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Getting Big: 100 Beautiful Days of Motherhood {21}

Today, I held a little boy on my lap. He grasped a book in his hand and kept some by his side for back-ups.

He came to me while the lunch dishes were being cleared and asked me to read him a book. “Two or three books,” he corrected when he realized I might be inclined to say yes.

I sat on the floor and a little boy who no longer has dimples on his hands sat in my lap. A little boy who used to fit there as if in a little nest sprawled out his legs in front of him because he doesn’t quite fit there anymore.

We read Are You My Mother? and a book that was far too scary for him but he said it wasn’t. I don’t know how going on a bear hunt can not be too scary. But he’s big.

He’s getting so, so big.

I smelled his hair and kissed the back of his neck. He smelled sweetly sweaty, the way little boys do after they’ve been wrestling their brothers, the way baby boys do when you nurse them in the summer and the heat from their bodies against yours makes the sweetest smell you’ve ever known.

Someday, he’ll smell big-boy sweaty, and that’s a different thing entirely.

But not now. Now, he is still a bit of my baby boy. He wants to climb up on my lap and read stories. And on this beautiful day, I think this is the part of motherhood I like best.

When it Doesn’t Add Up: 100 Beautiful Days of Motherhood {20}

It was the counting by 2’s that got to me.

“Zero—it is zero, right?” Kya asked as she began.

“Yes, the even numbers start with zero.”

“Okay, zero-two-four-six-eight-who do we appreciate?” she chants and dances the way we’ve been doing for months. “Ten…ten-nine-eight-seven-six…”

“No, no Kya, you’re counting backwards now.”

“Oh!” she says with a grin and begins again. “Two-four-six-eight-ten-twenty-thirty-forty…”

“Wait…now you’re counting by tens. Remember, counting by two’s is just skip-counting. Just say our little chant. Remember our little chant?” Of course you remember our chant. We’ve been doing it for months and months and months on end.

Kya jumps right in, happily chanting all the wrong numbers. 12—14—15—16, she says at last, and I do not tell her she is wrong.

“Let’s write them out on paper,” I say instead. Sometimes, seeing the numbers helps, but today, she can’t remember which way a 10 goes, and she can’t remember what to call a 12, and she’s sure that 20 should have a three in it, somewhere.

She can’t do it.

She’s six-and-a-half and she can’t do it. Not today.

I take my heavy heart upstairs, and I think I will not cry. I will not cry. Not today.

But I don’t know what it is. I don’t know what is wrong, and I don’t know how to help. I have helped so many children, but I can’t help her.

It is agony. I want nothing more than to protect her from feeling stupid or slow or different. I want to hug her and tell her it’s okay not to know 1+0 or how many cookies you have left if you eat one. Just eat them all, I think, and then it won’t matter.

Because Kya is exceptional, and I want her always to know it.

Under her bright blue eyes and dimpled smile is a pure heart and tender spirit. Always caring, always attentive, always gentle—that’s my Kya. She is delightful, and delighted, in every circumstance. We call her our Sunshine in Seattle, because it’s always sunny when Kya is around.

She is also highly creative and so perceptive, it’s almost unnerving. Even as a baby, she could tell when something was different, something was new, something was off. It was her habit, every morning, to survey my wardrobe choices and give me her unrestrained opinion in the sweetest possible way; we nicknamed her “Quality Control.” She is witty. She is funny. She is the only one of our children who gets her father’s humor and the only one who can, so quickly, give it right back.

But she is also soft. Fragile. Vulnerable. It will not take much to crush her. Not much more than a stack of flashcards she can’t answer. And I worry about that, way down deep and in words I don’t want to say. I think of my impatience and I wonder, “Will I be the one to take it from her? Will I be the one to make her feel less than she is? Will my beautiful baby grow up to feel inadequate because her mother couldn’t let her be enough?”

That brings the tears out that I said I would not cry. That brings me to my knees and I beg, beg, God to make me more patient. Now.

When I come down from upstairs, Kya has drawn a picture for me. It is a page filled up with circles, each one filled up with a different pattern of beautiful colors. Her math page has been decorated with patterns and grinning people with legs and arms coming directly out of their heads. She doesn’t believe in drawing bodies.

She tells the boys all about it, but she can’t think of a word. “I can see it,” she tells them, “I just can’t say it.” Her sentences are filled with pauses and slowly spoken phrases as she tries to collect thoughts from a brain that can’t access words very quickly. When she was a toddler, she had her own language. It bubbled out of her in giggles and turned-around phrases. But she knows enough now to try to reach for words that sit just beyond her grasp.

Oh, how I love her.

She laughs at her brothers and her own silly words and they laugh too. She lets them answer her math facts and then lines them up to tell them Bible stories that are probably heretical and asks them questions that don’t make much sense.

“Paul, what’s first Genesis chapter six?” she asks.

Paul squirms uncomfortably in his chair because he has neglected his lesson.

“It’s God. The answer is God,” she says. “Micah? Mr. Micah? Do you know who made you?”

“Dod,” says Micah, because his tongue doesn’t quite say the things he thinks. Kya understands about that.

“Yes. God,” she says as hushed and holy as possible. Micah and Paul nod and try to remember that in this class, the answer is always God.

The answer is always God.

Who made you? God. Who knows your worth? God. Who created you just as you are? God. Who can be glorified in your weaknesses? God.

I believe. Lord, help my unbelief.

Because it’s one thing to believe it for me. It’s another thing to believe it for my babies. It’s one thing to come to terms with my own faults, but God—oh God! –it’s quite another to come to terms with theirs.

That requires faith, and on this beautiful day of motherhood, I find my faith is lacking. I find my mother-heart tempted to fear. I find myself worrying when I am told to trust. Trust. It is a beautiful thing to be able to trust my children to the God who made them, to see the missing stitch and give them back to the One who knit them together. It is a beautiful thing to know that love always adds up, even when the math facts don’t.

On Waiting: 100 Beautiful Days of Motherhood {19}

My husband’s slippers are made of soft shearling. They were a Christmas present from his mother one year. He wears them almost always because the thermostat is set on “economy” and that is not nearly enough to take away the chill that seeps into our house with the damp from the rain.

My husband wears his slippers so much, the rubber soles have begun to crack and leave little bits around the house wherever he has walked. “You need new slippers,” I say as I walk by with an armload of laundry.

“Mmm,” he replies, turning one over in his hand while contemplating the big gaps that have formed where the sole and the leather should meet. He is barefoot, and I notice the strange patch of freckles around his right ankle that showed up after a childhood cast was removed.

I remember back many years ago when I ran my fingers across those spots and wondered about them. It was the first time I had ever touched him. My heart felt almost sick to trace out that little strip of skin where his socks didn’t quite reach the bottom of his jeans.

I still get a little woozy over his ankles.

But it’s not right to let him walk around cold-footed in January, so I think I should set about trying to find him a new pair, maybe on sale. It’s not really the time to be spending money on shearling slippers, not while he’s still out of work and looking for a place to minster.

But I figure I can find something just to get him through for now.

A little while later, Jeff is at the kitchen table with a gaggle of kids around him. There is duct tape and a razor blade and the sound of something dangerous going on. I peek over their heads. The slippers are undergoing reconstructive surgery. The cracks in the soles are being sealed up, and the worst places taped together.

When we’re all alone, I ask him about it. “I can find new slippers for you,” I say, and he smiles.

“I want to make a deal with you,” he says. “I don’t think this is a good time for me to spend money on slippers, or anything else.” He lists a few other things that he is going to do without, and even give up, for the time being.

I nod, sadly aware that we need to find a way to make our tiny budget a little tighter. Jeff takes me by the shoulders and looks into my eyes. “I don’t think we should spend money on slippers because I want you to spend the money on your blog.”

I am stunned, so stunned I almost don’t hear all the beautiful words my husband is saying to me, all the words about how much he has wanted this for me, how he has felt a shared agony over the fact that this gift—is it a gift?—must remain unopened while the pressing duties of life and motherhood take priority.

“It is time,” he says, “for you to write.”

I choke back a sob that comes up out of the years of waiting, wondering, doubting. It is a sob for a dream that has been buried so deep and for so long, I thought perhaps it was dead. I thought perhaps it had never been real.

But it is a gift, he says, and my eyes fill up with his words. God’s gifts and His call are irrevocable. Time and circumstances cannot take them away.

All these years of waiting, of feeling the weight of a gift I cannot use, seem all at once not to matter. The season of early motherhood, when I couldn’t find the balance between using my gift and loving my children, when I couldn’t keep a home and entertain a dream, was just that: a season. Not the dead-hard season of winter but the sleepy-cold season of early spring when the ground is almost too cold to plant.

In the dark of the earth, with muddy furrows above and beside and beneath me, I mistook the season. It was not a season for dying. It was a season for being planted, for waiting, for growing in strength down in the dark so the gift could grow when the sun came to shine. It was not the end of a dream. It was the beginning.

On this beautiful day of motherhood, I am thankful that the dark years cannot diminish who God has made us to be. I am thankful that the gifts God plants in us do not whither for the waiting. They are simply waiting for the right time to grow.

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