They Come Together

She runs and I can’t breathe.

From the bedroom window, straightening out bedcovers, setting pillows, I see her bare little legs under that dress of hers flying over gravel yard. Her blonde curls fly too. She’s running into autumn.

I only have sheets half pulled up, but I’ve paused, cotton still in hand. I have time—a whole lifetime-- to stand here, just here, to watch last child run with the wind.

Last child?

I can’t breathe.

She’s slowed at grass edge, on her way in. Stopped to look a moment at old Ford tractor parked there. I watch her watching. The lab’s laying there by the worn back wheel, warming in morning light, and she bends to pat his head. They are both gold and I gild this moment and this air in my lungs burns.

It sears the walls of me to think of no more still-first-curls taken up in the wind. No more wee footprints tracking across the barnyard. No more child wonder, that bare-faced exuberance, coming to find me, embrace me, tell me all about it.

I watch her stand again. The dog dozes and she runs on. Does she never walk because she can’t wait for what the next moment holds? Slow down, child, slow down. Under the ancient maple spreading, past the sandbox, then up the stone walkway with her wee clogs, that blur of ringlet life. And then I can’t see her anymore.

And I hurt more. Because that’s just it.

Breathless, flushed with life, she finds me in the bedroom, smoothing out our wedding quilt and this sadness. Her hair’s tangled and windblown, her eyes wild too.

“Mama? You wanna know?” She’s still catching her breath.

I lower myself onto the corner of the bed, sink into now and the blue of her eyes. Touch her October cheek and gilded time.

And she stops, reads me. “You sad, Mama?” She cups my knee with her chubby hands and I feel fall’s chill.

The words ache in my throat and come slow, so quiet. “I just never want to be done with babies… Wonders like you.” I tuck a wisp behind the curve of her ear.

And then we just look into each other, eyes feeling along. She’s figuring those words. Then she leans in close, the weight of her slight frame against my leg, turns her face up into mine.

“You always want a real baby that cries?”

Her little string of words yank. Baby dolls like hers, stuffed and stitched and painted, can be rocked and bundled close and sang to. Wondered over. But they’re not real babies. Just gilded.

I’ve figured her words. Real babies are real because they feel this world’s real ache... like we all do. It’s part of the coming here. She doesn’t know it, but she’s asking me if I know that real love embraces pain, gathers up the sadness, gently rocks the howling places.

Her child words startle with Kingdom truth: Love’s only tenderly real if it knows the taste of tears. I want gilded time, goldenly stilled, wrapped close and held tight. But that’s not real. What’s real, hurts.

Yes, child, so you know it: lament threads through real love.

In this fleeting moment, I feel it sharp.

And the ache of love too.


Father God, when today hurts, remind me that this is just part of the living, love and lament. They come together. How You know it.

Photo: a lone berry on thorn bush

Related: Learn to Lament