You little dervish
All red hair and fire
Pint-sized
You would get in a mood and storm
Then get distracted by your toys
Begin alternating between
The distraction of playtime and the vague memory that you had been
so recently aggrieved
If I am honest, you were often a pain in the ass. Your attachment disorder meant that I was the primary target of your anger when you were growing up, which was not fun, but good for me.
I remember you when you were little, I remember the stress, chaos and exhaustion. We would look at you and Charles when you were asleep and say, they are cute when they are asleep.
find myself trying to construct an old play fort out of this gray day, the sky folded into the quilted tent
This is heaven, I tell myself, this is Mary, she was college-aged, after all. She could be here, Heaven could be this, the thin line between the realms could be as gossamer as time itself–
Yesterday you were among the living
And now I return to the prayers I prayed when I held you as a child, fierce ball of anger
Oh, God,
Make us real
Make us vivid
Wipe away the tears, the past, the unbearable
All things made new
Last week I flew to Pittsburgh, got a rental car to Ohio, picked up my adopted granddaughters, and flew home.
Overall they both did remarkably well traveling cross-country with a stranger, but in the Nashville airport Em lost it. She just did not want to go from gate C whatever to gate A whatever, so she wailed and squirmed as I carried her.
By the time we got to A whatever I was reddened and drenched with sweat, utterly convinced that cardio-resistance workouts do not “go with” masking
And she remained in high dudgeon, as Jane Austen would say.
I was genuinely concerned she would not calm down and I would not be allowed to board a plane with a screaming, squirming child and I would be stranded, far from home, with an inconsolable child.
An amazing woman came to my rescue. She bought the girls coloring books, a bottle of water, tic tacs, She talked us through, back to normal and calm enough to board a plane.
I did not ask her name or get her address, but I wish I had
Knowing, as I do, that I could never thank her enough.
I don’t have time to write this blog. My house is chaos, I am behind in my “day job,” and my adopted granddaughters live with us now.
Both girls have been through fires, literally and figuratively.
As I see headlines about the Texas heartbeat law, I cannot stop thinking about what an appalling loss to me and the world entire it would be if they were not here.
They, like all my kids, light up my world. If one were missing, the loss would be unbearable.
That is what the rhetoric hides–each child saved from abortion is a
Little girl twirling in a princess dress
A little boy looking for spiny lizards
A child who knows grownup words long before they should
An irreplaceable light in the darkness.
Recently I told this story to a friend facing loss–
It was a beautiful, uncharacteristically sunny day in Beaver, PA. There was a cop car parked a block from us, I suspected they suspected I might run to Canada with you. You had a cute Sesame Street ensemble on, replete with orange coat. Our church friends were there to help us through.
Your dad wept. He is not usually a crier. I did not. I did not believe at that time that you were going to be away more than a long weekend.
I knew God was gonna bring you back.
The pain that followed was truly unspeakable. I questioned my faith. How could I have been so sure that I would get you back?
I asked God
And He said
“You were not wrong to believe you would get her back, it was just your timeline was off a bit.”
I know you will always be God’s baby girl, because you have always been mine💗
Hey Little One,
I will fight for you
Let us write a book my loves where each of you gets at least a single word because, as the Good Book says words are signifiers of eternal things and you are nothing if not eternal.
This time only you and God will be able to decide what words your little lives will signify
And how much each is worth
Words for children
A progeny of words
Like the teeth of a dragon
Sewn beauty in the field
Where once was only sorrow
I woke up this morning to a picture of some ladies holding a bright pink sign which read LONG LIVE ROE V WADE.
And I thought–long live?
Then the WSJ wrote, in its explication of the situation, “Roe and its progeny…”
Could this be an accident? Could the ladies in their vagina cloches and the explicators at the WSJ both be blissfully unaware that the language of living and progeny is exactly what the unstoppable machine of Roe v. Wade has made untenable?
We have lost so many children through this law and its wake of carnage. There is nothing about Roe v. Wade which brings life or encourages progeny.
After all these years, let us at least make our language precise and appropriate when we talk about our deliberate legacy of death.
The old woman and the older woman sit down across a flimsy folding table. Between them there is a plexiglass barrier, the kind you might encounter now at a doctor’s office or the checkout line at the grocery store.
This time we all know we are contagious, right?
They type into complementary machines–one English to Korean and the other Korean to English
Do not forgive these Korean letters, forgive something else if you will.
The devastating depths men may plunge to
If the womenfolk fail to speak.
I told myself I would
Swim the coldest days
Knowing the river runs
Warmer than the air making it
Rise in Holy Ghost waves
I turn to watch the tide
Tell me you remember
Every day you stayed with me
When all the cool kids
Left town
Carrying Light 