Rest

Everyone warns you about the exhaustion that follows the birth of your baby.

Less discussed is the exhaustion that continues long past when the nightly wake ups end.

Exhaustion.

From trying to keep up with other mothers.

From carrying the weight of our humanity around our necks.

From running alongside our guilt.

From needing to daily extend past our ability.

From trying to out sprint our darkest worries.

From continually fighting the worst of ourselves to give the best of ourselves.

From feeling the continual pressure of the force of love for our babies working against the currents of everything we can’t control.

From giving, giving, giving and needing to give yet again.

If this motherhood gig has made you tireder then you anticipated and wearier than you can sometimes bear, here’s a reminder of the invitation to come to Him for rest.

But in the busyness if it all, how do we come?

Maybe it’s as simple as trusting that the best we’ve got is always fleshed out by His grace.

As simple as believing that even in the middle of real failure, He’s got us covered.

As simple as remembering that we first and foremost exist for His delight.

And maybe it’s as simple as knowing He sees those tears of discouragement shed privately in our minivan, those moments when unbridled anger shakes us, those unwitnessed moments of poor mothering, those nights we lay awake wrestling with our deepest doubts, and all these long, short weary days of our attempts to answer this wonderfully hard, holy calling, and still whispers to us with a love more powerful than that of a mother, to come to Him and curl up on His bosom like a tired child would and just rest.

Two years

Two years post diagnosis, and nothing feels easier. A lot feels normal. Some things feel harder.

She’s had it for more than half her life and she’s not even four. She’s getting more difficult to micro-manage. She barely flinches at the prick of a needle. I haven’t had a full nights sleep in two years. She’s able to tell me how’s she’s feeling. Sometimes I forget she has it. She’s not cured yet.

I guess the nature of living with diabetes mimics the disease itself, with its stretches of stability and predictably, then frightening dips and unexpected twists. It’s the unwonted character of this invisible thing she battles, this curse that somehow hides so well but never completely vanishes.

I’m perpetually astounded by her grit and bravery, and then I watch her try to eat through a plastic bowl to get to the candies in it in the middle of a low and I’m overwhelmed by her weakness and vulnerability. Most often, I am just so happy she’s alive.

Will I always swing between the near constant gnaw of worry and reverent gratitude? I suppose I will as long as I live on this globe suspended between hell and Heaven. Joy and suffering, the strange bedfellows leftover from Eden, continue to lace their contradictory threads through the fibre of existence. And like the very earth itself, we continue to spin through it as a great bundle of cursed atoms gilded with grace.

Never forget

Everything seems so normal most of the time. And it is.

We play, argue, plan vacations, run errands, sit down for supper. We make messes, do chores, tear around the neighbourhood and fall back in bed exhausted at the end of the day.

Then we hear of a little girl that died as a result of a diabetic complication and we remember with all the blunt pain of a swift kick in our stomachs that the battle ever rages on in the background. Our normal is bought with the high price of never being able to forget.

To never forget that we can do every last thing right and still have it go so terribly wrong.

Never forget that the task of acting on behalf of a broken organ doesn’t allow for a lapse or mishap.

Never forgot that precision and predictability are not insurance against the worst.

Never forget that our wisp thin normal overlays the iron fist of battle.

Never forget that each ordinary second is borrowed from the mercy of Jesus.

Oh, my heart is broken for her family but I grieve intensely and especially for her mother, with an akin sense of knowing how much she poured out only to have it come rushing back to her in a tidal wave of sorrow. I cannot fathom her grief but I have shared her worry, her care, her efforts, and her worst fears and for that reason I also carry a piece of her agony.

And how I weep for the happy little girl who went to bed and woke up to touch the face of God.

On homesickness

I’m writing this on the highway between my home and “my home”, that long stretch of asphalt ribbon that will ever connect my present with my past with its eastward twists and turns from vineyards to sea swept coast.

Journeys home always procure these deep reflective thoughts (peppered of course with the continual garbage collection and pacifying that’s indicative of travelling with small fry) as I mule what it is to be rooted down, to be growing up and what it feels like to belong.

I was asked recently if I still get homesick. The short answer is no.

But since I have all the time in the world as we travel the piece of road through New Brunswick that always seems to uncannily contain the bulk of the minutes of this trip, I’ve been probing the question past the perimeters of a simple answer and find, as is usually the case, a much more complex web of truth lying beneath.

The long answer unfolds in a myriad of ways, woven throughout the experience of building a life outside of one’s past.

When I first moved to Ontario, I was utterly homesick, in the true definition of the feeling. It was physical in its manifestation and almost all-consuming. It was this strange feeling of “bidding time” in a life that didn’t feel my own. If you lifted a flower from the ground and transported to new soil leaving its roots behind, it’d inevitably wilt. And that’s exactly how it felt. The newness of adjusting to marriage and a different life chapter, without being surrounded by the support of familiar comforts that I had spent my life relying on and building up, created an unsettling, perfunctory response to my new environment. I existed but didn’t really feel like I was “living”.

Time is generous benefactor who has a way of smoothing out wrinkles of the soul and offers the chance to build new spaces to plant our feet. And in time, I found places to put my roots down, to create new support, and accepted the invitation to continue living my life that I eventually realized was not a “then and now” experience but a “this is it” adventure.

No, I’m not homesick now. I am something different, for which I have yet to find a word.

It’s not nostalgia, it’s not melancholia, it’s not sentimentality, but perhaps something akin to it.

It presents as this tug that settles somewhere in the recesses of my heart or soul or spirit or that intangible place that composes our deepest self. When I hear wind chimes sometimes and I can see the way the sun used to spill into our dining room during summer suppers. When I look into my nephew’s eyes and remember lying next to crib so he wouldn’t cry. When I lay in bed and hear the rain pattering against the windows and suddenly feel myself lying on my top bunk in the basement bedroom drumming up imaginary stories with my sister. When a bank of fog rolls over the orchards and I imagine the rumble of the horn and spray of sea salt. When I pull up to the white bungalow that still gives me this peculiar sense of belonging that any other home in all its dearness can never give me.

Is it homesickness? I don’t know. It’s something. It comes as a glimmer of sensation and I let it ache for a minute, knowing that in the next moment it will dissipate into the present.

Maybe it’s that the balance feels shifted now. In the beginning, the scope of what I gave up felt so weighted against the one reason I had left. But now the scale has tipped to touch where I am planted. My beautiful babies. My lovely home. My hobbies and memories. My husband that I love better now than I could then. It all tugs me towards a settled contentment to thrive right where I am.

If you’re reading this and you feel a little like that wilting sprig of life that has been transplanted, know that it won’t always hurt quite so much. In the generosity of time, you will find new life taking root.

The distance home is shorter now than I when I first began writing this. What a funny thing life is with its journeys, it’s roads and bends and unexpected detours. The only sure thing is that we’re always moving along, moving away, moving forward. And somewhere in the middle of where we came from and where we’re going, there’s a little pocket of mercy where we can experience all our growths and changes and aches, knowing it’s sufficient for the day and new in the morning.

Onward.

As the sun

Mostly every evening, we head to the front porch to sit in the warm stillness of summer dusk with the fine company of glimmering dust, hum of crickets and rustle of leaves to watch the orb of heaven touch the rim of the earth in it’s final curtsy. Without fail, the slope of the horizon meets the edges of that great, blazing star in a divine union of brilliance and colour. In a hundred uncertainties, it’s the grounding guarantee. The curtain call of day will come.

You wait for it, for that brief kaleidoscope of unearthly beauty to ribbon across the heavens and then like that it’s gone, tucked away into memory and forever.

The teetering light transformed into darkness always brings with it a bittersweet pang of finality. It’s the eternal paradox, the gravitose reminder that everything of beauty is temporary.

Yeah, there will be other sunsets but not this one. This exact one, it won’t come again. We witnessed it’s one act of existing and suddenly it’s gone, disappeared to wherever the intangible things go.

I look at my kids, their golden heads afire with the last surge of sunshine and can’t help but think how moments with them are just like this – a rapid spectacle of something divine, flooded with brilliance and then just as quickly, vanished.

Yeah, there will be other moments with them, but not this exact one.

When you lay your little head on my shoulder and I inhale the scent of your essence. When you crawl between us again, putting your feet as deep into my side as they can go, your baby arms flung over your head in the sweetness surrender to contentment. When you laugh like the gurgle of a crystal stream, that’s bedded deep in my crevices.

Never will this exact moment come again with you being like this and the light being like that and everything still ahead that hasn’t happened yet.

As the sun tucks into the bed of earth, and moments disappear, I linger in the beauty of a thousand shades of light that link heaven to earth, and soak in the beauty while I can.

Because unlike the surety of the setting sun, another moment with them may not be written in the sky tomorrow and even so, certainly not one just like this.

Little miracles

The other day, we experienced a mini-miracle over here. Actually, I should drop the “mini”. Anytime heaven bends to touch earth, that’s the most colossal and miraculous act of mercy we can know.

We got up to get our breakfast on Monday morning as we do, and I went to go fetch Ella’s needles from their spot in the kitchen to dose her up – only to see they weren’t there.

It was strange because I only have two or three places I would ever put them so after searching all those places failed to yield them, I had no clue even where else to look. I went through the dirty laundry pile – maybe they had gotten caught in some clothes. I went through every room, turned over everything that could hide them, and even pilfered through the kitchen garbage in case they had accidentally been swiped in.

That needle case didn’t seem to exist in this dimension anymore.

After looking for a solid forty minutes, I was starting to get panicky. It wasn’t an emergency necessarily – but she would definitely need them shortly and if I couldn’t find them soon, I’d have to figure out how to get her some new ones promptly. I don’t have a secondary way to deliver insulin to her. I have a set of back-up needles but they are designed to fit the old brand of vials she no longer uses. It was imperative that we find her needles quickly, not only so that she could eat, but so that she could get her daily long-acting insulin which keeps her body from becoming acidic. All this was being mentally processed while the kids whined for breakfast. The frustration and anxiety started pumping through my veins.

“Hayley,” I finally said. “We’re going to need to pray and ask the Lord Jesus to help Mommy find the needles for Ella, because I can’t think of anywhere else to look for them and she has to have her medicine.”

So we stopped in the middle of Monday’s mess, in the heat of the search and simply told our great High priest the care of the moment. We weren’t very eloquent in our request but we didn’t need to be. He heard the frustration and like a good Father, stooped down to help us.

In a “part the sea” moment of clearness, I stepped away from our huddle of prayer and walked into our bedroom – and saw her needle case laying the floor behind our curtains!

Hayley was floored by the instantaneous answer. I was so thankful. I’ve been walking with Lord long enough to know that sometimes the solution isn’t always that near at hand – and sometimes He chooses to teach us through patience, and waiting, and difficult lessons like maybe I should have been better prepared for mislaid supplies (we’re in the works to get a second set!)

But, He’s so, so gracious. Maybe He saw me in all my unlovely glory of an unrested housewife and mother on a Monday morning, who just wanted to give her babies breakfast so she could sit for a moment with a cup of tea, and took tender pity on me.

It was a reminder to take Him at His word…to believe that when He encouraged us to cast our care -even little worries like lost needles- He not only meant it but is waiting to prove His care in exercising His kindness towards us.

So this is me telling you the great things He has done for me, and to remind you that whatever cares you’re holding onto right now – a lost slip of paper, a looming bill, a nerve wracking appointment, a dent in the van, an unresolved issue – He’s big enough to hold whatever you cast on Him.

Hayley summed up the incident as only she can, when we finally sat down, insulin flowing, to eat our breakfast.

“When we couldn’t find Ella’s needles, I was SO disappointed. But when Jesus gave them to us, that made my belly so happy.”

Amen.

This I know

It’ll get normal in time. Soon you won’t think of it all. It’ll become second nature.

Comforting words spoken to me shortly after diagnosis and I clung to them like a pillar in shifting sand, believing in hope that the dust would soon settle into safe standing. And everyone was right. Things did become normal. I stopped thinking of it at every moment. It has become most naturally integrated into my life, that minutes can go by where I’m not thinking of it all.

But I am learning there’s a flip slide to this normalcy, a dark underbelly that shows up unexpectedly in the middle of a summer day.

We were playing outside under the hot sun and I was feeding Micah and talking and delegating, completely swept up in our normal, when Ella came over to me with that tell-tale look awash over her face.

My stomach dropped because I remembered in a flash that I had given her a shot of insulin and then left her munching on the snacks laid out, forgetting to follow through on making sure she ate enough for her dose. Sure enough, the number on the meter was the lowest I’ve seen since diagnosis. That she was able to walk and find me, thank you Lord. But … what if someday she is too weak to come find me? What if one time I get distracted and forget to check on her just in time? What if it becomes so normal I forget to remember? Today everything was ok, but what about tomorrow?

Two threads of fear that have always knotted me my whole life are the fear of messing up and the fear of loss. In some kind of awful irony, I’ve been given not just the daily, not just the hourly but a moment by moment responsibility for ensuring that neither of these things happen.

This isn’t any way to live but I have to because what other choice is there? This little girl who loves playing and long snuggles and eating snacks straight of the bag and drinking out of a blue cup and back scratches, her life depends on my attention, on my vigilance. The fallout caused by my potential failure is too much to even contemplate.

Ever since she could talk, Ella’s favourite song has been “Jesus loves me”. I don’t think it’s coincidental that I hear that refrain sung daily in her tiny voice right straight into my anxious heart.

Jesus love me

This I know

For the Bible

Tells me so

Little ones to HIM belong

They (I) am weak

But He is strong

I want guarantees when there aren’t any, a promise that everything will be ok, to know that I’ll never do anything that would cause her to suffer a second longer than she needs to. I cannot know these things for sure, but this I do know:

My weakness makes room for His strength. She belongs to Him and so do I. And in the moment by moment clumsiness of being very human, out of His infinite kindness He gives more grace, again and again because Jesus loves me.

This I know.

The Bible and this sweet girl, they tell me so.

(This video was taken the day after we came home from the hospital, the first time she sang the song through)

Love that’s complex

Loving a child should never be complicated, should it?

That’s what I’ve been led to believe anyway.

But if I’ve learnt anything in the last while it’s that sometimes it is. Affection is organic and care is instinctive but that component that ties it altogether into a tidy package called Mother Love, it sometimes feels frayed around the edges, like a ribbon whose loose thread has been pulled on too much.

And I think it feels that way because we’ve been sold the belief that love is something light and easy like a white, well-fitted nursery and filtered fun. Anything short of that feels like we’re missing the magical component that alleviates every ounce of difficulty.

Loving a child is complicated.

And that’s because the love we experience looks a lot more like crying on the edge of your bed at 3 am because you’re so done with no sleep. It’s deciding to wake up and do it again after you failed in one thousand four hundred and forty four ways the day before.

We all have that one thing, that one child, that keeps us humble where pride would sprout.

For me it’s been this girl, the complicated rhythm of her needs.

It’s complicated because there are moments I don’t know what I’m frustrated with, the impudent girl in pigtails or the menace of disease that lurks beneath her skin. A good mother would be able to entangle the two, but I’ve never claimed to be a good one – only a clueless one who is clumsily feeling her way through the obstacle course. My guilt at her pain makes me indulge her where I shouldn’t. I don’t know how to discipline her properly when I’m plotting every moment just for her to survive. When I look into her face, I stare down the barrel of the gun.

I love her more then my words can transcribe. Complicated doesn’t mean less than. It doesn’t mean impossible. It just means it’s not simple, and requires pieces of me I didn’t even know I had.

I’m a visual person so I sometimes imagine what it would be like to strip the layer of diabetes away. How lovely that would look. But since I cannot, like a good realtor I try hard to sell these less than ideal surroundings for both of us. Yeah, it needs some work but look at the fine details. See the potential. If I keep working at it, I can make something beautiful of it for both of us.

And love – real love, the kind that chips and chisels and strips and restores – will turn these rough and ragged edges into some kind of spectacular result.

On trusting

Diabetes is most frustrating.

The fact that is not a perfect science when it has to be.

The fact that we can do it all right and still get it wrong.

The fact that we live under the ever present shadow that a mistake could be lethal.

The fact that it’s longevity demands our meticulous oversight but still denies us any guarantees.

I was thinking today how diabetes is a picture of how it is to parent. Only as diabetic caregivers, we have this technology that allows us to check in with a digital read on how we’re doing. A pendulum swing between sigh of relief, moment of pride, punch to the gut. Imagine we could scan our children’s souls and see how they fared walking the tight lines between devastation, stability, and long term effects?

Diabetes, parenting, it’s all a reminder that no matter how hard we try, we’re never really in control of the outcome. I’m persistently stubborn in believing I can somehow contort this invisible thing to bend to my will which always leads me to the disappointing realization that I cannot.

This truth is hardly limited to diabetes. The bad attitude. The poor decision. The worries that niggle us. The patterns of behaviour that concern us. We can predict, calculate, measure, study, guess, and apply our best methods but there’s still that random untouchable factor that reminds us that while we are tremendously influential we are not the ultimate factor. These children, their souls and bodies, every inch of their personhood, belongs to higher authority than us. We are only feeble stewards, asked to give it all we can.

On the one hand, this feels like a great, big pile of too much…a terribly awesome responsibility that quakes the foundation of our bones and rattles our souls. On the other hand, if we are open to receive it – I think it might be an invitation to trust. A quiet here, take my hand and hold tight while I steer through the fog that hides the clear paths.

We lay what we cannot control, into the hands of a God we cannot see, for these beloved babies we cannot bear to lose. Oh, this trust it rends us!

The sustaining comfort that wards off the heartache of it all is the knowing He loved them first, He loves them better. Their days were written before they were mine. Thanks be, despite my failures, my distrust and shortcomings, He saw fit to write me in.

From yesterday

I got caught in a rabbit hole of flipping through old photos this afternoon.

From the old house. Before diabetes. Before a lot of things. From a couple years and forever ago.

And I thought it was interesting how as I looked at those photos I could remember everything that was going on behind the scenes. Worries I had, insecurities, challenges, missteps. Yet looking at them at now, at our smiling faces enshrined for posterity in still form, they only fill me with a gentle warmth, a nuanced sense of longing. Several of the photos, I can remember to the nth exactly what was burdening me in the background. But still, I baked the pie and walked to the park and the babies are smiling. We looked so happy. We were happy sometimes.

It made me think how these days I’m documenting now, that are filled with little bits of their own heaviness, will be preserved in the same rosy cast of hindsight. And that when I arrive at the end of it all and photos are all I have, the mosaic of life will be more beautiful than it was brutal, more moments of grinning ear to ear and laughing with our heads thrown back than nights we cried ourselves to sleep. I’ll thumb through and think goodness did we ever have it wonderful.

Time is the great forgiver of all that makes us hurt. It has this way of gently rolling forward, paving the past with pleasant lines, preserving what was in the most complimentary glow. These days I’m in now and everything that’s in them – the good, the hard, the long, the wonderful – I’ll keep documenting them, keep baking the pie, keep walking to the park. The babies are smiling, everything’s going to be ok and even when it’s not we’ll remember in the end that it mostly was.