“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. […]

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 […]

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 […]

“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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

I have kept my shoes on all afternoon for just this mad-rushing, this quick gathering—the blankets slipping from my arms. “Come on, you guys, come on,” Zoe says, and we hurry to huddle in the dark, pressing our bodies into each other. They say that the best place to be in the wind-ripping event of […]

Days after Christmas, and their wishlists still hang on the refrigerator, curling slightly at the corners where our nearness, our brushing past, has gently reshaped the paper.  And of course, the lists have been moved a few times–carefully detached to travel with me to the store, lifted once or twice for closer reading, softly touched with an […]

She walks in just as I slide my weary bones down into the water, just as the steam curls up over my knees and I give thanks for simple pleasures I know full well that some do without—hot, clean water flowing by the gallons at the twist of a knob; sweet-smelling soap. Hi, she says […]

She apologizes to Kevin like we autism mamas do, ignoring the sharp, slicing pain it brings just to say the words. I’m sorry, my daughter–she has autism.  She doesn’t mean nothing by it.   She says this gesturing over something Kevin barely noticed, a failure to say hello, a back turned, a little stumble over […]