About Elea Lee

Foster parent, adopting parent, family advocate, educator, homeschool parent

Shooting Stars

They pepper me with questions on the way to the office. When it is just the three of us we can lean into our survivors’ solidarity—

How do birds fly? What are shooting stars?

I want to say you are shooting stars, bright bits of light in night sky, not stars, but bits of iron and silicate broken from the mother rock

Contrails in the inky sky

What emperors wear

In my mind I have a picture of my maternal grandmother, mother of 11 children, flawed but beautiful

She looked like a grandmother—skin settling in, soft. Her hair went gray early but her face was always delicate and lovely

I am a grandmother now, and many of the adjectives apply to me—soft, round, wrinkled.

Fat to be blunt.

I am fine with all of this. I made a deal with myself years ago that I would see my aging process as an experiment in entropy—eventually gravity will have its due with us all.

I went on a deep dive this morning looking at a host of cosmetic procedures—surgeries, lasers, radio waves, deep tissue this or that—all promising to make a body toned, sculpted, and smooth.

I don’t really believe most of them work, but even if I did, I don’t believe they are for me.

I am supposed to “know God and glorify Him forever.”

https://www.apuritansmind.com/westminster-standards/shorter-catechism/

The phone booth at the end of the world

The words spill out about a horror movie you showed them and I say excuse me girls I need to make a brief phone call

And walk to the phone booth at the end of the world—

Just a couple of Dixie cups and grubby yarn but a good enough connection for me to

Shout

I am so angry at you! How could you have picked monsters instead of little girls? How could you have let them see all those scary movies? The too-real monster men? The empty ache for an awake mama?

I am so pissed at you

No wonder they have been angry too

The Billionaire’s Deer

Over the weekend one of our neighbors spotted a wounded buck on the banks of the Lake Dunlap portion of the Guadalupe.

He had wounds on his back leg and he was not able to walk.

The police were called and an officer assured us they would contact the owner of the property and “take care of” the deer.

In the end they dragged the deer’s carcass into the river 10-15 feet from the riverbank where he was last seen alive.

The Be-born

When words are inaccurate, or worse yet, dehumanizing, then we should change them

Let fetuses become young ones

Let blastocysts become our sons and daughters and let us consider that if the dividing line between protected and unprotected in the lives of young humans is the womb, consider calling our littlest ones the be-born.

Make it a blessing to each one-

Be born, little one

Be-born

“Unborn” is not enough

Not enough of an acknowledgment of the inimitable beauty, power and purpose inherent and irreversible invested in each human life.

https://theexperiencedmama.com/bible-verses-about-unborn-babies/