Part of a series this week on time and the new year…
It’s too late on a Saturday night the beginning of January.
I shouldn’t be slowing to let these emotions feel about for expression — miles to go before I sleep — but some moanings need to work their way into words.
Soup and Sandwich Sunday tomorrow after church services and we’re hosting two families. We provide the soup, dessert and home, they provide the sandwiches, conversation, laughter.
We’ll happily fellowship.
So I’m doing important things in preparation. Like shuffling around furniture. Organizing shelves. Choking on this swelling pain; trying to swallow around burning lump in my throat.
I’ve moved books. Gathered up Dr. Seuss’ The Foot Book. Minarik’s Little Bear. A Dick and Jane reader. He can read all those now.
I lined up a shelf just for her: Keat’s Snowy Day. William Kurelek’s A Prairie Boy’s Winter. Hader’s The Big Snow.
Then the art readings for afternoon tea with the middles, those littles lingering too: A Child’s History of Art. The Story of Art. A few on Michelangelo, a flip calendar of art from the Louvre.
Next the poetry: Famous Poems Old and New, Best Loved Poems of the American People. And the history: Vos’ Story Bible, The Story of the Romans, The Story of Mankind, A Little History of the World, A Child’s History of the World.
A whole shelf just for exploring the world with quirky Sasek and his series, bookended by A Child’s Geography, Window on the World.
I remember these books when the covers were new and fresh, and we were too, me a green homeschooling mama reading with my olders who were then just starting out. I hold Vos’ Story Bible and can see again our two oldest boys on that sagging green couch, them begging for one more page. And now they’re off reading Augustine’s Confessions, Bede’s Essay on Ecclesiastical History of the English People, that green couch long gone.
With each book I set on a shelf, it pierces deeper: How much longer until I won’t be reading these books to these children anymore?
Tears ambush, and I fight back, valiantly, really, but they win, and here I sit, sad, hurting too much to move.
Time. It does this thing I just never get use to. This thing that wrests my heart right out, squeezes the arteries right dry, wrings me out.
It takes babies and children and all these days away. These days of books and paint sets and playdough. These days when they read all sprawled out and the snow falls. These days when we all know endless togetherness.
These day like the day before and a moment with these books.
I had been in the center, where the couch cushion valleys low, and he with the curled cow-lick had laid his head on my shoulder, and her with blonde mop leaned close on other side, and the book was open on my lap, illustrations and story leading us on, and I read long and they followed along, and that’s when she interrupted and said it.
“I wish you were small.”
“Small?”
How did she know I’d eaten too much peanut butter fudge these past two weeks, that the scale and I are no longer on speaking terms?
Three-year-old wiggled up onto her knees so she could pat my cheek with her hand’s round smoothness. Malakai waited for me to turn the page.
“Small. So I could hold you. And rock you.”
I’d looked into her oceanic eyes. She stroked my cheek with her palm. Pressing her forehead against mine, she asked.
“When you get small again, can I hold you?”
I remember her curl brushing my eyelashes right then.
How a three-year-old’s world tilts. When I get small again…. I try to imagine that.
When this child who’s leaving little can cradle in her arms this mama who’s growing old. When we can exchange places. When she’s the Mama … and I’m the frail, weathered one, needing holding.
The calendar page had turned the year and I had turned the story page for Malakai.
But I’d wanted to turn the pages back, recklessly flip them far back, when they were small and I rocked them close and the years were not of this millennium. On a Saturday night, I sit with an armful of books, wanting to hold my babies again. Wanting to inhale time and new life unfurling. I want to know the beginning again, not just a January beginning in the middle of life, not just a beginning again, but the definitive beginning. Back then.
Page-turning hurts.
I straighten up the dog-eared Little House series, fill aching lungs with deep breath, grope along real truth again: The way back is forward.
I had whispered the words to Shalom. “Yes, someday, years from now, when I am small again, you may hold me, Shalom.”
She had wrinkled her nose in happy smile.
And I had read the next page to Kai and Shalom and they had leaned in and the closeness warmed and moments like that are what I never want to end. Moments I’m desperate not to end. The tears on a Saturday night don’t.
Standing in the dark still with piles of books about and the chicken broth cooling for Soup and Sandwich Sunday, the washing machine wringing out one last load while the children sleep, I know what George Moore wrote:
A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.
We search the world over, some late at night with a mouse and a cursor; braver ones with luggage, tickets and hungry hearts. Regardless of path, we’re hunting down more, seeking that elusive, age-defiant something else, something beyond time’s clammy grasp.
What we seek is here. What we need is here. What lasts forever is here.
Here where it hurts, where love’s raw and sharp and unfathomably deep.
And turning pages, letting time move forward, traveling on, leads us back Home to find it.
This now-love, love today in this place, travels us out into Home’s forever-love, timeless, without-end love.
So we love here in this home with these kids, us turning pages and time, the books and memories and moments stacked high.
Lord, remind me often: Love is the only forever thing. Let me keep returning to that. Living that. And let Your love keep leading me Home.
Related: Run the River
Photos: book moments in the light from here
