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100 Beautiful Days of Motherhood: I Have a Little Girl {7}

He was a very old man. Hunched over and faded, he looked like a wisp, a memory, an hourglass whose sands had almost all slipped from one side of eternity to the other.

My little baby was sleeping in my arms, young and pink and new. He saw her. Slowly, he shuffled toward me on the arm of an aide who looked like she wished she could do something more than walk the hallways with an old man.

“Is this your baby?” he asked in a deep voice that still held some of its strength.

“Yes, it is. Would you like to see her?” I uncovered a bit of the blanket to reveal the dark hair and curled lashes of my child.

He looked in but didn’t say anything. I wondered if he could see or if his eyes had already abandoned him.

After a minute, he said from some far-off place, “I have a little girl.” Then turning to his aide he asked, “Is this my little girl?”

“No, it’s not Charles,” she said, her face softening to him.

He nodded slowly. “I have a little girl,” he repeated.

“She’s all grown up now, remember?” the young woman pressed his arm and smiled.

“Yes, yes,” his voice trailed off.

“What’s her name?” I asked, then immediately regretted it.

Charles peered up at me but didn’t see. He was looking for the memory he couldn’t find.

“What’s her name…?” It was not there. Shame filled his eyes in hot pools of tears. Desperately, he looked at the dark-haired woman by his side. “I…I…I don’t remember her name.”

But he remembered enough to know he that he should.

This woman did not know his daughter, not really. “Isn’t it Susie?” she offered. “The one who came to visit you last week?”

“Susie,” he tried the name on his tongue and then looked at my daughter to see if it fit.

“I’m sure she’s beautiful,” I offered.

Something in Charles changed. His eyes lit up with old light and he smiled at me like a brand-new daddy. “She’s perfect. Don’t tell her momma but I think she’s the most beautiful thing I ever saw.”

“I’m sure her momma feels the same way,” I grinned.

Charles rocked back and forth like he could almost press into the memory.

“Would you like to hold her?” I asked.

“Naw,” he said sheepishly. “I might drop her.” But he reached out his curled fingers and stroked her hand. “I have a little girl,” he whispered. He could not take his eyes from her so he could not see the tears in mine.

Some days, I think that parenting is my undoing. It is not. It is my becoming.

From the moment I knew I held a child in my womb, I was changed. Something in my heart opened that could never be put back. I was altered. Every woman who has ever known she was a mother, whether her arms ever held a baby or not, knows it is true. A mother can never again be anything but a mother. It stays there, in the deepest part of her being like a healing scar, a memory of being all at once undone and all at once completed.

Years from now, when I hold another baby, it will be my baby. When I long to go back in time, it will be to these days. I will think of my children when they do not think of me. I will look on their grown-up faces and drift back in time to a place where they are all with me, like before, and I will long to have them with me still.

These are the beautiful days that define me, the beautiful days of my making, the beautiful days that are mine all because I have a baby girl.

100 Beautiful Days of Motherhood: School {6}

When I first started homeschooling my daughter, I had no intentions of making it a thing. I was a mom who happened to be homeschooling, but I was NOT a homeschool mom. There’s a difference.

In the beginning, I was organized and creative and a little smug. I had a daughter who, at two, could spell her name, count in Spanish, and sing the order of the planets. At playgroup, she said words like otoscope, marsupial, and impertinent. At age five, she informed me that her favorite book was The Swiss Family Robinson. Unabridged. I proudly displayed her beautiful handwriting on the fridge and plastered gold stars all over her work.

Fast forward a few years and a few more children. I am no longer smug. I am no longer organized. I don’t even have stickers because someone stuck them all over the cat. I have no idea what I’ve taught to whom or if my third child even knows there are planets.

The counters are covered with suspicious jars of things for science and toilet paper tubes for art, which is ironic because the old me would have sworn toilet paper tubes could never be art.

I am a homeschool mom. Not just a mom who homeschools, but a bona fide, tried-by-phonics homeschool mom who teaches not just one advanced child, but five children of varying degrees of talent and ability, attention and cooperation, desire and will. I am not just a patient, creative, enthusiastic teacher but a distracted, tired, and sometimes frustrated teacher who hopes the grocery clerk won’t ask the kids any difficult questions like “What grade are they in?”

I am a homeschool mom, and the dirty truth is, I don’t really like it. At noon on most days, I am on my second pot of coffee and my first pair of pajamas. Even on the best days, when everything is clicking right along and no one has cried over math even once, I sometimes stare out the window and indulge a fantasy about a big yellow bus that makes house calls.

I’d like to quit. I think about all the other things I could be doing instead of teaching long division again. I am convinced that if there really was such a thing as Purgatory, it would involve teaching long division. Or beginning reading.

Every few months, when a new math lesson results in mass hysteria or cursive practice threatens to be fatal, I have a little breakdown. I go up to my room and cry and think about the fact that there are worse things than raising five illiterate children.

Of course, that’s an exaggeration. Only two of them are illiterate.

There are also worse things than doing something you don’t like. No one will tell you that, but it’s true. We want to believe that we were put on this earth to feel good and serve our own dreams and desires, but that’s a lie. We were put on this earth to glorify God, and that sometimes takes a different road than I would have guessed.

I think about this often on the “I Don’t Wanna” days. Like it or not, homeschooling is the best option for our children for now. I’ve done the math. It always comes out the same. That means that God is in this. He has led me here and He has called me to this trial challenge opportunity for His time and for His purpose.

If God has called me here, He will provide the strength I need to stay here. I realize I have an unparalleled opportunity to see God work. And do you know where He tends to work first? In me.

That is the awful beauty of homeschooling. It gets at the stuff I tend to shove in the corners. It gets at the cruddy parts and the broken parts and the parts that should have been refined by now but aren’t. I am impatient, still. I am selfish, still. I am lazy, still.

No matter how many times a big yellow bus stops at my house, it is not going to take away all that stuff that lingers in my heart. Only God can do that, but God will only do that if I am obedient.

So on this beautiful day, I am thankful to be where God is. It just so happens to be in a living room sprinkled with flashcards and library books. It just so happens to be in my own home teaching my own children. It just so happens to be in the refiner’s fire.

It just so happens to be right where I need to be.

100 Beautiful Days of Motherhood: Sickness {5}

My little sickie

I knew something was wrong when I heard the doorknob turn. I opened my eyes when the bedroom door creaked open and I heard a little person whimper. “What’s the matter?” I asked, looking through the darkness and trying to find my wits.

“I threw up in my bed!” It was Kya. “I threw up all over my green blanket!” she wailed.

“Oh dear,” I said, thinking about how cozy my bed was and how much I didn’t want to wake up to vomit. “Go hop in the tub. I’ll be right there.”

Sure enough, Kya was sick. She threw up in the bathtub and again on the couch and once more while the older kids started school. The twins didn’t know what to do without their mini-matriarch so they hovered near, bringing her stuffed animals and books and asking if she felt sick.

She did feel sick. It was one of those mothering moments when I felt a little sick too, not just because I turn into a paranoid hypochondriac when there’s a stomach bug about, but because one of my little ones was suffering and I couldn’t do anything about it.

But I was thankful too. When I saw her little body cuddled up under a blanket, I was reminded how healthy she is normally, how healthy all of my children are. Not every mother can say the same.

Jonathan at Children’s Hospital, May 2007

I remembered a day when this was not true. We were out in the warm spring air. Jeff was pushing Jonathan and Faith on the swings, high up into the bright blue sky. I held the baby and laughed at their delight. Suddenly, a rope broke and my three-year-old was hurled high into the air above my head where I could not reach him. I ran but I could not catch him. He was on the ground too quickly. His little body crumpled into the winter-hard earth head and shoulders first.

“Don’t touch him!” I yelled as we ran to him. My mother-in-law and husband and I gathered around, all three of us who had been right there but could not stop it. All I could think about was what might be broken inside my boy—his neck, his back, his skull.

But it was his femur that sent him to Children’s Hospital in an ambulance and earned him five weeks in a spica cast. I stood next to his hospital bed and looked at him. I could not believe he was alive. I could not believe he broke his leg and not his neck.

Still, I was grieved by what I saw and heard. He was in so much pain and his lips were dry and cracked because he couldn’t have any water before his surgery. The doctor said his leg might never grow properly. He might walk with a permanent limp. He might need surgeries in the future.

Waiting for surgery

The first day home

Just beyond the flimsy curtain on the other side of the room was another child, about Jonathan’s age. His mother stood by his bed too, but it was not the same. Her boy’s head was wrapped in white bandages. His skin was all at once pale and dark. It was a brain tumor, I heard, and her boy might not live. There was only so much they could do, the doctors told her, and most of that had already been done.

I went into the hallway and cried.

This is how he rolled

I thought of that little boy today when I looked at my child suffering through a sickness with a bowl by her side. I have long since forgotten his name and I’m sure his mother has no idea how much her son touched me. I’m just the mother on the other side of the partition, the mother with the healthy boy. But I see his face today when I look at my daughter, curled on a couch with a bowl by her side.

And I am grateful for this stomach flu, for her body which is healthy enough to fight and was designed for that very purpose. I’m thankful that these symptoms stand in contrast to the ordinary days and are not a definition of them. I am thankful that she is already asking for food and needing to be reminded that sick girls can’t chase brothers.

It is a grace to be able to hug my children at the end of the day, fully expecting to hug them again tomorrow.

On this beautiful day, I am thankful for sick kids.

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