Tag: parenting

the accidental coffee hour

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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.

a laughter a day

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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.

of throw pillows and washing dishes

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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

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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.

the God of math

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I wake up some days already ready for bed. I don’t think I am completely alone. All it takes is children, especially children who wake up at night asking for Mommy or a piece of toast or wanting their pacifier back to feel as if you’ve spent half your day’s energy before you dropped back into bed at 3 am.

It’s days like this that I need to remind myself of God. God is good at math. Stay with me – a blog is a terrible place for a deep-dive into algebra and I am aware of it. God knows how many hours are in a day. Twenty-four. Ask him. He’s not stupid. He also knows I have kids. Two. An even easier number to count to than twenty-four. But (and this is where the numbers get tricky) with two kids pulling you different directions every waking moment, twenty-four hours can begin to feel more like forty-eight, or even (hang in there) like forty-eight hours that require seventy-two hours worth of energy. That’s three days and we can stop climbing there because you get the picture.

So suddenly the really simple math of one day = twenty-four hours is less simple. It’s less like addition and more like the quadratic formula. Once it was “8 hours of sleep = 16 hours of energy = 8 hours at work + 2.5 hours for meals + .5 hours of exercise + 1 hour of driving + 2 hours of in-between things and down-time + 2 hours of eating the food”. Now it’s more like “6-ish hours of sleep + 2 cups of coffee (drunk cold because of children) = 12 hours of energy + 1 dinner of cold cereal + 2 childrens’ and 1 adult meltdown + a quick trip to the Starbucks drive through = negative 3 attitudes”. 

Things don’t seem to add up anymore. And that’s without dividing by 2 months quarantined at home, or raising to the power of 3 legos stepped on. I could go on. If you feel tired just looking at that kind of math, you’ve got the answer right. Tired. It’s tired. I’m tired. Tired is the answer even if you sneak in a third cuppa (luke-warm this time.) I think the quadratic formula involves imaginary numbers and I’m equally confident in guessing that your energy by the end of many days feels equally imaginary. (Also, can we please just raise a red flag about imaginary numbers in math? Seriously WHAT THE HECK. Ok, rant over.)

The math, I reiterate, is exhausting, confusing, and doesn’t seem to add up. This is where it’s nice to have a God who’s good at math. He can solve for X. Or for Mom, which is more important. He knows how much energy I need to get through a day. I mean, if he can number the thick hairs on my head (constantly changing as I enjoy what seems like postpartum balding), then surely he can figure out how much energy I’ll need after laying awake in bed for an hour, and getting up two times during the night. He hasn’t left me without resources. I have the strength of Christ waiting to be availed. I have hope that one day, in heaven, our attitudes will never slip into the negative and by all that is gracious I will never step on a sharp toy again. 

I think of the woman with her unending jar of oil or the five loaves that filled five thousand bellies. There were two mites dropped into the offering box at the temple – all the widow had to live on – and I’m betting you she didn’t go home and starve. Maybe the prayers muttered over a morning cup of coffee have a power of multiplication just like the legos. Maybe the quiet of two kids napping simultaneously has spiritual power to calm the wind and the rain. I’ll probably never beat God at the word problems that read as long as a Thursday afternoon, but I begin to understand that the math will always add up. The bottom of the coffee cup with it’s dried brown rings is always steaming again in the morning like a very promise of God: there is always enough energy for the hours.

the weather ski

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It is not winter anymore, but I think this essay is more about hope and heart than snow, and maybe even in June we have things to learn about the cold.

When I was in high school, my family went on a ski trip to a town a few hours drive east of our home. It was a once-each-winter trip. Most years we’d drive there in the morning and drive home after they closed, unpacking the ski boots and snow pants on sore feet at midnight. This year, some friends who lived nearer the slopes were out of town, and offered us the use of their home. We accepted gladly.

In the morning, when we were cooking a big breakfast and slowly stretching out our legs, we noticed a single cross country ski standing straight up out of a drift in front of the kitchen window. It was blowing slightly in the wind. Mom chuckles at the kitchen sink, and points it out to Dad when he joins her. They laugh together, and the sound draws all five of us kids, pushing and crowding around their shoulders. 

“Maybe it’s a Weather Ski,” Dad jokes, and puts on a radio announcer voice, “Yes, the weather ski is bent at just a ten degree angle, so light winds today. Keep a watch out for black ice.”

My brother chimes in: “Friends, the weather ski is at a forty-five degree angle; looks like a real blizzard out there!” We laughed together companionably and then scattered again, leaving Mom still washing dishes and the curved, colorful ski bobbing in the intermittent breeze.

Now it is springtime in 2020. I never planned to check the weather as part of my morning routine. Usually I just dress for whatever the day might bring. Jeans, a t-shirt, a jacket, a down vest over it all if it’s cold. But this year, almost the entire nation is under a quarantine. We’re fighting a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic. And since I’m not getting dressed in a hurry to take my toddler to play dates and library programs, I’m slowing down to check the weather. That single app on my phone with its prediction of sunshine and temperatures is the indicator of whether we’ll even get outside. My mood seems to rise and fall with the weekly highs and lows. 

Some weeks are warm and sunny. The highs reach for the 70’s for days in a row. I put on shorts and dig out 3T shorts for a toddler who still calls them pants and we find sun hats for him and his sister. We wrangle out the double stroller and head for the grassy spaces in the park. The weather has smiled on us. In weather ski talk, maybe the ski is fading and peeling in the heat – a warm one today folks! 

But intermittently, cold days come. Back in Minnesota, the ski is probably bobbing lightly in the wind while its snowdrift takes on a new layer of white. Here, our red-brick patio slowly disappears under a steady film of flakes. So does my energy. The two-year-old runs from one part of our tiny home to another until he feels the cooped atmosphere too. Then he lags and droops like a wind-bent ski-tip, clinging to me when I let him and sliding to the floor in despondency when I try to get up, do the dishes, finish the laundry – anything to spur us into motion. 

Sometimes it is cold for so many days that I stop checking. I don’t open the curtains in the morning. There doesn’t seem to be much point. Who wants to look at the tired, frozen pile of snow on the patio anyway? The little blue toddler truck that he pushes with his feet is as deeply buried as the real vehicles that we’re not using – that’s what happens when you stay at home for a full month I suppose. I take one look at the picket fence and see the snow in delicate heaps on its ridged top, and I lose hope for the day. The sudden mischief of a black squirrel brushing snow off in bursts, left and right, as he scampers along the rails is lost on me. I’ve already turned back inside to wonder what will become of our day, stretched long and white until the distant evening.

I forced myself out for a walk one cold day. “Won’t I need a coat?” I wondered out loud. “No, just a vest,” my husband reassured me. He gave me a searching look, as if he knew I’d already resigned myself to all the warm layers I’d wear to fend off the cold. “Well then I’m wearing a hat,” I replied in defiance of his optimism. 

I felt like a stranger to the sunshine, walking down the sidewalk towards the park. The air was cool, but not as cold as I had anticipated. The snow had stopped. The sun was lowering towards dusk but miraculously still held some warmth. I let myself take big breaths of the air I hadn’t smelled in days. It was cold and unscented in the dust and impossibly fresh. It tasted like morning air, spring air. My soul seemed to tiptoe forward with cupped hands and shining eyes, like a shy child. I smiled at the masked strangers as we gave each other wide berths – walking off the sidewalk around each other when we passed. 

I have never been the first one out into the snow on a cold day. Not when I lived in Minnesota and adored the “snow globe” days of large flakes coming down slow in the still world. Not when the pines were lightly adorned with picture-worthy white on their branches. Not when the neighbor plowed the drifts from our driveway into one large, snow-fort-worthy heap. But I was once more resilient. I remembered how to see past the cold to the beauty. Snow may be frozen but it sparkles in the light. Winter may be cold but laughter in the outdoors is warm. The weather ski anchored in a drift outside the kitchen window may be bending and dipping in the wind but it’s not waving a frantic warning – it’s just an indicator, like the snow on the patio tells me nothing more than that it is snowy outside. Snow can’t tell me if I’ll find joy when I go out, or whether the work of bundling two children two-and-under into thick snow pants for a short walk will be worth it or not. The weather can only tell me if I need a vest or a coat, not if I’ll find hope in the too-bright sun and air that’s still somehow fresh as a mountain morning. 

It turns out we DO have fun outside, even if some days it’s just poking our heads out to see how cold it really feels. But at least I’m learning not to rely on how far out of the shade the patio snow drift is lying. The weather ski has been reduced again to just that – an old, slightly faded cross country ski nodding along to the wind and the drifted snow – not a needle on the gauge of hope that bends closer to zero as the wind speed increases. I check the app on my phone and plan which part of the day is best for a walk – when will the wind die down, when will the stroller find the least resistance in the snow? When can we get outside in the cool air and carve hope out of the sunshine? I check the weather and I think of the old weather ski, and I smile. 

mommy at work

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“Daddy at work?” he asks, standing on pudgy toddler legs with one ankle crossed. Yes, Daddy is at work. “Mommy work?” He looks down at me seriously from the top of the stairs. When did he become taller than the banister? I look back at him with a smile that says more than he might ever know. 

“Yes, Mommy is working too.” Perhaps it is fitting that he asks me when I’m between fixing the bed and washing the dishes—a moment in time when I snuggle our newest as I move her from tummy-time under her mobile to a bassinet in the bedroom. If I were in a formal workplace, I might even take an overdue, two-minute coffee break. We’re already a few hours into the workday that will tick into overtime by mid-afternoon. The office opened at 6 am when he called from his bedroom to ours, asking for a snack. We’re already halfway through a morning of staff meetings—the diaper meeting, the getting-dressed meeting, the disciplinary action meeting where one colleague ends up sitting in time-out in the corner of the stairs after a mild lecture. On the docket for the afternoon there’s a lunch pep-talk about the importance of eating at least three bites of cucumber, and a company fitness break at the park with mass participation required on the big slide: if I’m lucky, there will even be a focus hour when everybody is quietly working—or napping—at their desks.

Motherhood—it is very much work. Almost every mother has been asked, or even wondered herself, what it is she does all day, but no one who is a mother has questioned whether what she does is hard work. Motherhood is changing millions of diapers and washing too much laundry when you didn’t change the diaper fast enough, or even when you did. It’s walking to the park over and over and over and never saying the word “park” (or snack, or Grandma, or library) unless you’re committed; because at the least hint of possibility, your little committee will fight to get a walk to the park added to your duties, regardless of what it’s like for the employee behind the stroller. 

A mother’s workplace is not exactly safe or sanitary. You will stub toes and bump heads and step on legos. Motherhood means no longer wondering why there is poop on your elbow or hotwheels cars hidden in your shoes or Cheerios of unknown age hidden between the cushions of all the office furniture. You plan the work parties and you host them and you clean up from them – or you don’t, and the floor accumulates it’s dried macaroni and stale Cheerios until you remember to pull out the vacuum—a sadly non-industrial sized affair that management refused to upgrade, probably partially clogged with the hair that you lost after you became a mother.

Motherhood comes with lifting requirements too, though they’re rarely listed on the job description. We mothers lift our babies in our bellies for nine months and then we lift them with our arms into their car seats and bassinets and high chairs and above our heads and we lift them with our hearts in those bone-deep aching prayers we murmur once they’re finally, finally asleep. The job of mothering is more physical than for movers or stockroom employees or construction workers. You can drop a box or a board but babies need more than This Side Up. Motherhood is carrying babies on your chest until your shoulders ache and then pushing them in the stroller until your legs ache and then coaxing them to eat what was, only yesterday, their favorite food until your head aches. And then you watch them sleep with an arm over their head just like Daddy and your heart aches a little too.

Motherhood is doing work while they’re awake and then spending most of that precious nap time wondering which important thing you should do while they sleep. There’s cleaning or dishes or reading or workout or getting a nap yourself, or planning the afternoon activities for when they wake up. 

Motherhood is wondering over and over in each season “Who am I?” And you know it’s important because you get to shape how these babes of yours answer that question for themselves one day, so it’s vital you know. But it’s vital for you too, because in between the mothering that touches and changes every part of you and your life, you still need to be a whole person on your own. That’s where the job description gets fuzzy—Motherhood isn’t as easily pinned down as a teacher or agent or cook or nurse or circus clown. It is all of those and anything your little This Side Up parcels need—Professional Snuggler and Lullaby Singer and Medical Researcher—and beyond all that, it is yourself. It is your old hobbies, it is the nicknames you had and the particular way you smile when the sun comes out from behind the clouds. It is in the way you still remember how to shoot hoops and you know what to do with a brush and canvas even if you are limited, right now, to sidewalk chalk. It is in the moment you take to curl your hair and that silly voice that only comes out when you ask Who’s a good doggy?! 

Motherhood is hard and glorious and a thousand years long when naps disappear one at a time like balloons popped before you were ready for the party to be over. There are actual decades between the day you go, nervous and excited, to the hospital and the day you stand at the end of the driveway and turn over the phrase “empty nester”. At each birthday, your heart has aged steadily past your own years, but somehow we never wish our hearts back to twenty-five or even thirty the same way we do our skin tone, our hair color, our eyesight. And yet we look back each twelve months and sigh, and laugh, and sigh again at how all those seasons have passed in mere seconds. Was it yesterday that we held an infant lighter than the dumbells we once used at the gym, and yet wondered how to bear the weight? 

But we do it—we lean in slow, cleaning and washing and lifting and aching and knowing that workmen’s compensation will never come in the form of cash but not caring anyway. Motherhood will not pay for the coffee it requires or the lego injuries or the moment we realize with a pang that we can’t undo what was said to them at school or during the sleepover or when they missed a goal. But we do it anyway, because the moment we see the first smile and hear the first laugh, feel the squeeze of tiny fingers around our own or hear the sleepy “Wuv you too, Mommy”, we are recompensed for all the work at once. The injuries may have added up and the work must go on, but in the middle we are stopped suddenly by a giggle sweeter than a bank balance, and we know, for that moment in time, that we picked the right job.

my favorite fork

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We have probably all heard of Abby Heugel’s tweet by now: “Welcome to adulthood. You have a favorite spatula now.” It’s true: there’s a spatula we use so often that I keep it in the little spatula dish on the stove, even when it’s clean. It’s lime green with a bamboo handle and I bought it at TJ Maxx before I even made plans to move out of my parent’s home. But I also have a favorite fork. 

It happened like this: When I was 22 and just engaged, I moved into an apartment of my own for the first time. My husband would move in later, you know – after he actually became my husband. But when I moved in, I didn’t have any silverware. This dawned on me after I sat down and tried to eat a meal and didn’t have anything to eat it with. My mother-in-law-to-be came to the rescue. One afternoon when I was at spending time with my fiance at his family’s home, she went downstairs or into the garage or somewhere and came back with a ziploc bag full of mixed silverware. 

“It’s not matching sets or anything but you might be able to find a few that coordinate,” she said, and handed the bag to me, “Or you can be eclectic and make them all different.” 

I went the eclectic route. No two spoons, forks or knives were matching. One knife was even three-quarter sized, and one fork had U. S. stamped on it and a large oval hole in the end of the handle; for lightness of transport with the US Army maybe? I gathered them all into a cheap silverware tray from Target and was content. 

Then we got married. We used our single Williams Sonoma gift card to buy a ladle (much needed), a garlic press (apparently just for show), copper-colored teaspoons (they matched my wedding colors), and silverware: two spoons, two forks, and a knife. That was $99 of the $100, and we told the cashier to throw away the plastic card – we couldn’t afford to get anything else just to use the last dollar.

In a year, we had a baby. When he was six months old I pulled out one of my eclectic spoons to give him his first meal of rice cereal, just a quarter-teaspoon’s worth on the tip. The spoon was too big of course, but I persisted for a week or two until I finally remembered to put baby spoons on the shopping list. There are now four Munchkin baby spoons with heat-sensitive tips rolling around in the diaper bag, used far less often than they should have been but in my defense the boy loved finger food, and he had a really wide mouth for those eclectic spoons. 

That boy is now two and I’m realizing that eclectic silverware doesn’t make it any easier to teach a toddler how to properly use them. Clearly, toddler utensils need to be added to the shopping list, but who wants to do that when you have an old US Army fork with a hole in the end, or a hobbit-sized butter knife? But perhaps that is just my wild individuality showing – I too-often prefer the unique and unexpected to the ordinary, even when an ordinary toddler fork would make my job easier. It is honestly always a bit of an internal battle now when I sit down to meals: do I give him a full-sized fork like a good, patient mom (damn my absent-mindedness in shopping!), or let the gooey mac’n’cheese become finger food (again)? 

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I must have had a good morning that day that I gave him silverware when we sat down to lunch together. I didn’t pay much attention to which silverware I gave him, except to reach past the heavy, polished pieces from Williams Sonoma to get the smallest one in our bunch of definitely-adult-sized forks. And so we sat down together with our no-two-alike forks and our diced sweet potatoes with cinnamon and I think I actually was looking at something on my phone when he interrupted me.

“Twinkle shtarsh!” he exclaimed, holding up his fork.

“What?” I looked at him confused.

“Twinkle shtarsh!” He pointed a chubby finger at the handle of the fork he was holding up. I looked at the fork. He was right – there were tiny starburst patterns all along the handle. 

“Sing twinkle shtarsh, Mommy?” I smiled. Yes, why not?

“Twinkle twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are. Up above the world so high,” he listened, and gazed adoringly at his fork, “like a diamond in the sky. Twinkle twinkle little star…”

“How I unner what you ow,” he chimed in almost inaudibly. 

I sat in the moment, silent for a few minutes even after he went back to stabbing and inhaling his sweet potatoes. Perhaps the toddler utensils that never made it onto the shopping list were less crucial than I’d thought. Maybe I could miss out on a few supposed necessities and still end up with a successful, spoon-wielding boy after all. Maybe – just maybe – what this boy needs from me isn’t the perfect preparedness one expects of mothers, or constant use of heat-sensitive baby spoons. Maybe what mattered more all along was the eclectic, the unique. Maybe he just needed me to be his mama, unlike any other mama. Shining and twinkling in my own funny way, just like the starbursts he admired so much.

Welcome to motherhood; I have a favorite fork now.

the waiting months

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Spring and waiting seem to go together like coffee and cream. It’s not winter anymore; some parts of the country have crocuses and snowdrops springing up and snow hasn’t been on the forecast for weeks. At the same time, a certain Dairy Queen in Moorhead, Minnesota opens for the season March 1st and you can see a line of people with spring in their hearts and winter boots on their feet stretched out several feet long, waiting to get ice cream that they hope will, with an irony as swirled as their chocolate-and-vanilla cones, convince the cold to leave again.

But whether you’re licking an ice cream while you stand in the snow, or welcoming snowdrops, there’s no finality to March and April. They’re an in-between. Spring probably doesn’t feel fully real yet in the first warm days. And yet spring is a season unto itself. These months may be seem to be a segue to summer but they’re really a destination too. 

I think there are seasons in our lives that feel like that. We’ve waited and worked to get to where we are and we’re there now, at a destination of sorts, but it’s a moving, shifting destination. An arrival that signals an end and a beginning, and is itself a long, stretching, middle. It’s like having toddlers. (So many of my ideas and writing and topics revolve around toddlers right now.) You’ve waited and wanted to become a mom, and then you were eager for them to be walking and talking, and now they’re walking and talking, and you know that childhood comes next but it’ll be a minute yet, and here you are! But here you remain. 

It’s possible that this is largely the sleep deprivation talking. The nap strikes, the refusal to eat dinner. Don’t misunderstand me – I love this boy of mine and his sweet attitude and his constant activity and his curiosity. I love him deep and whole and I love him all the time. But if you’ve ever gotten on a treadmill to run at a fast jog for hours until your legs give out and then another lap for good measure, you know what kind of energy and tenacity it takes to parent a toddler. 

It’s just like the month of March. You’re in between two starkly contrasted seasons and it’s a season of its own and it seems to be longer than January and February put together, ya know? 

But don’t swear off children just yet. Recall the snowdrops I was talking about. They’re not the only spring flowers. Snowdrops come and then crocuses come, and soon there are even daffodils. Here in Colorado the golden forsythia glow even on a cloudy day. There are green spikes of irises reviving in my neighbor’s garden bed. The sharp yucca plants become more vibrant. Lilacs are stirring. Trees are budding out before they sprout leaves. You may lay down on the landing of the staircase in exhaustion and open your eyes to discover your toddler bending over you to give you a goodnight kiss as he “tucka ‘oo in” for a nap. You may find that one day when you lay down next to him in the middle of the nap strike, you both begin to giggle uncontrollably, down on the floor, face to face. Making memories, I hope. Laughing memories that stay bright in the dusty storage banks of recall.

Look for those moments. Hunt for them. Lay down – a patch as small as the landing of the stairs will do – and stare at the ceiling until you can remember what it is about this season that brings you joy. Don’t hustle too far too fast yet: let moments of happiness “tuck ‘oo in” to the season of in-between. It is better when we linger.

some assembly required

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Do we build our lives moment by moment? 

I have nearly finished arranging the wall above our chairs in the living room. A large framed poster, a small piece of art from a craft fair, two photo grids with miniature clothes pins, a star-chart, a macramé hanging. One framed picture card left to hang. A few photographs left to clip up to the photo grid. Not complete, but close. 

I’ve collected the things over a long time. It took even longer to realize I wanted a gallery wall like this. I’ve never fallen in love with the gallery walls Pinterest has to offer when I search for them. But somehow the homemade macramé, year-old star chart, framed poster from an Airbnb, photo-grids that are just gold-colored cooling racks from a kitchen, and craft fair art from ten years ago all belong together. A motley crowd, joined by the fact that I admire them, and some occasional overlapping colors. 

In so many ways we’re moving into this new home the way I’ve collected art for our wall. Piece by piece, bit by bit. We settle one thing here and then there until we find where it belongs, where we love it. Should the clock stay in the kitchen, or do we hang the spice rack there next to the fridge and move the clock to the dining room, pop of color between two windows? I pushed the huge, wheeled coffee table back and forth across the room three times in one day while Erik napped. I stopped when I was too tired to remember my own opinion about where it should go, and too tired to push it anymore. We grew to rather like it where it is though, and I haven’t had to sacrifice anymore of Erik’s nap times to shuffle it around. Good thing too, as there’s a box with bathroom cabinet supplies waiting out in the garage and I still don’t know where my mixing bowls are.

Sometimes I feel as if all of life were scattered piecemeal around like this, waiting to be unpacked and admired, or not, depending on our own choices and actions. The choose-your-own adventure novel happening right here when I decide to move the clock and leave the writing desk; who knows what lives will begin or end on those decisions? 

The most wonderful moments of our lives are tucked in, just waiting to be noticed and gathered up over years. A picture, a feeling, a kiss. They’re as real as the photos clipped to the gold kitchen cooling racks and as intangible as the seconds stepping steadily by in the clock. You’ve got to keep your eyes open. 

At this moment in these years, I think my eyes are open. I call Erik sweet baby boy child and I feel his smile alter the thrumming of my heart when I do. I stand on the first step to kiss Grant and some days my heart stops altogether, just for a second; just to hold that soft moment out of time, where it belongs. 

Every morning the waving arms of the trees trace their arcs across the floor. Every evening the faint luminescence of the moon ignites the snow in cool sparks and glows subtly through the white curtains. Every week I get a text from Johanna and I send one and we slowly plan around our baby boys’ naps to spend time together, sipping hot coffee or pushing strollers on long walks. The trickle of friendship seems to color all of my days by the buzzing of texts on my phone and the dates we keep for thrift shopping, eating gyros, stumbling into Toddler Time at the library only a few minutes late. 

In our last home the walls were plaster, no hanging of picture frames allowed without the express permission and assistance of the landlord. I resorted to the use of command strips. I didn’t want his help with my interior decorating. It felt odd and intrusive. The small blue picture-card in its glass frame wasn’t sticking with the command strips I’d stuck to the back of it, so I carefully unscrewed the small bracket for hanging and saved it in my toolbox. The frame was flat enough against the wall then; the command strips were still on it when I unpacked the first box of our décor in the cottage. 

It was just a guess that the hanging bracket would be in the toolbox, in the capsule of nails and tacks I kept there, but they were. I took them out, found the Philips screwdriver with the right sized head. I’m not new to a toolbox but I’m still a bit timid around it. And there I was anyway, getting a picture ready to hang on the gallery wall I’d designed. Piece by piece, year by year, beautiful things have come and stayed. Friendships, photographs, clocks, coffee tables, coffee dates, a family. 

Ikea furniture comes with the prior knowledge that some assembly is required. You can walk through the maze of assembled showrooms and show-homes with a belly-full of Swedish meatballs from their café, but when you pick that furniture out of the warehouse and put in on your unwieldy cart, you’ve got a box full of pieces, an instruction manual with no words, and one extra wooden peg for good measure. Assembly, styling, use, appreciation; all are up to you now. Nobody’s going to come and hang the mirror on the floor-to-ceiling cabinet that holds your newly inspired minimalist wardrobe and bookshelf both. You’ll never sit in the chair if you don’t start twisting in the screws, pounding in the pegs, attaching the legs. 

Life is a lot like that, I think. You can get all the good things in the world and you’ll never see them if you don’t look. You’ve got to put together the pieces. 

I don’t think life is easy. There are months when grief drives through you like the twisted sharp steel of a train wreck. You feel the sharpness in your throat and the throbbing in your mind and the heaviness in your feet. Yes, those days come and sometimes they come to stay for a while. 

But when they go again? When the sun traces tree-shadows on the floors like moving laughter, when the kiss is long and slow, the evening hands you a cup of wine, the morning brings a smiling toddler in footy pajamas sliding down the stairs on his tummy – we’d be fools not to laugh along.

go live first – letter no. 3

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I think it was Hannah Brencher who said that writers aren’t people who are good at writing about life; they’re the people who’ve gotten really good at living. There is a ring of truth to her words. You can’t write if you’re not living anything. We can all see how true it is for non-fiction; you can’t write what you haven’t experienced. But I think it’s true for fiction too. You can’t write about lives in any believable way if you’re not living in the thick of them. How can you create people if you don’t live with people, love people, mingle with them and celebrate with them and mourn and dance and eat and take long walks with them? There is a vibrancy and a grittiness to real life that we can’t ever write if we don’t ever live it first. 

There’s a lot of reasons this is hard, but can we just talk about two of them for a second? 1. It’s easy to get caught up in our own heads, trying to write and stumbling against our own lack of experience without realizing it. 2. It’s also easy to swing the other direction, to get so caught up in trying to live a life we can write about that we forget to just live, to be present and unguarded, to be alive in the moments that will later become the stories we have to tell, without having taken notes on or wondered at them as they happened. 

I’ve done both of those before: lately I’ve been living all in my own head, trying to write about life without sinking my teeth into the meat of it myself. It’s a cyclone of an existence. I think of John Green’s book Turtles All the Way Down where he opens up about his experience of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and how it becomes, for him, a whirlpool of thoughts spiraling tighter and tighter in dangerous directions that feel completely beyond his control. On a very different scale and in a manner very much more IN my control, that is what it’s like to live stuck inside my head, and maybe anyone’s head. When you close the doors and sit down to analyze what you have without letting in light, fresh air or new ideas, you spiral around and around in the same frustrations, fears, and failures. 

I began to come out of that shell late this summer. One day during camp, I walked outside onto the sunlit deck and stood, soaking in the morning warmth for a moment. There were kiddos already running back and forth, but there were also mamas. And they were sitting. There were cups of coffee on the arms of their chairs. They weren’t just wiggling their toes in the sunshine before they walked back inside to do the dishes, they were sitting outside drinking deep from the cup of mountain air and children’s playtime and mama-friendship that life was holding up to them in that moment. And I had almost missed it. I had been missing it most of the summer. I don’t want to miss moments like that for the rest of my life; they’ll be the moments that come back in stories one day too. They’ll be the moments of conversation that inspires me, of wisdom that empowers me, of joy that refreshes me. Maybe quiet moments sipping coffee together won’t come up in dramatic retellings of the stories of my life, but they will influence and shape and nurture me as a writer all the same. 

Learn to live, darling. Learn to look up from your desk in time to see a squirrel leap into the trees, learn to laugh at the weird, new, odd things your toddler does that could, if you’re not careful, drive you crazy. Learn to laugh so hard you pee a little and learn to cry when the people around you – your people – are crying too.

But I have a word of caution for you. As you learn to live, don’t think so deeply about it that you begin to spiral in on yourself again. Life is not a race to collect stories or a contest to acquire the richest material. There’s no prize to the one who’s lived in a tiny home and a mansion and also backpacked through Europe: you can live in a cul-de-sac and vacuum your split-level stairs every week and still be living the life that people need you to write about. Trust me on this.

When I moved to Colorado in my early twenties I believed that adventure was out there and I was going to find it. And I also believed that if I didn’t find it, I’d never be the writer I wanted to be. I’d never have the words or inspiration or opportunities that a writer needs if I wasn’t out there living the adventure that everyone wants to read about. It took me a very long time to realize how wrong I was. Adventure wasn’t just waiting in the wild aspects of a life few people get to live; adventure was waiting in the mundane, belly-laugh moments that everybody gets to live. I was given the adventure of a lifetime – the lifetime of one human being, which is always, always an adventure. I had no idea then how poignant, how rich, how write-able that one wild adventure would be. And wouldn’t you know it, here I am with two children and a tiny cottage where I can sit and watch the squirrels, where my toddler counts to ten and inserts “four” whenever he can’t remember what number comes next. Here I am with my one computer and the under-the-stairs bedroom that makes me feel slightly like Harry Potter, and the gallery wall of art complete with kitchen cooling racks that I use as photo grids. There is more adventure in my three red picket fence gates than in the life I thought I would have when I moved out here, single and hoping that a good story would find me.In all the advice that we give writers to sit down and write the thing, don’t forget to go out and live the thing too. I mean yeah, you won’t get far at all without plunking yourself down and opening a tab to your writing platform of choice, instead of streaming another episode. But you won’t get far streaming another episode anyway. You’ve got to be wildly, vastly, energetically present in this one grand life of yours. You can’t hope to write it if you don’t live it. So go live, darlings. Go live deep and real and hard and beautiful. Then we’ll write.