Family

Maybe Small Hands Can Do Big Things Too

My mother’s hands are sinewy and sturdy. In church on Sundays I used to trace the raised veins running across the backs of her hands, pressing them down with my chubby fingers and watching them pop back up in wonder while the pastor talked about God’s will. It gave me the same feeling I got when I stamped down the mole tunnels that pushed up ridges of turf in the front lawn like a wrinkled carpet. I would press the soft dirt back down into the cavity of the tunnel, delighted by the feel of the ground squishing softly beneath my feet, secretly hoping the mole would come back and raise more mounds for me to smooth.

My mother’s hands are soft and cool and fragrant from the lotion she rubs into her palms and over her cuticles. When I close my eyes I can feel them, cool against the hot skin of my back, or smoothing my hair, or cupping my face. She keeps her nails trimmed back, rarely polished. These hands, they aren’t dainty. They know about hard work. And they know about long nights clasped together, begging God to show up, to guide, to comfort, to intervene. They know about fighting for what is right and about holding on to what is true. They know about the pain of letting go and the pain of holding on too tightly.

My mother’s hands are large for a woman’s – broad knuckles and sturdy fingers. They are my grandfather’s hands and maybe the hands of his father before him. My grandfather worked on the railroad for forty long years. The skin on his hands is tough and leathery like an old baseball glove. His fingers are so thick, when he takes off his wedding ring the band is wide enough to pass a quarter straight through it. My grandfather’s hands can never find a way to be still, even after years of retirement. These strong hands with their indomitable German work ethic have sacrificed every day to provide for his family since he was still a boy himself.

My hands are not like my mother’s and my grandfather’s. They are not like my grandmother’s or my father’s or my sisters’ or my brother’s. They are something entirely their own. An unfathomable combination of genetics and complex conditions in utero that resulted in the inexplicable production of these hands – unlike anyone else’s in my family, or likely anyone else’s on the planet. (My high school biology teacher was tickled by the discovery when we were studying the unit on genetics. “Do you know that if you marry a man with a similar condition there is a 1 in 4 chance that your children could be born without any fingers at all?” he asked, delighted.)

My hands are about the size of your average nine-year-old’s. My left hand middle and ring fingers are slightly webbed and bent rather dramatically towards each other so that they are always touching. (This phenomenon being the reason that I wear my wedding bands on my right hand). My right thumb joint is locked so that when I spread my fingers, instead of creating a backwards “L” with my forefinger it creates a very upright check mark. And the absence of a necessary tendon in my right index finger required the surgical addition of a screw when I was sixteen to keep my top joint from bending the wrong way.

“You have such small hands!” people say when they have occasion to notice them.  Yes, they are small, but they are strong too! I want to say. My fingers are short and thick and crooked and I may never be able to throw a football or hold a bowling ball properly, but maybe these hands were made for something else. Maybe small hands can do big things!

I don’t have my mother’s hands, the hands her father passed down to her. But I hope I have inherited some of their virtues anyway. I hope my hands are gentle warrior’s hands like my mother’s, and strong and hard-working like my grandfather’s. I hope they are nimble and elegant like my grandmother’s. And I hope they are affectionate and generous like my father’s. I hope they are tender and compassionate like my sister Maggi’s and confident and creative like my sister Anni’s.  I hope they are resilient like my brother Joshua’s and I hope they are as faithful like my husband Jonathan’s.

There is pain and there is beauty in the smallness – the pain and beauty of being confronted with my own fragility. Being forced to accept that I just can’t hold onto every worry, every responsibility, every disappointment and every failure, even when I try. And the realization that I was never meant to. My hands simply aren’t big enough. But there is another beauty too. Such small hands are easy to fill up– with love, with grace,  and with brilliant and unbridled hope.

***

(i do not know what it is about you that closes

and opens; only something in me understands

the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)

nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

~e.e. cummings

from “somewhere I have never traveled, gladly beyond”

childs-hands

There’s No Place Like Home-If Only You Can Find It

I am 3 years old and Home is a duplex I share with my mom and my brother. I love because it has an upstairs and a laundry chute that goes straight from the floor of the upstairs bathroom into the laundry room below. Before this there were other homes, but I only remember them in singular, faded images. A rocking horse. A brown basket full of books. But this home I remember in its entirety. My brother’s hamster Conan, and the witches I knew lived inside the air condition vent. This is my mom’s home, but not my dad’s, which is a little confusing for me. Sometimes my brother drops me down the laundry chute for fun.

I am 5 and Home is a long brick house with an eggplant-shaped pool in the back yard. I don’t like it as much as the duplex because there are no stairs, but I do love that pool. And I like that this home has more family in it. My mom and my brother, but also my pop and the new baby. My imaginary friend, Sammy the Squirrel, lives in the backyard and my maybe-boyfriend Christopher lives next door. This is the home we board ourselves up in for my first major hurricane. I’m confused because the hurricane is named Andrew, like one of my cousins, and I can’t figure out what they have to do with each other. One night at dinner, my spaghetti is too hot, so my pop takes it outside and runs around the pool with it to cool it off. Then it’s just right. I’m sitting on the tile floor in the kitchen eating my milk and cookies (because we aren’t allowed to eat on the carpet in the living room, but from here I can still see the TV) when my mom and pop tell us that we are going to have yet another baby. “I guess the new baby will be the old baby now,” I think, and they tell us that we will move to a bigger house before the new baby comes. I am devastated to leave my true love, Christopher, but am consoled when I consider that the new house might have a window seat.

I am 7 and the new house does not have a window seat or any stairs either, but it does have a two-story wooden playhouse in the backyard and a neighborhood full of kids my age. Now we are six: my mom and my dad (because I realized nobody else has a pop and I didn’t want one either), my brother and my two little sisters. I was confused by the arrival of the second sister. I’d been certain she would be a boy to even things out demographically. I even pre-filled out the book my parents gave me about being a big sister with these details. “I have a baby brother. His  name is Gus.” I wasn’t so sure about another girl, but she grew on me. Home is the place for dress-up and fairy tales. The place where I live out a hundred storylines in my imagination and read books out loud with my dad before bed each night. It’s the place where I start growing up – where I have my first sleepovers and learn how to shave my legs and wear a training bra.

I am 11 and Home is shifting again. We are moving to a new place with lots of land. A place where we can breathe, my mom says. There’s a spiral staircase in the living room that leads to the second floor. When we first move in, my brother lives upstairs, but after a few years he moves out and the tower is mine. I spend many hours reading in my tower room, listening to the sound of rain on the tin roof, wondering what it’s like to fall in love. I am Home when 9/11 happens and we watch the towers fall over and over again on the TV in the living room. Home is the place where I chronicle my first serious crush and where I cry when my brother is deployed to Iraq.    In those volatile teenage years, Home is a place full of internal turmoil – a refuge from the daily torture of high school, but also a place where I feel I can’t do anything quite right. Where I fear I’m always in the way. In those years it is a place where I haven’t quite grown into myself. Where I am a child, but I no longer want to be.

I am 18 and my concept of Home has been ripped in two. Home is Louisiana. It’s a white house with a tin roof and oak trees all around. But it’s also a dorm room in a little town in Illinois. It’s the girls that I live with who are helping me become me. It’s a triple set of bunk beds I always have to be on the bottom of because I’m afraid of falling off. It’s the commuter train to Chicago and the little parks dotting neighborhoods full of dear old houses full of stories. It’s the college itself, alive with new ideas that challenge me and with laughter and with love. And lately it’s also becoming a red-headed boy from Indiana.

I am 22 and in the space of a few sacred moments at an altar what was Home is now “my parent’s house” and my Home is wherever this red-headed man is. But, of course, it isn’t quite as clean a break as that. It takes a while to break the habit. To stop thinking of my childhood house as Home. Our first apartment together in Illinois is small and sweet. In the winter the bedroom window leaks so badly we sleep in layers of sweatshirts covered by a pile of blankets so thick, the weight of them makes it hard to breathe. It’s here that our family grows to include two cats – animals I’d always believed I hated until those two darlings stole my heart and changed my mind. For a year we live here and we learn so much about love. But Illinois never feels like it could be a forever home to me. And after a year we know it is time to move on.

I am 24 and Home is Raleigh, North Carolina. For the first time I feel my heart is tied to a place itself instead of just the people who live there. My heart belongs to North Carolina. Its lush green hills, the trees everywhere, the lakes and the creeks and the impossibly glorious fall. The bluegrass music and the hipsters with their micro-breweries and the sweet clean air in my lungs. This is Home. This is where I learn to run. Mile after mile along the winding greenways. This is Home  – the place where I both land and quit my first real job. The place where I learn to take control – where I become strong and healthy and focused.  The place where so many people I love are close enough to visit and where my best friend lives just around the corner. This is Home. This is where I want to grow old. But I’m not ready to grow old just yet.

I am 26 and Home is a fragmented thing. Sometimes Home means an apartment in South Korea, covered in bright floral wallpapers and growing mold in spite of aggressive attempts to keep it at bay.  This Home is full of love and adventure and a willingness to try new things, to change and to grow. But in many ways it doesn’t feel like Home at all.  Home is also America. All of it. The sights and smells and tastes and people that mean comfort and joy and love and belonging. Home is each other, just the two of us, wherever we may be. But home is also the family, the friends, and the pets we’ve left behind. The places we have lived and loved. The places that have shaped us.

Sometimes Home is a dorm-room, an apartment, a house, a city, a state, an entire country. Home seems to be an ever-changing creature. But always it is a feeling. It is the place where love is given and received. It is the place where you are free to be and to become yourself.  It is the place where you are known.

When You Feel You Don’t Belong

I moved out of my parents home when I was 18-years old. I left my life in Louisiana and headed off to college outside of Chicago. Other than for a few months the summer after my freshman year, I never lived at home again.

When I left home my sisters were 13 and 11. My parents were in their mid-40’s, and known for being the strictest parents among the other students in my graduating class. My grandparents were building a house next door to my family’s house. My brother was 25, still newly-returned from deployment in Iraq.

I started college and I grew and changed at an almost alarming rate, absorbing everything around me, then cracking off the shell of myself like an insect shedding its exoskeleton again and again, crawling out of my old self, growing into something new that seemed to have only just solidified when I burst through it again. Through the end of my teens and the beginning of my twenties my opinions on almost everything changed. Sometimes more than once. I learned different ways of thinking and acting. Different ways of handling conflict and disagreement. Ways that I could love better and more truly. And ways that I was deeply flawed and broken. I am still learning these things, but at the time all of this was accelerated by my environment. I was surrounded by good people who were different than me, challenging my mind and my heart in a million ways.

I lived far away from my family during all this change, but I was still tethered to them. I grew into adulthood and falteringly learned to have respectful disagreements with my parents. I learned to give words to feelings I hadn’t been able to express in my silent and submissive teenage years. I tried to know my sisters even as they became unknowable to us all, draping themselves in this or that garment of adolescence. Trying on identities the same way we tried on ball gowns together in the JC Penney’s dressing room when I came home each Christmas. I felt tethered to them when my grandparents moved into the house next door and became an everyday part of their lives. I felt tethered when we lost my brother to shadows for a time, flying home from school, waking my mom up to surprise her and crawling into bed with her so we could cry together.

And then I was in love and there was a glow around everything, and my sisters didn’t understand what was so special about this, why I was so serious about him, why I wanted to get married so young, how I could possibly know he was “the one.” My parents were cautious, but kind, and my heart broke open to let in a new love and I started the halting process of bringing someone new into our family.

All of these changes came and yet, to me, my family was constant. Seeing me change and accepting who I was now. And now. And now. But in these last few years since I’ve taken this bearded man’s name as my own and tried to learn how to build a home big enough for just him and me – and also, all of his family and all of mine (because we never truly go into marriage alone)- these last few years I’ve felt my family changing too- becoming people I no longer know.

I visited my parent’s house last spring for my youngest sister’s high school graduation. I felt like I was in a house full of strangers. My parents’ bodies are fit and strong, toned from the hard workouts and clean diets of people I don’t recognize. My sisters are women now – something that, to me, has happened breathtakingly fast, in the mere month’s worth of days I’ve spent with them over the past few years. My brother is 32. He owns a gym that my parents go to every day and has a kindergartner who runs around catching frogs and calling him, ‘Dad.’ My grandfather has somehow begun to look frail inside of his large frame, and though my grandmother is as beautiful as ever, I can see that the death of her sister last year has marked her, made her more aware of life’s fragility. Both of my sisters and my mother are in college now. My mother is chasing a dream she gave up for us long ago. And my father has relaxed into life – without the responsibility of raising children, he has found less use for his stern face and loud voice and has more time for laughing. He has mellowed, less concerned with being right and more concerned with loving well.

My family is beautiful and yet, it’s a family I can no longer find my place in. They have changed and I have changed, but they have changed together, in each others’ presence, and in some of the same ways. They have grown together. And I have grown apart. They speak a language I can’t understand. My parents aren’t the people I grew up knowing. In many ways, they are better people. I don’t begrudge them that, but they still feel like strangers to me walking around inside my parents’ skin.

Somehow, I failed to understand that my family, particularly my parents, could change too -that I wasn’t the only one. I was unprepared and, oh, how this has hurt me. Awakening to find myself outside of the one place I always felt I belonged. But they are still my family. They are the ones who loved me when I dressed up like Laura Ingalls Wilder ever day for a year or more. They are the ones who reserved judgment when I totaled my mom’s car 3 days after I got my license. They are the ones who didn’t laugh when I accidentally dyed my hair green. The ones who cheered for me when I graduated from college and danced with me at my wedding. The ones who send me care packages in South Korea, even though it costs a fortune to mail them.

They are my family. For years, they shifted around me, making room for me in all my various forms. Maybe now I am the one who needs to shift. To get to know who they are now, and find out if there’s still a place for me. If there’s somewhere I might fit. If I can still belong.

Family

Sorry that this is a picture of a picture, but I didn’t have anything recent and digital where we were all together.

Ain’t Nobody Got Time For That (catching the anti-baby bug, or an update on the state of my uterus)

For as long as I can remember I’ve wanted to be a mommy. Not only did I play with baby dolls from toddlerhood to embarrassingly far into my preteen years, but I also routinely made lists of the names I would give my children, updating them as my tastes matured.*

Not only did I want kids, I wanted a lot of them. Six! With a set of twins! Preferably redheaded! I said before I understood the dark realities of pregnancy, childbirth, and child-rearing. By the time I graduated from college I had bagged myself a red-headed sperm-donor husband and had brought my hopes down to the more reasonable goal of three to four biological children and at least one adopted child to break up all the little redheads.**

I wasn’t entirely naïve. I had done A LOT of babysitting in high school and college. Mostly with very young children. At one point my senior year I was getting up at 5:30 AM to watch kids for a few hours before school, heading to another family’s house from 10:30 – 3:30, and then finishing my day with a third family from 4:00-6:30. And after college I worked for a year as a full-time nanny, which I extensively chronicled earlier on this blog. I got burnt out and exhausted from working with small kids all the time, but no matter how tough it got, never once did I waver in my conviction that I wanted to have kids of my own someday.

About a year ago I got baby bug in the worst way. Everyone was getting pregnant and having babies and, being in a meaningless corporate job at the time, I found myself wishing for motherhood more than ever before. I knew that the timing wasn’t right. And I knew that the sudden, overwhelming urge to quit my job and grow a baby was not a good enough reason to bring a human into the world. But the logic of the situation did not stop me from hoping against hope that the baby fever was God’s way of preparing me for a surprise pregnancy. And even though I wasn’t trying to get pregnant (in fact, I was actively preventing) I still managed to feel disappointed every month when it became clear that God had not miraculously intervened and made my body defy science and logic to conceive anyway. Jonathan and I agreed that we would re-visit the topic of baby-having in a year or so and see how we felt about it then.

For several months I continued to have baby-on-the-brain. Then I decided that if getting pregnant in a year or so was a possibility, I should probably do all of the things I really wanted to do pre-baby. Hence the commencement of Operation Lily Runs a Marathon and Operation Lily Goes to Grad School. I really wanted to undertake Operation Lily Travels the World, but sometimes even I have to be an adult and realize that I can’t have everything, so I settled for last summer’s vacation to the Dominican Republic and my marathon trip to Disneyworld. I also decided that before I had kids I wanted to be healthier, which led me to a radical diet change where I cut all sugar and starch from my diet and started eating lean meats and vegetables. I lost 20 lbs in 7 weeks and have a lot more energy and much fewer health problems than I did before.

I’ve made a lot of changes and a lot of progress over the past year: I quit my job, started grad school, ran a marathon, changed my diet and lost weight, did some travel, grew out my hair, and stopped biting my fingernails. But something else changed too. Starting in about October and growing steadily ever since has been a strong feeling that I no longer want to have kids. Not just right now. Maybe not at all. Ever.

If you know me at all, you know how weird that is. Like I said before, all I have ever REALLY wanted in my life is to one day be a mommy. I mean, I’ve wanted to have a meaningful job and a good marriage and to write and help others and all of those things too, but even when some of those things have been unclear or I have felt directionless, I’ve always had this deep desire for motherhood someday to hold onto.

In fact, my desire to be a mother has driven me to the point of fear sometimes. Thinking of having a house full of kids has made me feel a lot of pressure to figure out what I want to do career-wise as fast as possible because I don’t feel I will have the luxury of going back to school or trying to figure that out once I start having kids. I have put a lot of pressure on myself to get these things figured out because, after all, I’m 25, and if I really want to have 4 kids, I’m going to have to get started on that in the next few years.

But for the last 4-5 months I’ve found myself wondering if I really want to have kids, and I’ve concluded that what I really want is to have babies, not children. In other words, I love the idea of carrying a baby and then having this tiny little creature who is part of Jonathan and part of me and part something all his own. But I don’t want to bring an 8-year-old to dance class or fight with a 10 year old about cleaning his room. And I certainly don’t ever want to have a teenaged son.

Frankly, there’s a part of me that doesn’t even understand what the point is of having children. I know most of you won’t get this, but sometimes I think, “I could spend most of my life raising these kids who may or may not turn out to be good people, regardless of how good of parents Jonathan and I are, and for what? So they can go out and have their children that they spend their lives raising those kids so that those kids can grow up and have their own families.” There’s just something inherently narcissistic about it to me. I mean, if we just wanted children out of a desire to give of ourselves and our love and raise great men and women to right the wrongs of the world, there would be no more orphans. We would look at these millions of parentless children and find exactly what we were looking for. But that’s not all. We might want those things, but we also want mini-me’s made in our own likenesses.

Don’t get me wrong, I am grateful that there are parents in the world. After all, if my parents had felt this way, I would never have existed. And I like existing. I’m just not sure that, for me, the reasons above are good enough reasons to have children. I’ve been thinking a lot about parenting and how, to do it correctly, it really does require you to sacrifice everything for the sake of your kids. I see the family I work for now where the parents aren’t willing to self-sacrifice for the kids, and how their kids suffer for it even though they have all the material wealth in the world.

And I look at my own family. I have two parents whom I respect and admire deeply. Not once in my life have I ever doubted that they loved my siblings and I and that every parenting decision they made was genuinely out of a desire to do the best for us. And yet, I look at my siblings and me – my brother who has wrestled with addiction for at least 10 years, my sister, whose entire understanding of her world has been rocked to its core since leaving home, and me, who has lived believing that my best would never be good enough and that no matter how good I was and how hard I worked, fault would be found in me. My youngest sister is on the brink of adulthood now and we have yet to see the things she carries.

My point in saying all of this is not to rag on my parents. It’s to point out that even having some of the hardest-working, most self-sacrificing, godly and loving parents in the world, we have reached adulthood deeply scarred. If this is the reality for a family so committed to raising their children well and loving them deeply, I am utterly terrified to think of what I, a much more selfish person than either of my parents, might do to my theoretical children.

When I started to articulate how I am feeling about all of this, it sort of freaked me out. I mean, I have ALWAYS been the one who loved kids and couldn’t wait to have a family. And more than that, I’m really good with kids, especially really little kids. It’s one of my main skills – something I pride myself on. Jonathan and other close friends are convinced that this is a phase I am going through and that I won’t feel like this forever.*** They might be right and that will be ok. It may be a phase I am going through that will last 6 months or a year and then it will fade away and I will go back to the way I was before. But for now, this is where I’m at and I’m embracing it instead of fighting it.

So what does the future look like for the girl who spent her whole life planning on being a mommy only to discover that she might not want to be one? Honestly, from right here it’s looking pretty unlimited.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________

* If I had named my kids at age 11 they would have been called Chloe and Oliver. But then, of course, we named our dog Chloe so I couldn’t use that one anymore.
**Because I am convinced that all of our children will be redheaded, recessive genes be damned!
***At least, Jonathan is certainly hoping that’s the case. I can’t really blame him, I mean it’s sort of false advertising for him to pick a wife based on the fact that she wants to bear him 4 sons, only to find out after the deal is sealed that she really doesn’t want any. Bad form, Me. He has assured me that he will still love me if I do not bear said sons. But I can tell he still thinks the whole thing will blow over.