the radical attitude {when maybe the waiting is just confusing}
We walk in the museum as the day turns to shadow—my sister-friend and I and our bouncing scribble of children. Our group moves like an earthworm—fat and thick in the middle, undulating in a thin, crooked line in front and behind. We are multi-colored coats, scarves, boots and tennis shoes, wading into the snarl in the museum lobby. She looks at me, and we sigh together.
An employee dressed in a primary-yellow golf shirt spies us and approaches, guessing at the reason we’ve come.
“Uh, are you here for the young artists’ exhibit?”
“I think so,” I say, rifling in my purse for the letter I’d stuffed in.
But before I can find the letter, he gestures to a knot of people standing around a few more museum employees. “Just check in there.”
The children’s museum makes me crazy. I lose the ability to form complete sentences. “We’re here for…they won,” I gesture loosely at our children. “There’s an awards ceremony?”
He smiles, nodding, gesturing toward the crazy, unorganized swarm happening in the northeast-middle-of-nowhere in the lobby. He’s seen the likes of me before. “Right there,” he says, still smiling.
My friend makes it to the kiosk first, where a woman passes out gold coaster-sized stickers bearing the museum logo. “You all just need stickers, and then the artists check in with Sarah,” the woman says, sweeping her hands in a voila motion toward her partner at the desk.
“We need a lot of stickers,” my friend says, reaching toward the sticker lady, swirling her other hand in midair above our children’s heads. We didn’t need to say it. Both of us just wish she’d hand over the roll and let us make quick work of the stickering. When we tell Sarah our kids’ names, she pulls out two certificates from a file, one for Zoe, one for my friend’s son.
“It’s just around the corner there,” Sarah says, gesturing. Zoe pushes her certificate in my hands as we move our small crowd toward the exhibit, and I wonder what sort of ceremony might be left for the awarding. Around the corner, there, we see the kids’ art, a small selection of maybe twenty pieces, attached to the wall with clips, their names, the title of the work. When we round the corner, Kevin stands waiting, already stickered. My friend’s husband arrives soon after, and we clump around the artwork.
Zoe had painted an ice cream sundae, and my friend’s son had done a detailed pencil drawing of an athletic shoe. “Hmm, I don’t remember adding those glitter swirls,” Zoe says, examining her work, “but I like them.” She gestures to the two cherries she’d painted floating in a sea of whipped cream. “I think the cherries make it look more like a monster.”
We stand appreciating the kids’ creativity, noting details, commenting on choices, looking at the other pieces, and then a lady steps up to a small podium. She welcomes us, apologizes for poor acoustics, and then calls first, second, and third place winners by name. Two of the winners seem to be missing from the crescent-shaped crowd of parents and children. Adam stands just in front of me, and I sling a protective arm around his shoulders, patting his chest with my hand.
“Piggy bank,” he whispers, his eyes traveling the length of a wide staircase rising behind the speaker. Other kids scamper up the steps, headed to a wonderland at the top that appears to be made of yellow and green foam. I see just part of a sign, in pink. Piggy Bank.
“Yes. For just a minute, but let’s stay here for Zoe first.” Adam accepts this, waiting patiently. He’s waited all day, coming to me first in the morning, sleep still blurring his eyes, asking me to write the schedule so he can see that this crazy place remains on our list for the day. Adam loves this children’s museum.
The awards lady mentions the art teachers by name, then invites all of us to enjoy the exhibit and the museum. Short, wandering applause follows, and my friend and I turn to each other, looking at our watches, glancing toward our husbands, looking beyond us to brightly lit play rooms and running feet, shoe strings hanging loose. The pomp and circumstance that had inspired our trip ended just a few minutes after we arrived.
So, delighting in our children but agreeing in whispers to keep the time brief, we move our group—now a lopsided, six-legged spider—up the broad staircase toward the piggy bank. My friend and I feel like we want to gather all six legs in our arms, afraid we might lose one of our satellites, counting, counting, 1-2-3-4-5-6. “Where’s ______________,” we keep saying, naming a child, and then “Oh, there,” as we wander up to the next level. I want to make them all hold hands and walk in a line, but they’re too old for that and still too young to be completely aware of potential danger.
When we arrive at The Piggy Bank on the second level, we moms look at each other and grin. “Only one way in or out,” my friend says. “Perfect.” So we take our position at the entrance and watch our children scatter into the big room, which features a ball pit just below a “piggy bank” that the kids fill with pails of foam balls from a loft above. When the bank fills up, a door in the bottom of the pig opens and all the balls fall out. We see spiral slides, a pizza shop filled with toy food, giant coins the size of pizzas.
At first, I don’t realize that Adam still stands beside me. Adam, who just after school checked and rechecked with me about the time we would leave to go to the museum; Adam, who could not let me complete sentences without asking; Adam, who had verified repeatedly that he would be included, who had whispered “Piggy Bank;” Adam, who had waited patiently for just this moment of freedom.
My friend and I stand talking in low voices, our arms crossed, sharing life, relieved to have our free-flying children contained in one place. Adam leans into me the way he did downstairs, and I slide my arm around his shoulders where it lands so easily, touching his hair with my other hand. And then the thought punctuates: He’s not playing.
And that’s when I attend, when I see him watching the activity in the room, see him flapping his arms with glee over those foam balls, spilling, pooling around the feet of the children. That’s when I see the woman to our right, standing just inside the doorway, her hair pulled back in a quick ponytail, some of the strands falling loose around her ears. She bends crookedly toward the floor, her shoulders tight, her cheeks pink with exasperation. A child, maybe two, with pudgy cheeks and fiery curls dangles from the end of the woman’s left arm, extending her body into a strange tangle. Her eyes flash. He purses his red, ripe lips, determined, yanking fiercely at her hand.
Oh, I remember, I think, wanting to bring her coffee and a chair, and then she speaks the iron-words through her teeth, strong. “ADAM. You. are. going. to. have. to. WAIT!”
The little boy shrieks and screams, crying, still yanking at her hand. “No! NO, no, NO!” He howls.
My Adam looks at her, confusion knotting his brow. Then silently, he looks up at me, then back at her, stepping backward, leaning more heavily into me. I can hear him thinking, can see it written on his face. “Okay look. What more would you like me to do? I’m waiting. I’m waiting. But this is my mom.”
I laugh out loud. I turn Adam around, hold his face in my hands. “Adam, do you want to go play?”
“Yes,” he says, glancing quickly at the woman with the ponytail.
“Adam.” He pulls his eyes back to mine. “It’s okay. You can go play.”
“Yes,” he says, smiling.
“Yes. Go play.”
I release him and he spins, running into the ball pit.
And I remember a red stop sign on the floor of his first grade classroom, taped just in front of the door leading out to the hall. Adam, wait. Adam had been the line leader that year, but he never wanted to wait for the line to form behind him. When it was time to go, he’d barge into the hallway, and then he’d get angry when his teachers called him back. So, they’d made a place for him to stand. A red stop sign on the floor, reminding him to wait.
Sometimes I wish the waiting were as clear as that.
I remember the way Adam used to crumble at the sound of that horrid word, how he, like the baby boy with the same name in the museum, used to shriek and clinch fists and spit–“WAIT!”—anger throwing the syllable, setting his cheeks on fire, tears streaming. And I think of me just then, the mom with her shape and her face all contorted, with hair flying from her pony tail. I think of the frustration and the weariness of those hard days still, how sometimes I chant all day, “Do not grow weary in doing good, for at the proper time you will reap a harvest if you do not give up (Galatians 6:9).”
I offer the mom a conspiratorial smile, a smile that says, I know, thinking of all my own waiting, how still sometimes I yank at God’s hand trying to make things happen, how sometimes I am stuck believing that waiting means moving from nothing to something instead of moving from something to something more.
Just this week, I read something about this waiting, something that helps me marinate in the joy of Advent:
To wait open-endedly is an enormously radical attitude toward life. So is to trust that something will happen to us that is far beyond our own imaginings. So, too, is giving up control over our future and letting God define our life, trusting that God molds us according to God’s love and not according to our fear. The spiritual life is a life in which we wait, actively present to the moment, trusting that new things will happen to us, new things that are far beyond our own imagination, fantasy, or prediction. That, indeed is a very radical stance toward life in a world preoccupied with control (~Henri Nouwen).
I read this, thinking of Adam not losing his composure in the waiting. I think of him present right in that moment, taking joy in just the watching, relinquishing control, wondering when it might be his turn to experience the blessing. And I think of what he teaches me, how he leans into me when things get all tangled. It really is the only way to wait-openendly, without all the yanking and crying.
Advent ripens with this kind of waiting–this radical, leaning relationship. Simeon and Anna waited for the Messiah, not knowing when. Scripture says that at 84, Anna stayed in the temple night and day worshiping, fasting, praying, and waiting (Luke 2: 37). They remind me to wait in faith and hope, even if like so many of the faithful waiting I only see and welcome the things promised from a distance (Hebrews 11:13).
In his growing maturity, my son has learned the secret to waiting without losing his composure. And even as I smile over Adam’s mistake that day, this fills me up, renewing my hope in seeds already planted, in something happening as I wait and sometimes wade weary in the work.
Because —I wonder, is it like this for you too?—sometimes the waiting confuses and too many voices compete and my steps tangle. And I feel paralyzed just at the edge of yearning. I stand, glimpsing the very thing I hope for, still yet in the distance. And I knot up, thinking, “Am I supposed to do something or just wait? Is it God’s voice I hear?”
On my worst days, I rage, and God grasps my hand hard with that Father’s grip and speaks the iron-hard truth all through my heart: “YOU.will.just.have.to. WAIT.” Do not grow weary in doing good…
But more and more He changes me, and patiently, He teaches me to breathe, to just step closer to Him, to feel His arms fit easily around my shoulders. I am learning to trust the promise, to trust the seeds planted and growing, to wait in the pregnant fullness of hope.
Breathlessly, I anticipate new joy blooming, all grace.
And this, then, is all clarity:
His eyes on mine, my face held in His tender hands, His voice the breath blown through me.
