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everyday parenting as spiritual practice

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cusp

5 Comments

One has two more teeth, tiny and translucent, poised to cut through his swollen pink gums. Days away from their arrival, I couldn’t be more ready for the crankiness to end and the chomping to begin.

The other sports a shiny new backpack, wears it up and down the stairs to get ready for school. Weeks away from his departure, I couldn’t be more reluctant for our at-home season to end and the out-and-about to begin.

Both my boys are on the cusp.

The change in the air is palpable. August’s energy is different: the ripe garden ready to burst with harvest, the slipping summer begging to be savored with one last hurrah. I ignore the back-to-school ads, cram our calendar with one more picnic, one more fair, one last trip to the cabin. Trying desperately to grab onto what’s already sliding away.

And yet I hope I’m on the cusp, too.

I’m tired of where I’ve been the past few months, wrapped up in self and house, turned inward and stretched outward.

Every morning as I grab breakfast foods from the cupboard, I catch a glance of the small bookshelf in the corner, the one I dubbed our new family altar, the one I pictured as a place inviting us to pause, prettied with a prayer cloth, a candle, simple pictures of Christ and the saints. It’s empty. A too-obvious metaphor. I’ve made time for plenty of other projects, but not that one. And it shows – on my face, in my heart.

Sometimes I’m like my youngest when I’m on the cusp of change. Cranky and irritable. Unsure of what’s happening but unhappy with the intrusion. Convinced I’d be happier for things to stay as they were.

Sometimes I’m like my oldest. Grinning and breathless with anticipation of newness brimming on the horizon. Trying out the transition with excitement. Imagining and inquiring, over and over, what will it be like?

And then I remember God. The God who needs no altar to infuse my daily life, the God who peers into my soul like a parent searching for the almost-tooth, the God who watches with delights as I wonder what lies ahead.

I feel a moment’s pause in the August storm, a centering breath and a settling-in of shoulders hunched in tension of the too-much they carry. Patience, God whispers. Patience for you, patience for them.

Patience on the cusp.

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Comments

  1. Peg Conway says

    8 August 2012 at 10:43 am

    The August enervation is in full force here too! Preparing to take daughter (middle child) to college for freshman year a week from tomorrow. Then our oldest (son), a college junior, departs for a semester abroad two weeks later. Just two major life transitions in the midst of the usual start of school stuff for my husband, who teaches high school chem and youngest son (high school junior) plus several new initiatives for myself for the fall. “Breathe” has been my mantra.

    Reply
    • mothering spirit says

      15 August 2012 at 1:10 pm

      Amen, Peg. I’m learning that “breathe” should probably be my mantra every day.

      Reply
  2. mkk says

    9 August 2012 at 10:23 pm

    Beautiful. I needed these words. Patience.

    Reply

Trackbacks

  1. an (un)surprising end to an (un)surprising year « mothering spirit says:
    31 December 2012 at 4:10 pm

    […] gift of time on the cusp of another […]

    Reply
  2. these are the waning days « mothering spirit says:
    22 August 2014 at 8:16 am

    […] in two short weeks. Their worlds will widen, then settle back in together each afternoon. They are on the cusp of change, as […]

    Reply

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I’m Laura Kelly Fanucci. Mother, writer, wonderer. This space is where I explore mothering through writing. It’s where I celebrate how God shows up in the chaos of raising children. It’s where I love to build community with readers like you. Read More…

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thismessygrace

Mother, writer, wonderer.
Seeker of God in chaos & life with kids.
Author of Everyday Sacrament & Grieving Together.
Glimpses of grace & gratitude.

Instagram post 2195334718010341825_1468989992 You don’t have to apologize for staying in the slow lane.

Took two snowy hours creeping to the airport before dawn to remember this truth. Impatient trucks on my tail, angry red lights for miles.

Feel free to pass, as I fought off the urge of irritation at their too-close-for-comfort. I’m staying right here. Slow and safe.

Call it the Advent lane. The choice to slow down when the world speeds up.

Liturgical living isn’t about doing more, adding extras or achieving. It’s often about doing less. Living at a slower, sacred pace. Letting the world’s frenzy pass you by. Listening in the quiet for the still, small voice of God.

And here’s the secret you learn after years and years: it’s delicious, this discipline of living differently.

You gain time where others lose it: a full season of Christmas instead of one fleeting day. You feel time where others forget it: the weight of weeks before Easter. You notice how nature lives by the same cycles: waxing and waning, dying and rising.

Years ago our pastor preached about stopping at yellow lights as an Advent practice. One simple act, a few times a day, to remind you to wait.

Wait.

Slow down. Take a moment to breathe. Slip back into the living pace where you are no more important or urgent than anyone around you.

In a culture obsessed with success, speed, and endless upward mobility, it can seem crazy to take the slow lane—or the off ramp.

But you can stay here, slow and steady. Peace was never found by speeding up.
Instagram post 2192445717293184648_1468989992 “What if God were helpless?” Her question shook me.

We had sat together for an hour, wrestling with the biggest, hardest questions—suffering and death and grief and trust. But even from where she sat in her rocking chair, hair white with wisdom, eyes searching up at the ceiling for answers that don’t exist, her words shook me.

No, I wanted to leap to protest. God has to be Helper, not helpless. Powerful, not powerless.

Otherwise everything unravels, right? Otherwise what is solid ground? Otherwise who can I trust?

But I caught my own words. It’s Advent, after all. What we celebrate at Christmas is exactly this: God becoming helpless.

A newborn baby: nothing more helpless among us. Born into poverty. Vulnerable among animals. Away from his community. Unable to walk or talk or feed himself. Helplessness Incarnate.

And this was what God chose, the ultimate Power that set the stars spinning. Incarnation was the vulnerable, unexpected, scandalous, unbelievable way that Love took flesh and came to stumble in dirt beside us.

What if God were helpless?

What if it’s not a hypothetical question, but a theological paradox? What does it mean for my life?

It shakes me, as it should.

If you have understood, wrote Augustine, what you have understood is not God.

Advent is not a simple season, chocolate calendars and Christmas countdowns.

This is a time to remember that Jesus’ story is radical, upsetting every neat category and tidy expectation.

It would be easier if God stayed powerful: distant, removed, almighty. The shock is that Jesus becomes powerless, too: intimate, humble, among-us.

What if God were helpless? What would it mean for my life, my faith, my need for surety and solid foundation?

If God can be both—Helper and Helpless—what else might turn upside down? What grace might be waiting in the wreckage of our expectations?
Instagram post 2191564285632887396_1468989992 Anna Quindlen wrote that hidden within each of her grown children is the baby they once were, like the toy duck in the bathroom soap.

I feel the same way about infertility.

Yesterday I curved my sore back over the baby huddled inside, bent and swayed by the bathroom sink, seeking any relief. Nausea, sciatica, normal aches and pains—all of it daily burden, barely worth mentioning after all these years.

But I felt her rise up within me, the one who wanted Exactly This. All of This. Nothing But This.

She is the me inside me, the former and forever.

I see her in crowds, the one in ten walking brave each day through a world that flaunts what she wants (as the world does when we are wanting, filling our longing view with happy couples or pregnant bellies or warm homes or good jobs while we lust for the same). I carry her with me as I have carried each child, the ones whose hands I held and the ones I had to let go.

She taught me what it meant to crave control and to discover that I have none. She gave me the language of lament and the songs of sorrow.

I left her behind eleven years ago, on a cold winter morning like today, when a thin plastic test blurred to two lines for the first time.

I burst through the bathroom door as someone new, someone pregnant, someone’s mother.

I have never been the same.

But she is still me, and I am still her. Every day she prays me back to the place of all who are still waiting and weeping.

I could never call infertility a gift. But her companionship is.

When she whispers, it is louder than any stranger’s sneer, the judgement heaped upon four kids running ahead and a waddling mother trailing behind.

This, she reminds me.

You wanted exactly This.
Instagram post 2191077565846125357_1468989992 Advent is waiting to be discovered.

By those of us who have lived it for a lifetime. By those of us who have found it brand new.

Advent is quiet and calm when the world is anything but.

For those of us who delight in stillness and silence. For those of us who struggle to slow down.

Advent is the antidote we seek.

For those of us who crave radical challenge. For those of us who love ancient comfort.

Advent is never what we expect and always what we need.

The shortest season for the longest wait.

The perfect paradox for the God of surprises.

Advent is already the gift.

You can dip into this current any time, running strong and steady beneath the chaos of December above.

Any Advent moment will bring you peace and joy, which is already Love Incarnate, which is already Emmanuel, which is God among us.

A miracle. Don’t miss it.
Instagram post 2186625723368059660_1468989992 When I was pregnant with the twins, a strange thing happened.

As we started to share the news—in the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving—people reacted in a way I never expected.

Instead of raising eyebrows or laughing out loud, they would get this wistful look in their eyes, offer a longing “oh...” and pronounce the strangest blessing. “Your holidays are going to be so wonderful.” I thought they were insane. I could not understand. What on earth did Thanksgiving have to do with it? Didn’t they see that all my plans had been dumped in a blender and set to Purée? That I never wanted twins, or five children under six, or any of the current complications life was hurling my way?

But over and over, friends and strangers looked at me with wistful, longing faces, saying so many times I lost count in my bewilderment:

Your holidays will be so wonderful.

Imagine all of them around the table.

You’re going to have so much fun when they’re all at home.

I am not in the habit of judging family size. Infertility, loss, first-hand heartache of the complexities and complications of childbearing have ripped back the stories beneath the surface. I know there are a thousand reasons why one might choose (or not) to have any number of children—or none at all.

But what I learned from countless unexpected reactions to my own unexpected news was this surprise. Sometimes we see only scarcity or overload where others are able to see fullness.

You might think your life is too much or not enough. But outside perspectives catch angles you can’t glimpse from where you stand. Goodness might hide where you see only hard.

Now I remember those voices every Thanksgiving. In years when holidays felt painfully lacking and in years when they brim to bursting, I remind myself how many saw fullness I couldn’t see.

Whether dreaming of the future or longing for the past—from countless friends who whispered they wanted one more or the stranger who told me she would have had ten if she could have had one—what they taught me was the beauty of here and now. The goodness before my eyes, even if it was never what I would have chosen.

We believe we see our whole story. Thank God we don’t.
Instagram post 2180338770783390438_1468989992 The world is different because of them.

Not just the two who inspired tonight, the girls we loved and kissed and held as they left this world.

But every beloved child whose name or life was spoken into that sacred space.

The world is different because they were here.

47 years ago, one mother told us as she lit her candle in the chapel. And it doesn’t get easier.

Two weeks ago, said one dad. And the whole room felt it, the weight of new grief and the rush of our own memories, ever an inch below the surface.

On the drive to church tonight, I told my husband that I was so grateful that Maggie and Abby inspired us to start this Mass for other families—and I also wanted nothing more than to turn the car around and head home. Anywhere normal.

But we don’t get to choose, any of us. Life happens and death happens, and the world is different because of every person we’ve chosen to love. Even the ones we had to let go.

Two weeks. 47 years.

That room held so much love and sadness tonight that my heart could hardly bear it—but here is the phenomenal power of the human heart. It was made to hold so much more than we realize.

We don’t move on. We don’t get over it. We don’t put it behind us. We don’t forget. We remember, together. What a gift, to be part of our communal awakening to the truth that remembering together—not suffering alone—is the way we heal.

The world is different because they were—and are now and ever shall be.

Love without end, amen.
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