legacy Archives - Kristen Anne Glover

Ordinary Days

I got married in my home church in Wisconsin on a day in January when the sky was blue and biting. The lake was frozen solid and dotted with shanties the sturgeon fishermen had hauled out and stocked with beer as soon as the ice was thick enough to hold a pickup truck.

I stood at the back of the church in a dress that could have been warmer with my brothers on either side. They were both as tall as my dad, or taller, and looked so much like him, it made my grandmother catch her breath because when she saw them, she could almost swear she was looking into the face of the son she lost so many years before.

It should have been my dad on my arm that day.

But it wasn’t.

I had my brothers instead, and it was fitting and right because we had been down so many other roads together. I wanted them there beside me the way I wanted them beside me when my father slipped into eternity without saying goodbye. We stood together when we looked into his coffin and we stood together then, stepping awkwardly down a too-narrow aisle in time to the music. On that bitter cold day in January, they gave me away in place of my dad to a man my father would never meet.

It was hard not to feel the loss. There’s something about a bride walking down an aisle without her daddy that makes people blink fast and swallow hard.

My dad with my older brother and me on just another ordinary day.

Dads should be there on days like that, on the red-letter days when the calendar screams of life-changing events like high school graduations and college commencements and birthdays and marriages and babies and the news of twins growing inside.

My dad missed every single one of those.

And I miss him on those days.

But I also miss him on the brown-paper bag days, the ordinary days filled with a million insignificant events like scraped knees and bedtimes and cold cereal mornings.

Dads should be there on days like that.

Because life is short. I learned that fast and young when a snowy winter road took my dad before I even had a chance to say good-bye. I watched him go, that morning, you know? I watched him go and I didn’t say good-bye because I thought he’d be back.

I missed him hard, at first, like some piece of me had been cut out and replaced with cold air that kind of numbed but mostly burned. I missed him every day and in so many different ways, I didn’t think I’d ever stop grieving because I kept finding new ways to do it.

Many years later, when I looked back on a grief-journey that spans more years than my father ever lived, I realized I have learned something along the way. It is something so important, I wish I could grab you around the shoulders, dads, and make you hear it.

Someday, you’re going to slip right out of your body and your kid is going to be left grappling with the loss. It’s kind of strange how one soul can be free and another weighed down by the same event. You will be gone, and they will be here, remembering.

Do you know what they’re going to miss the most?

I do.

I want to tell it to you because it’s important, and I’m a kid who lost a dad so you need to hear it because one day it might be your kid who’s learned it, and by then it will be too late.

More than anything, they’re going to miss the ordinary days.

They’re going to miss those brown-paper bag days, the days that drone on and on and you kind wish you could fast forward because they’re all so much the same. They’re going to miss the days you thought didn’t matter.

Turns out, those are the days that matter the most.

You know those soccer tournaments you manage to make it to? Those are important. So are the graduations and the weddings and everything in between.

But they are not the most important thing.

What is most important is all the countless minutes filled with nothing much but you and them and the span of time between waking and sleeping when you say and do the mundane things that make them feel loved and important and a part of you.

Anybody can show up at a wedding.

But your daughter is going to remember how you talked to her at breakfast.

Anybody can cheer at a playoff game.

But your son is going to remember what you did when you came home from work.

Anybody can drive the family to church on Sunday.

But your kid is going to remember what you said when he messed up, whether or not you showed up, and if you lived up to all you said you believed.

Your daughter will think of you on Christmas, it’s true, but she will miss you most on some Monday morning when the sky is perfect for flying and the smell of an engine makes her think of all the hours she spent in the hangar, watching you work. She will think of you when a wood stove crackles and someone makes popcorn late at night. It will be stale jelly beans and Risk games and badly-sung hymns and mustached smiles and grey-blue eyes that search out the hurt and motorcycle roars and coffee first thing in the morning that will make her wish she could bring you back, just for a second.

It’s easy to think it’s enough to be there for the big stuff. But I’m here to tell, dads, it’s not the big stuff she’ll remember, and it’s not the big stuff she’ll miss.

It’s the ordinary stuff, the stuff you never thought twice about because it was just life.

Hear me, dads–that’s the part of your life that is everything to her.

I know.

I think of it today because it’s Father’s Day, one of those red-letter days when dads get new ties and handmade paperweights and everyone is together because they’re supposed to be, and it’s good.

But tomorrow is Monday. There’s Wheat Chex for breakfast and groggy kids to get up and a long day before you come home again. It’s tempting to slide a bit because there’s a good show on TV and you’re tired and after all, you just made a memory on Sunday, if you believe holidays make the best memories.

I’m telling you, they don’t.

Give your kids Monday. Give them Tuesday too. Give them all the ordinary minutes you can, dads. Because one day, you’ll be gone, and those are exactly the minutes they’ll miss the most.

They will miss your ordinary.

Give it to them.

My dad enjoying an ordinary day with my younger brother

100 Beautiful Days of Motherhood: Daily Bread {10}

When I was a girl, my mother made all our bread. It took forever to rise and even longer to bake, and while we waited, the scent of it crusting up and browning inside the oven filled the house and tormented me.

I pressed my hands against the oven glass and looked in at the two loaves inside. One was the sacrificial loaf. As soon as the timer went off, we’d cut into that loaf, risking the release of steam that might burn our fingers. Each butter-saturated slice was devoured with absolutely no concern for whether or not it would ruin dinner.

The second loaf was never as good as the first because we were not allowed to touch it until it cooled entirely. That loaf was reserved for sack lunches and breakfast toast, even though the butter didn’t taste as good on breakfast toast as it did on bread fresh from the oven. But it nourished us, body and soul, and that was the most important thing. With three growing children and a husband to feed, my mom felt that day-old bread was a blessing. Two-day-old bread was a miracle.

These memories came back to me today as I mixed up a big batch of dough in my stand mixer. I don’t need to do much more than dump ingredients in and let the mixer run. But sometimes, I like to connect to the process a little more, to remind myself of the earthly necessity of providing for my children and the joy that comes from being able to do it well. So today, I decided to knead the dough myself.

A connection to the common

I took off my rings and put them on the windowsill, just like my mother used to, and the way I imagine her mother did before her. When I was a little girl, I used to wear Mom’s wedding ring while I watched her work. I liked how it carried the warmth of her finger in the heaviness of the gold.

I turned the dough out onto a floury counter the way I had seen her do so many times before. In my mind, I saw her hands covered in dough. But I felt the work of the kneading in my own arms. Sweetly scented yeast and the fragrance of freshly-ground flour connected me to the generations and generations of women who have come before me, an entire lineage of mothers who have served their families in the making of their daily bread.

Sometimes I feel alone in this parenting thing. But not today. Today I felt a part of something bigger.

The children crowded around, observing my work and begging for scraps. I remembered pestering my mother the same way, and how she would give us little bits of dough to work until they were grey, sticky, and completely inedible to anyone but a child.

“If I give each of you a piece, there won’t be anything left to bake!” I said.

My children considered this. I knew what I would have said.

“We don’t care!” they shouted, as if on cue. I gave them each a little piece of dough and noted how quickly the loaves diminished when five children had gotten their share. But some things are worth the memories.

It is a different world now than it was when I was a child, I thought as I waited for the bread to bake. Motherhood is all at once more complicated and less valued than ever before. Sometimes, I don’t think my great-grandmother would understand my struggles very well, and I wouldn’t be able to relate to hers.

But then, I wonder. Perhaps it is more the same than I know. I thought of my mother’s hands, shaping the loaves, and my grandmother’s, and mine. We are, all of us, mothers. We understand what it is to do our best to provide for our children. We are mothers who have lived in different times and under different circumstances but yet we have felt the same heartaches and triumphs that come with trying to raise children to the praise and glory of God.

It is a common loaf we share.

Daily Bread

Whether we feed our children with rice or with wheat, we understand. We are mothers.

On this beautiful day, I am thankful that I am not alone, that I share the common experience of uncommon motherhood with women of every space and time. I am glad to know that I am putting my hands to the work that has been done so well by so many others before me, and that, by the grace of God, will continue to be done by so many after me.

Today, I knead and bake and taste the bread of a thousand dailies, the bread of a thousand generation of mothers who are just like me.

30 Days to Enjoying Your Children More: Teach {Day 28}

Thank you for joining us! You can find Day 1 here.

One of my earliest memories is of watching my dad weave a heavy nylon cord, the kind he used to tie down planes at the hangar. He had one end of the yellow rope tied to his big red Craftsman toolbox, and with his free hands, he worked the smaller strands into one very strong cable.

As he worked, he talked to me, explaining what he was doing and why. He taught me the pattern and let me have a turn. My three-year-old hands were too small and the weaving was complicated, but I liked being near him and watching him work. He smelled like metal and grease and bit of Old Spice, and I thought he was very handsome.

He was always teaching, always explaining, and always demonstrating something to me. When he took me up in the airplane by myself, and I got to sit in the co-pilot’s seat, he made sure I knew exactly what he was doing. He taught me how to make cookies and how to play Risk and showed me how to remove stamps from envelopes so I could start a collection just like his. Teaching was just something he did, like breathing.

My dad died only three days after Christmas the year I turned eleven. He pulled out onto a snowy Ohio road and never came back. They said he died instantly in the crash, that he never felt a thing. But we felt it.

The wake was held just a few days later, and then the funeral, when everything was hazy but real enough to be horrible. People came up and said things to me that seemed to make them feel better, about how it was all so tragic and how there hadn’t been enough time.

It seemed the right thing to say. His death was unexpected and heartbreaking. He was so young. We were so young. There was a gaping wound where once he had been.

But in another sense, it was not tragic, and it was not too soon. Many other people had lived much longer lives and done much less with them. It seemed that was a greater tragedy.

In the years that followed, I have known many friends and family members who have died, but no one has ever said there was enough time. Death always comes too soon. I remember talking to my grandpa the summer before he died from prostate cancer. He had lived over eighty full, fruitful years, but even he was struggling with the idea that life was closing in. There was still so much he wanted to do, so much he wanted to say, and the living part of him could not help but grieve the fact that the dying part of him was winning.

Life is a precious thing. Even a full, long life is over in a blink.

The tragedy comes when life is over before it ever really began, when a person fills his life with nothing but small stuff and never gets around to the things that really matter. For parents, the tragedy comes when they save for tomorrow what should have been started today, when they bother over enjoying their children today with little regard to whether or not they will enjoy them for eternity.

That is a tragic.

But in my home, teaching us about faith was the priority. I do not remember a time when my family did not pray around the dinner table. I don’t remember when we started reading a chapter from the thick children’s story Bible after dinner. I don’t remember when we started going to church or memorizing Scripture or reading missionary biographies. I don’t remember because it always was.

My parents took seriously the charge to care for our eternal well-being by teaching us God’s Word and demonstrating real-life faith in flesh and blood right before our very eyes. From a very young age, I understood that all of eternity hinges on matters of faith.

Keeping the commitment to godly instruction was not always easy, I’m sure. I stomped my way into church more than once, and the busyness of life threatened the quite times with God. But absolutely no temporal sacrifice could compare with the eternal enjoyment of each other that was born out of that faithful work.

Because of the way my parents taught me, I was able to see the hand of God even in the sorrow of my dad’s untimely death. I remember opening my Bible on the night he died, seeking comfort in the Psalms. His legacy, shortened though it was, carried me through the early years without him, the firsts of college and marriage and children, the uncertainty of childhood transitions and adult decisions.

The things he taught me governed how I lived, helped to determine whom I married, and even today, gives me a pattern for how I raise my kids. My dad’s priority has had generational impact. Even though he has never met them, his grandchildren are following in his footsteps.

He had enough time because he did not take his time for granted.

I want to parent like that. Whether I die today or fifty years from now, I want my kids to say I had enough time, that I kept my priorities straight and I did not neglect the big things because the small things were more immediate and more demanding. I want them to know that I did the hard things, the less enjoyable things, so that we could enjoy each other forever.

What is life, but a breath? Yet all of eternity stretches out before us. May we make decisions today that will ensure we can enjoy it with all of our children and the many generations to come.

In happier times.

Please join us tomorrow for Day 29!

Start today…

1) Take time today to explain to your children why you believe what you do. Do they know your testimony?

2) If you have not been faithful to teach your children, confess it. Tell them that you have not done something you should and tell them that you are going to start today.

3) Pray with them today. Even a very short prayer at dinner or bedtime leaves a lasting impression.

4) If your children are small, get an age-appropriate children’s Bible and read a chapter a day. One Bible storybook we love for the littles is The Jesus Storybook Bible: Every Story Whispers His Name. Older children can be read to from The New Living Translation (a very well-done modern paraphrase) or any Bible you have in the home.

5) Find a Bible-believing church and go!