she laughs
Early, while the sky’s still grey, Riley comes downstairs, slowly, like always. From my chair in the living room, from the place where I sit still dark and curled, I can hear the fall of her feet. Her knees crack, an inherited weakness, as she plants herself on each step, and for a moment I wonder what makes her take the stairs that way, if it’s just what she learned as a small girl when her feet turned in, when therapists spoke to me about low muscle tone and pronation and autism sometimes all in the same sentence, or if her careful, over-precise nature insists on it. Sometimes I think I notice that her feet do still favor that inside edge, that they seem structured with a subtle but curious curve, even though the orthopedists always said she would grow out of it. In any case, Riley takes the stairs the way we all do when we feel uncertain, gripping the handrail, one step at a time, just to be sure.
Sometimes I hear her coming down that way and fall still, remembering the time she seized at the very top of the stairs, the way, by grace, God had told her to hold on. They say some people with epilepsy realize a seizure is coming right before it happens, but Riley never had before that day. Some silence had made me go looking for her, and from downstairs I saw her, poised on the edge of the top step, holding on to the wall, her head jerking, not like a person at all but more like a glitching robot wearing Riley’s skin. I had raced up, my heart thumping in my throat, pleasedon’tletgo, pleasedon’tletgo, and reached her just in time, wrapping my arms around her shoulders. She doesn’t remember her seizures, but sometimes afterward she cries. She says, as her face crumples, “I just wish I didn’t have them.” So when I think of that day on the stairs, my mama mind can’t help but wonder if she feels some premonition of danger and that’s why she takes her time. Even walking around can be unsure; I always listen until I hear her feet touch the floor.
She steps into the living room, her hair flying behind her in long, glossy ribbons that swing over her shoulders, her eyes puffed from sleep, a crease from the pillow marking a line from eyebrow to temple. She stops along the way, pausing to glance back and forth between Kevin and me, just as I have written to God, you have made this day, too, just as I have confessed to letting complaint overwhelm my thanks-giving. We glance up at her, me looking over the rims of my reading glasses, smoothing the journal page with my hand, and she laughs, not a giggle or a chuckle or any sort of amused chirp, but a full chortle that rumbles up from her belly, that erupts from the fullness of her joy. Her morning eyes sparkle. Maybe her steps feel uncertain, but her heart feels safe.
Barely awake and her greeting for us is this, this romping, snorting guffaw that only grows while Kevin and I wordlessly shoot curiosity back and forth. Did I miss something? What’s so funny? We’ve been grumble-grappling with dailiness, with the weekday routine, and here she comes, delighted, or so it seems, by the newness of this day. All these years with Riley and our jocularity still feels mismatched. The more puzzled we look, the harder Riley laughs, great peals like music, until finally, Kevin asks aloud, “What’s so funny?”
“I don’t know,” she says, more laughter hiding behind her wide smile, spilling with the words, “I’m just happy. Because God Jones made me that way.” It’s a long story, but Riley calls many of those she loves ‘Jones,’ and for Riley, God is and will forever be the best of the Joneses.
“I’m just happy,” she says. But how? Because I woke up groaning and wishing for a different day; because I let the dailiness of today dull my expectation for depth; because I’ve just been asking God for the restoration of joy.
Kevin looks back at me, wearing that smile, because he can see all this on my face; because he feels my groans when he doesn’t hear them. “She laughs at the day to come,” he says, paraphrasing an oft repeated verse, and that one line, it speaks paragraphs.
“Yes, I do,” Riley says, watching us with glittery eyes. “I sure do.”
She is clothed with strength and dignity, the poem says, and yes, beyond the rumpled pajamas and the fuzzy socks and the slow gait on the stairs, I can see in my daughter the unmistakable glint of eternal fortitude. She can laugh at the days to come. The passage comes from Proverbs 31, a bit of verse describing an ideal woman, the woman a mother wants for her son. So impossibly perfect does that woman seem that we spin jokes about her. The poem is a prospective mother-in-law’s ode, subtly underwritten with, no woman could be good enough for my son. We get lost in the verses, in all that ideal woman’s doing, and we miss the most important parts. Translations fumble, rendering a Hebrew word that means the strength and force of an army as something that to us sounds much more tame and pristine: They describe her as a woman “of noble character.” We believe her to be the woman who can do it all instead of seeing her as a woman full of the God who does it all. Hebrew listeners would have extrapolated so much more than we do from that that line, strength and dignity are her garments, because they conveyed whole identities in the giving and receiving of robes, and would have sung the Psalms acknowledging God as the source of all strength, describing Him as tangible shelter–fortress, rock, covering. It was their way to see Him—the immaterial, ineffable, forever One—in material and tangible things. It isn’t that the Proverbs 31 woman, being fully capable, trusts in herself. She can laugh at the days to come because God within her, God covering her, God empowering her is the force of whom the entire world could never be worthy.
People of faith don’t misunderstand their own weakness; they understand the fullness of God’s strength. They know where to place their trust. The book of Hebrews describes the faith-full as those who “went about in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, persecuted, and mistreated (Hebrews 11:37),” because true nobility doesn’t look like what we think. Robes of strength and dignity can look for all the world like rumpled pajamas, like sheepskins and goatskins. If our all-mighty King wears a crown of thorns, the kind of woman who laughs at the days to come just might be the same one who takes those stairs one at a time.
“Because God Jones made you that way,” I say out loud, and then, suddenly unable to withhold it anymore, I start laughing too.
