“Yesterday, a child came out to wonder”.
The voice in my head pleaded, “Don’t cry…don’t cry…don’t cry on your way to the post office.” I had been unexpectedly emotional since the early morning phone call from the postmaster letting me know that my new chickens had arrived. Chicken keeping, like most everything else, has a rhythm, and we find ourselves in our fourth year of what has become a most beloved hobby.
It’s so quiet, here in the dark, but I just cannot turn off the noise in my head. Silence cuts all the things that were never said, never gathered into form to be witnessed and set free.
Seconds that seemed stretched into hours have now passed, and I wonder what took so long.
“And the seasons, they go round and round, and the painted ponies go up and down.”
The cautious nature of new love, holding the words deep within as a best effort to protect myself from the vulnerability of my own truth; this is how our child comes to us, afraid to love, afraid to trust, for fear of the eventuality of rejection and abandonment, a lifelong pattern.
It’s not a fair comparison, but the emotional commonality of simply being human offers up the possibility that the bridge to a relationship can be challenging to navigate. We are afraid that who we are will not be enough.
Parenting any child is both daunting and beautiful. We cannot know what to expect, and sometimes we can never know just what the days, what the years looked like before the child’s path met ours.
“We’re captive on a carousel of time”.
The doctor is running late. My little son is on my lap, content with his threadbare blanket in the moment, and still under the spell of the travel sickness medication. If I close my eyes, I can almost pull open the capsules which hold the lives of those here with me: people that I have not seen before.
The television is loud, perhaps not loud enough for those that are actually trying to make sense of what is happening in this cartoon: a cat jumps from a the head of a boy with skunk hair as the boy yells, “no fair!” The rest of us stare at the screen for a random moment or two, processing nothing but our previous thoughts.
One young mother, waiting in the appointment line and dressed in very high heels, lets her distraught toddler son free from his stroller. Light moves across the child’s face as he rolls to the floor, clumsily pulls himself to his feet, and promptly escapes down a hallway, running in circles into the rooms as he cackles and showers the office with crumbs from his snack, likely given as an attempt to avoid this entire scenario. The mother wipes her brow, rolls her eyes, and disappears in her high heels in pursuit of the boy.
“We can’t return; we can only look behind from where we came…”
I have been this mother, minus the fancy shoes, for nearly thirty years. Most of my children are older, and often I find myself chasing not them, but who I thought they wanted to be, who they used to be, or what I thought they might need.
Today, I felt relieved that I was not the one breaking a sweat, running around the hematology wing. Today, I was grateful to hold my own uncharacteristically calm and quiet child as we waited our turn at looking for an answer.
Just a few days ago marked thirty years that Dan and I have been together. My brand new sisters-in-law did the music and vocals for this Joni Mitchell song at our wedding, and still it plays on.
“Then the child moved ten times round the seasons…skated over ten clear frozen streams”.
I watched as my nine-year-old little league player/acrobat seemed to listen at about twenty-five percent attention to what the baseball director had to say about the high school team that had come to teach these boys to bunt at this spring clinic: “They’re all here because they love the game.”
And “loving the game” is enough. I know this now, many years removed from the day that my then almost sixteen-year-old tied his cleats for his final game. To me, it hadn’t been enough; I craved more seasons on the bleachers, more Saturday tournaments, and more of the dichotomous heartbreak and joy laced up in every baseball and stitched through every glove. I wanted him to keep playing, but for me, because I so loved the game. What I hadn’t realized at the time was that because he, too, loved the game, it was time for him to look ahead.
“Sixteen springs and sixteen summers gone now. Cartwheels turn to car wheels through the town”.
We’re afraid to stop because we don’t know what comes next.
Still, we love the game.
The wait was longer than usual at the doctor’s office. We didn’t get an answer today. I wonder if anyone did. In this moment where we have found ourselves, we are okay. We walk away from where we have been, on the way to where we are headed.
The dark of the night offers clarity, just until my eyes are opened once again. I can’t remember what it meant. I just think we need to keep going.
Soon my little-leaguer will again take the field. My days of chasing small boys around the clinic won’t last much longer. I am ready for both of these.
“And they tell him, take your time…it won’t be long now till you drag your feet to slow the circles down.”
The hard parts will continue, though they will promise new kinds of healing and hope.
I didn’t cry until after I picked up my package from the post office. Even then, with a box full of eleven peeping baby chicks in the car beside me, I no longer had much to cry about.
“We can’t return…we can only look behind from where we came, and go round and round and round in the circle game”.
Song lyrics from “The Circle Game” by Joni Mitchell❤️