Part of you starts to expect that kind of call.
All of you dreads the time when it will come.
One minute you’re passing the salad around the table, telling your kids to eat one more bite,
and the next minute the phone rings and that bite count doesn’t matter at all.
I held a shushing finger to my lips, and went somewhere to hear the words better.
“It’s looking like she had a stroke” my brother said of my mom.
“I think they are going to admit her.”
He told the facts to me in black and white.
My mama.
My first, and loudest cheering friend.
The words he said next I could hardly process.
His black and white, to me, felt blazing red.
He sent photos to show me some proof of life.
She was sitting in a hospital bed.
I studied her thinking about her white head in my hands cutting her hair the last time she was here.
I noticed it had grown some,
but she somehow looked even smaller.
I looked at the hands that have soothed me thousands of times holding her phone, probably trying to reach out as to not feel too alone.
This is the part that I have worried about –
How it would feel with us living so far apart during this supposedly “Golden” phase.
I can’t hold her hand.
I can’t ask the doctors things.
I can’t sit beside her in that bed.
I was upset as I called her sister – My aunt – to tell her this terrible news.
But her sister’s voice, like the sound of home to my heart, held me in the place of my mom’s.
“Oh, Honey. I love you and your precious family so very much. I promise we will be praying for you;”
And when this aunt tells you she is praying for you,
it is no passing thing.
She will hand you like a child to its loving father.
She will draw away to her Georgia porch lit by a field of fireflies, and pray your name more than those gold beams will flicker.
Person after person sent messages to me after I posted asking for urgent prayer.
Friends near and far.
Texts and phone calls.
When we cannot stand
we are carried, still.
This week has already been hard.
My husband is sick. The kids are starting school.
My hands ache from the feeling of holding the world down.
Pandemic, fire season, sick dad, and now their grandma.
My girls look to me as the last one standing.
So I told the girls then to go grab their suits and we’d go for a night swim at a friend’s.
If I know anything at all, it’s that problems feel smallest where the sky is big.
We set about gathering things until in the corner of my eye I caught my 13 year old, Chloe’s, face and realized it was her that I most needed to gather first.
We sat on her little sister’s bed, my big girl being surrounded by stuffed animals a reminder that in some ways she is little still, and we breathed together a minute.
I asked her softly,
“What is it you are most fearing?”
She thought before answering me through her tears,
“It feels like I keep praying but God isn’t hearing.”
Now, this subject, to me, is an important one.
I know she will feel this many times as she grows.
I was not going to answer her flippantly.
What I would say, at first I didn’t know.
But then I realized I was being shown all along.
“Sometimes the answers to our prayers don’t come just like we want.
We want life one way,
and it shows up looking different.
But we have almost literally walked through fires before,
and all it did was teach us that this family, we can survive fire.
These challenges we are facing – They are like fires, too, burning away at what is temporary.
But the strength you are gaining from these hard things as you grow?
Those can’t be burned away.
They’re eternal.
These are the things that show us who we are.
Do we keep going forward, or do we crumble?”
She nodded and hugged me;
My shoulder wet before the pool, and we drove to it together.
Me thinking of an encounter I’d had today in the store.
Now it seemed even more to matter.
I had run into a friend I haven’t seen in months,
and she had complimented me on my writing.
“You’ll never know the way that you have lifted me,” she had said.
“Your words, they just sometimes…Oh…”
She clutched her chest here,
and she just kind of swayed,
and then she said with her eyes on fire,
“You are a life-speaker, you know.
What you do gives life.”
That title gave me tears in my eyes.
She spoke life when she gave it.
In the ER lot,
as I say “Take on more bite,”
when I struggle with my kids,
when my marriage is hard,
when my husband is sick,
when the hospital is where my mom is
I don’t always feel like the “Life speaking” type.
I feel wilted, and tired from clinging.
But that woman sitting in that hospital bed tonight,
my aunt lifting me up by her fireflies,
and a woman in the produce aisle all
reminded me today exactly who I am,
so I will speak life tonight
to the mother and the daughters:
We are hemmed in behind,
and we are hemmed in before.
We keep going,
And we aren’t burned by fires.
Mom Outnumbered
Hi! My name is Kerri Green; Wife to Justin, and mother to four highly entertaining daughters -Alena, Chloe, Tessa, and Paige. I am an artist, a writer, a daycare provider, a lover of people, a believer that there is humor and beauty in all things, and the author of Mom Outnumbered; a blog about real family life, and my observations of it. My goal is to make people laugh, to be there for them when they cry, and most importantly, to let them know that they are not at all alone in this up and down world. I live with my family in Sebastopol California, and I am opening the window into our life. So welcome! Come in. Sit down. Just please don’t mind the mysterious wet spots.
