C.S. Lewis, Til We Have Faces

Before our son’s wedding in July, I had never been to the Pacific Northwest, never seen British Columbia, never been in Seattle.

Well, okay, I had been in the Seattle airport. But views of tarmac and airport kiosk don’t count as actually seeing a place. Proximity isn’t presence: I had never set actual foot on actual Seattle soil.

Before taking the train to Vancouver for the wedding, we spent four days in Seattle. Our AirBnB had a view of the water and of the Space Needle. We went to the top of that Needle, we took a Duck Tour. We made our obligatory trek through the Public Market and spent an afternoon in the aquarium. We loved all of it.

Seattle is famous for rain. They say it rains all the time there. They say it rains nine months out of the year.

But in the four days of our visit, the skies were cloudless, and every day we were there was warmer than the day before.

My husband declared that it never rains in Seattle–a fair claim, based on our experience: We’ve been to Seattle. It didn’t rain.

***

Chilliwack, British Columbia is 63 miles and a hair southeast of Vancouver. Where Vancouver is all brittle glass and waterfront, Chilliwack is a broad basin ringed with mountains, an agricultural plain become, in many places, a sprawling suburbia. From any one of the mountainsides surrounding this verdant town, you imagine you are seeing all of Chilliwack from end-to-end: the roads that cross it coming together at right angles or not; the subdivisions and neighborhoods, the downtown area with its restaurants, businesses, and hotels.

This is its latest iteration. Even now, gorgeous townhomes and neighborhoods are claiming square blocks. New developments cling to the lower sides of the surrounding mountains. Chilliwack is become Vancouver’s bedroom community, where once upon a time it was all farms.

And before the farms, a long time ago, Chilliwack was an ice sheet hemmed by mountains. Then the glaciers receded and Chilliwack’s Fraser Valley was, for a time, a lake. Eventually, so say the geologists, the land under that lake pushed upwards, emerging into daylight and becoming the plain that encouraged farmers to dig in, plant a field and a farmhouse, make a life.

Chilliwack as we know it hasn’t always been Chilliwack, you see. There is no such thing as always.

***

What I noticed first was the cottonwood trees. I didn’t know their name; I didn’t know that’s what I was seeing. But driving through this vast basin, it was their height that compelled me, and their breadth, and the way they stood shoulder to shoulder to shoulder along stretches of what looked like prairie.

The trees border rivers but also stand elsewhere, brakes against the wind. They have thick trunks and a long reach and leaves that look thick and waxy but still turn onto silver backs in the breeze.

I am told these trees can be a nuisance: in the spring they release some gauzy, cotton-like filament that drifts through the air and embeds itself in the grass. My Alaskan nieces told me about the chore it is to pluck it in handfuls from the lawn. Apparently, a rake won’t do the trick, and to be sure, the task sounds like a tedium.

But the romantic in me imagines the cottonwood filament floating in the air like something out of a fairytale. And I love the way cottonwood leaves turn and catch the light. There is something in their rows reminding me of poplar trees that, once upon a time, I watched from a terrace in the south of France. They bent together in the wind just like the poplar trees did that marked the edge of my friend’s backyard in Pittsburgh.

***

Until two days before the wedding, we had never met any one of our son’s bride’s family. We got out of our car and began walking under the willow tree toward their front door, and out of the house they came, one after the other, the beautiful reality of the faces and voices we’d known on Facebook and over the phone.

We could hardly wait to meet them–this family from so far away and somehow also so like us: each on the edge of loss and gain in this strange arithmetic of marriage. And each of us doing this for the first time: sending a child out from the family to become a family of their own.

I will freely admit to weeping when I saw and hugged Shanna’s mother: each of us was grieving in this stricken and overjoyed way, and I knew she understood like no one else at the time.

It was the only time I cried publicly during that wedding weekend. I say “publicly” on purpose.

***

With a mental hand, I reach in and grab whichever of the teeming memories comes readily to mind. It is William, just two, at his sandbox.

*

The sandbox is red and shaped like a crab with a dome of a shell that we threw easily to the side for digging. William and I, without jackets in the warm autumn midday, are perched on the edge of the sandbox. I am quite pregnant with Everett and very tired, and we are approaching William’s nap.

We fill a bucket with sand, and I show him how to tamp it down. We fill it up and pack it in; we make a level place and overturn it. And then I tell him, “It’s the moment of truth,” and we pull the bucket gently away to see what we’ve made.

We do this again and again, and every time I say, “It’s the moment of truth,” because I somehow think this is funny. And then one time he finally tells me to stop saying that, and so I do.

*

We played together in that sandbox countless times, and these are the details I recall–these and the fact that I was ready for him to take a nap and therefore kept a wary eye on the time. I loved to be with him and also I needed these moments to not last forever, because I needed a nap just as much as he did.

I think we heard the wind in the tops of the loblolly pines that traced the edge of the yard. I think we felt the warm sun through our sleeves. I think I kissed, so many times, the top of his warm blond head.

Bill and I gave him that sandbox for his second birthday. We hadn’t known what to get him. He didn’t expect anything; he didn’t understand the sometimes overblown concept that is a birthday.

He needed nothing, but we wanted to give him everything.

***

On the morning of the wedding, Bill drives me across town to where I, along with bride and bridesmaids and Shanna’s mother and aunt, are getting ready for the day.

It is a Saturday, mid-morning, mid-summer. The landlord of our AirBnB stands on his deck shirtless and holding a yellow coffee mug, talking to his neighbor.

“What are you doing today?” his neighbor asks him.

“Nothing,” he says.

We pass a woman trimming a shrub at the end of her driveway. We pass three teenage girls in shorts walking down the sidewalk, and the one nearest the fence trails her fingers in the chain link.

July 8, 2017, was a normal day for some people. Maybe it was a normal day for you.

***

Ask me about permanence, and I will tell you that I know it to be impossible and that I also pretend it exists, and that above most things, maybe all of them, permanence is a thing I long for.

***

One of the beautiful things about cottonwoods, and poplars, and maybe all trees, is their receptivity. They’ll take on the sun and the cold, the light and the heat. I realize they have no choice. But it’s the way they respond to these things that is so lovely. The way cottonwoods, birches, and poplars take on the wind, for example. I like that.

Willa Cather was a student of trees, apparently, and of life, as writers will (must) be. She said, “I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.”

I’ve said it before. I’ll say it again: one can learn a lot from trees.

***

(Will’s groomsmen stood shoulder to broad shoulder, handsome in their fitted gray suits. I worried that we hadn’t reminded them, during the rehearsal, not to lock their knees: if you stand still with your knees locked for too long, you can faint dead away–and no one wants that, especially in a wedding.

It wasn’t a problem in the end, but this thought was something that distracted me briefly while my firstborn son was getting married.)

***

It was a beautiful wedding. It was truly one of the happiest days of my life. So far.

***

The day after the wedding, a group of us hiked up to Lindeman Lake. It was a gorgeous hike that was all steep inclines and often a scramble over rocks. The view throughout was wooded and lushly green, with needle-shaped pines and thick ferns and waterfalls. It was what I had always thought the Pacific Northwest should be.

We climbed for more than half an hour, and it was arduous at times–a far cry from the hiking we’ve done in our more gentle Appalachians. When we finished, we emerged at the edge of trees to the rocky border of glacier-fed Lindeman Lake.

I had heard about this lake. I knew it was cold, and I knew what I had to do. There could be no hesitation. If I stood at the edge and thought about it for any time at all, if I allowed the air to cool me after that hike, I would lose all sense of necessity and nerve.

So I immediately stripped shoes, socks and shirt and clambered onto the sloping rock. And I jumped.

Lindeman Lake is turquoise, clear and stunningly cold. The shock of it is enough to knock your breath clean away. My brother-in-law, who lives year-round in Alaska, had himself a fine little back-stroking time on the lake, but not me. I got out of that lake as soon as humanly possible.

None of us went in a second time.

***

I think I want permanence, and then along comes a need for the opposite. Like my very brief swim in Lindeman. Like my need for a nap, all those many years ago, when I sat with my son at the sandbox.

But there was something about Will’s wedding–or maybe just the days leading up to it–that made part of me wish for the sandbox again: I wanted to sit in the sun one more time with my golden-haired boy just two years old. In my imagination, I would sit there again for hours.

It’s a longing for permanence that I didn’t at all desire at the time.

***

Before I became a mother, I found a song for my children. It was a Beatles song that was then covered by Alison Krauss, and while it might have been a song for an unknown and hoped for lover, it was to me a song of longing for my as-yet unborn children.

I sang it to Willliam before he was born and after. Of our three children, he was the one I sang it to the most. And when I danced with him at his wedding reception, it was the song we danced to.

Love you forever and forever, love you with all my heart. Love you whenever we’re together, love you when we’re apart.

Because I will always be his mother. Always.

The post Such a Thing as Always 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.

She posts a picture of her alarm clock: 5:45 AM, and the words, “Only Wednesday.”

***

She is my workout buddy on Wednesdays, younger than I by, perhaps, twenty-five years. We are warmed up, waiting to run, to heave the barbells, to do the burpees. The clock is ticking and we are talking about the days, about last week’s class, about what we’ve been up to.

I can’t remember the context exactly, but her words make sense and also are words I might have said–words I did say–years and decades ago, but nothing that I say anymore.

She says, “It’s a good thing. It makes the time go faster.”

***

He is home from class, making his lunch before launching into his to-do list. Which is considerable. He is in the kitchen and I am on the deck, talking with him through the open door that gives on to the breakfast room in this house we moved into when he was two and where once, long ago and yesterday, I painted his two-year-old belly with a smiley face.

I say aloud, “I can’t believe it’s already the 25th of January.”

And he says, “I know. I’m so glad.”

Because he’s getting married in July, and when you’re getting married in July, you want it to be July Right Now.

I smile to myself, and I don’t say what I know: July will be here in five minutes.

The post Perspective appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

“Are you related to Robert Louis Stevenson?”

And the second from the mother, who is old enough to be a mother:

“(The Daughter) is reciting her most favorite tomorrow… ‘The Swing.’ I’ve been coaching her to try to recite it without the cadence because I think it loses meaning. Thoughts?”

Thoughts. Immediate: to swings, and how I love to go up in them.

How do you like to go up in a swing/Up in the air so blue? Oh, I do think it the loveliest thing/ever a child can do!

I’m thinking of the time I learned to pump the swing myself. We were visiting my grandmother in Florida, and my older sister and I were taken by the hand by our father and walked rapidly (my father always walks rapidly) down a sidewalk that had, to one side, a tall white fence. Over the top of the fence we could see lemon trees, and my father sang us a song about them as we went.

Lemon tree, very pretty and the lemon flower is sweet. But the fruit of the poor lemon is impossible to eat.

And this was Very Funny, because my father loves lemons.

We arrived at a park, and my father pushed us on the swings, and then he explained how one leans on a swing and pushes one’s legs out and back again. Suddenly I had learned to pump the swing with my legs, and I could swing on my own.

How do you like to go up in a swing, up in the air so blue?

I pushed William on a swing when he was barely old enough to sit upright. Everett, too. And when Emma turned one, we bought her a baby swing for the swing-set in the back yard. I remember her blond hair, so fine and straight, swaying back and forth from its pigtail above her grinning face.

The mother: “I’ve been coaching her to try to recite it without the cadence.” Thoughts?

Yes, to the mornings my children and I sat around our kitchen table eating breakfast and reciting poetry. It was my way of packing in a few elements of school before they had a chance to realize it: a Bible story, a picture study, a poem over pancakes and in our pajamas.

Among the many, we learned Stevenson’s “My Shadow,” “The Wind,” and “The Swing.”

“Are you related to Robert Louis Stevenson?” I think my children wanted to know if they were, too.

Thoughts?

Yes, to grading papers at my desk when teaching high school, typing paragraphs of encouragement about supporting arguments and placing commas inside (INSIDE) the quotation marks, and wishing from time to time that these students had spent a small corner of their childhoods reciting poetry–and many of them had. Because you can teach a person how to shape an argument, how to develop said argument over a series of paragraphs, how to enfold supporting evidence via quote or paraphrase into one’s sentences. But by the time one is in high school, it might be too late or insupportable to teach the value of rhythm, the power of varied sentence length, the priceless weight of emphasis and inflection, the music of our spoken–or written–words.

The mother: “I think it loses its meaning.”

Can it?

Up in the air and over the wall/till I can see so wide/Rivers and trees and cattle and all/Over the countryside.

I can imagine the daughter standing at the corner of the sofa, reciting. Or seated at the table, head bent over her coloring, reciting. UP in the AIR and Over the WALL till I can SEE so WIDE.

What is the rhythm of this poem if not Stevenson swinging himself? Back and forth, back and forth. The daughter may be sitting at the table, colored pencil in hand, but the words she is saying are motion, and they are moving her back and forth with the poet himself, with all children anywhere ever who have sometime swung on a swing.

Till I look down on the garden green/Down on the roof so brown

Stevenson’s poem will lose its meaning only when there are no longer children outside because they’ve all turned to their iPhones, when all the swings sit idle, when the rushing breeze and flying force born of a child’s volition loses all power to answer.

Up in the air I go flying again/Up in the air and down!

“Thoughts?”

Yes. That surely some of the meaning is lost on the daughter, for whom swinging in this way is so close–for now–to her everyday experience. For her, for now, this mother is doing everything right: getting this poem in the child’s head. It’s Stevenson’s cadence that will keep it there, and so she’ll be saying it in her head for years to come.

And someday she‘ll be pushing her little one on the swing and admiring how the breeze pushes that one sweet curl back and forth, and she’ll mindlessly start saying the poem to her curly-headed cherub. And suddenly the poem’s meaning will bring happy tears to her eyes, just because the realization is so sweet, and she’ll know for the first time that her mother gave her that poem–a gift– years ago, and she’s only just opening it now.

“Are you related to Robert Louis Stevenson?”

Yes. We think so. Scotland is small enough. How many Stevensons can there be?

“Mom, are we related to Robert Louis Stevenson?”

Sure. Why not?

The post Two Questions appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

What was I doing? Passing through, I suppose, on my way to the next busy-ness, the way it usually goes with me. But I was arrested by the question, and then made a mental calculation: was it six months until his graduation from high school? No, that’s almost (still) a year away.

“How do you feel about that?” he asked.

And then I got it. Six months (nearly) until his birthday. That’s what he meant. He will be eighteen. An adult. No longer a kid.

“How do you feel about that?” he had asked me, and of course it merited answer.

***

There is a right answer to these sorts of questions, I think. Parenting has taught me this much. There’s often an obvious, honest answer–but that doesn’t make it the right one.

For instance, there was the infamous time we were driving somewhere with three children in tow and William, age five, piped up with this doozy: “Daddy, are you going to die someday?”

Not likely a search for existential truths. Not a query demanding statistical probability. Maybe just looking for reassurance.

Bill’s answer: “Sure! I could die anytime!”

It was an honest answer and, to Bill, it was obvious. But maybe not best. Maybe not the right answer, given the circumstances: the age and person of the boy in the backseat.

As with Everett, fifteen years later, standing with me in the living room.

“I only have six more months to be a kid. How do you feel about that?”

***

When I was a girl, I think I imagined that motherhood would magically transform me. I believed I would somehow cease to be a person with her concomitant fears and insecurities, and somehow become a Mother–which meant I would be fully responsible, confident, capable–and also void of personal interest.

This probably says a lot about my mother’s selfless love for me, but it prepared me not at all for the reality, which is that a mother is a person.

And this is pretty much true all of the time.

***

Of course the learning curve, in a very practical way and in most cases, is steep and sure at the beginning. At the beginning, a mother is on demand basically All of the Time. Feeding, changing, feeding again. Trying to coax a little body into sleep.

I remember an afternoon when William was just two weeks old. Bill was at work, my parents had just left, and the newborn in my arms was wailing away at the top of his lungs. I was crying, too–until I realized that probably one of us should stop crying just, you know, to be on top of things. And the one to stop crying was going to have to be me.

So I couldn’t quite be a person in that moment. Not, anyway, the person I wanted to be–or felt like being, anyway.

But things even out soon enough. The challenging terrain of those earliest days gives way, invisibly, incrementally, to a hands-on parenting that contends with new necessaries: 3-square meals and bedtimes, “use your words” and swimming lessons. You’re doing so much for them, needed so much by them, that it truly becomes second nature. Schlepping them, signing forms for them, buying them (endless need) new pairs of shoes.

And there are those conversations, too, uncounted and imperative, that extend from the existential (where do we go when we die) to the fundamental (where do babies come from). These are sometimes challenging. They are often inconvenient. And sometimes they require that we step outside of ourselves in order to be the people our children are needing: people who are unembarrassed, and wide-open honest, and sometimes honestly fearful or grieving or humbly apologetic.

In those moments, it isn’t at all about who I am as a person, but it’s about who they need me to be and the answer they need me to give. And often, appallingly, it’s the far more Real Me that they need than I am comfortable giving away.

Which is fine. The discomfort is totally worth it.

***

Good thing we get this practice, this careful evaluation of them-over-us in these specific kinds of moments. Because, for now, anyway, these kinds of things haven’t gone away.

“I only have six more months to be a kid! How do you feel about that?”

What good, in that instant, would all the honesty be, exactly? How good for him to know how I actually feel? That in that instant, standing there in the living room, I was calculating the months between his eighteenth birthday and his high school graduation, hoping that our time with him at home is just a little bit longer than it might seem, realizing that I have left of this extraordinary life under this roof with us only about–give or take–twelve more months?

Twelve months is no time at all.

So I said to him what I’ve said to all of them, when appropriate, from time to time. And it is the truth: “I am so excited for you.”

To see what you’ll do. To see who you become. To watch you have your own life.

***

“You coming?” That was his question to me as we stood together in the little office at Burlington Aviation.

He was about to go up in the cockpit of a Cessna 172, a single flight lesson that was a Groupon-turned-birthday present for our seventeen-year-old son. Yes, there was to be a flight instructor in the seat next to him, and yes, the boy has logged many hours of time on flight simulators.

But the enterprise was nonetheless a terrifying concept. Despite my love of flying, airplanes remain a terrifying concept. What truths–fundamental or existential–have us consistently flinging things heavy as airplanes–peopled!–into the air?

I had many times contemplated this trip with Everett. This forty-minute drive to Burlington, this son-of-mine-in-the-cockpit-flying-a-plane, the harrowing stories of the fiery demise of far too many small aircraft.

“You coming?”

And he had had to schedule and reschedule the lesson quite a few times. This Thursday, that Tuesday, both of us arranging an afternoon- one of us mentally steeling herself- for this event. But wind, clouds, rain always had us putting it off.

Until that Friday, standing in the office of Burlington Aviation.

The person I felt like being, in that particular moment, was maybe the car-going kind, the kind standing securely on the ground. She was the kind who wanted her seventeen-year-old to be seven again, riding his bike in the cul-de-sac, or maybe playing with a toy airplane in the living room.

That was the kind of person I felt like being, but instead I said,

“Yes.”

I deposited some of my fears on the tarmac and buckled the rest under my seat belt. I sat in the backseat and wore my headset and decided that physics and angels (mostly angels, let’s be honest) are all we need.

Because I’ve always meant to be a brave person. I’ve always wanted to be Everett’s mother, even when I hadn’t met him yet.

Because he is absolutely going to have–is having–his own life, and from the backseat of a Cessna 172, I got to see another part of it.

The post You Coming? appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

The plush frog was a gift sometime during the first year. With a music box embedded in its belly, a fabric-covered pull-string attached to its back, and a loop tied at the top of its head, the frog was the perfect toy to hang in the corner of the crib.

The post How It Works, Part II appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

As if, left to its own devices in my desk drawer, in my laptop files, it might nonetheless continue to evolve toward completion.

And, in truth, it might be gaining life. In fact, I know it is–but not in the way one hopes. It is gaining life in the way of all creative projects when they are neglected: it is growing wild. When I do (today? tomorrow?) return again to the project, it will be scarcely recognizable to me, grown woolly and fierce. I will have to wrestle it to the ground, read and re-read its pages. I will have to remind myself of its identity and my intentions. I will have to, all over again, tame it.

*sigh*

But that is for another post.

This post, this very one here, is all about the reason why I am letting my fourth child grow feral in the unsupervised wilds of my laptop. The reason is my other children, the two-legged ones, the three quasi-adults who inhabit the rooms of this house.

How is your book doing? It is neglected, sorry to say, because my other children are not. What have the last weeks–no, months–been if not tending to these Busy-nesses? These persons who must come and go with their own agendas, not necessarily needing me and then suddenly Needing Me Very Much?

In a way, I suppose, things have always been like this. Children–no matter their ages–don’t need us and then suddenly do. Think, for instance, of the skinned knee, the erupting quarrel, the sudden and bracing trip to the emergency room. But for the most part, when they are younger, the needs are quiet and unsurprising. He needs a nap. She needs a bath. Now they (clearly) need to be read to. Those daily things were predictable and completely under my control. I had things well in hand.

I don’t necessarily feel that this is any longer the case.

We have, as I have alluded to, more coming and going, for starters. I do a lot in the way of ferrying–trotting people to lessons and appointments, picking up Everett from school so that he can drive home again. I’m out more than I’m in, and for a homebody, for a writer, that has its limitations. At the same time, it’s a situation that has been mounting. It has been like this for awhile–and now, perhaps, more so. It’s normal, I know. It is the way of things.

And then there are the Events, the things that simply take More. Our latest and biggest was Will’s graduation from high school, joyous and wonderful and carrying also that quiet nostalgia. It meant, of course, preparations, which also meant stemming the activities of our home-school for a time. It mean out-of-town guests, and a Really Splendid Party, and getting ready for those things, and, since then, the recovery (vital) afterward.

Now, of course, things have slowed down, haven’t they? Will is graduated, Everett has finished his finals. Emma and I (mostly Emma) have a few things to wrap up, and then things will grow quieter, won’t they? Now, a friend encouraged me, this summer, she said, is the time for your book.

Predictability, ease of pace. The (perhaps) imposition of a schedule such that I have predictable time to myself each day, compulsory quiet, and a string of several hours together.

Right?

And then there was last Monday and the unanticipated 1.5 hours I spent in the DMV. He needed a parent (who knew?) to apply and receive his “after-nines.” Here was an errand I hadn’t anticipated. I had anticipated catching up on homeschool stuff that morning, sitting quietly with a history text and making notes, deciding what Emma needed yet to do. I had planned on doing laundry. On wrapping languishing packages. On making (and saving) room in my afternoon to work on that book of mine.

Instead, I did some very little planning in the DMV, perched on a chair with a desk attached like they have in high school, and coaching Will (again) in the art of the thank-you note. Yes, it was productive, and yes, it was time with Will. But it wasn’t (at all) what I had anticipated. And I never did get to the book that afternoon.

Which was fine.

Last night we held a sleepover, unexpected and last minute, the way my kids do things these days. They were quiet and respectful. They kept to themselves. When they left the house at 11 p.m. on an errand to buy some Cheerwine, Everett was thoughtful enough to text me. Everyone slept soundly, so far as I could tell, and this morning I made them muffins for breakfast.

I shouldn’t have been surprised by my later encounter with the family room: empty Sprite cans on the end table, empty glasses and chip bags on the floor. And, inexplicably wedged between the wall and sofa, the empty 2-liter bottle that had so recently been full of Cheerwine. The boys, oblivious (is it possible?), had begun to hold a band practice–and I made them stop immediately and take care of it all, which they did with no audible complaint.

Now those two dear sleeping-over boys have left. Like my children’s mother, theirs has necessary plans for the day. But at our house we are enjoying the unexpected visit of our youth group’s summer interns. A game of Settlers of Catan is in full swing on the dining room table, and I am letting Emma (who has a grammar test to take and some history to read) enjoy this fun with them.

I’m thinking there is yet time in the day for homeschool, and also (I think so) for the book. But these three children of mine have a mobility that, for all its wildness, my novel decidedly lacks. Feral or otherwise (and oh, I hope for mostly “otherwise”), they will take on lives of their own.

The book, when necessary (and thank you for asking), can wait.

The post At Our House appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

And that’s fine, isn’t it? It’s what mothers do from time to time. A coping mechanism or maybe simply practical: get the kids squared away and steal time (so rare) sans external demands. The tasks and the quiet. That’s all we need.

Good-bye! Have fun! Adjusting the radio to preference (mine) and the (much quieter) ride home. Arrival. Laundry. A little rustling of the feathers, a little settling in. What to do first?

And then the phone call. The kind mothers never want to get. The kind no one ever wants to get.

Ever.

“Mrs. Stevenson? I’m (such-and-so, sorry, but I wasn’t attending to names. This wasn’t cotillion; I couldn’t care who he was), a life-guard at the pool. Your son was doing a back-flip and he hit his head.”

What information could I eke while I was grabbing car keys, grabbing my purse, grabbing (of all things) my water bottle? He was conscious; they were keeping pressure on it.

But could he move? I wanted to ask, but didn’t. Is my son paralyzed? I read the book Joni when I was eleven and have consequently never really learned how to dive– despite my grandfather’s deliberate efforts to teach me. Diving is dangerous.

Instead I asked a stupid question, more of a statement, truth be told. I think the keys were already in hand. Still, it was stupid, and my only explanation is that when you get a call like this, you kind of lose your mind, and then when you go reaching for it, you find it where you had it last. My mind? Still sitting at my desk in front of the computer, files for my novel open, ready to go. I asked the anonymous lifeguard on the other end of the line: “So I should come there, then?”

He said yes, that would be a good idea.

I was out the door.

The pool is near our school and our church, and so also on a trek I have made regularly for years. A trek I had made in reverse only (was it?) minutes, really, before. Yet suddenly I had to ask myself which was the fastest way, the best way to go. And when I had made up my mind and was barreling (carefully) down the highway, I found that they had moved it, had moved the pool to an infinite distance, and no matter how fast I drove, there would always be red lights and agonizing waits and that I couldn’t (absolutely couldn’t) get there fast enough.

And when I finally did get there, my legs couldn’t carry me fast enough– though I did realize (only in retrospect) that they carried me fast enough past the friendly staff-person who seemed to know who I was at the check-in desk (I did not check in) and a waiting life-guard (the one from the phone?) and the friend of Everett who had been there when it happened and was waiting (so kindly) for my arrival.

I had nothing to say to any of them.

Because there he was across the pool deck, already strapped to the stretcher, flanked by the EMT’s. My son in one of the few (or many? are there many?) postures in which we never wish to see our children– or anyone, for that matter. Everett ready to go into the ambulance.

Tears were decidedly coming. I felt my face screw up. If there were a time for tears, then maybe– some might say– this was most decidedly it.

Except. Except that in a space for thought I couldn’t imagine existed in a time of emergency, I made up my mind to not to cry.

My children like to tease me about crying, which I hate, which only makes them tease me about it more. In truth, I am not a big crier. I don’t (generally) cry in movies, for instance, even the highly cryable ones. But I do get choked up over things. There was the time, for instance, when we drove past the car accident on the way to school, and the pedestrian who had been hit and killed by the car was still lying there wrapped in the bloody sheet when we drove past, and I cried, and my kids got upset with me.

That seemed worth crying over, would be what I would say.

But then there were the times– the token few, the handful (and this makes my childrens’ ridicule so unjust)– that I cried at the Chick-fil-A.

No one should be surprised at this. You know what I mean, right? In the drive-through? Surely you have cried there, too.

It’s that whole, “My pleasure” thing they say when you say, “Thank you.” Time was, the Chick-fil-A “my pleasure” could get me Every Time.

But here’s why, and I have explained this to my children, not so’s they’d care. It was back in the days (so recent, so long ago) when I was working full-time and by Tuesday evening was Tired, and by Thursday was Flat-Out. Tired leads to tears in some people, and I am, in this case, some people. So I’d be taking my exhausted self and my children through the Chick-fil-Al drive-through (and this wasn’t even weekly, mind you, but it happened from time to time) and I would be (have I said?) Exhausted, and then I would also be experiencing the whole “I am the mother of these children and they should be enjoying a quiet dinner at home with both a cold salad and a cooked vegetable not to mention whole grains and here I am taking them through the drive-through at a fast-food establishment” thing. Know what I mean?

And so that was me, at the wheel of the mini-van: a ball of guilt-and-fatigue-and-impossible-ideals, and when I thanked her, the invisible but friendly personage at the other end of the intercom would always say, “My pleasure.”

I teared up, I tell you. I did.

And my children always caught me at it, when only moments before I had been practically and merely furniture at the van’s helm and the means to some really yummy food, plus lemonade.

So Wednesday on the pool deck, I think Everett expected me to cry. I think, hearing the story later, Will and Emma expected me to cry. But this time, arriving at the side of my neck-braced, strapped-in, motionless son, I, terrified for his life, for his potential paralysis, for the unknown impact of his (still largely unassessed) injury, did not cry.

Everett needed me not to cry, so I didn’t. It’s what mothers do.

What Everett needed, so I decided or implicitly knew, was reassurance– and this mostly in the form of light-heartedness, even joking. Comments, say, about the dried blood on his chin and how he looked like a tough. Remarks about riding in an ambulance and the superiority of this single (it was his first) visit to the emergency room to that of his brother (3 times) and his sister (5 times).

And this continued– the lightheartedness, the banter– even when he blanched over the insertion of the I.V., and when he threatened to throw up in the ambulance (how?), and when the medical team surrounded him at the hospital. The lightheartedness continued even then they lifted him to the hospital bed, when they turned his body all in one motion like they would for a spinal injury.

I got quiet while the medical team examined him, when their words were all they were needing to hear. But I patted his foot just lightly so he would know I was in the room; and when I recited scripture to myself, it was under my breath where he couldn’t hear it– because hearing your mother recite scripture, especially in a time like this, could maybe be worse than seeing her cry.

I watched them poke him up and down the back; I watched them check his extremities for sensation; I saw him wiggle his toes. And I let him play games on my phone while they were shooting the open flap in the back of his head with needles for the numbing effect. I talked to him, too, about random things, about nothing in particular, about– maybe– the games he was playing on the phone. I even chatted him up, a little bit, anyway, as they put the 8 (eight) staples in his head.

At one point, the doctor asked me if I was a social worker or something. “It’s great,” he said quietly, “how you keep talking to him, keep him distracted,” he said. And I told him that I am not a social worker. “I’m just his mom,” I said.

Once, when he was eighteen months old, William had to get ten stitches above his eye (impact with a plastic cup– I am not kidding). And when he was two, he had to get superglue in his chin (impact with the bathroom counter). And when he was three, we spent a long time in the ER waiting room because he had gotten a scratch on the eye (on the eye). When she was two, Emma had to go back to the ER five times (five times) for rabies injections, because the room in which she had been napping had had a bat in there and bats can bite without leaving a mark and when we caught the bat we didn’t have the presence of mind to kill it and have it tested for rabies (because “bats” and “presence of mind” don’t generally enter cordially into the same sentence) and you don’t know if a person has rabies until they start showing symptoms and by then it is Too Late and so we decided to have her get the series of rabies shots in a preventative, potentially life-saving sort of way.

But Still, it was uncontestably decided that Everett’s singular trip to the ER is the Best One in Family History– what with the EMT thing and the ambulance thing and the staples and the terror of it all.

Which I didn’t let on about.

We brought him home within five hours of the accident, wearing his eight staples and a bit of dried blood, a little weary and a lot hungry, but walking– God be praised!– on his own two feet. More than stable: Absolutely Fine. And even, so it would seem– so it continues, miraculously, to seem– concussion free.

I asked him what he wanted to eat, and he said, “Pizza and sushi,” which is a weird combination and also exactly what I got for him, because at that moment I would have gotten absolutely anything he asked me for, because I am his mother.

But afterward, I did tell Everett I was going to be keeping his hospital bracelet, and I cut it off carefully with scissors. He asked me why.

“Because,” I told him. “Because I still have the one that they put on you in the hospital when you were born.” Which didn’t seem to enlighten him. Which is fine.

I could tell him that keeping things like this is what mothers do, but I’m not sure he’d get it. Any more than he gets that I have three boxes under my bed, you know.

This bracelet will go in Everett’s box.

I got one hospital bracelet when they gave him to me the first time. And I got this bracelet when they gave him back to me again.

The post It’s Long Because I’m Processing, Which is What Mothers Sometimes Do appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

I remember going on youth group retreats when I was a teenager. I remember that I never wanted them to end. Somehow, the return to the everyday at the end of the weekend was not at all what I was wanting.

The everyday is often difficult. What does the worker gain from his toil? I have seen the burden God has laid on men. We wake daily to the demands of the day before– and new ones, too, assert themselves. Meanwhile, there are the persistent and quotidian that can weigh us down: once again, today, this morning, my eyes not really entirely awake, I had to make the lunches.

And then there are things like weekend retreats, or that vacation last month or even last summer: plots in time  where we would set up camp and live forever. I’m guessing you know what I mean.

Through my kitchen window, I can see under the holly trees that border our yard and the neighbors’. Just under their lowest branches, I have a small view onto their yard– the yard that Will mowed the other day.

It’s not an easy lawn to mow. One side of it is a steep hill, and there is a large garden he must maneuver the mower around. Due to a broken mower, the yard had recently grown into a meadow, and I had been caught off guard when, mulling over the blackspot on my budding rosebushes, I spied the patches of ajuga blooming in that lawn. Tall purple spires in thick pools, and lavender-colored ones, too. The lower half of the hillside was broken here and there in sudden and surprising choruses of purple– all of them upright and looking modestly pleased, as was only appropriate.

I did not want him to mow that lawn– er, meadow. But there are ordinances against meadows where we live, and the quotidian, always, will assert itself.

Will mowed.

And yesterday I was washing the dishes (oh, the dailiness) when I glimpsed it under the hollies: the patch my son had left for me. It was there in the neighbors’ freshly mowed lawn: the oval pool of lavender spires, just where I could see them.

He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.  Ecclesiastes 3:10-11

Here is a poem I recently met. It changed me, which would seem to be one of the effects of a good poem, and I’m glad.

Love Calls Us to the Things of This World

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
As false dawn.
Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.

Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.
Now they are rising together in calm swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear
With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;

Now they are flying in place, conveying
The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving
And staying like white water; and now of a sudden
They swoon down in so rapt a quiet
That nobody seems to be there.
The soul shrinks

From all that it is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every blessed day,
And cries,
“Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.”

Yet, as the sun acknowledges
With a warm look the world’s hunks and colors,
The soul descends once more in bitter love
To accept the waking body, saying now
In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,

“Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;
Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;
Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating
Of dark habits,
keeping their difficult balance.”

-Richard Wilbur

The post Difficult Balance appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

But I could see that something was meant by it. Here was not the idle casting off of clothing before the boy climbed into bed– not that this would be inexcusable this week. It would, in fact, be excusable: he has had Quite A Week. Play practice into the tens every night after a full day of school, looming academic deadlines and tests and quizzes besides. Not to mention the soccer game on Sunday.

He climbed into the car ashen-faced on Monday and read me the list of All He Had To Do. It was enough to make me a more than a little nervous, to be honest. I did not envy him the weeks ahead, and felt Genuine Concern for this young man who is closing in on the end of his junior year of high school. So much to do.

Pray about it, I told him, and then just do the next thing.

What more is there?

So the pile of clothes was excusable. And don’t I, even, in the midst of a busy week, allow once-worn clothes to lie across the blanket chest or slide onto the floor? Don’t I pile laundry baskets with clean clothes and then leave them that way, prying articles I want from between others in the stack?

Yes, I think I do.

Still, the pile languished. Tuesday, Wednesday. On Thursday I gathered them up.

All whites. All t-shirts. Here, the shirt he got from last year’s basketball camp. Here, the one he got as a freshman, promoting a special event at his high school. This one is from a 30-hour famine he participated in, and the other from the a capella group he sings in.

None of these shirts fits him now.

Oh.

This used to be my job. My long and tedious job, done twice a year: cleaning out the children’s dressers and closets, putting away the warm-weather (or cold) things and taking out the cold-weather (or warm) ones. Along with that seasonal sorting, I was also sizing them in my mind, mentally holding them up against the body to whom that drawer belonged. Would this fit him anymore? Had she outgrown it?

The process ended with three piles: clothes for the drawers and closets, ready for the season ahead; clothes for the bin, saved for fall or spring; and clothes for the give-away, things the child had outgrown and wouldn’t be needing anymore.

It was a job I hated, to be honest. Tedious and long and also, always, a little bit sad.

And now, witness the pile on the bedroom floor, where my son, my sixteen-year-old son, my very-nearly-a-senior-in-high-school son, has done (part of) the job himself.

Which is as it should be, even if he didn’t get to finish it, even if he didn’t get to tell me what was up with the pile, because his week has been so busy he has hardly been at home.

I am going to have to get used to that.

I am all too aware of this, early griever that I am. I know how long a year is: short. I have tracked the days in their mysterious diminishment. They grow shorter and shorter, the days and the weeks. My son’s time left at home, if all goes as planned, is not very long at all.

The pile of shirts at the foot of his dresser was eloquent.

And the play was excellent. It opened last night and, truly, the audience was delighted. We gave them a standing ovation, in fact. The acting was so strong, the sword-fighting (yes!) believable and impressive, the wit delightful. Will plays Will Scarlet, brother to Robin Hood, and the joy that characterizes him (honestly, it does) was apparent from the moment he stepped on the stage (which was the play’s first moment) until his death (horribly) at the hands of the evil villain.

Most of the students on the stage last night were my students once. They all did a stellar job. But when I stood to my feet to join in that ovation, I will admit that I was standing for my son.

He has worked so hard this week. I’m not going to hold a little pile of clothes against him.

The post Going, Going…. appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.