the greater work
Monday morning, and I have a shorthanded list: laundry, laundry, laundry, empty trash cans, clean hand towels in all the bathrooms. I move in that weekday flurry, recycled shopping bags for the trash cans rattling in my hands, having just come home from dropping Riley and Adam at day camp, with a plan to spend the afternoon batch cooking the week’s meals. These days, I live in the tension between the tasks born of responsibility and the interruptibility born of love, thankful that God gives grace instead of grades.
“Mom?”
I hear Zoe’s voice coming from the kitchen, where I am sure I will find her making toast, a coffee cup cradled in one hand, sleep still lingering around her eyes. Summer has made her golden, and if anything her eyes have taken on a deeper hue, the steel blue color of clouds that promise to break the heat. Sometimes when she says my name the syllable falls softly, like a natural murmur that sounds more automatic than intentional. I hear it like the memory of her life beginning within my own, like the whisper of the silvery threads that still bond us to each other. I know of only one way to respond to that sound, the way I have since the beginning. I go to her, thinking suddenly that God says call to me as often, if not more, than he says come. His name falls softly from my lips, a familiar sound, like a breath.
“Hi,” I say, stepping into the kitchen, folding my arms, and all those crackling shopping bags with them. I feel like I’m carrying my list, like the bags scream busy busy busy when I want them to be still. I would toss them aside aggressively, except that the movement would create an unwelcome distraction. Zoe would raise her eyebrows; she would shift away from what she wants to say to thinking about what I was doing; she would swallow her words, thinking them smaller than whatever it is that I had been on my way to do. The only thing worse than not listening would be pretending to listen while my mind is somewhere else, my body already reorienting to something else, and that is not what I want to do. Instead I want to disappear a little, to be entirely present, yet without commanding attention. We think God is so silent sometimes, but just now I wonder if it isn’t that he’s listening for us.
“This is maybe random,” she says, which always seems to be the way our real conversations begin, as though she’s apologizing for her lack of linear thinking, as though she thinks it unfair to include me in the middle of a thought. I want to tell her not to do that, to say that I don’t require it of her, that I can handle any haphazardness that comes with her honesty. But this too would be a distraction from what matters to her, so I wait. I smile, hoping she’ll see that anything she wants to share is a joy to me. “This has just been on my mind,” she says in preamble, “and I need to talk to someone about it.”
I nod, thinking how grateful I am to be that someone, hoping she will see my openness, my intention to carefully receive, and she must, because she continues, moving back and forth between the stove and her coffee, picking up the spatula she’s using for her eggs, lightly setting it down again. Leaving off the apologies, she begins to tell me the truth, and very quickly I realize it’s not advice she seeks but my shoulders, my arms. She wants me to help her carry things as she sorts them, and this, I believe, is the best use of my hands.
I don’t know why it took me all the years when Zoe was small to figure out that the most important moments are not the measurable ones, not the ones I list when someone else asks how I spent the day, not the moments most people ever know about. It used to bother me when someone would ask what I did and I only knew how to talk about who I am. “I’m a mom,” I wanted to say, because that takes up an entire day, an entire life. At the time, I could never have said, “I spent all my time just being with my children,” and smiled, because that is enough. And even now, when someone asks how loving God has changed me, I imagine they will not understand how beautiful it is that He has made me a listener, that because of Him, I finally realize the greater work it is to be present for someone else. Now, just shy of Zoe’s adulthood, I am learning to let go of less important things; I can say, without reproof, that I spent the day and all of my energy being with her. But that’s growth God prunes and not something for which I deserve any credit. So I drop my arms now as I listen, one and then the other, slowly, absently, and those empty bags–I had forgotten them–drift silently down, like rain.
