dare {one thousand gifts}
We’re sitting in a circle, you and I, with half a dozen other people we love. It’s late at night, past the hour when everyone started yawning, past the time when we all ambled into the kitchen looking for snacks, all the way past pitch dark and silence to that hour when the world seems to melt away and we function on the energy of our souls instead of the nothing-left in our emptied bodies. You and I sit Indian-style, not wondering anymore how we’re going to get up at the end of the night when the new light begins to explode on the horizon. We are engaged, because it’s our turn, being side-by-side, and all of our friends have shifted to listen, one leaning on a bent arm, another stretched out on her belly, another pulling a blanket around her knees.
I smile at you, leaning forward just a little. “Okay. Truth? Or dare?”
You lift an eyebrow at me, knowing that I already know your decision. The truth is not always something everyone can handle. And when the truth is poorly handled, it makes you wish you’d never spoken. “Dare,” you say, squinting at me, a little grin pulling at the corner of your mouth.
I lean forward, just a little, smiling. “I dare you to live fully right where you are.”
This is not a childhood game anymore. Life isn’t innocent anymore. It’s brutally guilty. Of causing pain. Loss. Betrayal. Warfare.
And sometimes motherhood aches and makes us want to walk out the door and never come back. Sometimes we cry and feel like we might not stop. Sometimes we grieve expectations that have been ripped out of our hands. Sometimes Waiting and the Unknown threaten to smash us flat and take everything that matters to us. Well, everything except the One Thing they can never take.
Knowing this, I take your hand. “I dare you,” I say, squeezing hard.
When I was a girl, sometimes I wept so hard that I couldn’t breathe. My sobs were punctuated with gasps and shaking. I don’t remember all the details, but I know I cried over little girl things, things that admittedly are tiny in a parent’s eyes and huge to a little girl. Maybe I’d not been allowed to have a friend over at the exact moment I wanted to, or I’d lost or broken something. Then there were the bigger things, like admitting a wrong I’d committed, or recognizing the look and sound of disappointment in someone I loved. My parents tolerated emotional crumbling a reasonable amount of time, but their patience with it was limited. My dad seemed to tire of these displays almost immediately. My mom would draw me in, hugging me close, smoothing my hair, patting my back. But eventually she too would draw back and look at me and say, “Okay. That’s enough.” It seemed that the more dramatic I became, the more ridiculous things I said, the quicker that moment came.
My dad would finally say, “Change your attitude. Now.”
As I child, I thought this tact hard, unreasonable, and even mean. “But I can’t,” I’d say through my tears, thinking “Look.at.me. I am crying! I am sad! Doesn’t that matter??”
“Oh yes, you can,” Dad would say, his tone unyielding. “You are in charge of your emotions, young lady. They are not in charge of you.”
He would not release me to run away and continue my rant in secret, where I wanted to hug my favorite stuffed animal to my face and soak it just to show him how bad I felt. No. Instead, he made me look at him until he could see something change on my face, until I tried to smile again, until I had begun to take control. Then he’d relax, smile at me, and make me talk to him without losing the mastery I’d established.
There’s no way my parents could have imagined the specific texture and shape of the life I would live as an adult, but they both have said that they entered into parenthood with a common goal: To raise us to one day be independent, Christ-following adults. Everything they did flowed out of this goal, the goal not to keep us for themselves but to send us out. As an adult, this one lesson—that I am the master of my emotions and that they don’t master me—has proved to be one of the most important. It is a lesson about choices, and one that God has repeated for me over years of pilgrimage.
The truth is that were it not for the careful training that began when I was girl, I could live every day of my life in a hole. Every day, certainly every week, I could soak my cheeks, my hair, my pillow with tears. And tears have their place, for a time. But after a while, the weight of all that sadness will swallow you up. And you’ll forget there was ever a you before the pain.
I remember days like that with three babies—one who rocked back and forth and lined up all of her toys and wouldn’t make eye contact with anyone; one chunky, happy, but silent and uncomprehending; one new and needy. The second came five months after the word autism hung in the air over the first one’s blonde curls. And by the time the third one came, I was strapping her to my chest in a Baby Bjorn, nursing in bathroom stalls, praying over a jogging stroller as we lapped our neighborhood or the pond in a park, while the second baby went to speech therapy, play therapy, and structured teaching, the same word—autism—stamped on a thousand pieces of paper bearing his name. The first one, still a baby herself, went to school all day in a special classroom, and when she came home I had to withhold things she wanted to get her to speak to me and velcro picture schedules to my refrigerator door. It swallowed me up. I thought I might forget who I was or go crazy. I used to call my husband crying and beg him to come home. “I’m just not sure I can do this anymore,” I’d say to him.
He ached for me. He gave me time when he could. He loved me well. But the day did come, when in his own gentle way, he said, “Okay. That’s enough.”
Some of you already know about that day. I’ll never forget the exhaustion that marked his face or the love in his voice when he said, “This is hard for me too. I feel like nothing is ever going to change, and there is.never.any.break. from it. But you know, this is our life. We can’t change this. We’re either going to have to choose joy, or we’re going to be miserable for the rest of our lives. We don’t know what the future holds. Two of our children may never leave our home. We’ve got to make the most of it, because we can’t live like this anymore.”
That day, something in me that had begun to die came back to life. I remembered my dad, holding my gaze, telling me, “Change your attitude. Now.”
It’s funny that one of the lessons I hated most as a child is one I cling to now, one I’m teaching my own children.
Yesterday, Zoe started talking to me on her way into the kitchen, before I could see her. I could hear complaint etching itself into her tone before I noticed that her face alternated between forced, decided frustration and neutrality. Her eyes had begun to water. She was working herself up to it.
“Mooooom, I asked Riley to wear these earrings so we could be twins today, but she won’t.”
“Well, it’s nice that you wanted to do that. Is it that she had planned to wear a different pair?”
“Yes, but I wanted her to wear these. ” She extended her hand and the unwanted earrings in my direction.
“Well, I’m sorry she didn’t want to today, but you know it’s okay if she wants to wear something else. And besides, you get to choose how you’re going to react to that. Why be sad and frustrated with her? Happy is a lot more fun.”
I smiled wildly at her, and all the heaviness in her expression fell away, leaving a beautiful, sheepish smile in its wake. Quickly, she changed the subject.
Confession: this week has been especially hard for me. The week before track out is nearly always insanely busy. On Friday, we’re hosting one of our favorite events: a brunch for all the wonderful people at school who make such a difference in our children’s lives. The kids are so excited about it. They love having these folks into our home and serving them good food. It’s a beautiful thing to see, this outpouring from their hearts. And I love all the preparation, all the details, and the fact that I get to share hosting with a dear friend whose children happen to share a lot of the same teachers. But added to a thousand other things—mom things, household management things, daughter of the king things—Well, I’m just wiped out. I started off the week sighing when I didn’t mean to sigh, feeling all those “never enough rest, never going to end, never enough time, never enough energy” thoughts packing themselves onto my shoulders. A migraine lurked, thumping a warning. Whenever I start thinking over everything in paragraphs of “never” and “always,” I know it’s time to do some heart work. These days, I draw my own line in the sand, and it’s my own voice I hear saying, “Okay, that’s enough.”
And I’m reading this book you really should read. It’s called One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are, and it’s beautifully written by a real woman with a real story—Ann Voskamp. A dear friend gave it to me for my birthday, knowing that it would inspire not just my life but my writing. Already, it has done both. And the fact that she knew it would mean something to me is a gift itself. Having grown up under the umbrella of family tragedy, having known tears and darkness, the author begins a list of a thousand things she loves. It was a dare, sent to her by a friend.
She dares me, and I don’t even blink. Could I write a list of a thousand things I love? I read her line again. …To name one thousand blessings—one thousand gifts—is that what she means? Sure, whatever.
It’s not like I thought that this is the carving, the flying, the healing of my wounds. Sometimes you don’t know when you’re taking the first step through a door until you’re already inside.
I grab a scrap of paper…Across the backside, on a whim, a dare, I scratch it down: Gift List. I begin the list. Not of gifts I want but of gifts I already have.
1. Morning shadows across the old floors
2. Jam piled high on the toast
3. Cry of blue jay from high in the spruce.
That is the beginning and I smile. I can’t believe how I smile. I mean, they are just the common things and maybe I don’t even know they are gifts really until I write them down and that is really what they look like. Gifts He bestows. This writing it down—it is sort of like…unwrapping love (One Thousand Gifts, Ann Voskamp, 45).
If you’ve known me very long at all, you know I love these lists. It began for me in journals, pages soft from my fingers and the press of a pen. A way to change my attitude. Now.
So, this week, when the “nevers” started, I returned to a list I started long ago, a list of the gifts poured out on me every day. Something about writing them down changes me. Something about declaring them everywhere I can obliterates all the heaviness threatening my joy and helps me smile and remember who I am because of Love. “Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights,” James wrote so long ago (James 1:17).
Every day that I list, I feel better. It’s not that I feel any less inadequate for the challenges I face, but simply that I can’t believe the lie that He’s left me alone, to face them without all the force of His love and power. I can’t believe that when I’m staring at lists and lists of unwrapped love, taken from the scarred palm of His hand.
So, back in the circle, I’m leaning so far over that my knee presses into yours.
I repeat: I dare you to live life fully right where you are.
~
Three of my favorite songs…and the reason will be no mystery.
