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seasons of favorites

3 Comments

They’ve done it again. Gone and switched on me.

You’re never supposed to admit it, of course. Parents aren’t supposed to have favorites. It’s a gasp-worthy thought, that you could love one more than another. Or even have a preference. Parents should be divine-like in this respect, we assume, doling out affection and attention in equal doses, like perfectly sliced pieces of pie.

If you brought them into the world, you should love them all the same.

And yet. I find that sometimes the secret slips. It is often easier to love one than another. These are the simple facts of life, the rough rubbing up against each other day after day. Each child goes through phases of pushing away and pulling in close. So too, parents. It’s not that we love more, but that we love differently. And can we be blamed when the easier love seems, well, easier?

. . .

I’m trying to accept that it’s fall. The mornings smell different, and the breeze, even on the rare warm days, blows with a sharper edge. Colors are creeping into the woods: browns and tans of drought-dried trees, a rare burst of red or orange from a resilient maple.

And I do like fall, at least I try to like it. Crisp apples and wool sweaters and pumpkin bread and squash on the vine and the roar of Friday night football and the stubborn brightness of September sun. But summer has my heart: the warmth, the all-around light, the ease, the fresh possibility and the bare feet in cool evening grass.

Summer is my favorite. Yet I have no choice but to live all four, firmly rooted in my Midwest. I joke about being called to the sun and surf, but I’ll never be a snowbird. It’s a lazy, lovely dream, but not the real call of my life. So every year I have to journey through these seasons. The ones I love and the ones I’d love to skip.

At the end of the day it doesn’t make a difference which is my cherished soul-time. I have to find good in each season – real joy, not just biding-time – all the way.

. . .

It doesn’t matter, of course, which child I prefer right now. (And I wouldn’t admit it to a soul anyway.) When I read this again, months or years from now, it will have switched a thousand times since. Just as it has since the first day I had two to love. Favorites are flighty things, fading like fashion. It’s loyalty and love that endure, not the memory of which one I wrestled with when.

Seasons cycle, the phases change as regular as the moon, now half-full to harvest. And yet I find myself so small underneath, gaping up at the vastness of the sky and the weight of all those stars, always spinning and struggling to remember my place in the cycling and changing. Trying to remember the call to trust.

That even when love is hard, the goodness of loving runs deeper.

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Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Dave says

    18 September 2012 at 2:51 pm

    Much like I was (eventually) proven right about NPR making you old, one day you’ll come back around to fall being your favorite. It’ll happen!

    Reply
  2. Stephanie Romero says

    18 September 2012 at 4:44 pm

    Thank you for being honest. I have been there, where the season is just easier with one child and not so much with another. It’s reality…thank you for being real.

    Reply
  3. Thrift Store Mama says

    20 September 2012 at 9:38 am

    You are right in that the children seem to switch places in pulling away and pushing the boundaries. Mine just switched on me, and although I do feel a little sad about the one that used to be my buddy who now only can find fault with me, I relish the closeness of the other one now.

    Our previous state was that way for 2 years or so, and I’m glad that I never categorized them as “the good/easy one” and the “challenging one” or else they may not have been able to change out of those roles.

    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 2197653351004688513_1468989992 Hope high. Expectations low.

This motto is what gets me through travel, holidays, church—basically 90% of life with kids.

Keep your hope high.
Keep your expectations low.

Because expectations are anticipation-gone-control-freak. Your picture of the perfect holiday. Your picture of the perfect family. Your desire to do anything 100% your way, unfettered by other people’s mess or needs or humanity.

Hope on the other hand? Spacious. Surprising. Sustaining.

Hope smoothes over minor disappointments and major disruptions. Hope lifts your eyes to a wider horizon where plans matters less than people. Hope is a balm to deepest suffering and a boost to daily slumps.

Call it a virtue, a practice, a gift. Whatever you do, start to claim it as your own. Because once you choose hope over expectations, you loosen your grip on everything else. Laughter shows up. Love, too.

If the food gets burned or the show starts late or the weather turns terrible or the kids melt down, you always have a choice—even in the chaos. You can set expectations gently aside and turn to hope instead.

Same for the harder turns through the holidays—the years when we want to wish away the cheer because we’re grieving or suffering or lost and everyone else’s (alleged) joy makes us feel even more alone. Hope reminds us that the surface is not the story and that now is not forever.

Expectations are our own creation. Hope is a higher calling—to lift our eyes up from our desires and plans to remember we are not in control.

So let your clenched fist of expectations unfurl this season. (However low you think your expectations are, sink them even further. To the basement. Trust me.) Then watch your own delight at discovering goodness that you never could have planned. 
Because hope reminds us of holy truth: life never had to be perfect to be good.
Instagram post 2196944524877817946_1468989992 Beauty from brokenness.

At the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport, there’s a mosaic tucked back in concourse F, hidden by the bathrooms. I notice it now because it’s the work of a kindred spirit.

A grieving mother.

By chance I read her story when the mosaic was installed. How her second child was stillborn and her world shattered and after months of wondering how on earth to create again, butterflies became a symbol of hope rising from ashes.

I remember her whenever I pass these restrooms, usually dragging a small child of my own behind me before a flight. Today I walked in with a pregnant belly, looking for all the world like a simple story: woman having baby.

My story is not simple. Neither is hers.

We are among you, the bereaved. Walking by you every day. Daring to keep going instead of giving up. Creating beauty from brokenness. 
You might miss it. We learn not to shout. But when we get space to share our stories, strange and sparkling beauty can be found.

Mary Shelley wrote her masterpiece Frankenstein while she was grieving the death of her baby. Prince had an infant son who lived only a few days. I collect these stories now—the artists who created out of their pain.

When something is shattered—a bone, a bowl, a dream—it can never be put back together in exactly the same way again. Cracks, jagged edges, trauma’s hard memory persists.

But an artist catches the glint of hope under the rubble and refuses to let destruction have the final word. Every creation is a mosaic, built from brokenness.

MSP Airport, gate F4. Check it out next time you’re here.

Thank you, @josielewisart 🦋
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.
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