I first wrote this little essay for a group of mothers on Friday afternoon, the last official day of Lent in the Eastern Orthodox tradition – the Christian tradition of my family and many of my dearest friends. It’s a reflection from my heart at that moment, as we look towards what is normally a week of the richest community events of the year. Holy Week leads up to the celebration of Pascha (Easter), the pinnacle of Feasts in our tradition, and it’s a week in which we normally spend hours and hours at church, often multiple times a day. We are together sharing the most moving and beautiful music and traditions of our year. And we eat together and celebrate together until often 5 AM on Sunday morning. By contrast, this year, we’re facing down a week of being only in our homes, thanks to a global pandemic. It’s beyond sad and scary in many ways to face this week without our larger communities.

In the 48 hours since I first wrote these words, I found some pussy willows(!) and had a beautiful weekend with my family, filled with lots of work and a bit of play, awkward (and sometimes contentious) praying from home, delicious foods, online and telephone visits with friends, porch exchanges of goodies, a few family arguments, and heartfelt conversations with my sons. I still haven’t cleaned the dining room. There is plenty of hope, but we’re still staring down a weird and long week. With that knowledge, and at the request of multiple friends, I’m sharing this raw look at my home and thoughts now. Hoping it is a source of encouragement.

Tomorrow is Lazarus Saturday. As we gear up for Holy Week this year, ideas are flying around the internet, on phone calls, on parish email lists. How can we celebrate Holy Week at home? How can we make it meaningful for our children and families? Many of these things are really beautiful. The power of human resilience and cooperation is shining through in amazing ways. But, for me, it feels like more pressure than I’m ready to stomach. Usually today I would be putting last touches on plans for a huge children’s festival for Lazarus Saturday – buying balloons, planning games, confirming the bounce house delivery.

I’m doing none of that. Instead, I’m in my home, not dressed at 3 PM, behind on multiple important deadlines for work and for my role in my parish, awaiting the arrival home of an essential worker husband whose work is more stressful that it has ever been in our almost 23 years of marriage. He just texted me to say he’ll be working most of the weekend, too. I really want Lazarus Saturday and Palm Sunday and Holy Week to dawn beautiful and memorable for my kids. But, I’d need to start with finally cleaning up the dining room, a place that has been Chaos Command Central for weeks.

We’ll do some special things this week, but it’s just going to be different. And it’s not always going to be beautiful. It’s going to be hard. Today, I am deeply mourning the loss of a young friend and the sorrow of his family, and each new moment is met with some sorrow. This is the reality for many of us. Each day dawns with some pain. I finally just realized it: this itself is the story. It’s going to be a weird and hard Holy Week. It’s going to be memorable, but not because I created some perfect beautiful way to enter into the week at home. It’s going to be memorable, because we are going to walk the way of the Cross the week. We may just have to walk it in the messy dining room and missing palm or pussy willows and lack of sleep. Our sacrifice this week may have to be long hours of work at a laptop to help people keep their businesses afloat instead of long hours of standing in prayer.

And our children? They will remember it. Maybe not because mom made the perfect Holy Week craft. Maybe simply because we walked the way of the Cross together as a family. And we cried and argued and struggled, just as Christ and his Disciples and His Mother did during this week. Especially as His Mother struggled. At least that part of the story is in my heart.

I don’t really want this week to feel too good. Because it’s not good and normal to live in isolation like this. Our hearts should be crying out to be with our people, to embrace and kiss and shout together. So, our children will remember that the week was hard. But they’ll remember that we did the hard together. In our tiny little community we tried to be patient with each other, and sometimes we failed at even that, but we loved each other through it. And we patiently awaited the day when we could return to our larger community of loved ones.

And at the end? At the end, Christ will be Risen as always, no matter how deep and dark this next week gets, no matter if we lose more loved ones along the way. The earth and heavens cry out for joy on Pascha, and that will still happen.

Friends, have a Holy Week that your family will remember, even if it’s not remembered for creative beauty. Our souls will remember this year for a long, long time. For eternity, I assume.

In a muddle of both joy and sorrow, I raced to two stores last Friday afternoon. At the craft store, I made a beeline to the floral section and grabbed some wet foam. At my grocery I disinfected my hands at the door and found three dozen roses and some frozen shrimp for dinner. One more round of sanitizing at the door and back to the car.

The third Sunday of Great Lent was approaching. I love this Sunday in the Eastern Orthodox tradition – the marker that we’re over the hump of the middle of the Fast. I adore the cross covered with flowers and the theme of resurrection and the victory of the cross. Last Friday was the time to prepare for that. Our dining room table was quickly covered in rose stems and foam. No space left to eat that shrimp. Within a half hour, my parish’s beautiful wooden cross was adorned with red and white roses and ready for a weekend of veneration. But, in a surprising change from the norm, I wouldn’t be there for all the beauty.

I had hurried so I could take it to church and leave it in the refrigerator during the Friday service of the Akathist. A beautiful weekend was dawning, but neither I nor my family would be there to smell the roses. Love and obedience would keep us home. We distance ourselves from our loved ones and from our favorite places to prevent the spread of a virus. If anything has ever felt counter-intuitive and bizarre, it is this.

I expected to be very sorrowful about dropping off the adorned cross. But I wasn’t. I felt resolute and joyful.

“I’ve been preparing my whole life for this,” I told my parents and siblings.

I meant that. Almost three decades ago I plunged myself into learning the stories of those who had to keep faith and art alive in the Soviet Union when churches were closed. I’ve spent many years living with and seeking wisdom from the people who lived through that period. I’ve told their stories to my children. They have always been my heroes.

A part of my heart always resides in St. Petersburg, Russia, at Kazan Cathedral, the place where, at the age of 20, I began to truly know prayer. In those days, the cathedral had had only been recently reopened to worshipers. For decades before that, it had been the Museum of the History of Religion and Atheism, and the icons and holy items had all been removed. Only a handful of small icons stood on stands around the barely functional church when I learned to live there . . . to spend my afternoons there after university classes. There in an enormous empty space I soaked in something unspeakable and unknowable. It’s something of which I rarely speak, because it defies language.

In the decades before my heart moved into that cathedral, the relics of the great St. Seraphim of Sarov had been hidden in the attic. For years and years, his body lay in hiding, known secretly among believers in the gilded city of canals. Guards stood at the doors of the museum, and some days, women would silently bring flowers or blooming branches and leave them near the doors of the enormous building. If asked why they were leaving flowers, they would simply reply, “They are for batyushka.”

Quietly, unobtrusively they brought their gift of love to the saint. Silently they waited.

As I left my glorious roses in the kitchen at my little parish last Friday, I breathed in the strength of these women. Suddenly, I was them. I had become my heroes. I could do this. Flowers are a gift of love. I could give those roses and return home to my quiet prayer and meditation. How beautiful to become the women I’ve always loved.

It’s an imperfect metaphor. These women showed faith at risk to themselves in the Soviet Union. I have no risk as I show love for my church and my tradition. I am free to say and think anything. My gift is a small fraction of their sacrifice. But still, I drew my strength from them.

Seven days have passed since I left the flowers and the cross. Since then, new orders have been issued in my state. The doors of the church have been closed and locked. The flowers and cross have moved into the home of my priest. On Thursday, he called and told me that the roses had finally wilted. He had disassembled the arrangement.

In those seven days, our lives have drawn closer into our homes. We’ve begun to more severely distance ourselves physically from our neighbors and loved ones. As my physical circle grows tighter and smaller, I continue to think of those dear and brave women.

And this week, I’ve learned something new about them and their courage. What makes them so bold and beautiful? I always thought it was the bravery of the gift of flowers. But that’s not really it.

Their strength was courage in the face of the unknown.

With no idea when or if their present reality would end, they marched on. They continued to leave flowers for Batyushka Seraphim, knowing not if his relics would ever come out of hiding, knowing not if the museum would ever become a place of prayer again.

They feared not the unknown, and in this they survived and thrived.

As a nation, as a world, we sit this month in the tyranny of the unknown. We talk about our anxiety about having to stay home. We whine that we miss seeing friends and that it’s hard to be home working and schooling. Those things are hard, but I suspect they are not what keeps us awake at night.

“I just wish I knew what was going to happen!”

My husband exclaimed this in exasperation a couple days ago. He’s bearing the heavy burden of managing staff and a family while having no idea what tomorrow will hold. Leadership in a time of uncertainly is full of pain. Each new day dawns anew. Who will be sick tomorrow? Who won’t be sick? Who will die? Will my family get sick? If they do, will I be able to help them at all? What law will change next?

“What’s for dinner?” My sons begin with this question each day around 3 PM. It’s a liturgy I’ve been living for many years. My answer is often, “I just don’t know yet.” One of my boys hates this answer. He likes to plan and know what is coming next. At 3 PM I’m not ready yet to tell him. But knowing what is next eases his heart. So sometimes, I stop right then and make a decision. It helps him move forward.

In March 2020, the answer to everything is the same. We just don’t know yet. We don’t know what tomorrow will hold. No one does.

We turn to experts and modeling to guess how many people will get infected with the virus. We look at reports about readiness and supplies and hospital beds and attempt to make predictions. We watch statistics from other countries or states and guess what might happen in our neighborhood in the next day or week.

But we just don’t know.

Several friends have encouraged me to read more positive media and models with conservative estimates about the level of devastation. It’s better to be positive, they say. Perhaps that works for some people. I prefer more extreme estimates. I like to prepare emotionally for the worst and then find myself thankful that things didn’t get that bad. I always prefer a pleasant surprise to an unpleasant one. It’s not a bleak outlook, it’s a realistic one for me. Realism gives me some degree of peace.

But I’ve never liked the unknown. I like to plan and know what will come next. I like to consider all the possibilities and the twists and turns that might come. I like to mentally prepare for how I will respond.

That moment while we wait for the unknown? It’s so painful. It’s standing in the hall after a dissertation defense, waiting to hear the committee’s decision. It’s waiting for the acceptance or rejection letter from a university. It’s waiting minute by minute after midnight when the teenager is late getting home. What will happen next? Is he even alive? I play out the worst scenario and prepare my emotional response.

It’s a habit that has its benefits. I soaked in the stories of those women at Kazan Cathedral with flowers for a reason. I knew I would need their response some day. I plan my response to struggle intentionally. Some day I may need it.

Exactly one year ago, in a complicated turn of events, I spent a terrifying 10 minutes searching for a son whom I felt confident had been severely injured in a local shooting among teenagers. I learned a lot about my reaction to such a trauma. My response was, in fact, similar to what I’ve often planned and imagined. And I did rely on the prayer and peace that I’ve practiced my whole life. But it also felt even more helpless and horrifying than I ever imagined.

Exactly ten years ago, I awaited the arrival of my third child while a dear childhood friend prepared for her first child. From miles away, I celebrated the birth of her son. And then, while watching my body continue to grow, we walked a dark path in which she descended into the depths of respiratory failure. Mine was a pregnancy that began with a terrible case of influenza in the midst of another respiratory pandemic. As I followed her struggles via multiple daily phone calls, I hid the details from my two sons. It was more pain than I could share with them. But it was mainly the tyranny of the unknown in that period that hurt. What would each new day bring? Would she improve? And the days of the unknown played out to the worst. In the midst of it, someone was kind enough to give me a warning. It was only a guess about what would happen, but it proved true. And it gave me a bit of time to prepare.

When she died, I couldn’t travel to the funeral. I was home, growing a child who would learn to play with hers. Today, as our sons approach their tenth birthdays, another pandemic will keep me from even the option of traveling to her ten-year memorial. Her memory is on my mind every day. Every day.

Exactly this time last year, my firstborn child prepared to graduate high school, and we waited for letters to arrive with news of acceptances and scholarships. The stress of not knowing what awaited with each email left both him and me exhausted. It felt impossible to live in the not knowing. Not knowing where he would live in the coming year. Not knowing what friends he would make. Not knowing how it would feel for him to be gone. On the same day that I lived through the trauma of a neighborhood shooting, some things about that next year became clearer. The last of the expected letters arrived. Some doors were closed. Others opened. Within a few weeks, we had decisions and a path ahead. And I exhaled. We knew. We knew what the year would hold.

And here we are. March 2020 has shown me again that we didn’t know. A pandemic was nowhere in our minds as we planned out the year. My fears of adjusting to my son being so far away are irrelevant. He is now so very close all the time. We all are here in my home. Here together. Here today. Here among each other to just be.

Plans and schedules have been slashed and rewritten multiple times. But those are all just details.

It’s really the unknown that tyrannizes us all.

And here is where I begin to find my peace. There are moments that often seem uncertain. They seem unbearably unpredictable. But those moments are not rare, they are actually always. We are always in the unknown. Every minute, every hour, every day, we are living in the unknown. We really just don’t know what will happen next.

So what we have are our continual practices of peace. We continue to bring flowers. We continue to make cookies, to plant vegetables, to birth babies, to pray.

We know always that we don’t know. So we slowly make peace with not knowing.

It doesn’t make tragedy easier. The reality of a tragedy often still feels more horrifying than we expected. But tragedy also becomes part of the next step and the next breath. It is where we are, in that moment, and in the next moment.

And those women with the flowers? Most of them did see Batyushka Seraphim again. Because the Soviet Union fell. And the museum closed. And someone who knew the secret brought out St. Seraphim’s body. And the cathedral reopened for prayer.

Some of those women didn’t live to see it. But I did. And I will continue to draw my strength from them.

They walked boldly each day in the unknown. And I will do the same.

It’s March 17. It’s a day when most of the United States has big parties to celebrate St. Patrick of Ireland. Green clothing, green rivers, shamrocks, beer, soda bread . . . it’s a day to do all the Irish things.

It’s March 17. For much of the Orthodox Christian world, it’s a day to celebrate St. Alexis the Man of God. That’s who we celebrate today in my family. He’s a saint near and dear to us, since before my husband and I were married. He’s the patron saint of our firstborn son. And he’s known for doing the crazy thing.

It’s March 17, 2020. No one in the United States is having big parties for St. Patrick. No one is having parades. People are sheltering in place in their homes. Big parties and parades might well be the death of us all. A virus has brought us to our knees as a society. We wait in semi-solitude and silence.

It’s March 17, 2020. We’ll celebrate St. Alexis at my house. We’ll have yummy food and drink. We’ll sing and pray and laugh. We’ll probably tell a few stories. We’ll rejoice in doing the crazy thing as we always do this day. But this year, everyone is doing the crazy thing with us.

When I say St. Alexis is known for doing the crazy thing, I’m not exaggerating. I’m not speaking in metaphors. I’ll give you the Cliff’s Notes. On the night of his wedding, Alexis left his new wife with wealth to sustain her safely in the home of his parents and fled. He fled to seek out absolute ascetic humility of the Christian life. He fled to embrace a life of extreme poverty, one that eventually led him to live in anonymity as a beggar at the gates of his childhood home. There’s more to the story and who he became, but really, he just became a holy beggar. I’ll leave it at that for now. He did the unfathomable and crazy thing.

I know. I know. It’s sounds bizarre. I’m not going to mince words. It seems like lunacy. It just does. And I know. I know. Why would a saint leave his wife? It’s a confusing tale in some ways. I won’t claim to always understand it. I’m glad my husband didn’t choose this path.

But I love this saint. From the depths of my soul I love him. His humility and continued love for those who seek his help is also unfathomable. There are many reasons we entrusted our firstborn son to his care. I won’t share them all publicly. But since his birth, I’ve always told my son one thing. “St Alexis reminds us continually that sometimes the right thing is the crazy thing. If you have to do the crazy thing, so be it. I will always love you. Sometimes our path to goodness seems crazy to other people.”

My most recent post on this blog was from Thanksgiving. It was about how much I love a home packed with people and food. Gatherings of people are my love language. I’m an extrovert to the core. Give me a group of people to be with, to love, to embrace, to kiss, to share food with, to get dirty with. I’m not worried about cleanliness or neatness or quietude. Just give me a room full of people. And noise. This is how I love.

This week, this month, the world asks us to do the opposite. No gatherings of people. No churches filled with worshipers. No classrooms of eager learners. And no hugs or kisses. No physical touch. Unfathomably hard. Unfathomably.

I had to sit in a room with a few close friends Monday night and not touch a single one. We sat in sadness and fear about what is coming next. It’s a time when we would normally hug, exchange kisses, pat each other on the shoulders, hold hands. And we had to look at each other from six feet away and just talk. That’s it. We had to prepare for the reality that we can’t even gather this way again for quite some time. Phone calls and emails will be our contact. Crazy. Just crazy.

And, yet, today, this crazy is the good thing. This is the way we are called to love this day and this month. This is how we are called to goodness and truth and beauty. We must spare each other with our distance.

It is so painful. But it is also beautiful.

It’s absolutely crazy. And it’s also right and good today.

Thank you, St. Alexis, for preparing us for this. Today, we’ll rejoice that we can to do the crazy thing. We were made to thrive in this day.

I love a beautiful table filled with rich, delicious food in a cozy home on a special day. I love almost everything about it – the extra labor of cooking from scratch, pulling out the good china and silverware, filling a vase with flowers, coordinating the colors, deciding who will have to sit in the folding chair, forgetting to iron the cloth napkins, setting out wine glasses even for the kids, searching for extra trivets because there are so many hot dishes, the mad scramble to grab that one dish that was almost forgotten, pushing some papers and other junk into the hallway or bedroom to make the crowded dining room a bit more roomy and neat, and the beloved irony of sitting down to a gorgeous meal while wearing jeans and sweatshirts.

On a holiday like Thanksgiving, I prefer to load the table with the bounty than to set up a buffet.  Buffets send people along to fill their plates individually, in an orderly series of polite turn-taking. But when the table is packed with hot dishes, arms reach around each other, and we talk. A nine-year-old takes plates from others and serves up the mashed potatoes because the dish is closest to him and it is too hot to pass. We bicker half-heartedly about which direction to pass the gravy. Someone gets irritable because the hot rolls never made it to his end of the table. One brother corrects another about not taking any mushrooms. Someone gets an elbow to the nose. We laugh, and we share. We knock each other around in the process of filling our bellies with warmth.

I love the frenzy of connection. The chaos and the noise fill me with joy. If you want to make me happy, pack my dining room with hungry chattering people and a pretty tablecloth.

This loudness is also how I like to practice thanksgiving – by actually giving thanks.

At a recent retreat led by author Dr. Nicole Roccas, I was intrigued by her juxtaposition of the notions gratitude versus giving thanks. She pointed out something that I’ve been pondering myself for several years, but have yet to put into written words until now. It amuses me that I haven’t sat down to write about it, because it intimately connects to my own academic research background. Roccas mentioned that she prefers to focus on giving thanks rather than simple gratitude, because giving thanks actually involves a specific action – offering thanksgiving – as opposed to simply being grateful. I think her main focus was that thanksgiving encourages us to offer our thanks to God, while gratitude may remove notions of God from the discussion. But her words touched me more broadly about ideas I’ve quite literally pondered and studied for years.

Gratitude is an internal process. It’s one that we can do alone in our own little private closet. I can feel grateful for things all day and never interact with anyone else.

Giving thanks is different. It involves someone else. It is offering our thanks to another.

Had I written about it in my dissertation, I would have said that giving thanks is an agentive construction – it implies agency. Even if you don’t love linguistics like I do, even if you haven’t taken years to write about minute details of verbal structures in multiple languages, please stay with me here. As much as people have teased me about my eccentricity of loving nuances of meaning, as often as people have furrowed their brows when I have described my research interests, it is actually these details that matter to me deeply when I endeavor to live a life of beauty.

‘To give’ and ‘to offer’ are transitive verbs with indirect objects. They involve one person or thing acting upon another. When I give thanks, I am an agent giving something, and, what’s more, I give it to someone else. I have agency because my act is deliberate. Ideally it affects another person, but even if the message is not received, my act was still intentional. And it was life-giving for me.

This is where the chaos and the loudness show up. Gratitude is quiet and contemplative. It has a place in shaping our internal worldview.

But thanksgiving – the act of giving thanks – has power even beyond ourselves because it connects us with others. In the agency of giving thanks, I affect those around me. Thanksgiving builds relationships.

Gratitude is walking through a buffet line in an orderly fashion, filling our plates with goodness. It nourishes us, but it doesn’t connect us.

Giving thanks is noisy and chaotic and often messy and awkward. Some days it even involves a little argument or a glass of wine spilled all over the table. But it connects us to each other, helping us to know each other’s thoughts and loves, and it even sometimes hurts. Most days it feels worth it, but other days it is forced. Usually thanks is happily received, but sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes the message does not even get through. And, yet, the effort and the bit of crazy that this practice creates? It’s worth it. Desire for relationship is at the core of each our hearts.

In the spirit of that sumptuous feast of beauty and chaos, I offer here another poem – one of active giving of thanks. If you are reading and find yourself below, I’m glad the message got through. Truly, thank You to each of you.

Thank you, Father D, for teaching me that, always, friend and foe, we must eat together.

Thank you, sons, for willingness to help in the kitchen, and for making disgusting mistakes. And thank you for laughing with me.

Thank you, our parents and grandparents, for making long drives to be with us. It’s a silly small thing in the whole context, but, thank you still. Miles on a bumpy Midwest highway don’t go unnoticed.

Thank you, owners of a nursery who grow hothouse roses in November.

Thank you, crafty developer who created WhatsApp so I can talk freely with my grown baby across oceans. Did you know your app is a true miracle?

Thank you, Jesmyn Ward and Evgeniy Vodolazkin, for speaking to my soul and redeeming the power of fiction.

Thank you, Sal Khan. You must know why.

Thank you, small group of friends of 26 years, who wait always on a group text, ever ready with a compassionate and sincere word. And thank you for keeping me grounded and silly and sane.

Thank you, innovator at C&H who thought to put brown sugar in a plastic ziplock bag.

Thank you, some genius out there who first thought to soak almonds and make milk from them.

Thank you, my friends, who question and doubt and struggle, and who share those things openly with me. You know who you are, and I love you right through pain and beyond.

Thank you, my husband, for doing my laundry. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Want to join thing new poetry challenge and practice the agency of giving thanks? Share yours with me, please!

Poetry is a big part of my parenting plan.

We aren’t good about cleaning the bathroom, and we can’t keep matched socks in the drawers at all. But we do read and write poetry.

We all have goals for our kids right? Hopefully those goals fall more in the category of lofty overarching aspirations like love your neighbor or love God or live with purpose than in specifics like becoming an Olympic gymnast or a Nobel Prize Winner in Physics. I generally consider all of mine to fall in the lofty group, but there have to be some tools along the way. If you were to ask my kids, they all know that poetry is a big part of the toolbox. There are just a few constants along the way around here and reading poetry aloud together is one of them. Usually it goes along with tea or hot chocolate or hot cider and something sweet. Sometimes we go a month or two without it, but we always come back to it.

Why do we do this? Mostly just love. I love poetry, and I love spending my time reading it. My time is minimal, so this whole thing is unabashedly self-serving. I’m serious about multi-tasking. But, I’m also hoping they learn to love it – the words, the rhythm, the metaphor, the music, and the brevity. I’m raising sons, and I’d like to send men out into the world who love poetry, or at least who know a bit of poetry.

Does it work? Usually. Pretty much. So far, some enjoy it more than others. One likes to tell me, “I just don’t enjoy poems, Mom.” But he still has some favorites, and he still quotes them. Most of the others really do enjoy it a lot, and even ask me to read it to them.

Which poets? I’m not picky. It’s about what you learn to love, what sounds nice to your ear, what you feel like reading again, what makes you sigh or laugh, what makes you want to paint or write. They all remember how I cried the day Maya Angelou died. Big fat tears of sorrow. (I also cried on the day of Maurice Sendak’s death, but he’s a poet for me.) Longfellow to Silverstein to Stevenson to cummings to Sanchez to Akhmatova to Nye. Anything goes.

Rereading the same poems? Absolutely! Some as often as once a week.

Memorizing? Sometimes, but only when it’s something we find we love. Those that we reread often get naturally memorized anyway. The others we sing through in the moment and we move on to the next. It’s about the joy of discovery with each poem. It’s about the musical performance of that moment.

Writing our own? Yes, please. If you get an annual Christmas card from me, you know I make someone here write one at least once a year. But it happens more often than that. Sometimes it’s decidedly forced, sometimes they whine and slump to the ground before putting pen to paper, but they tend to be quite happy with the results after muscling through my demands.

Editing? Only rarely. We write for joy. We read our compositions aloud together, I save them, and we move on. Poetry is in the moment. I like to think about how Emily Dickinson’s poems were found everywhere after her death – on little scraps of paper in drawers and stuffed between pages. Writing a poem is all in that quick moment – a thought, an image, an emotion saved momentarily in verse.

A few days ago, I shared a poem I wrote almost four years ago, inspired by an English translation of a poem written by one of my beloved muses, Wisława Szymborska. I mentioned that I have a practice of rewriting this poem every few years and having my children do the same. It’s a way to mark a moment in time for each of us – a snapshot of our minds and hearts on a given day. What could be better, really? I honestly love these more than any photo portrait.

We did that this week. Today I’m sharing the work of my youngest, my seven year old. I’m still working on the others to consent sharing their work. It’s good stuff. We’ll see how persuasive I can be. This one is presented in its first draft original format, because seven-year-old poets make beautiful art. I think Sonia Sanchez would approve.

Possibilities

I prefer liveing to dyeing
I prefer pizza to tomatos
I prefer video games
I prefer Coke
I prefer Painting to reading
I prefer tv
I prefer ellie to Grass
I prefer opening Gifts
I prefer Christmas
I prefer plaYing
I prefer kissing mom to kissing nicky
I prefer ellie
I prefer Soda
I prefer Games
I prefer mommy
-B, age 7, November 2019

Want to join this? My challenge is still on! Write your own! Several of my dear friends and family have already joined in. Read my original challenge here and then read others: Elizabeth, Thea, and Susan. If you write one, share it with me, please.

For Wisława

I prefer red shoes.
I prefer keeping old friends.
I prefer tea with honey.
I prefer not holding a grudge.
I prefer long conversations.
I prefer telling it like it is.
I prefer certain kinds of white lies.
I prefer gold leaf.
I prefer the ocean, even on a cloudy day.
I prefer irises to roses.
I prefer Rublev to Rembrandt.
I prefer Malevich to Bierstadt.
I prefer spirited boys.
I prefer poems in the original language.
I prefer telephone calls.
I prefer being known by the manager and waitress.
I prefer a messy kitchen to an empty one.
I prefer a bit of noise.
I prefer real dish towels.
I prefer pondering things in my heart.
I prefer cowboy boots.
I prefer wooden churches to stone cathedrals.
I prefer cellos to pianos.
I prefer Diaghilev to Petipa.
I prefer Welty to Austen.
I prefer Springtime in the South.
I prefer watching the prairie burn in April.
I prefer cheese grits.
I prefer feeling like an outsider.
I prefer tears of all kinds.
I prefer giving it a try.
I prefer a bit of dissension.
I prefer the memory of the battle to the moment of the victory.
I prefer making cinnamon rolls from scratch.
I prefer worries for an infant to worries for a teenager.
I prefer digging in the dirt.
I prefer wine to beer.
I prefer having struggled.
I prefer voices on an old cassette tape.
I prefer knowing some heroes.
I prefer Grandmother’s letters in cursive.
I prefer chalkboards.
I prefer hardbound books with gold inlaid spines.
I prefer seeing my kids surpass me.
I prefer believing that the something beyond can be found here today.

– January 2016

A note: I prefer poetry to prose. And, yet, I know prose is often poetry. Posting some of my past poetry here over the next few months. This one is inspired by one of my favorite poets, Nobel Laureate Wisława Szymborska, and modeled after her beautiful poem “Możliwości,” often translated into English as “Possibilities.” And, yes, I prefer it in the original Polish. This poem I return to over and over, rewriting my own every few years. My children also write their own versions every few years. 2016 is my most recent, so look for a new one soon. Want to write your own? Share it with me, please!

If you are a mom of sons, you may recognize this story. It’s one that tends to repeat itself, at least in my life. In fact, it has repeated itself three times in the last two weeks for me – in three unconnected settings, with two different sons.

Your son is out playing with a group of kids. Everything seems fine. Then suddenly, a quiet girl appears at your side. She’s a bit timid, but also confident. It always starts like this.

“I don’t want to be a tattle, but . . . “

This is when your stomach begins to knot. You want to turn and say, “Well, then don’t tattle.” But she’s not your kid, and you know you should stop and listen patiently. That is the noble thing to do when you’re a mom who is responsible for a little boy.

So that’s what you do. You take a deep breath.

“OK. What is the problem? Does it involve one of my sons?”

“Yes, it does. You see . . . “

This is when you hear of the serious transgression that has just occurred. You listen carefully. You live with this little boy (and a few others, too), so this sin doesn’t seem all that sinful to you. No one was hurt. There is no blood. There was no foul language. You try to keep listening while your inner eyes are rolling. Ok. Maybe it is a bit serious.  I mean, throwing things outside can be dangerous. Heck, you’ve had sons break both house and car windows when throwing things. Yes, you remind yourself, throwing things is dangerous. And potty humor? Is it really that big of a deal? Oh, wait. Maybe that one crossed the line. He shouldn’t have said that. Ok, yeah. Maybe he was wrong.

You turn it over in your head. You try to push aside your frustration with the little girl who is batting her sweet eyelashes while she lays out for you the serious flaws in the child you so adore. You take another deep breath. You thank her for the information and promise to deal with it. You set out to find the little sinner, wishing you didn’t have to do it.

You speak to him. Maybe it takes a bit of prodding, but he admits to the transgression. You explain why it was wrong. You encourage him not to do it again. It’s just a regular parenting moment. That’s it. You’ve managed to cross yet another little threshold. You send him off to play again, and you retreat.

But this is not the end. A few minutes later, another girl comes to tell you about it. You smile and reassure her that you’ve already dealt with it. She can let it go. But then you notice a group of girls whispering about it in the corner. You suddenly notice the talk moving all around you. Now a parent comes to talk to you about it. The thing the parent mentions? It has somehow become much bigger and more significant than the original story. It’s more than the first accusation, and it’s more than your son admitted to doing.

You know that game called telephone? The one where you line up and whisper a phrase in each person’s ear down the line? And it’s completely different by the end of the line? This is happening all around you, among all these little girls and a parent or two. And it’s all about your son – that child you always have and always will adore. The knots in your stomach are much larger now.

Your son? He’s out playing again happily, not even noticing. He’s content. Oblivious is a good word. At least that’s the case until the game of telephone makes it back to him. By that time, he’s totally confused. In fact, he’s pretty angry. And, really, so are you. But you are also heartbroken. How did that one little bad choice turn into shunning and all this mean chatter? And why is no one outraged at the chatter itself?

Probably not a single person set out to be malicious or wrong. But here we are in all this mud. It’s like that dreaded quicksand of every cartoon and adventure movie of the 1980s. There may be no way out other than to be very still and quiet. And we still might all sink.

Without a doubt, this is my least favorite part of being a parent. It’s the worst.

But this? Right here on the playground or the library or the church yard around age 8 or 6 or even 4? This is where these kinds of misunderstandings begin. And they play out right through high school and into marriage.

I hate it because I truly know that little girl. I know her because I’ve been her. I know exactly how she feels, how ridiculous that little boy seems to her, how badly she wants things to be right and proper all the time. And if I’m honest? I haven’t just been her. Far too often I am still her.

This is it. The shock at someone else’s bad deed, the deep desire to share that bad deed with others, the deep need to tell on someone, the inability to believe that another person is capable of change. And the way that first telling always grows and changes as it moves through a group.

And in the end? In the end someone is out there confused about why no one wants to hang out with him anymore. And his closest people? Well, their patience is pretty thin as well.

Without fail, every single day with my kids helps me to reevaluate my own habits and and my tongue and my attitudes.

There are some big things out there. But, in reality, so many of the big things are just little things that we thought about or talked about far too much.