Everything is so busy.
I have one daughter getting married, another moving away, and my son starting his junior year of high school. I try not to worry, I do. But it comes anyway, in waves and gulps and mist. Sometimes I can breathe through it, pray, unhinge my shoulders from my ears.
But the past few weeks, my mind is a hamster wheel with a cat stuck inside.
And I'm the hamster.
running running running
glancing back occasionally to see how close that cat is to me.
A few days ago I was cleaning off my desk of the zillion little things that accumulate all week with no purpose whatsoever and yet I can't throw any of it away. Paper clips, receipts, mail, ribbon.
I had a few pictures, pictures that I needed to PUT AWAY IN THE BOX ALREADY.
I don't know why I do this but I see them and instead of putting them away, I just move them over 5 inches.
Maybe stack them neater .. and then move over 5 inches. It's so dumb and completely breaks some rule about clutter and touching one's things more than once without putting them in their proper home.
I don't know.
But this day, this day I was making progress.
Up I scooped them and to the closet I went. I keep a plastic bin in there that holds an attempt to organize all my pictures.
A very sloppy attempt.
I can't ever find what I am looking for without going through them all a thousand times. Today though, instead of dumping the handful in, I pulled the box out, sat down, scooched my back up against the wall, and took off the lid.
I smiled.
There they were. All my babies.
Small. Laughing. Safe.
I lifted a stack out and started rummaging through them; remembering what it was like to have Breann run up to me and give me a hug around my legs, laughing at the look of mischief on Sammi's face as she eyeballed her sister, smiling at the seriousness of Jacob on my wedding day when he was just five. I always get a little misty when I look at these.
Our life.
How fast it goes by.
I continued to filter through them and then, random, I found an old one of me.
Me. Kendra. Tracy.
I blinked.
This was Kelly St.
All the houses in the group home were named by the street they sat on.
Kelly St. was for newbies.
Tracy was my roommate. She stood on the far right.
Tracy.
So obviously hard in her leopard print pants and football jersey. Eyes like steel. Eyes that screamed, STAY AWAY FROM ME.
Kendra. She doesn't look loud here but I remember. Her voice carried like a mega-phone was attached to it. It was like she sucked all the oxygen in from the room and then it came roaring out every time she spoke or laughed or yelled. And she did all three. Frequently.
And then there's me. I look so ... so...
small.
A child. Face partially hidden in my hair. Hand clenched inside my shirt. A jean skirt and black high-topped converse.
It's the shoes that got me.
The shoes that grabbed a hold of my eyes and my memory and then slammed my heart against a concrete wall painted baby diarrhea green.
Leaning against the wall in my hallway while I sat on the floor. Nobody home. No one to hear me. I leaned my head back and bawled.
You ever see those car commercials where the city is dark and yet you can see lights zipping through the city, the freeway, and it's just a blur this way, a blur that way?
fasterfasterfaster
That was my brain. Zipping and blurring and skidding along, trying hard to grasp what I was supposed to see here, what I was supposed to get.
This picture.
Taken in the group home.
Which was after juvenile hall.
which was after I was arrested,
and when I was arrested I wasn't wearing any shoes.
Shoe-less
Calloused
Hard.
Exposed.
Going in barefoot. Well, that was no big deal.
Walking in toes out, in the middle of the night, doesn't compare to the humiliation of being stripped, searched, squatting, coughing, jeered at by coaches and detainees alike.
But going out, in brightness of midday, with a complete stranger, to a waiting van...
well... I kind of think it's how Adam and Eve must have felt.
Naked.
Exposed.
Seen for who they had become.
I relate to how they must have frantically searched for leaves, brush, anything anything to cover themselves, because I would have given anything for at least a pair of shower shoes.
but juvie.
They don't give anything away.
Your vulnerability is on full display.
Remember this moment, child.... and don't come back.
This picture.
I'm thirteen.
Smiling. In a group home. With shoes they bought me.
You would never guess by looking at this that just months before I had started smoking cigarettes,
and then weed,
and then snorting lines of meth,
and drinking more alcohol than I could puke out,
and giving my virginity away to a greasy boy I didn't like and didn't like me,
and then swallowing a bottle of pills the next day because I was so disgusted and wanted to float,
and then taking a car that wasn't mine,
and then putting my hands up with a gun pointed at me.
You wouldn't guess that for the first two weeks in juvie I ate with a dixie cup cut in half and couldn't have a blanket with corners and they peeked in the window every half hour to make sure I was still breathing..
You wouldn't guess that I would jump up, fists swinging at
anyone anyone anyone
who looked at me crazy or uttered a word about me being white or young or a princess.
You wouldn't guess that I had stopped caring a long time ago and
nothing nothing nothing
would make me flinch in fear.
I knew what to be afraid of and these girls and this place wasn't it.
I grew up with monsters.
This picture.
In a place that most couldn't wait to leave but I felt safe.
I could breathe and smile and go to school and close my door and refuse the phone.
I didn't have to pretend.
I didn't have to run.
I could just be.
This picture.
I held it in my hand as I cried on my floor. Thinking back to all the places I had been, the things I had done, the horrors that had been done to me.
And I'm more than just o.k. now.
I do more than just survive.
I live.
I love.
I think about all the people that have said to me,
You're so strong.
You made it.
You did it.
And I always get asked the question,
How?
And my answer, so inadequate, such a let down to what they were hoping for.
Just a shrug. A nonchalance, not because i didn't care but because I didn't know what to say.
And as I sat on the floor, it came. Something I have known but didn't really grasp until right then.
This picture.
I stared at it, blurry in my tears, heartsick in the worry that sometimes wants to drown me for my own kids, and their struggles, and the pain and disappointment they are learning to feel and walk with and grow in. All the things I can't save them from.
I could weep for the girl in this picture.
But I won't.
I've done so much of that already. A mourning for a different life that was stolen in whispers and darkened bedrooms with a person that's now dead.
I celebrate her instead.
For waking up.
For somehow choosing to keep going.
For dreaminng of something bigger.
For sacrifcing so her kids would have what she did not.
It's incredible.
The strength.
Not hers but from the one she shunned and raged against and blamed for so long.
HIM.
Giving a strength she could not muster.
There were no big girl panties to pull up. Someone had yanked those down from her long long before.
This picture.
It's a child.
And then I knew.
He was right there, in every moment I felt alone, in every tear I dropped, in each place I felt my heart crack and shudder, He was with me. His heart broke next to mine.
All that love He walked in and pursued me with ...
it is the same love He walks and pursues my kids with.
They will struggle and their hearts may break,
but they won't die.
It won't kill them.
He will carry them,
strengthen them,
and they will do more than survive.
They will live.
I get it.
And I hope you get it too.
Our kids, we want so badly to protect them from everything... and it's our job to want to do that. We should do that in all the best ways we can.
But we also have to know that is an impossible task.
We are here to love them, guide them, pray over them, support them,
and let them go.
They are not alone.
Not ever.
Breathe deep mamas. Unhinge your shoulders from your ears.
It's a big love out there.
It's a perfect peace.
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