71May 20, 2016
Waiting at the stoplight on the way to school, drizzle dotting the windshield, and I grab my phone to take a picture of my daughter. The cloud-cast makes her skin look more alabaster than olive-gold; makes her blue-gray eyes look stormy. “What’re you doing?” She asks. But I catch the hint of a smile, just […]
72May 13, 2016
She comes to find me on the porch, settling lightly on the double rocker next to me, shimmying her body close to mine. The warm wind picks up a stray piece of her hair and plasters it across her forehead. She leans against the pillows, considering me briefly, reaching up to tuck that wild strand […]
73May 6, 2016
Her hair blows against my cheek, just one errant, brassy strand. She laughs, and I laugh with her, taken by those eyes that have always been as blue as the sky just before a storm. “You know, this is how it would have to be with us,” she says, lifting a hand toward the door, […]
74Apr 15, 2016
Early evening, and already I feel splintered and scattered and sore from carrying the day. It has been one of those—the kind of day that wakes me before the sun, pressing into me in the emptied hours, and then sends me chasing time and late for everything; the kind of day in which, right from […]
75Apr 8, 2016
“When I struggled so much with anxiety, God taught me to pray,” Riley says, lifting her hand and turning it over, as though neatly wrapping the words, a gift. And then, when later we reach for each other’s hands, she quietly asks God to help her brother talk to us. Maybe she’s just following Zoe’s lead. […]
76Apr 1, 2016
Adam finds me sometimes, just to talk about the things that excite him. I’m one of the few with whom he’ll take that still awkward step, because he can appreciate the way that I know him, the way womb-forged bonds overcome every other kind of separation. I almost always know what Adam means to say before he says […]
77Mar 25, 2016
In the early hours before the sun rises, we rise, and we’re so tired we move around in silence for a while, fumbling to make the bed, pressing back against sleepiness to dress for exercise before we find an excuse. We’ve tried so hard for intentionality with regard to first things—time with God, time with each […]
78Mar 18, 2016
“Hey now, offer him grace, okay?” She sits in front of me, tears pooling in the pit of the day, and I wash onions off of my hands with soap meant to smell like a sunrise sail. It won’t be enough. I know that, but I try anyway. Hours from now, my fingers will still smell […]
79Mar 11, 2016
Today, just a prayer, whispered, then fervid and carpet-muffled because that’s where I plant my nose. I can’t seem to bend low enough to accommodate the feel of Him. It’s a prayer I need, one I offer often in some garbled, half-torn way. But He knows all the parts, so I don’t have to remember them, […]
80Mar 4, 2016
I should have prayed right then, right out loud, right in the car. I’m learning that. Mom, middle school is hard, she says, just as I’m scanning the road for anything I might have missed, just as I punch the gas and we dart across. Navigating traffic always feels to me like being stuck in […]