The Secret Sound of Solitude

It's an odd thing, learning to be someone you haven't been before, like substitute mama to little folks with different customs and lifestyles than yours. It's a wave-like rhythm here. Laugh, hold, feed, yawn, grump, cry, smile, love, sleep.

I don't have enough hands, enough time. I don't have enough skills to know the answer to questions like, "When will my dad get out of prison?" or "How come you have a bathroom in your house and my grandma doesn't?" Then perplexed at little folks who don't know their own last names but without prompting, fold hands and squeeze eyes tight and pray in unison, an unintelligible sort of chanting to the rest of us, at the dinner table over what sounds like poo'd (food).

I don't have enough love either, and this is a new learning…drawing it straight from the Spirit around me, pulling love out of thin air, the love poured down all around and over me, and spilling it onto them. I'm a pipe of sorts these days, a filter. God love pouring through me and spraying all over these little folks, love I don't have within me any other way.

Still, I'm the sort of woman who tries in my own strength just about all the time, tries to be understanding and patient, tries to be compassionate and selfless, and the more I hit my knees before him and plead for strength, the more I realize how I've been doing it all wrong all this time, how the coming before him in desperation needs to be first and not last ditch.

I have escaped to the front deck for a breath and a quick go at my keyboard. There is an inflatable swimming pool beside me, the kind you get for ten bucks at the superstore that lasts a few uses before deflating, and the water inside is still and even, crystal clear and at peace. I breathe the image in for a bit and practice making myself calm and cool, still and unrippled, a refreshing drink for the thirsty babes collecting at my feet. It is a practice only of channeling Love, not the love we can create in gesture and batting eyelash, but the Love that saves us when we cannot save ourselves…the love that is, the love that does.  

Soon the pool will be full of babies, splashing and pouring, smacking and drinking and the water will be an explosion of sound and movement, clear liquid fireworks, and the stillness will be gone. Soon, too, my respite on the porch will be finished and I will jump back into the fray, the seven-ring circus that makes me laugh and cry and sometimes curse when they're out of earshot. 

I got up early this morning just to hear the sound of silence for a bit, to remember what the air is like when not interrupted by toddler voices. It sounded like bird song and eager Saturday lawn-mowers, the refrigerator drip-drip-dripping into the ice maker and the house settling upon itself, inch by inch… my heart settling upon itself too, inch by inch. I am not a morning person but I am a woman who needs her solitude and, as it turns out, there is much to be said about hanging out in the silence early in the morning, before the crunch of cereal and plunk-plunk-plunk of the coffee pot, before giggles and whines, before flushing toilets and crashing plastic toys.

For me, the voice of God comes most clearly in that sort of noisy silence, the quiet that allows you to hear the sounds that are always there, just normally muffled under the din of daily life. It always feels like a breeze upon my neck and earlobes, a whisper that says many things but always, always says, "I love you, child." 

The Kind of Girl Who Brings Herself Daisies

Daisies droop, dying over the edge of the hurricane glass, the one with the hotel logo on it from our family vacation last October.

Some of them with broken stems, some jut out in odd directions, some curl around themselves to get a better view of the light.

I am trying to become the kind of girl who brings herself daisies.

On Mother's Day, I set into the side yard with red-handled scissors. The blades are sticky with popsicle residue and I guess these are all the signs of summer before me. White pedals crawled with aphids and spiders, yellow pollen torturous, but allergies or not, sometimes a girl's just gotta have flowers.

I gathered two bundles, one for the hurricane glass and one for the porch deck, in a red polka-dotted water bottle. Those were dead by Tuesday, even with the air and the wind and the sunshine pouring upon them. The ones inside survive, barely, but they're here, rag-tag and awkward and a lot like me.

Writing is what writing does…and writing, today, is bringing myself literary daisies, quietly rejoicing in all the signs of summer.

From Where I'm Standing... A Look Into Summer

There are geckoes and junebugs skitting all up the window screen in front of me and it feels like summer all too soon, coming with the speed of a freight train… the hot days and wild hours with chlorinated bodies splashing in and out barefooted all around to grab a bologna sandwich with a water balloon in the other hand and me chasing them out the backdoor, waving a pink bottle of SPF 50 like a lunatic.  And I try to take a breath and brace for it, for the comfortable chaos that I imagine summer to be, here.  This is the last season we will be new at, now.  It’s nearly been a year.

Today we had a taste of it, a breezy afternoon with football on the front lawn and water pistols that took a turn toward egg-throwing and whipped cream in boyish ears and sour-cream catapults that had us all in stitches, remembering, this is the good stuff.  Laughter and front lawn food fights and family movies into wee hours just because we can, because we love each other and most days, we even like each other, and I whisper thanks for that, for it is so good.  The kids are amped up for summer and its all I can do to try and get things together before the tornado of flip-flopped-feet stampedes in and out the storm door all summer long. 

I like chaos.  I do.  But this ADD-mama fears a bit of the necessary insanity that accompanies summer’s revolving door, and the mash of moods that crunch together in the melting Texas heat.  I worry about my ineptitude, that summer’s sun will magnify my weakness for order and organization, that my half-hearted routine will splinter and I’ll “lose” control (the illusion, of course, that I ever had any to begin with). 

For today, I watch these still-spring clouds spread wide and thin above my head and linger in the manageably warm air for another day – counting the days to come, mulling it over with a bold dash of anticipation as to just what summer will be like, here, and will I be able to handle it, now, with all these twelve bodies home all day, cranky and cantankerous, eventually pent up together in hiding from the blistering heat?

And as I wonder and calculate, I try to lay down my expectations and again practice gratitude for the days at all, for the season and all that is to come, whatever will come.  And I count, in the here and now, (and even a tad "late", with Ann, toward one thousand gifts.

370.    My mother-in-love’s safe arrival and wonderful company.

371.    Cool weather that makes for hours of chatty porch-sitting with neighbors and friends.

372.    Returning a favor, for a friend.

373.    A one-on-one lunch date with one of our cottage boys, full of honest talk and reassurance.

374.    Rain, even if only a little.

375.    A mini-vacation coming up later this week, trip to Austin/Fredericksburg.

376.    Side-splitting laughter.

377.    Deep words over cold ice cream.

378.    Mild-weather days.

379.    Sunlight, at dusk, and how it plays on my children’s faces, all aglow.

380.    Frozen waffles (and an extra few moments to sleep, this morning).

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