The holiday season–that busy stretch of weeks between Thanksgiving and the New Year–is often filled with Comings and Goings. Someone traveling somewhere and remaining for a while. Guests. Visitors. We had many. Did you?

Here’s the thing about Comings and Goings: some are more welcome than others. 

We definitely welcomed my parents.

They arrived the day before Christmas Eve and stayed for just over a week. In that window we took walks and ate lots, watched the third season of The Crown and then, hungry for more of England’s royal family, The Queen. We debated politics and theology; listened to Bach and Christmas carols; stayed up late and slept in; made, packaged and delivered Christmas cookies to the neighbors. My father repaired a faulty electrical socket in a bedroom and took lots of pictures. My mother did most of the laundry, cleaned up the kitchen, and played the piano.

It was lovely.

We also welcomed Shanna’s family.

Her parents and two siblings arrived December 20th and left January 2nd. They stayed with Will and Shanna, but we got to see lots of them nonetheless.

We celebrated Christmas Eve with them at Will and Shanna’s house. We celebrated Christmas Day with them at our house. And we celebrated New Year’s Eve together (plus three (most welcome) friends), eating raclette and playing games and finally ringing in 2020 outside at the firepit, where we toasted a new decade and then sang a hymn or two.

We welcomed Bill’s brother Ray, who came to us from Pittsburgh, and also his mother and brother, who live nearby.

All of these were Comings that were, as I said, Most Welcome.

But we also welcomed some Goings.

There was, for starters, the possum on our door step the night before Thanksgiving. Presumably lured by cheeses that cling to empty pizza boxes (stashed en route to the recycling bin), it was captured by my dog when I was heading out the door to borrow corn syrup from my neighbor.

Despite my dog’s having caught it in her teeth (I made her leave it); despite the possum’s proximity to a human’s front door; despite being a wild creature threatened by a dog keenly interested in catching it again, that possum remained. It played dead for hours on our top step, mostly obscured by the pile of empty boxes, but leaving exposed one tight claw and the sharp teeth that circled its open mouth.

We don’t know when it left, but were very pleased that it was gone in the morning.

The thing about Unwelcome Visitors, I’ve found, is that they don’t know when to leave– which was the case with the squirrel that, for a time, inhabited our Christmas tree.

When I awoke a few weeks before Christmas to hear it banging around in our breakfast room, I didn’t know it was a squirrel. I thought it was the cat (our cat doesn’t bang around) or the dog (who was lying on her bed). I certainly didn’t think it would be a wild animal, a squirrel caught in our many-windowed breakfast room. When I came upon it, still blurry with sleep, the squirrel was throwing itself against said windows, trying desperately to get outside.

I called the dog away from the room. And the cat. Then I called my husband. We opened doors and windows (outside it was 30-odd degrees and raining) and did all we could to usher the wild, frightened and somewhat bruised creature out of the house.

So it (logically) ran from breakfast room to living room and hid in the Christmas tree.

The sheriff wanted to carry the tree out and set it free. Durham’s answer (in this instance) to Animal Control, he wore boots and heavy gloves and had Squirrel-in-House Experience. But despite gentle prodding with our broom, the squirrel wouldn’t leave. Yes, it emerged a time or two and raced around, hiding temporarily under the sofa, threatening to go upstairs, and (always) missing the open doors that beckoned it outside. But every time it darted forth, it found its way back to the tree again.

In the end, the tree did not have to be carried out. The kindly sheriff kept at it until–in what was a third or fourth round of mayhem–we assume that it found a door.

We were Very Glad it went.

Yes, we had our share of comings and goings, of both the welcome and unwelcome variety. And we had one other: a Going-and-Coming, a Departure-and-Arrival. But it wasn’t an arrival here. It wasn’t a coming to us. It happened on Christmas Eve, but we didn’t see it.

On Christmas Eve, Emma and her team of nine left Kona, Hawaii for Athens, Greece. As we slept, as we celebrated Christmas, as we enjoyed the quiet Day After, Emma was flying halfway around the world.

She arrived in Athens on December 26th at 5 p.m., and she’ll be there for ten weeks, working with Youth With a Mission to serve refugees. These are people who know Going in ways I’ve never understood it: necessary, frightening, desperate. And their Coming to Greece, too, is likely full of fear. I’m hoping Emma and her friends can bring them some small relief.

We would have loved to have had her home for Christmas, but we’re so glad that she is where she is.

And when she gets home in March, we’ll be overjoyed to welcome her.

All photos by Richard Brewster with the exception of the above, which was sent to us: Emma playing guitar on Mars Hill in Athens.

The post Holiday Visitors appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

While it is already January 3rd, we are not quite through the holidays at our house: my parents are still with us, and so I refuse to return to normal life.

But I thought I’d throw a little something out on this here website of mine, something that reflects where my mind–in those rare, idle moments of these holidays–allows me to go.

And where does it go, you may be asking (or maybe not, but I’ve led us that way, so here goes)? My mind moves ahead to what 2019 will be bringing: the wedding of our second-born, and the high-school graduation of our third-born, and the anticipated and inevitable emptying of our nest.

I have more thoughts on this (are we surprised?) but will leave them for now. My parents are here, and I want to spend more time with them. Instead, I will offer you this from another year, a Christmas that, in practice, was not all that different from this year, except that Emma was four-and-a-half, and we went to Pennsylvania and Bill’s parents for the holidays.

Emma Sleeps

These are not ordinary days, these Christmas ones, these holidays. These days we are eating too much, and lazing around, visiting with family and friends we haven’t seen in too long, and staying up too late. We are away from home now, and we are gone home to western Pennsylvania with Bill’s family. The children love it here, not just for the snow which, sadly, is melting fast anyway. The children love it for their grandparents and the joy that comes with being with them. It is good to be here.

One of my earliest memories is the sound of my grandfather sipping his morning coffee where he sat in the lazy-boy of his living room. From my bed at his house I could hear this, and I would go creeping down the stairs to be greeted with joy by both my grandparents, greeted with almost unreasonable joy: we were only just starting another ordinary day, after all.

My grandfather loved to remember a story of me on an ordinary morning like that, a morning I remember well. How old was I– six? I came down the stairs and climbed into his lap, laid my head on his shoulder and closed my eyes. I stayed there like that with him for a long time, half-listening to him sip his coffee and simply breathe, half-hearing him tell my mother and grandmother that yes, indeed, I had gone back to sleep.

I had not gone back to sleep, but I stayed there, comforted, for a long time. And afterward I loved to hear him remember it, his eyes almost closed by his smile and the pleasure of the memory. I don’t remember if I ever told him that I hadn’t slept at all.

But these are not ordinary days, these Christmas ones. Christmas can make Emma sleepy, particularly if we leave the house at 5:30 in the morning for our big trip, particularly if the seldom-seen cousin arrives at 10:30 at night, particularly if she doesn’t go to bed until after mid-night, regardless of Santa Claus.

She was so sleepy that she fell asleep on my lap during mass last night just as the priest was beginning the homily. I could tell that Something would have to happen: she was just far too squirmy to make it through the service without a Serious Scolding. She sat on Bill’s lap, she sat on mine. She tried to climb on the kneeler; she tried to climb on the hymn-shelf; she made a Big Hole in her tights. Trying not to sound horrified, I told her that she Must Sit Still and Say Nothing. Within minutes she had folded herself sideways, her head on my knee. I stroked her hands and traced her fingers; I stroked her hair where it fell over her forehead and my skirt.

It wasn’t long before I realized that she had been still for a long time– a Long Time for someone who is four and has only recently been climbing the pew-back. I looked and saw her eyelashes lying on her cheeks; I saw her fingers relaxed and still against her leg; I knew she was asleep.

There is a good deal of wonderful and significant standing, sitting and kneeling in a Catholic mass. I missed it all but the sitting, enjoying her slumber and its privilege falling on me. I listened to the reading of Luke 2; I sang the hymns from the missal; I was moved again– again– by the reminder of the abject humility of Christmas, what Annie Dillard calls “God’s emptying himself into man.”

I felt nothing like empty, my arms and lap full of the weight of my sleeping daughter.

The children were awake alarmingly early this morning, considering how late their rest began last night. And although Emma Grace was the last to wake, she warned me of a Need to Nap only halfway through the gift-opening. After a bath, after brunch, she curled up with both brothers and Granddad and was still there an hour later, sleeping fast, the only one in the bed.

I let her sleep for that hour, then went in to get her. The need for sleep at her age is an awkward thing to balance: too much sleep now means no chance of it later, and then we begin the cranky cycle all over again. So I pulled her from the bed and carried her to the living room where I was visiting with family, hoping all the while to coax her from her dreams.

I didn’t try very hard. Although she is tall for her age, Emma Grace’s little body still fits warmly in my lap. Her yellow hair smelled so good from the bath; her even breathing contented me. She sucked her thumb and, as she always has, let her fingers spread themselves out over her nose and eyelids. Then her thumb fell from her mouth, her head tilted up, and I looked into her still-sleeping face, watched her lashes rest on her cheeks, watched her little mouth open like a flower.

I held her for nearly an hour, maybe more. The time felt like nothing, and the afternoon was nothing like ordinary, Christmas or no. I sat there with my daughter filling my lap and thought of my grandfather, his eyes creased with joy at the memory of holding me.

The post Something Old for the New Year appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

Our backyard maples are skeletal now. It happened in that sudden way that means I haven’t been paying attention.

I know they flushed to gold about two weeks ago. Emma called me to the window, and we stared at them together for a minute. They can seem incandescent in those early yellow days, like we don’t really need to turn the lights on inside at dusk.

I may have seen a leaf or two take a turn downward. There was that day I worked at the kitchen table and watched so many drifting free. Some of them sailed, some turned in tight circles. One I watched fall and catch itself on a lower branch.

And now today these trees are mostly empty.

***

Today, too, is word of loss. 48 dead in the California Camp Fire. This was the news that woke me this morning on my radio alarm.

On Sunday during our worship service, phone alarms from around the congregation reminded Bill and me of the alarm we too had received that morning: another Amber alert. A child taken, and a parent–unknown to us–inconsolable.

And last night, news analysis about pressure potentially brought to bear on Saudi Arabia: the chance that the kingdom could relieve the crisis of famine in Yemen.

***

I don’t begin to know how to pray for these things–and prayer seems ineffectual. But I can do nothing about the forest fire. I am powerless for the stolen child. Yemen’s distress grieves me–but also, for now, anyway–I cannot help.

***

I think He saw the leaves fall. Sees them fall. Saw with me the one cut loose then drift to resting on a lower branch.

So too He says He sees the sparrow–that small and unconsidered life. During the life of Christ on earth, two sparrows made the cheapest meal. A solid source of protein for less than an hour’s wage.

If He knows the death of the sparrow, how much more the life of the one who must eat it? Child. Woman. Man. Person. Image of God.

***

So I do pray for Yemen. For California. For the stolen child and her mother. I hold them up to him–fist full of sparrows. Lord, have mercy.

***

“Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father.” Matthew 10: 29

“Once God has spoken; twice have I heard this: that power belongs to God, and that to you, O Lord, belongs steadfast love.” Psalm 62: 11

The post Fist Full of Sparrows appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

Everett has been away from us now for five months, one week and four days.

I didn’t know the exact count until preparing to write that first sentence: I haven’t been marking the calendar with an x every day; I haven’t been keeping a countdown.

Which isn’t to say I don’t miss him, that we don’t miss him. Every once in a while, one of us will just say so: “I miss Everett.” A short, honest utterance that is as apropos at a family birthday celebration as it is in an otherwise silent car while waiting at a traffic light. Everett’s absence from among us, while neither unhappy nor unsettling, is also not welcome. Things are not as we prefer them.

He has been serving with YWAM, first in Hawaii and, for the last several months, in the Caribbean–mostly in Haiti. It’s the travel portion of his gap year, a grace of time between high school and college. This was the program he chose: one that allowed him to do some sailing, that gave him a chance to travel and serve others, that fostered his love for Jesus.

Meanwhile, we go about the business of missing him, which on the surface doesn’t look much different from when he is home. We are doing basically the same things–just without Everett.

Of the (now) six of us, Everett is the quiet Stevenson, the one most likely to come or go without announcing it, to be engaged in what he wants to do without bothering anyone else.

In light of that, we have pretended from time to time that he’s still home–which is pleasant for about ten seconds. He could just be downstairs, we tell ourselves, or on his way home from work.

And we jump when he calls. The other night Emma was talking with him, and suddenly she cried out in a pained-but-still-happy sort of way and said, “Everett, I just remembered that thing you do when you want to get a sip of my drink!”

Immediately I saw it, too: Everett leaning toward her glass or drinking straw, pursing his lips, making a silly sound. He does it often enough, but I hadn’t thought of it in months because that joke of a gesture belongs to him.

We were sitting on the living room sofa when he called. I was waiting for my turn to talk with him, and when Emma recalled aloud that simple gesture, my heart just sort of bottomed out from missing him, missing all the things that make him Everett, his inimitable, adorable, silly and deeply thoughtful self.

We have a space in our lives shaped like Everett. No one else can fill that.

***

I think there are two basic types of mothers. The first type watches eagerly for her children to achieve. She wants them to grow up, move on and out, find their way in the world.

The other kind rejoices in the achievements, but does so with a wary eye. She is keenly aware of what these developments mean: that her child will grow up all too soon; the baby she has loved will be gone. Her child’s childhood will be over, and she doesn’t want that. Not really.

Each type has strengths: impulses and practices that nurture children. And, I suppose, each has its weaknesses.

Confession (if you haven’t guessed it already): I fall firmly–for better or worse–into the latter type.

***

I follow an Instagram account that celebrates the glories of early motherhood. In truth, I follow it because I like how its owner decorates her home, but I enjoy the pictures of her several children and the busy-ness that I remember so well.

But there was a picture not long ago that, it would seem, I will never forget– less for the image than the text beneath it. The picture was, of course, Instagram-worthy: outdoors on a bright summer day and a clothesline, draped in bedding, in the foreground. The sun filled the sheets; the sheets gapped and gave on to the focal point: a galvanized tub sitting in the grass, and in it, happily playing, a chubby and apparently naked baby.

It was a beautiful image. A scene of domestic contentment, of cleanliness achieved in exceptional simplicity.

And the text beneath it, in the voice of the Instragammer herself: “My mother told me that I will never be this happy again.”

Is that true? Is that springtime of life, when one’s children are very small, the happiest time? When you know they are safe in their beds at night, their stomachs full of good things and their minds with pleasant dreams?

When nothing goes truly wrong for them and–if it does–you can make it all go away?

***

Everett went off to school in the second grade, age seven-and-a-half. I had homeschooled him and his siblings before that. His world was his house and his backyard, the neighbor children and cul-de-sac, errands with mom and playdates with friends and the climbing structures on the mulch-lined playgrounds of our church.

His siblings took to school without hesitation, but this was not true for Everett. He struggled mightily for a month with a level of distress we didn’t quite know how to handle. The fact that I was teaching at his school was of no comfort: we were in separate buildings, and his building felt huge. The children in the hallways overwhelmed him; the noise and even the smells of this unfamiliar place were too much.

There came a day when he was able to articulate his problem. It wasn’t that he didn’t like his classroom, his teachers, his new friends. It was that he wasn’t sure I knew where he was. With trips to the gym, the art and music rooms, with excursions to the playground, how could he be sure we could find each other at the end of the day?

As if I would leave school without him. As if I wouldn’t notice, pulling out of the parking lot, that he wasn’t in the car.

As if, were he to go missing, his father and I wouldn’t move heaven and earth to find and bring him home.

So I printed out a copy of his class schedule, and I hung it above my desk, and I showed it to him. See, I told him. Now I will always know where you are.

It helped.

***

In my most recent conversation with Everett, he told me about a weekend trip he had just returned from. They hiked to a remote region of Haiti, to a community of people who live without electricity or running water. Everett and his friends slept on benches or in their hammocks, and the nights were frigid. The days were spent getting to know the people who lived there and helping with a building project. And then they hiked home again.

Everett said it was his favorite part of his time in Haiti.

***

To say that I don’t miss my children’s childhoods would be a lie. For many reasons, their childhoods were a difficult time, but that hasn’t stopped me, far more than once, from wishing it all back again.

I think I remember mostly in photographs. I see images in my mind of them doing this or that. If I give myself a minute, I can conjure a voice or a recollected phrasing. There are the things Bill and I repeat to one another, something he or she said that have become part of our lexicon, even part of our way of articulating the world.

But was I happiest then, when they were young? Could the world–and life–be at its best for me when, for them, the world was sometimes overlarge and frightening?

Or am I happier now–for all I miss their littleness–when one of them is happily married, another showing such strength of character on soccer field, in school chorus, and among her peers in the hallways of her high school?

And when one of them ventures to Haiti and spends months of his young life there, who says that it is difficult but never complains, who sees and comes to love and appreciate  lives so different from his own?

***

Everett comes home in sixteen days and about one and a half hours. Among others, I will be waiting for him at the airport.

I think he will be able to find me easily enough.

The post Missing Everett appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

Standing in her office, my editor reminded me that writing is a job just as ditch-digging is. The ditch must be dug. Must not also the writing be written?

She is right, of course. The ditch-digger goes to work and digs her ditch; so must the writer go to work and write her pages.

But, I think (my mind swelling with contingencies), must the ditch be dug in all weathers? And are not the graduation of a son/the marriage of another/the departure for six months of the former all grounds for writing’s suspension? What writing wants–I tell myself, I tell her (who is herself a writer and also not present during this rationalization)–what writing wants is level emotional space in which to write. One wants peace and quiet and non-upheaval, all of which (lately) have been difficult to come by.

***

My parents were here for over a week. They came, along with a beloved aunt, for Thanksgiving, and so for a time we were back to our usual number (+1) in this sweet little house.

We went for walks, we played games, we ate great food, we talked. And around the edges my father removed and stored all our window-screens for the winter. He replaced light switches and repaired a broken lamp and rescued two computer chargers that had been almost too thoroughly chewed by a certain rabbit (I’m not naming names). My mother finished my mending (languishing since time out of mind at the foot of my bed) and did all the laundry and cleaned up the kitchen most days before I could get to it myself.

I did not do any writing, and I do not feel bad about that in the least. Neither–if she knew–would my editor.

***

Yesterday’s loneliness was contingent on all of this. Emma had gone back to school, Bill was away, and our beloved guests had gone home. The dog, two cats, and offending rabbit, while present, offered little comfort.

I might have gotten some writing done. Indeed, my days’ contents are contingent on the demands of my work–except that yesterday my car needed repair.

And so for a while yesterday morning, my well-being was entirely contingent on the sanity and tow-truck-driving skill of a boy-man named Seth with a ZZ Top beard on his chin and a three-year-old son at home; and our comfort throughout the thirty minute drive depended on our ability to make decent conversation or for me, on the other hand, to stare out the window or immerse myself in my phone.

***

Everything hinges on everything else. Or, better said, everything hinges on something.

Refrigerator space is contingent on our finishing the leftovers.

A flushing toilet is contingent on good plumbing.

My happiness is contingent on the well-being of a very specific group of others–including my parents, who yesterday and again today are traveling north; and my husband, who yesterday was traveling south; my daughter, who is mere miles away at school; my daughter-in-law, who is gift and delight; and my sons, one of whom is currently residing on a island in the Pacific.

***

Seth earned his commercial driver’s license because another job fell through and he needed work. Currently, he has a class B license, which allows him to drive vehicles weighing 26,001 pounds or heavier. As we pulled onto the highway, we watched the rear wheels of a tractor trailer smoke, stutter, and come to a stop. He explained that the brakes had locked up, and for a time our conversation was of brakes and how they operate, and I told him that I have a real fear of rear-ending someone, so I always keep a gap between me and the car in front of mine.

He said that a tractor-trailer traveling at full speed requires the length of two football fields and then some to come to a complete stop.

This is true, of course, contingent on the weight of whatever it is the tractor-trailer is hauling.

***

So much can change so fast.

***

My mood is often contingent on what I have to do or what I can get done or some strange ratio between the two.

Yesterday my mood was contingent on the departure of my guests, the sudden quiet of my house, and the marks–everywhere–of my parents having been here: the newspaper my dad brought home from McDonald’s. My mother’s Sudoku book. The light coming through all the windows brighter, because my father had removed all the screens.

When they are here, everything I do seems more efficient, because they are so willing to do the difficult or menial things. They leave and the house looks basically the same, but in fact it is much improved.

***

Yesterday I sat at my kitchen table and noticed, for the first time this fall, pale sunlight irradiating the finest limbs of the maple trees that line my backyard–a beauty contingent on the cold and the leaves having fallen, contingent on the earth’s continued jaunt around the sun.

The last time these trees were bare–sometime in March, I think–we were still five people living in this house. But this change doesn’t make me sad as I once feared it would–and that is contingent on wisdom, for which I am grateful.

***

My parents left at 8 a.m., only minutes before Emma left for school, and it wasn’t until some time after they’d left that I realized I’d forgotten to wish them a Happy Anniversary. Yesterday was their 52nd.

We make our own decisions, live our own lives, but yesterday I was thinking that so much of my life is contingent on my parents’ commitment to God and to each other, which for them is, in a way, one and the same thing.

They practice what they’ve always told me: that you’ll find only One consistent in a world of contingencies–and that even this One sometimes only seems consistent because you yourself insist on believing he is.

I think sometimes we want him to leave us a note or send a visitation, but he has other ways. He doesn’t always tell us that he Is so much as he spreads scarred hands wide each morning and brings the sun up.

The sunrise contingent on his goodness, and all goodness contingent on him who is Always Good.

The post Contingencies appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

It’s tricky, though: when invited, I always tell my host that I recognize the liability. Having an author present for her book’s discussion can decidedly hamper dialogue and limit expression: how many attendees will be willing to say what they’re really thinking with the author sitting right there?

Of course, I am more than willing to hear criticism. Releasing a book into the world requires lots of things, and a thick skin is definitely among them.

***

One of the first book clubs I attended for this novel was also among the best. They were a large group of intelligent and educated women, most of whom were empty-nesters. We had a long and very rich conversation, and people were not at all unwilling to express annoyance with characters or frustration with ideas.

But I was taken aback by one critique: one woman said–and others agreed–that there wasn’t much in the book about Maddie as a mother. They wanted to hear more about that, they said.

***

That was the day she’d imagined she was knitting–though she had never actually learned how. But she had imagined that she could, and that as she sat, her knitting needles clicked in her hands, binding together the softest yarn into a ribbon and then a square, and then an oblong sheet that grew so long it fell to her feet. Still she knitted, calmly, efficiently, so that the blanket (for this is what it was) pooled onto the ground and then, by the force of her knitting, began to move away from her and toward her son where he sat in the sandbox or walked toward the swing. This great blanket of her affection followed him over the playground, flowing up the ladder behind him and then piling around him as he sat on the platform at the top. It followed him down the slide, too, and she could see in her mind’s eye the way that it surrounded his torso and flowed over his legs that, once again, he used to brace his body against gravity. Such was her love for this child, and such was the way that she willed it to cover him. 

***

The fact of Maddie’s motherhood is in fact central to the novel. She and her husband Frank have three sons, and her cancer diagnosis–occurring very early in the book–keenly shadows her thoughts, feelings, and fears as a mother.

As one might expect it would.

***

***

I’ve thought often about that remark at that book club. At the time, I didn’t defend the novel against it, although immediately my mind ran through multiple instances wherein Maddie’s love and fear for her children are in view.

It’s a trick of my attending book clubs not to be defensive, to let the book speak for herself (or remain silent, if necessary), to let the liability of welcoming the book’s author not be such a liability.

I am not an expert on many things, but I am an expert on this book. There is never need to let that authority cow the expression of others.

***

***

Yes, the truth is that Maddie-as-mother is a very important part of this novel, and over the course of the book it’s a concept I return to again and again. Maddie’s motherhood is, in fact, vital to the overarching themes of the work as a whole.

And of the few autobiographical elements of the book, Maddie’s motherhood experience is perhaps most closely linked with mine.

Being a mother has been and remains one of the most important experiences of my life, and I contend that, of the myriad experiences this life has to offer a person, motherhood is likely one of the most powerful.

One can see this, for instance, in how intensely personal it is, how every comment can so readily be received as a critique. The “Oh, I see your baby sucks his thumb!” becomes a commentary on the mother-as-enabler, as addiction-engenderer, as potential destroyer-of-her-child’s yet-to-emerge teeth.

Every comment, every tantrum, every failure to sleep through the night is fodder for assessment as to how well one loves her child.

And every mother feels inadequate, because every mother sees–if only in glimpses–how gloriously separate her child is, how unlike any other, how inconceivably precious are the toes, the fingers, the thoughts, the phrases, the efforts, the successes, the failures, the being of the one she mothers.

***

Mothers should know. A mother should know her child’s face, she thought. She knew that Garrett’s left ear was just the slightest bit bent at the top, that Jacob’s whorl of hair was just to the right of the center back of his head. And Eli had his father’s nose: straight and, even at this young age, elegantly shaped. It was like a little ski-jump, Maddie always thought: dramatically steep with just the slightest inverted angle at the end. He would be handsome when he grew up.

***

Kerri is mother to twins who are going on three. The other day on my walk, I stopped to chat with her where she sat on her deck in the afternoon sun. The twins were in their beds: naptime.

We talked about them at pre-school, and Kerri marveled aloud to me about Eli’s predilection for holding open the lid on the classroom garbage can so that his classmates can throw away their trash.

“How does he know to do that?” she wondered. And we were silent for a moment, taking this in. Here was an untaught behavior, a glimpse into a nature uniquely Eli. What might it signify? A pleasure in being helpful, a blooming compassion? A fascination with hinges, an interest in seeing things properly put away, a love for his teacher? An ambition to someday drive the garbage truck?

“What does it mean?”

I stood with my dog on the other side of her fence and pondered it with her, I with my years and years of parenting experience, with two out of three of them– by all accounts– full-grown. What could I say?

I told her what I thought, which is to say that I told her she was doing the right thing. I told her it is her privilege and perhaps her unique responsibility as a mother to pay attention to these things, to notice.

I have a collection beyond counting of the things I have noticed and know about my children–things that might no longer interest them, things they have moved on from, things that once defined them and really no longer do so.

But I have collected and I keep them; and this, to me, is part of what it means to be their mother.

***

***

The women at that book club had wanted more from me about Maddie as a mother and, as I’ve said, I’ve given that request a lot of thought. Had they missed what is there in the book about Maddie and motherhood? Certainly other themes and plot elements speak far more loudly in the book, I see that.

Is it that they are empty-nesters, and so are missing the difficult and excellent work that means having children at home?

***

I am not displeased with the way I wrote Maddie-as-mother. In fact, I feel quite the opposite. I didn’t say this to the women that night, but this is how I saw it when writing the book, and this is how I see it now:

Motherhood is one of the most powerful experiences this life has to offer. Raising it in ordinary conversation can evoke all kinds of reactions, from those who wish they were mothers to those who never want to be mothers to those who had a bad mother.

And raising it in a book is equally if not more powerful for the distilled nature of a novel. That Maddie was a mother is incredibly important to the book–but it is a bell I had to ring lightly because of the reverberations it evokes.

In short, writing too much about Maddie-as-mother actually might have been unkind. I couldn’t say too much about it, because motherhood is too dear to me. This book–and any good work of fiction, I’ll warrant–is not about the author. Any and all of the personal emotional investment the author puts into it is actually none of the reader’s business, and, if there, would necessarily tarnish the reader’s experience.

The experience is the story. The means is the writing. The book is the gift.

How many books do we read from which the writer lacked courage to tie off the umbilical cord? How many gifts do we open from which the writer neglected to remove the price tag? Is it pertinent, is it courteous, for us to learn what it cost the writer personally?

—  A. Dillard, The Writing Life

***

These days, every day, I drive Emma to school. She is a junior in high school now, nearly as old as she’s going to get before she moves on from home.

Every day she gets out of the car, tells me she loves me, closes the door behind her, and never looks back.

But as I pull away, I always look for her blond head moving in the crowd, and I say yet another prayer over her lovely self, and I send the blanket after her, covering her, keeping her all through the day.

The post Maddie and Motherhood appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

Every student in this country has started back to school by now. The other day, a boy in my daughter’s math class announced that, two full weeks in, they had completed exactly 5.5% of the school year.

This was not excellent news to Emma. She wasn’t sure that 5.5% was worth registering.

Nearly three weeks ago now, I visited her school with her at student orientation. With five minutes to pass between classes–threading our way in and out of buildings, up and down stairs–we sat in each of her classrooms for ten. Her teachers met us at their doors, encouraged us to take copies of the neatly stacked hand-outs. And in what must have felt to them like a hot second, they explained the scope and sequence of their courses, their methods of teaching and evaluation, and briefly listed (if we would be so kind) those extras we could provide that might be handy over the course of the upcoming year: whiteboard markers, boxes of tissues, hand sanitizer.

None of them knew that I have been a teacher, but like every parent in that room, I’m sure, I was interested in how my child would do in that class. I wondered if the methods employed would work for her unique mind, her way of perceiving the world. And, as a teacher, I had that other perspective: knowing what it feels like to greet student and parent alike for the first time. Knowing that I would be navigating relationships with both, listening carefully to both. Seeking to know each student insofar as he would allow it, as was appropriate. Seeking to like each one. Knowing that my standards were high and earnestly believing that my students could and would get there, that it was my job to give them everything they needed to reach those goals.

Emma’s 5.5% has been well worth her time already. I hear it in the way she talks about her classes: the experiments, the discussions. On the way to school this morning, she was telling me about parent functions in math; last night before bed she was discussing Malcolm Gladwell and rhetorical analysis. She likes each of her classes; she likes her teachers very much.

***

Once, years ago, I saw a comment about teachers on Facebook that saddened me. It was made by a mother of grown children, each of whom had been educated through college and perhaps beyond. She was complaining about teachers asking for pay raises. Why did they need to ask for more, she wondered aloud on social media. They only work nine months a year. They get the entire summer off.

I didn’t reply, but if I had, I might have said something about the work a teacher does around the edges of her day, those hours when she’s not required to be in her classroom. I spent hours and hours at planning and grading when I was a teacher. After an eight-hour day at school, I easily and often put in two to four additional hours of work at home, especially in my earliest years of teaching.

Listening to my daughter’s teachers talk about the upcoming school year, I had a difficult time assessing the value of their expertise. This one has a Bachelor’s degree in chemistry and a Master’s in teaching. She will conduct her students in performing experiments that will help them draw conclusions about acids and bases, and she will–at the same time–ensure that none of them blows himself up, or his neighbor, or school property.

When you are a teacher– I wanted to say to this Facebook remark– you don’t work with your colleagues. You almost never see them. You work instead with people who are vastly younger than yourself in age and experience, vulnerable people, people who are not in charge of their own lives and so sometimes (often?) are victims of poverty or anger, who are trying to understand the world while you are trying to teach them the beauties of a sonnet.

Please put a price tag on that and then pay the teacher accordingly. Or give her the summer off. Or both.

***

Every year I was teaching, my husband would compose a list of “class rules” and write it on a white board in my classroom. This is fall, 2007. Sorry for the flash. Again, 2007.

Of course I realize, too, that some people are terrible teachers, that they entered their profession in error or that, over the course of years, they have become calloused or embittered to the point that it might be best for them to stop teaching altogether. But that doesn’t happen because teaching is easy. That’s never why.

***

A teacher is a person with two loves: her subject and her students. They vie for dominance within her, and she is at her best when their marriage erupts in the classroom: when her delight in a sonnet equals her delight in her students discovering the same.

This doesn’t happen every day. It can’t.

And the most difficult part of a teacher’s job is when he is altogether unable to enjoy the thing he loves in deference to loving his students. They present with needs, difficulties, challenges, issues (or essays) that he must give his full attention while his love of sonnets molders behind the classroom door.

And that is part of the job.

***

My very favorite teacher helped me learn to write. I can’t say he taught me: like the best teachers, he understood that the best learning was a process of discovery. But he provided the insights and the examples, and he made me write. And then he only gave me praise when I wrote well.

He was an excellent teacher, and in what I consider to be among the best of the essay-ish things I have ever written, I recounted his excellence and my blundering foolishness in the face of it, and my regret.

He was a teacher, but he was also a writer– and it was his love of good writing that equipped him to teach me. No doubt it was also his hours spent evaluating my writing and that of others that prevented his getting more writing done. I wish I could thank him for that.

But there is this: he has released a book. Or rather, a book of his writing has been released (ugh, passive voice–he would have hated that), compiled and edited in the years since his death by his colleague and another of my favorite teachers, Dr. Gloria Stansberry.

Fragments is a collection of Bill Donnelly’s short stories–some fiction, some not–that showcase his love of language. He taught me to love the dictionary, and this book demonstrates that he loved it too–for all the wonder and surprise a rightly chosen word can deliver.

He was a brave writer, unafraid to experiment with writing–and this is what he encouraged us to do, so many years ago now, in his Advanced Writing class.

I think he knew what I have learned: that writing is always a risk; that you never show up to the task alone, despite how solitary you are; and that perseverance just might produce quality. So it’s always best to try.

He said, “Fragments are not the enemy. I like fragmentary sentences, vivid imagery, humor, weird repetition and variation, sound effects, contentious dialogue, electrifying facts, surprise.”

I did not know him well, but I can vouch that the above is true. It describes not just the way he wrote; it was the way he taught.

The book is titled Fragments because, I think, of his avowed love for them. But the book is fragmentary too: pieces of a life.

And that’s the thing I like best about the book: I can hear his voice as I read. No matter which story, it is Bill Donnelly’s voice reading it aloud. He is perched on a desk at the front of the room, his long legs bent in front of him. He is sucking his cheeks, he is pausing, he is enunciating the words exactly so. And I am riveted, listening, hearing not just the words but their sounds, not just their sounds but their rhythms–and finding my own voice because he shared his so generously. I am sitting there listening, and I am learning how to write.

I received my copy of the book a few months ago, but I’m writing about it today to celebrate. The book itself is a few months old, and today my novel celebrates one year since its release. I guess one could call it my book’s birthday.

So this is another gesture of gratitude to Dr. Donnelly, who above all others, helped me find my voice as a writer– or who, at the very least, most emboldened me to try. It is the page, after all, that teaches us to write. But Dr. Donnelly provided me immeasurable help.

Once more, Dr. Donnelly: thank you.

William Francis Donnelly, III    1935-2015

Fragments is available here. 

The post Of Teachers and Why We Love Them, My Favorite One, and Two Birthdays appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

His email arrived sometime in May, or maybe late April. An invitation. He’s a writer, a someday filmmaker, and he wanted to talk Art.

I’ve known Joel since he was born, I guess. His family and ours go to the same church; his age falls just between that of Everett and Emma. I’m sure they tumbled over one another in the church nursery. But he first truly registered with me when, at about four years old, he spoke to me on the church sidewalk with all the gravitas of a grown-up. He was adorable.

Since then, I’ve watched him grow up in the way that parents watch children not their own: out of the corner of my eye. But in recent years, he’s been around more, hanging out at my house with my children. Among teenagers I’ve known, he’s emerged as that scarce and winning type: deeply thoughtful, with the confidence to discuss those thoughts with adults not his parents. We’ve had some good conversations over the years.

Now an invitation in the inbox: words over coffee. Would I meet with him at a coffee shop and talk art-making? Talk writing, to be specific? His schedule was flexible. Would I meet him?

Yes, and I was looking forward to it.

The problem was time. When could we meet? I was working on a magazine article, a project requiring research within the limitations afforded by Everett’s upcoming graduation. My answer: Sure! I’d love to. But can it wait until after May?

There’s no hurry, he said, which was good. May flew by, as did the graduation festivities. Our home’s exterior, due to long-neglected damages, was undergoing a modest reconstruction, as was my magazine article. Meanwhile, a wedding loomed.

Can it wait until after the wedding? Mid-July at the latest. I’m sorry.

His answer: No problem.

So then the wedding and all the travel, and a return to a house interior– due to recently developed damages– undergoing a modest reconstruction. The living room furniture was in the dining room, construction dust was everywhere, and the suitcases had exploded on the bedroom floors. The magazine article, meanwhile, was in a sorry state of disrepair. And we were leaving town again in–what was it?–a few weeks.

Me, embarrassed and tired: After that?

Him, cheerful: That’s fine.

But things still did not look good. Remember all that time I spent on the magazine article and consequently not on the clean-up? And you know the faithful miracle of housework: It always waits for you. Mine grinned at me from dust-coated walls.

The article, meanwhile, Was Not Good.

And we were anticipating a wedding reception. Not a wedding, mind you, but a party to celebrate our newlyweds here among their North Carolina friends. There was a house to clean up and a yard to make right. There was Emma’s back-to-school preparations. I sprained my ankle walking the dog. I had no time for the article and absolutely no business meeting anyone for coffee.

Me: So sorry. So, so sorry.

Finally we met this week–but mostly because he was here at the house already, hanging out with Everett. Our conversation wasn’t in a coffee shop; there was no coffee involved. He sat on our living room sofa and I on a nearby chair, happy to not be on my feet (er, ankle) for awhile. He ate his Chick-fil-A French fries and, with all the gravitas of a grown-up, asked me:

When you’re starting a story, do you think about the concepts and ideas you want to communicate, or do you start with plot, or with character?

Here was something I hadn’t thought about in awhile. Not in a long while. Suddenly I was recalling Maddie in her earliest days–such a long time ago.

You start with ideas. No, with character. Well, but character must absolutely drive the plot. One can play with believability. Almost anything is believable–potentially, anyway, if you handle it right. But you can’t readily believe a person suddenly doing something out of character.

And what does one do with the ideas or images that come to mind–those random ones that seem completely insignificant to the larger work? Are they worth writing down, or do you wait until you’re sure of a thing and then take the time to develop it?

No, you don’t wait, because you never know. You never know when an idea or an image isn’t exactly the one you will–someday–be reaching for. Write it. Bring it to life and then, if need be, squirrel it away. You never know.

I had a useless character while writing my book who kept coming up. I didn’t know what to do with her. Truly, I had no idea why she mattered, but I kept writing her, and I kept writing her in. In the end, she was enormously significant to the story. I needed her throughout, but she came of her own volition. I can’t explain it to you, and I’ve heard other writers say the same thing.

We went on like this for the better part of an hour, each of us talking about that what comes in the exhilarating isolation of creativity. I summarized some concepts from my book for him. I told him about how, for years, any church communion service I was part of had my head teeming with ideas. I had little notebooks of grocery lists and errands that were punctuated with thoughts on the meaning of the Eucharist. It was a vital part of my book, I told him, and now that I’ve finished the project, these ideas don’t come to me anymore. I can receive communion in penitent and grateful prayer, just like everybody else.

He told me about a concept he’s working on. He showed me the paragraph description that was an opening scene, and in a few moments of reading, its quiet and fearsome tableau filled my living room. He talked about it, and behind his eyes, I watched the strange multi-fold labor of the creative: ideas made manifest in character, then teased out in images that invite others into the room.

He said: the most terrifying thing in the world is a blank page.

Yes, I said, remembering that fear and wishing that I were staring down a blank page again.

But I had to go. Time to get Emma from school, and then hit the grocery store, and then a meeting at church at 7. I was running late already, having lost track of the time because for ten-twenty-thirty minutes I was talking about writing, that thing Annie Dillard describes as “mere,” but that, for some of us, is akin to life.

We continued talking as we walked to our cars.

He won’t go to film school. Quentin Tarantino (among others) says don’t bother. Joel says Tarantino said to make a short film. And I thought about my training as a writer: two classes, one workshop–all of it twenty and more years ago.

I picked up Emma. We went to the grocery store. And the ensuing days have been full of preparations for the wedding reception– all of them must-do’s for that joy-filled reception.

The “words over coffee” had happened– without the coffee, but rich with reminders of what I love to do. I’m grateful to Joel for the conversation, wedged as it was into an unforgiving schedule. And I’m looking forward, more than ever, to confronting a blank page.

Soon.

“The written word is weak. Many people prefer life to it. Life gets your blood going, and it smells good. Writing is mere writing, literature is mere.” — Annie Dillard

“To this day I actually think that…rather than go to film school, just grab a camera and try to start making a movie.” — Quentin Tarantino

“The page, the page, that eternal blankness, the blankness of eternity which you cover slowly…. that page will teach you to write.” — Annie Dillard

The post Words Over Coffee appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

It has always been the field at the bottom of our neighborhood, the backyard of the community pool. Earliest memory finds us there with baby William at his first Easter, eight months old and unable to walk and sitting in the sand that is the volleyball court. We were late for the egg hunt, but really, he wouldn’t have been able to hunt for eggs yet anyway.

Soon enough it was the field where he first played soccer, and Everett and Emma after him. Once, on the sidelines of a friend’s game, little Everett accidentally scratched Will’s eye, and we ended up spending a good portion of the afternoon in the emergency room.

And once, distracted by the action of six-year-old William’s game, Bill and I both were surprised to find the game stopped by the cry, “There’s a baby on the field!” and one of us (both?) went hurrying out to retrieve our toddling daughter.

At age four, little William came crying toward us. He didn’t like the game. He didn’t want to play anymore. I stood with infant, stroller and toddler and wondered what to do, but Bill made an early show of fatherly wisdom that we still talk about today:

“You don’t have to play,” he told our teary boy, “but first I want you to go back out on the field and kick the ball one more time. Just once more.”

William re-entered the game and kicked the ball once, twice, lots of times. And he played soccer forever after.

Our days of sitting sideline on that field are long over now. Each of the children graduated to different sports or different fields or both, and now that field serves only as backdrop to the pool. Occasionally I see parents like we once were toting bags and chairs down the hill, their children racing ahead of them. We ourselves haven’t been down on that field in I don’t know how long. We have no reason to go.

But it’s funny how I know that field and how it’s divided up for games. There is where I sat with my in-laws, there where baby Emma played in the grass during practice. There where Will sustained the eye injury, and where his father encouraged him back onto the field.

***

We pulled into the driveway this afternoon to see our kids all leaving the house. They were dressed for playing. “We’re going down to the field to play soccer with Nathan and Katherine. You come too!” they said.

It was 82 degrees and the sky had only scattered clouds. We changed our clothes, we grabbed some blankets. I brought the novel I’m currently reading.

And of course we took the dog.

***

The days around here are full and normal. All five of us aren’t always home for dinner; people come and go based on class, meetings, work, friends. But I am consistently aware of two realities:

1. we are on borrowed time and
2. this isn’t going to last.

By the end of the coming summer, Will will be married and Everett off on his gap year or in college.

Everything will be different so soon. Which is fine and good and the normal, healthy course of things.

But what I’ve decided in these weeks and months of “last times” is to *not* pressure the family to make something of it–to plan trips and getaways and special events. Instead, I’ve just decided to let it come and enjoy it.

It’s been working out nicely.

***

This afternoon, in glorious 80-degree, sun-soaked winter light, I tossed a Frisbee with my dog and family. I watched my kids play soccer and walk handstands across the field. I lay on a blanket next to my husband and listened for the umpteenth time to his recent playlist, which includes all kinds of things I would never hear if it weren’t for him, plus the occasional number from Hamilton.

I watched our dog make friends with a bear (okay, it was a dog, but it was hard to tell) named Gus, and I watched my husband make our dog a drinking bowl out of a Frisbee.

I lay on my back and read my book. I lay on my back and watched hawks make wide circles in blue sky. I lay on my stomach and sang harmonies to Bill’s playlist and realized that I actually can read something as gorgeous and complex as Wolf Hall while enjoying Mood Robot. 

I closed my eyes and felt the sun soak through my clothes. I listened to the sounds of my grown and near-grown children play soccer with their friends. I watched their young, strong, powerful bodies run across the field. And later I discussed some of the merits of Wolf Hall with Nathan and Katherine, who asked me to read them a sample. Which, of course, I did.

***

The field at the bottom of our neighborhood is where my children learned to play soccer. It’s where baby Everett gave little William an eye-scratch and where Emma got a soccer trophy (I remember how badly she wanted one).

But today, if you were to come down to the field with me, I would show you where our grown-up children played and where I played with them, where the soccer goals were and where Will did his handstands.

Where our blankets lay and I used my purse as a pillow and read a book or didn’t on a February afternoon.

It was right there. I remember.

The post Field Day appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

It hasn’t always looked like this. I don’t think we wrote on it–ever–until Emma was home-schooled in the 7th grade. That’s when she helped me see that this window would make an excellent substitute for a white board. And so, throughout her three years of home-school, this window occasionally bore math equations, sentence diagrams, and conjugations of Spanish verbs.

In fact, the entire right side of the window is still covered in verb conjugations (leer, vender, escribir, recibir), some residual practice after her instruction back in May.

Why is it still there, you ask? Well, maybe because I loved home-schooling her, and there’s a part of me that’s sad I’m not doing so anymore, and I’m just not ready to erase it.

And also, cleaning that window is kind of a pain, and maybe I’m lazy, or maybe I’m just doing other things.

Older still is the text on the left side of the window. I don’t remember when that got there, but I think it was also sometime this spring. The five of us were eating dinner, and somehow one of us conceived of an idea for what we thought would be a very funny movie, and the next thing you know, we were creating a trailer for said film. We thought we were so hilarious and clever that we felt the urgency to write it all down.

So what you’ve got on the left is a list of ten shots, not necessarily in sequence, that would comprise our movie trailer, and I don’t want to erase it because it’s hilarious and a conversation piece and a memory of a fun evening.

Also, Will wrote it, and soon he won’t be living here anymore.

At the very top of the window is a line from Everett: “Espanol es mi FAVORITA ……Calcitines.” Not exactly correct spelling. Not perfect grammar. But it is very funny (“Spanish is my favorite… socks”). His spelling includes the tilda over the “n,” and, again, he wrote it–maybe a year ago. So I’m not terribly interested in erasing that, either.

The latest addition, there in the pink at the bottom of the left-hand side, also written in Will’s hand, is some to-do’s for Bill for Will’s upcoming wedding. I think we’ve checked all the items off by now, but clearly I haven’t erased it yet.

It’s a good window.

Except.

As you might imagine, the scrawl we have written here makes it tricky to see out of. Depending on how the light hits it, it’s less a window and more a whiteboard, and in that regard it is more a record of our family than it is any kind of lens onto the outside world.

Which is fine. It’s our window, our breakfast room. And we have other windows in here. I am under no obligation to clean it. No one has asked me to. And when I’ve been working in the backyard–at other times, with other text scrawled across the glass–sometimes strangers have stopped and asked me what it says and why it’s like that.

I’m always happy to tell them.

But when is a window not–also–a metaphor?

Here is our view, colored by our humor, our labor, the things we focus on. It is, in a very real way, a record of what matters to us.

Beyond the glass, the neighbors walk by with their dogs or their strollers. The leaves change, twist, fall. A woodpecker lands in the upper branches of a maple. And a resident neighbor, barely visible through the trees, makes use of a leaf-blower.

We would miss so much if we didn’t also see these things–if all we knew was what we chose to study, what we thought was funny, the tasks immediate to our hands.

If we always only saw what we’d written on the glass, then we might as well have no window at all, and replace the whole shebang with a white board that dully reflected ourselves to us.

From whom we learn so little.

In the course of my 47 years, I’ve had some trouble with people. Not everyone, and not always. But I’ve had people who antagonized me or who, no doubt, felt antagonized by me. I’ve been envious or resentful. I’ve felt with absolute certainty that certain people are mean or selfish, hard-hearted, wrong.

And let’s be honest: each of us is each of those things, often more than one of them at any given time, at multiple points in our lives. In our days.

But every time I’ve been helped by the grace of God to look past those perceptions and taken the time to get to know better the person who is offending or hurting me somehow, I’ve always learned that my perceptions weren’t the whole picture; that there was far more to see, appreciate and love than I had been able to imagine; that I had been, in my judgments, Wrong.

Every time there has been more insight, new understanding, greater appreciation and love.

Every. Time.

View from outside my gym on Wednesday, November 9, the day after election day.

Forgive me if I’ve been a little bit preachy here. It’s been a difficult week, and heaven knows there’s been a lot of preaching. And forgive me, too, if the window metaphor wasn’t just a wee bit too obvious.

If need be, chalk it up to my being a writer, to my needing to do some verbal processing.

Thank you, nonetheless and always, for reading.

And now I think I’m going to clean my windows.

The post Window appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.