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.

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.

Almost always they are my own, earlier incarnations of these same beings who, even now–at eighteen, and sixteen, and fourteen–do much to order my day.

A week ago it was Emma, suddenly arriving while I visited with a friend who was in the midst of moving house. Boxes and displaced furnishings and noise surrounded us. Teenage children, our children– those of my friend and also my own–came and went. And then, without warning or, bizarrely, any awareness on my own part, I gave birth to Emma, who reasonably presented with the demands of a newborn, which were strange and also familiar, as was true the first time she came.

Two nights ago it was Everett, age two. At some point during the dream, he went missing, and while other disremembered plots of the dream were resolved, the terrifying aspect of his disappearance persisted until I awoke–just barely–to realize with sweet relief that it was just a dream.

And other dreams over the course of recent weeks, each freighted with habit and sensation as acute as yesterday: the down of William’s newborn hair, the tender fold of his newborn body, the skin so soft it was otherworldly. When she was days old, Bill and I remarked of Emma that the grooves of our fingerprints were too wide to apprehend that softness.

***

I wonder if this is simply a cumulative effect: these days I have a lovely handful of friends who are considerably younger than I am, and recently they are reproducing with remarkable celerity. In the short time we have been friends, two of them have given birth and one of these is expecting again, while last month the other gave birth to twins. And now a third is expecting her first baby.

All of this is wonderful and exciting and also evocative. What mother–observing a pregnancy, hearing of a birth–doesn’t also tacitly or otherwise revisit her own pregnancies and births, doesn’t marvel again with mute recollection at the miraculous growth of an infant, the widening eyes, the head swiveling toward sound? We experience it differently when, this time, we are not the ones doing the mothering, and are instead able to observe, notice, wonder at the insistent force of miracle.

***

And these days, too, the world outdoors is doing its predictable April thing. The newborn leaves of our backyard maple were chartreuse strands last week. Today they have widened into their own recognizable hands with which, for months to come, they will register breeze and pending storm. They will hail us in the breakfast room with silver backs and shield us from the neighbors. And beneath them now hang their pink and golden seed pods, which will soon enough let go and spin like helicopter blades (or is it helicopter blades that spin like seed pods?) down to the lawn.

Meanwhile the pine tree pollen is relentlessly turning the white car yellow, the gray car a sickly green. The dog and I went for an overdue run yesterday afternoon in what was decidedly heat, and I came home again drenched in sweat and coated with a pollen-grit that demanded immediate bathing.

Spring is decidedly here, making–if not all things–so many things new.

***

In the past two weeks, Everett earned his driver’s license and got a job. He drove himself to school today for the first time because today I don’t need the car, and because he can.

***

And in less than two weeks, Will comes home from Madagascar. Emma has counted the months, and then the weeks, and now she counts the days. And I, too, am aware, of course, that he will be home again. Occasionally I allow myself to imagine him here, the singularness of him. Are there words for this? The cumulative effect of loving him for these few, potent years. How vividly I remember his newborn moments, how Bill leaned in toward us as William cried into my bare shoulder. And I, exhausted, spoke quietly to him, and he quit crying and lifted his head.

The insistent force of miracle.

It is likely miracle, too, that I watch the narrowing margin of days with some sorrow–not for myself, but for him. For while he is eager and excited to come home, to see friends and family again, to do the new things that lie ahead, his coming means also the irrevocable end of these five months away and all–uncountable, invaluable–that they have meant to him, that they mean.

So here I register yet more new things: the expansion of our family to five again, the practical shift into having a child in adulthood, the richness and complexity of parenting him now. And the expansion of my heart to welcome this, to accept it as necessary and sweet and good. I, who have often lived backwards, with a persistently over-the-shoulder gaze. But that were a blindness, close-fisted and close-hearted both.

I am grateful to find I can open my hands to this, to await with expectation and joy the New.

The post Dreaming in Babies appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

The Bible tells me that God is kind.

The post The Kindness of God appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

And there is a small corner of my heart that wants to hit “pause,” or even “re-wind,” to have back just a handful of the days that were his childhood, their childhoods, because the pennies run out too soon.

But somehow I found this little gem tonight, searching for something else in the annals of my blog. For some reason I never “published” this post, but it was a gift for me to read just now: a snapshot of twenty-four hours or so, recorded back in February of 2006. In those days, I was a part-time grad student and a homeschooling mother, a regular member of our church orchestra and also of the 66 Dogs Book Club. 

And my children were ten, eight, and ever-so-nearly six. 

I’m not bragging or complaining, so don’t ask me. But I will just tell you that I left my house yesterday afternoon (five children in tow, two of those being guests) just before four o’clock. I arrived at the church building a little after four, just in time to help create a video that will be used in the church service this Sunday.

After this, I ushered my sons to choir practice and my daughter to childcare, and saw our guests off with their mother. Then I went into the room where the orchestra was rehearsing, only to discover that my A string was badly in need of a tuning, and of course rehearsal had already begun.

I tuned it, and it was all fine. Fine, anyway, for someone who plays as badly as I do and who sight-reads as miserably as I do and who forgets from time to time, even at important times, to Count.

Bill arrived just around the time rehearsal was over, which was none to soon. We traded cars, he took the children, and I ate my peanut-butter and raisin sandwich and carrots and drank my milk as I drove my stick-shift over winding roads on my way to Duke.

I made it with ten minutes to spare, and for the next two hours and forty-five minutes was lost in the world of Thomas Mann and the decadence of European bourgeois society in the late 19th century. Delicious.

After this, I went directly to Beth’s house for a long overdue visit. We chatted quietly for over an hour until my cell phone rang and it was Bill, informing me that I had forgotten to tell him I had plans after class and, moreover, had left the phone off the hook for about six hours. He had just discovered the miscreant phone and so was finally free to try to find me.

I went home.

At which time I wrote out my paper proposal and e-mailed it to my professor, then proceeded to fold laundry, clean up the kitchen, and generally tend to messes that had accumulated while I had been trying, madly, to finish reading Buddenbrooks. I went to bed a little after one.

All of that to say that my children woke me with their laughter this morning. And when school was over (a delightful few hours during which we became acquainted with the early part of the Middle Ages, learned a little more about carnivorous plants, tried to get a firm hold on object pronouns, and worked on various forms of arithmetic) and I finally had time for a shower (yes), I looked about me and saw More Messes.

And this mattered because all 66 dogs of the Sixty-Six Dogs Book Club are coming to my house tomorrow morning.

But I heard my children laughing again, and this time they were laughing outside in the cold, clear winter light.

So I went outside, too.

We played freeze tag, which is tricky with only four people of varying speeds.

Then we played “house,” and Emma Grace was the mother, her brothers were her somewhat disinterested sons, and I was her devoted sixteen-year-old daughter, which I think satisfied the noticeable height discrepancy. I helped my mother make lizard soup, which we ate with zest (yum!), and then she tucked us in to sleep on the platform of the backyard play structure.

After this we turned to “army,” a game that is only vaguely organized. For the most part, I followed the directions of my commander, who was Everett. Both of the boys were wearing their fatigues today, and each of them had a plastic weapon of one kind or another. My gun was actually a plastic violin, the neck of which, when pulled out, becomes an electric guitar. With the help of a battery it plays Beethoven or the Jackson 5, depending, but I didn’t make use of that function today. Instead, I ran around the backyard and pointed it at imaginary foes and made firing noises with my mouth, something girls are not genetically disposed to do.

We were in a fort, we were in a helicopter, we were behind enemy lines. At one point we ambushed the enemy and took over their headquarters. All the while, Emma Grace was a superhero who needed no weapon, and possessed the Highly Useful ability to heal injured persons without even touching them. This was good, because I was shot several times.

This late afternoon Everett had a karate class, after which we wolfed a quick supper and then headed off to Bible Study. I am about two-thirds of the way ready for our book club meeting tomorrow morning (well, I haven’t read the book), but I know my friends won’t mind if the vacuuming isn’t done.

Because instead of vacuuming this afternoon, I ran with my children in the backyard. And I watched, as I crouched in our fort, the marvelous way the sun reflects off the pine needles and how– so lovely– it has the same effect in my daughter’s golden hair.

The post Those Were the Good Old Days, And So Are These appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

I have an excellent imagination. This is a great quality when casting about for a new bit of character development for a novel, but it’s a perfect nightmare when, say, I’ve made the foolish decision to watch The Ring. 

Yes, I saw it back there in the early 2000’s, on DVD and in the comfort of my own home, and I was terrified for years afterward, I tell you. For Absolute Years. Here’s what I learned from that little bit of cinematic horror: televisions should never turn on of their own accord, and people on TV should never come crawling out of the TV.

Not Ever.

For better or for worse, I’ve always been like this. The house I grew up in had a set of wooden stairs leading to the basement, and the basement itself housed, among other things, a real live juke box. Sometime or other, my parents found and purchased A Christmas Carol for it, and over a series of five or six double-sided 45’s, my sisters and friends and I could listen to that glorious and harrowing Christmas story play out whenever we wanted to.

As a result, from the time I was eight until I was… well, until my parents moved out of that house (I was in my early twenties), I was Very Afraid of the basement. Even walking past the threshold of the basement’s open door was enough to spook me, for who knew when I might hear the clank of Jacob Marley’s heavy chain on the bottom of those wooden stairs, and his heavy, sin-haunted step make its slow ascent into the kitchen?

An excellent imagination.

So it shouldn’t surprise you then, should it?, that I am still keeping my eyes open for the Zombie Apocalypse. I know, I know. Zombies and their horrors are so 2013. We’re over it now, aren’t we?

That’s exactly what they want you to think, people.

Unfortunately for me, I am rather better educated in all things zombie than I might have chosen to be, but this is because I have sons. One son, in particular. Will, in fact, who–in the height of the Zombania (I just made that up: the “b” is silent) Loved Zombies.

I don’t know when it started. The zombies crept in through the basement (as zombies might be wont to do), into the space that Everett refers to as their “man-cave,” the space that holds a variety of musical instruments, the XBox, and also sadly, perhaps, in this case, the laundry machines. Which turned my friendly-chatting-with-my-son-while-I’m-folding-laundry-and-he-was-playing-XBox into a kind of unlooked-for education: Turns out (who knew?) that Will was fighting zombies.

I had no idea what I was in for. The fighting games (yes, we had talked about it) that we allowed them to own (when they were old enough; when we had given it considerable thought) weren’t (suddenly) some kind of search-and-seizure, overthrow-the-bad-guy thing that I thought they were. At least this one wasn’t. This was about zombies: slack-jawed, drooling, and decidedly un-dead, coming at us relentless and innumerable and in a persistent state of decay.

Yes, it turns out the Black Ops game had some zombies, and then there was Black Ops 2 Zombies–because one video game in which they are coming at you, in which the onslaught of zombies is unyielding–wasn’t enough. Call of Duty 5, I hear, is all zombies, and there are rumored to be other games out there, ones we don’t have: Left for Dead and Left for Dead 2 and, ominously, The Last of Us.

Back when it was popular, Will loved this stuff. Just loved it. He saw them all: Sean of the Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Night of the Living Dead and Land of the Dead. He hasn’t yet seen 28 Days Later, but he was sure to catch Zombieland and couldn’t wait, last summer, for World War Z. Of course, in the case of the latter, he had already read the book. And he has also read Zombie Survival Guide, which is, I’ll be honest, somewhat comforting.

Why comforting, do you say? Because, immersed as I was in all of this zombie violence and lore, I began not so much to believe in the inevitability of the Zombocalypse as to just sort of brace myself for it. I mean, I don’t believe in zombies. I don’t. I’m an earnest Christian, for starters, and so have some pretty established beliefs about life and death, and it’s difficult to find space for un-deadness in all of that. I don’t believe in zombies anymore than I believe in vampires or werewolves.

But, as I have said, I have an excellent imagination. And with all of the zombieness that has gone on around me–and despite the fact that both here and in our culture, zombania appears (despite the persistent popularity of The Walking Dead) to be decidedly on the wane–it’s difficult not to sort of start thinking along those lines, to maybe put into place my own “survival plan,” if you will.

Which I have done, and which is relatively simple: I do not plan to survive at all.

Now before you tell me that I need to “think positive” or that I’m selling myself short, let me explain my reasoning: I’m a pretty fast runner. I know this about myself. And I’m a relatively clever person. I know how to Lock Things. I can Climb. And, based on the aforementioned and relatively thorough if inadvertent education on zombies that I’ve received via Will’s “studies”, I also know that Getting Away From Zombies Is Nigh-On Impossible.

Oh, sure, one can try. One can run. And hide. And climb. And lock doors and bar windows and retreat into spaces where you know–you absolutely know–you are safe. And just when you believe yourself to be Escaped and even Rescued, There They Come. Slowly. Surely. Innumerable. Drooling. They are limping, scraping, crawling their way toward you. They are decayed and rotting, jaws unhinged and slack. Their eyes bug out, their limbs hang barely attached or missing entirely. Movement, motivation, drive– these seem impossible. And yet Still They Come.

And now you cannot escape. Now you have only one option: To Wait It Out. And what is it you are waiting for, I ask? I tell: You are waiting for that rotting, gaping maw to close down on you, to clamp and close and make a slow and rotting end of things. Only to become one of the un-dead yourself.

I Do Not Want This At All.

And so my “survival plan,” to which Will is the linchpin.

Because, you see, Will–who has read the books and played the games and seen the movies–will be leading the rebellion, and he will survive. And that is why, at the outset of the Zombocalypse, he is instructed to shoot me. Just end it. Right there.

I was very satisfied with this and, because of my imagination, I recently decided to clarify. To ask him about it just, you know, to make sure we were on the Same Page.

“Will,” I said, “when the inevitable Zombocalypse happens, you’re going to shoot me, right? That’s the plan, yes?”

And he said, to my Horror: “Yes, I will shoot you– After you are bitten.”

Oh. No. 

“But,” I protested, “it’s the Whole Approach of the Zombies that I was hoping to avoid. When the zombies start coming, I want–immediately and without delay–to be put out of my pending misery!!!”

We do not, I have discovered, have an understanding At All.

(again) Horrors.

But Will explained: When the zombies make their (inevitable) appearance, how will we know where we stand? Where, he reasoned, is the line between *Outbreak* and *Insurgence*? And from there, how do we know that an actual *Apocalypse* is underway?

One can’t jump the gun, so to speak. We need to watch How Things Develop.

“What if,” he went on to say, “we heard that the outbreak had begun and, according to our plan, I shot you, only later to discover that the zombies were localized in Kansas, or Utah, and everything was under control? We wouldn’t want to be hasty,” he said.

Oh.

This, I realize, is excellent rationale. This little bit of reason, coming to counteract my fear, is rooted in good civic responsibility, and ethical reflection, and plain old common sense.

And, perhaps– even likely– genuine regard for his mother.

Which is nice.

And so I am having to readjust. I won’t say that I am working out more. Not trying to increase my running speed. Not looking for Excellent Hiding Places. Not adding to my zombie-fighting gear, not building an impenetrable stronghold in the basement, not stock-piling weapons.

But definitely thinking less about zombies. Definitely relaxing that ol’ imagination of mine. Definitely noting that most people don’t seem so concerned, so maybe I shouldn’t be either.

And comforting myself that my son, even in the panic of the inevitable Zombie Apocalypse, sorta kinda wants to have his mother around.

Who knows? Maybe I’ll rise to the occasion.

The post Zombania appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.