He came into the bathroom as I brushed my teeth, each stroke marking my thankfulness that this pit-full day had passed. I hated this day. I hated the day before even more. In fact, the whole week stunk. My grandfather passed away last week (step-grandpa really, but he was always there), and with his passing my childhood memories felt tainted. That whole group of people whom I love, the ones who gathered for Thanksgiving and I can picture in my mind...those old pictures, could never gather again because a key player is gone. In a way, I felt like when my grandpa died, a piece of my childhood died with him. The passing of an era.
We’d been away on a trip, and before that, another trip, so my house has been out of hand for weeks. I don’t thrive well in the chaos. In the same way, home school hasn’t been established well enough to have a regular rhythm for the year.
And now we're home from the highest of highs of the most amazing trip only to be kicked in the gut by death again. I’m kicked hard and even more gut-wrenched because I live so far away from my family and my own kids didn’t know him. They never will. Just as they don’t know my Grandma.
It takes my breath away as I’m crying over the sink and the familiarity of pain embraces me like a friend and I feel a strange comfort. “Hello darkness my old friend…” runs through my mind and I think I finally understand what it means.
But as I’m flailing here, the days must go on. The house and the school and the fighting kids and the looming list sit on my lungs and squeeze them hard, until I’m barely breathing, and I can’t keep anything straight, and everything feels like an effort and all I want is sleep, but that’s elusive too.
All too quickly, when my guard is down, those creeping lies enter my mind! Suddenly they’re there where they weren’t before, and I knew they might come and I told myself not to believe them, but they’re there and I believe them and I don’t know how not to. I know I’m a terrible mother. I know I cannot home school well and I never should have tried in the first place. I know I can never keep up with my house. I know the list of ‘to dos’ is too hard for me.
Just the effort of the days suck away at at me. And I’d rather give into it and curl up in my bed then make the greater effort of pushing against it. But I’m a fighter, so I try.
I try to laugh with the kids, kind of. I try to look beyond myself and listen, sort of. I try to say yes when they ask of me, mostly. And, on Friday, he asked me to play a game of rope tag outside - a game where, if you’re ‘it,’ you hold onto the rope and close your eyes and you try to tag the person running in circles around you. Such exhilaration I’d not had in way too long.
But I still hated the day, generally.
To my surprise, when he breezed into that bathroom as I brushed, he asked me what my favorite part of the day was, that hated day. I had to push past all the mental mush of the hated and my first compulsion to cry out that all of it was terrible, bad, ugly….! And that moment on the swing came to mind. The laughter and the running and the freedom from those lies.
“Oh, the game on the swing, baby. That was the best part!”
With a tiny smile he turns to leave almost as quickly as he came. Reassured.
“Me too.” he says quietly and confidently as he hops away.
I’m a little awe-struck because it was just ten minutes of that terrible day. But it was enough to pour into my boy, that one growing up too fast, that he is important. It was enough to make memories right where I’m at with the life that I have and the people around me here. And that little “me too” from my oldest son, was enough to remind me that even on my darkest days, God has equipped me to be enough for my kids.
