I’m baack

“So for some reason, this verse made me think of you,” my friend says, flicking her finger back and forth on the edge of an index card as we settle onto her porch beneath warm party lights glowing in the cloudy afternoon and ferns gently swaying. I cradle the coffee cup in my hands and slip my feet out of my shoes and curl up into the corner of her outdoor couch, thinking I could sit here all day. “Cast all of your burdens on him,” she reads, “and he will sustain you.” She looks up at me and smiles, says, “Somewhere along the way, probably during some study or something, I wrote down ‘gifts.’ Because gifts can be burdens, too; burdens can be gifts.”

I’m thinking of this as I walk into the office–gifts can be burdens, too–me, with my slogging spirit as thick as the heat, wishing I still sat with my friend on her porch, where the rain tapped the leaves, glistening like jewels at the tips. The receptionist looks up and smiles politely. Her hair is smooth and carefully coiffed; her makeup is smudge-proof. She wears a cool lavender business suit. Meanwhile, my gray fairy hair springs up around my face with such abandon in this humidity that I think old lion (Kevin corrects: aging lion) when I look in the mirror, and looking down, I think maybe I spy a smear of something on my soft mom t-shirt. Almost absently, the receptionist murmurs a hello, glancing down at the computer in front of her, and I mumble something genial in return and move toward the waiting room chairs.

In her way, my friend had given me permission to lament. She had told me that she understood that the best things in life can also be the hardest, that it was safe to be honest with her. I twisted my coffee cup in my hands, looking out across a rolling field at an old, beautiful barn, wondering how many people had lived and loved and cried walking in and out of that space. I would not for my friend’s sake need to qualify my weariness with appropriate measures of gratitude and affection.

“I have carried a burden too,” she had said. “I just want to tell you that. And it’s only just–after so many years–only just begun to feel a little lighter.” She’d said this leaning in toward me, her voice hushed. I remember the warmth in her eyes; my friend’s eyes are windows to an overwhelming soul. I had thought about what she said, her gift to me that day, burdens can be gifts, all the way through the morning as I interrupted Riley’s autistic rituals to drag her out the door on time, as Riley darkly, tearfully complained, “I just don’t like to be rushed.” I thought about it, repeated it under my breath like a prayer, while thinking about the fact that at Riley’s age, I was finishing college; I was getting married. Sometimes I want to hand it all over for just a little while; I want to release my grip, and I realize suddenly that God not only gave me permission but told me to do so. “Cast all your burdens,” it helps me to remember it in my friend’s voice. That word cast means to throw and release, like a fisherman does with a net. I wonder what I could harvest if I took God at his word, if I threw the burden of mothering right back into his lap.

“I’m baaack!” Riley says, bursting through the office door a beat behind me, lifting one arm in a wide wave. I watch the receptionist’s eyes go wide, watch her face light up. Glory can be catching. Could it be that in casting my burden I could harvest the gift? Twenty minutes ago, Riley had not been so enthusiastic.

“Well, good to have you,” the receptionist says, smiling at Riley with sudden interest.

“Thank you very much,” Riley sings, like it’s a song, like she and the receptionist happen to be old friends.

I watch the receptionist sit up a little straighter in her chair, still smiling after us, as though the recognition has made her suddenly more solid. Riley’s jovial announcement felt like presumption to me, and would have been, had I said it in my afternoon voice. Who cares that we’re back? But the warmth in Riley’s tone, the familiar, easy love, it makes the words mean something different. “I’m back” turns into “I’m so glad to see you,” just like that. Burdens can be gifts, too. Autism makes Riley the most loving person I know and it also traps her in dysfunction.

A nurse opens a door at the end of the hall and Riley turns, drawn by the movement of light over the high-gloss floor. “Riley?” The nurse says, patting one hand against her purply-blue scrub pants.

“I’m baack!” Riley says gleefully again, replacing all our sighs, standing up like what awaits her through that door is nothing routine or regular at all.

I watch the nurse grin slowly, tilting her head. “Well, hello, Miss Sunshine,” she says. Riley does shine, but she’s a moon, reflecting the goodness of God. And sometimes there are clouds, bruised and thick with sadness, and it’s hard to see beyond those. To look at Riley right now, no one would imagine the fierceness of her tears over seizures or the milestones she may never reach or the relentlessness of her autistic OCD, or the valleys in her voice when she admits how-hard-it-is. Gifts can be burdens; burdens can be gifts.

“And that’s why thanksgiving is sometimes also a sacrifice,” I had said that afternoon on my friend’s porch, tucked into the refreshment of the Spirit, watching golden light pour from ancient windows in a barn-turned-potting-shed that sits crooked in her yard. Paint peels around the edges of those windows, curling like the bark of a Birch, and yet, the place looks so stunning and cozy I wanted to get up and go plant something in one of the terra cotta pots I could see stacked and leaning inside.

“YES,” my friend had said, sitting back in her chair, the word all at once an exhale and a celebration. “That’s why.”