opportunity, I was walking into a new challenge. Leveling up. 

    I think that realization in the truck as we drove into the city with our windows down at lunchtime was an important one. That wasn’t the first time I’ve beat myself up for not having tried this or that hard thing before. I’ve asked myself why I was so afraid to try water skiing that I refused for something like two whole summers, and I’ve wondered what would have happened if I had started writing more publicly sooner in my life. But the wondering tends to be a bit fruitless – I can’t go back and get up on skis sooner. And I think now I really wasn’t ready to share my essays any sooner than I have. I needed practice. The years spent writing in private are the years where I began to edit, hone, develop a voice. Those were important years. Those years were preparing me for these years. 

    So friend, don’t come down on yourself for only starting now. You’re starting, and that’s what’s important. You probably can’t see yet all the ways that your past has prepared you for your future, but it’s there and it’s working for you. Don’t beat yourself up. 

    Go forward. Take adventures. Hike on the days that seem too hot, and take the little people you didn’t think you’d be able to manage. They might surprise you, but even more importantly, you might surprise yourself.

  • when you can’t say it all

    when you can’t say it all

    It has been said to me frequently by other writers that in order to withstand the rigors of writing for publication, we have to fall in love with the writing itself. We need to love the process. It is the process that will always be with us; the editing and book launching and getting authors to write blurbs – these will be short seasons that pass. They aren’t what we’re here for. We’re writers. We’re here to write. 

    And as much as I try to love the process, there’s a pressure that often gets in my way. The pressure of making my best work. 

    Don’t misunderstand me – it’s good to make excellent work, to give writing the best that I have in me. It’s good to edit and polish, criticize and critique, hone and practice. That is vital. That is important. Without an eye to challenging our own work, without looking for the ways we can grow, we won’t. But my ultimate goal is to write for hope, for joy. Books and stories have given me fresh eyes to see the beauty in my own life and I want my writing to do that for others, and I want the piece I’m writing right now to be that piece and I forget that I have decades to fulfill this goal of mine. 

    I may want to be remembered as a writer who inspired hope into those who felt drowned in the mundanity of their lives, but I have a lifetime of writing ahead of me. Possibly, even hopefully, the one manuscript I have right now will not be the only one I produce. After all, I have no plans to stop writing if/when this book finds its publisher. And so, this book, this writing, this project can take on its own perfect, most excellent shape without being the exact embodiment of everything I want to say in my writing. I am allowed to say more, later. Maturity will have a different voice, a deeper voice. There are experiences and moments and decades and conversations and heart-changes that will never fit into the one manuscript I have written right now. 

    I can polish and edit until this book is perfect, but I need to avoid the trap of needing to fit all of my words into this one project. I have more memories than there are pages in a memoir. I have more essays than there will be posts on my blog. I have more thoughts than there will be entries in my journal. 

    I think we who are artists underestimate maturity. We think that when we finish our PhD, we need to have achieved the pinnacle of clear, scholarly thought. We imagine that when we are published, we will have established who we are as authors. We sit down to the long game of seeing a project to completion and we think that project needs to be the completion of us – we forget that there are often so many, many more years ahead. We forget that people change and grow and our voices, our art, will change and grow with us. That we will change and grow with our art.

    So don’t forget to close the chapter, sometime. It’s ok that some pieces are left out. Hone and edit and critique your work but remember that if it doesn’t not say everything that’s written on your heart, that’s fine. Your heart can say so much more than a book, an essay, a painting, a pottery vase could ever convey. So keep creating. We know in our minds that one project is not the end, but remember too that it is not the grand summary. It can express one thing you had to say. The next project will take it further, will add a new tambre to your voice. This is ok. This is maturity. This is knowing which work must represent which ideas, which growth. When you’ve published one book or sold one painting, you haven’t finished talking and we haven’t finished listening. 

    Hold fast, keep walking. Close a chapter and smile about it. There is more ahead than you can imagine.