youth

Marks and All

I started listening to a playlist on Spotify titled “Piano for Healing.” In the quiet moments, the melodies bring a bit of peace in the middle of a busy day. And allowing healing energy into my space is welcome as part of a routine.

Healing feels elusive at times – like you can’t quite wrap your arms around it’s finished point. This week baby got a bug bite right between her eyes. The bite swelled, causing her eyes to puff up and I tried calmly to reach out to a doctor – allowing only small moments of panic in this new venture of parenthood. She needed Benadryl, nothing serious, and within a few days, the swelling was gone, leaving only a tiny scab for her to pick at with her raggedy finger nails.

We got out the nail buffer and she seems to go about her days. And still, I think her once perfect baby skin has been disrupted by a mosquito or four. Our entrees into imperfection start young – our chances for suffering and the required healing abound. We move forward – marks remain.

This month I’ve been given the gift of Enneagram coaching with a colleague of mine who is getting certified in the tool. My primary style is a 6 – a loyal skeptic – personalities prone to preventative thinking, emotion, and planning ahead. The word skeptic brought up so many emotions for me – and I asked, in my session, is the root of our primary style a result of nature or nurture, or perhaps the soul work we are here to do on earth? In other words, my little childlike self was concerned, did I come out this way, a bit afraid of the world, or did the situations that life gave me make me a little more hesitant to fully step in the ring? I felt shame for being one who lives with doubt.

My colleague didn’t have an answer, and I’ve been wondering how in service of my own healing, I can use this skepticism to my benefit, rather than a paranoid weakness. In my report, they also said the opposite of doubt is moving towards faith – that skeptics like me can balance our internal anxiety with the turning over of our control. God grant me the serenity …

And in my healing, I unwrap my own fingers, tightly bound, and move them to my heart. My skin is tarnished too, marked with moles my baby likes to point out and pick at as she falls asleep in my arms. Healing is life work. Faith, a pursuit of beautiful things.

So for this week, in honoring my own healing, I raise up the beauty in Benadryl, in self-nurturing and the questions ones ask deep within. Beauty in saying there’s nothing to be ashamed about. Skepticism, too, can be a superpower. Beauty in a baby mouthing ‘mole’ and acceptance that our beautiful bodies tell our stories, marks and all.

In the Unfolding Future

For the first time in over a year, I spent a full day in the home I grew up in. There have been multiple reasons for my absence. Changes in caregivers and in family situations. I’m trying to negotiate being an adult woman with a house of my own. A pandemic lurks, placing tentacles of fear and suckers of joy on the cracked cement steps.

As I stood at the front door this weekend, I realized my key no longer has a place to work. The lock had been replaced with an electronic key pad. I rang the bell, and the big dog began to bark. Upon answering the door, my mom repeated the numeric code I needed to get access. It’s not as if I was kept out intentionally. I thought I put the pattern in my phone. Apparently not.

We had spent thirty dollars to stand in a field under a blue sky made silver with smoke. Returning again to the community farm, we took scissors to stems and snipped bloom after bloom, placing our finds in a large, round bucket.

We had gathered armfuls of greens, daisies, dahlias, and delicate flowers to collect into vases and mason jars. We returned home to do our work, walking through the front room on worn wooden floors to approach the table that sustained me. While we shredded leaves and clustered our collections, my mom and I caught up on stalled-life and our slow summers.

It has been almost five years since I sat in the same place, in the tall oak chair frame my dad built in the garage, disassembling arrangements sent for his funeral. The scratchy chair pad nibbled the backs of my thighs saying, ‘I may be worn, but I’m still here, too.’

Some heart ache challenges simply must be tended to from the kitchen tables of our youth.

I’ve healed, wept, and morphed over the last few years. I suppose, if we’re paying attention, we all do. What I hadn’t realized before this weekend was, just as every day is given a new, so too is my grief.

Dad isn’t here for this moment. Or the one that just passed. Nor will he be here for the ones unfolding as this sentence continues. I didn’t realize I will continue to grieve in the unfolding future. The every day ache is not debilitating, but it demands attention. When grief gets neglected, my soul gets hard.

I moved from the kitchen table, to the arm chair in the study, and still our conversation continued.

As noon turned into early evening, I kept wishing Dad would walk through the garage door. Couldn’t he be home from work or an outing at the hardware store? Perhaps he would have brought us a treat.

The door never opened. Instead, I walked out through the front.

I brought the bouquets to my new home. As I placed one vase after the other in rooms where I sit these days, I wondered if flowers can be seen as friends. I’m working from home without companionship now, as my husband returned to a socially distanced office armed with hand-sanitizer and a closing glass door.

The flowers keep me company. I’ve surrounding myself with beauty and scent and bursts of color to bolster me while he’s away. The refrigerator hums and my fingers click on the keyboard. I play classical music to keep my anxiety at bay.

For Dad’s not here now, in the next moment, or at the end of this sentence. I’ve learned I get to miss Him still, as the adult I’m becoming in my own home. I draw up familiar lessons of comfort. Memories of past greetings from the wide-open garage door nibble into me like bites left from worn, knitted, chair cushions.

Now, instead, I wait for my husband to return from his office to walk in our blue front door and I miss Him. And that, is a beautiful thing.

If you believe in the pursuit of beautiful things, have ever come back from a set back in life, or hold firmly to the belief that we can all be kind to one another, invest in this on-going project.

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