There’s a question Jesus asks a blind man in the book of Mark that I am occasionally a little jealous of.
“What do you want me to do for you?”
I picture the man there, not seeing the hairy legs he sits in front of. Knowing what Jesus smells like, committing his voice to memory. Perhaps the man reaches out a hand, adding a fabric texture to his mental portrait.
Four years ago a friend in publishing suggested I start a blog (well. Five years ago. Took me awhile to come around). I initially looked at her like she’d suddenly sprouted horns.
I mean, who has that much to say? (Especially publically? Isn’t that like running naked through cyberspace, waving a flag?)
So I got a call from the principal. I confess to even wishing her (rather brightly) a Happy Friday.
She responded pretty kindly, considering my son was there in the office with her. (It was only 8:40. What could happen before 8:40?)
A couple of weeks ago, I was stuffing paper bags with sandwiches, flipping pancakes, signing permission slips, smelling breath to confirm teeth brushing, etc.–all your average morning chaos. That’s when my middle child told me he was quitting football.
Imagine the activity in my kitchen suddenly lurching to a halt. “What? Why?”
He had some good reasons. And a few not-great, 12-year-old ones. It was one of those weird parenting situations where you wish there was a highly detailed playbook. What to do when your kid wants to quit football and he’s been in it for a month and isn’t getting to play and… I told him to go to practice, and we’d talk about it on the weekend.
Okay, one of my least favorite job descriptions of motherhood: Media Nazi. ‘M I the only one who feels like I’m constantly saying “nope”?
Because see, I want more than “Mom said no. Again” for my kids’ worldview. When they get to college, I’m certainly not going to be harping over their shoulders. (At least I really hope not.) Plus, they’re about 100% more likely to have buy-in if they’re the ones making the [hopefully right] decision.
So I have a teenager, and another just about. Most of me is tickled pink about all the real conversations we get to hold, all the fun we have as a maturing family, all the crazy jokes they tell me that leave all of us laughing.
And there’s this leeettle part of it that scares the bejeebies out of me.
Seemingly separate note: I have recently acquired an agent for a non-fiction book I’m writing, which makes my heart do little cartwheels of happiness. It was a moment I wasn’t sure would ever happen.
Allow me to sketch for you a brief (yet oh-so-vivid) moment from about eight years ago. You would have found me slumped against the wall in the hallway one afternoon. He was only a year and a half old–and the potential for catastrophe was spreading before me.
Funny thing is, I don’t even remember what my then-toddler did to cause me to groan in despair. I just remember a lot of the stories that give me a pretty good idea: like that time while I was in the bathroom, when he pulled a barstool up to the counter, snatched a packet of drink mix from the top of the toaster oven, wrenched it open, and sprinkled it around the house like fairy dust.
In college, I answered a youth crisis hotline one night a week. So many who called in were so…raw. Or embarrassed. Or afraid.
There was something freeing, I think, calling someone anonymously; at finally being able to share the invisible bag of stones they carried around, its weight occasionally flopping over their foreheads and making it hard to see anything else.
Recently I went to a friend’s house on a dark day. (Even now, it is hard to type this. I might be crying a little.)
I’d been hanging out with her and her two-year-old son, Henry, every couple of weeks or so as they got their feet back under them after his chemo. Which happened after his brain tumor. Which happened after a life-threatening bacterial infection. Which happened after he was born prematurely. I’d arrived from Africa a little late to the scene, when they’d gotten the happy MRI’s with a healthy brain.
Until.
My husband and I were riding home in the dark last night, drinking in that laundry-on-the-line feeling of spring, even though I know in Colorado it won’t last long. (I’m scheduling this post for a day when they’re predicting more snow.) We talked about some happy successes with my new business. I mean, it’s not Africa, but I’m excited about it, I shrugged as we pulled to a stop sign. It’s okay. This doesn’t need to be Africa. It’s a new box; new expectations.
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