Ta-da! Welcome to my Brand New Website.

In fact, if you have read this far, then you have likely already arrived and are seeing it in its brand-new glory, with its lovely fonts and clean pages. And photos. Ever so many photos. Of me. (More on that shortly).

Welcome. I’m delighted you’re here, and delighted and grateful that this website has been created, a process that has taken Some Time–largely because of me.

But this post is not about that. Neither is it about me. Instead, I want (again) to welcome you here. Welcome! When you’ve finished reading this post, please take time to explore. Click on all the site’s click-able links, read the various blurbs. Sign up for my newsletter (details about the newsletter in a later post). Check out the countdown (at the bottom of the home page) to my next book’s release. Peruse old blog posts you may have missed. And just generally enjoy yourself.

I think you’ll agree that it’s a beautiful website. I can freely say that because, like you, I am (mostly) on the receiving end here. I didn’t make this website. Not really. Not (hardly) at all.

Shanna

Instead, first credit for this creation goes to Shanna Stevenson, my daughter-in-law. Without her, I never would have thought of getting a website. I would have continued happily–as I had for years–with my blog: a place to craft and then post short pieces of writing; to talk about my book(s), among other things; to write in a public space on the off-chance that someone would want to read it.

I never bothered much about the blog’s appearance because, truth be told, design is not my thing. No, the blog–for me–was always about the writing.

But Shanna understood it differently. A great fan of my work, she convinced me that it was worthy of a beautiful platform. “You’ve already got the content,” she said, by which she meant the writing. What’s more, she pointed out, you have a book to sell. On-line presence is pre-eminent, she said. Your work needs an honest-to-goodness website.

And so the idea for this site began.

Joy

Yes, I had the words, but a website of words might actually just be the blog I already had. I would be needing pictures.

Enter Joy, a beloved friend from CrossFit, partner for a workout or two (or six) in a competition in fall of 2017. The kind of gym friend who always has me lingering for at least an extra twenty (or forty) minutes after class because we just have so much to talk about.

And also a stellar photographer.

But not just a stellar photographer. Joy is the kind of photographer who can almost (very nearly) make you forget you are getting your picture taken–and this was something I needed, because having my picture taken (in various places and poses) for the better part of two hours made me feel weird.

I know, I know. Millennials do photo shoots with their friends All The Time. What’s the big deal? And I shouldn’t be so self-conscious.

But I am no millennial, and I am self-conscious–maybe not about many things, but very definitely about having my picture taken. Again. And again.

Somehow, Joy knew how to get me to pose without feeling like I was posing. She got me to laugh or to reflect, to shift my posture to make it look natural. To think about other things so that the expressions on my face were genuine. In truth, she made the entire process a pleasure.

It was two hours of her time for the photos, and then who knows how many hours for the editing, but the results are pretty stellar. Which is a reason why there are so many of them on this website.

Toban

Still, the website would not exist At All if it were not for Toban of Penner Web Design. His was expertise I desperately needed. Left to my own understanding, my website would be a barely customized template with occasional personal photos plugged in here and there. Its information would be haphazard in presentation. It wouldn’t guide the viewer or feature anything in particular.

But from the outset, Toban knew the questions to ask about my work and my hopes for it. And he is experienced such that he knew what to include and highlight. In fact, our conversations at the beginning were as much about marketing as they were about websites.

And yet it wasn’t long at all before the website was taking shape. I really trusted him more than myself about most decisions, but he was nonetheless readily responsive to my questions. When something needed an adjustment, he often fixed it before I’d had a chance to check for his answer in my inbox. And from my collection of favorite photos, Toban distributed them across the website such that they are a good reflection of who I actually am. This helps so much (So Much) when it comes to that whole self-conscious thing I mentioned earlier.

And Me

Really, it’s the self-conscious thing–the Me thing–that, if anything, has been the problem. I am the one who delayed this project that was born (way back) in April.

April. That’s more than six months ago.

But when Toban was needing text (and he needed text, as you’ll see from your perusal of the website), I was dragging my feet. I like to write, yes. The production of text, per se, is not difficult for me. But writing “About Me,” or crafting blurbs about the book I wrote or the book I’m writing–these things trip me up. Knowing these are “due” can make me suddenly busy in all sorts of other directions.

And then there’s this other bit–the many (many) pictures of me. I’m self-conscious about those, too. Should there be so many? What difference does it make where I live or what I look like when it comes to the words on the page (or screen)? Writing is writing, and you like it if you like it. You could conceivably find me annoying or even hate my guts and still appreciate Healing Maddie Brees.

But here is where your marketing, website designing experts can help you; this is what the best photographers know; and this is what the millennials–even your old-soul, profoundly wise daughter-in-law–might open your eyes to: we live in a visual age. And maybe, to some extent, the whole world always has. What’s the adage? A picture is worth a thousand words, or something like that.

Here’s my hope: that this website makes you feel welcome. That, stopping here, you know I am grateful you’ve come. That regardless of who or where you are, there are ideas here that interest and hold you, ideas that might start a conversation–on these pages, or with a friend, or even in your own head.

So when you see my face on (almost) every page, hear, too, what I’m saying: Hi. Welcome. Thanks so much for being here.

The post New Website! A Tale of Shanna, Joy and Toban (and Me) 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.