A season of Sanctuary

2 a.m.

Eyes wide open. 

Trying not to blink too long. 

When my eyes close too long I see his little body slowly losing its warmth in that hospital room. 

In my heart I cry out, "God please take this!" 

In my mind I scream, "Sanctuary! God please sanctuary!" 

I think of Mamas in my group who had to identify their little ones

and my heart breaks under the strain.

God give them sanctuary somewhere inside.

I have always loved the idea of a sanctuary. People crowding into a holy place crying, "Sanctuary! Sanctuary!" And being relieved of the terror of physical violence. But if there is one thing death has taught me it is that there is no physically safe place. Each of us is more fragile than we know. Physically. Spiritually.
Refugees cross oceans, blacks and whites change neighborhoods and schools, cops change jobs, military personnel seek treatment. People die in churches, malls, schools...Truly there is no safe place. My body can't find sanctuary.

Yesterday well before my two a.m. episode I heard/watched a song that for some reason brought to mind seeking a spiritual sanctuary. I have come so close to spiritually breaking and at times have held on only with Simon Peter's question "Lord unto whom would I go?" He is the only one with the words of life. And so I stay and I hold on and now understanding how spiritually fragile we all are I pray to be led to a place where we'll be (spiritually) safe.

May you find the only sanctuary that there is in this world.

I hope you take your family there and your neighbors.

This season is truly a safe place for my soul.

God give us faith so we'll be safe.

Here's the link and some of the lyrics:
The Prayer with David Archuleta and Nathan Pacheco

I pray you'll be our eyes
and watch us where we go
and help us to be wise
In times when we don't know
Let this be our prayer
when we lose our way
Lead us to a place
guide us with your Grace
to a place where we'll be safe

I pray we'll find your light
and hold it in our hearts
When stars go out each night
Let this be our prayer
When shadows fill our day
Lead us to a place
guide us with your Grace
Give us faith so we'll be safe

Stay Autumn Stay

Stay Autumn stay

Days full of chemo,

Nights full of linen changes.

We won't put up a twinkling tree

or cook a huge feast.

We won't let the leaves

stop falling.

Ever.

Spring is too new,

Winter too old.

The bluest sky is teaching us of beauty profound,

When life begins to fade

and yet is at its brightest.

Spring we take for granted

So much life,

too much for us to understand

too great to grasp.

Winter burns until we are broken.

Summer leaps like a child that has known only good.

But when Fall comes no one has to remind us to give thanks.

Fall is life finally understood.

So stay Autumn stay

God teach me how to pray

Days full of grief

Nights full of prayers

Give me back yards full of leaves

and arms full of him

and I will never ask for sleigh bells

or daffodils

I will wait for nothing

I will want for nothing

Stay Autumn stay

School days, school nights

Week three and I want to quit. 3 out of 5 mornings this week. What am I gaining? Should I send him to school this morning knowing he has been up since 2 again? I've taken him everyday this week but my resolve is faltering. I lay on the floor watching the minutes tick by listening to his anxious breathing and advising him to visualize good times and fun places. I glance over at my 3 year old in his toddler bed, the bed Ben painted with pink sparkly nail polish approximately 4 days after leaving the hospital on hospice. He is sleeping peacefully with the same blanket he had  the night I came in at around 2 a.m from the hospital and picked up his 2 year old self and sat down on the floor and cried. And rocked. And cried some more. Same curls, same beautiful brown skin, now though he sleeps with Ben's doggie that he has claimed as his own. He's grown a couple of inches in height since then and a couple of feet  in attitude. He is beautiful. He is scarred but not broken. I think of mental hospitals. I think of the neuro-whatchamacallit that we have an appointment with soon, but not soon enough. I anticipate my alarm going off in the next room. I try to cry quietly just in case there is any chance of my oldest falling into sleep. Scenes from the movie Beautiful Mind and Shine scare me and I wish I had never seen them. I glance at my 7 year old tossing and struggling not to obsess about his breathing. He is beautiful and he is broken and trying to hold his little 7 year old pieces together with all his 7 year old might. How long, oh Lord, how long?

Memoirs of a Boat Rocker

Let's pretend you and your best friend have been hired at the same place...I know way to go HR you just lowered your company's productivity by 95% but just go with it for a minute. You are not actually in the same area but at least, squee!, there is lunch to look forward to! You work all morning and then finally both hit the lunchroom at the SAME time! I know. I know. You start gabbing away about your morning, your kids, something you pinned recently, etc. then out of the blue someone approaches you and tells you your time to talk is over. Now you may have been pretty quiet all morning but then you had some pretty challenging, stimulating work to do. It doesn't take much effort or many brain cells to chew your sandwich. So you sit. In silence. Next to your best friend.

Does this sound familiar? Probably not unless you are one of the millions of American school kids who are required to spend all or a portion of their lunch time in silence. I currently work in a cafeteria (for the second time) in a public school in the good old U.S. and while the cafeteria I work in is one of the best I have seen it still has room for improvement! Below are three suggestions I have for lunchrooms across America. With just a little thought and planning I believe that we (parents, administrators, and aides) can turn lunch time into one of the best parts of the day for the kids and for the adults!

1) Why do the kids need to be quiet? Is lunchtime a break or not? These are the first questions administrators and aides need to ask themselves. What I come up with is a) So they can hear instructions b) so that others can get their lunches in a timely and efficient manner. This means that talk can be permitted at a low rumble 80%-95% of the time. Be sure to come up with your own reasons and address them appropriately without over doing it. Try to figure out how you can make it a break for them and still accomplish what you need to. Write out a schedule of times when they would need to be quiet and times they can talk and then clearly communicate it to the kids.

2) Set a time limit on Quiet time. One of the most aggravating things is when kids start out quiet and then slowly the talking builds to a roar. Adults are screaming,"It is still QUIET TIME!!!" "She just told you to be quiet! Why is your mouth open?" etc. Adults are frustrated, kids are nervous or out of control (depending on their personality type), there are literally so many kids talking it is impossible to discipline them all. I have found a good gauge of whether or not what you are asking is attainable is whether or not the obeyers can accomplish it. If even the "good" kids are talking you are asking too much. While you might have a definite time in mind for silence the kids have no idea how long they will be expected to be quiet which makes it really difficult for them to restrain themselves.
Here's an example of one way that setting a time limit can help.
Adult: Okay 1st graders, here come the kindergartners! That is our signal to be quiet for 5 minutes (while they get their food so that the lunch line staff can hear them). You may want to use a timer or tell them where the hands on the clock will be when quiet time is over.

3) Last but not least try silent signals.
-When I was the childrens' music director for our congregation someone had come up with something called the Primary 5. When the kids were getting too boisterous all I had to do was raise my hand. They would respond by raising their hands and closing their mouths. It often rippled across the room as first the attentive children and then the less attentive children and finally the rabble rousers :) noticed. If they didn't hear or see me asking for quiet they quickly saw their friends asking for it. We often practiced how quickly we could get the room completely silent. They loved trying to get faster and faster. I would put my hand at my side like it was in a holster and they would pretend to talk and then I would raise my hand as fast as I could.
-Another silent signal is laminated circles in red or green. As you walk around during your (SHORT) quiet time you drop a green on tables that are doing great at being quiet and a red on tables that aren't. The table needs to try to get there light to green by the end of the quiet time or there are consequences (just for those who are talking not for the whole table. One effective consequence is getting dismissed first if your table was the quietest or most obedient. Let tables go to recess starting with the quietest and see how quiet that room gets!)
-Google Cafeteria management or Lunchroom Management- Lots of schools have shared their great ideas and solutions to the problems you are having!


One last thing, if your staff does not like children or does not have the nerves to handle them talking you have two options- ask them to seek other employment or spend some time educating them on developmentally appropriate expectations for the age group they are working with. This education should extend to security guards, lunch line staff, lunch aides, basically anyone who comes in contact with the kids. Our expectations needed to be tempered with understanding or we are just kicking against the pricks and raising our blood pressures (and making kids miserable) for no reason!

Please share this post, print it and give to your principal or lunch staff, email it to other parents and friends! Together we can better U.S. schools as long as we are all willing to do our parts instead of just hating it but not doing anything about it. Thanks for the read!!

No safe place

My should have started kindergarten yesterday-er and my second grader.

The last two days, which have been the first two days of 2nd grade for my oldest have been Hell plain and simple. He has always struggled with anxiety. He has always wanted to be perfect.
Over and over again people tell me about their little worrier trying to reassure me that all kids go through this. The doctor thinks a therapist and maybe medicine will help. Is there pill for paradise lost? Can I have a dose, too?
I watch him writhe in his chair at lunch. 
More than anything I wish I could lift the burden that reality is that slumps his shoulders and droops the corners of his mouth. Worry is etched in his every angle and I try not to think of people, adults who have crumbled under less.
We truly take for granted the foundation that security gives us. The profound ignorance of our mortality becoming the basis of our ease. An ease my 7 year old can no longer enjoy. 
When Ben died his perfectionist characteristics obsessed over what the cause was. "Did Ben die because he wouldn't take his medicine to make him better?" "Did Ben die because he didn't wash his hands?" Round and round his mind went clinging to an idea and then rejecting it and then clinging to it again. Desperately searching for a way to keep himself and his family safe. 
That was last year. 
Now here we are. 
Our first time back at school since Ben's death and it is bringing us to our knees. 
Raised eyebrows every time I walk into the office. I know what they're thinking. I worked in school for years. I am amazed now at how judgmental I was then as I watch them smirk as I sign in and put on another visitor badge.  
He asked me to come have lunch with him again today. 
I'd give him Hope if I could. 
Instead I give him a juice box just like I used to back when that was enough. He smiles and relaxes for a second. Then he returns to his agitated stance. His eyes dart everywhere, frenzied. He talks to no one. Stands. Sits. Stands. Sits. Over and over. I sit down and strike up a conversation with the 2nd grader next to me about sharks. He slowly eats a few bites. Better than yesterday. Yesterday he ate half a cracker and stood up the whole time. Yesterday was worse. Soon the whole table is talking, "My cousin's dad wears make up!" "My brother is going to skip a grade." "I went to the beach and there were sharks!" "I saw on TV that sharks are attacking lots of people right now." My son stops darting his eyes around long enough to comment to me how the large majority of sharks are not that dangerous. Victory in my book! We are headed in the right direction! He may not have spoken to someone else but he spoke in their presence. My son is not shy, he is anxious. He is afraid to say the wrong thing or do the wrong thing.
I wish I could lie to him. 
I wish life wasn't so hard at 7. 
Mine wasn't. 
He came home more upbeat than yesterday but tonight cried himself to sleep again. Isn't there some better way to fix a broken heart? If only there was a corner of the world or of our hearts that didn't remind us that we are empty. If only it wasn't such a long way home. 
He wants Heaven. 
I will bring him a juice box instead everyday until the World ends and becomes a safe place for him again. Its the least I can do since I failed so much sooner than most at keeping his world safe and his heart whole. Let the office staff think what they will. I will be his 20 minute oasis that helps him make it to the end of the day. I am his mama. And a mama is shelter when there is no safe place and even when her own heart can't take much more. And I can't take much more.

Sunrise

“You’re sleeping the day away,” my great grand mother proclaimed as she flipped the light switch on. At 4:30 a.m., possibly the darkest shade of the day, there is no natural  light to warm your face awake. I don’t know where I learned to never argue with my great grandmother as I don’t remember ever trying. When we spent the weekend at Gramony's —Gram for grandma and Ony for Wyonia, her first name-- the days started at dark thirty. Seated at the table as my Gramony pulled hot biscuits out of the oven, I watched the gray out the screen door turn the many hues of dawn that I never saw in the city. I stifled a yawn. The silence was overwhelming and yet comfortable. My Gramony did not feel the need to fill the silence with anything. No lectures, no pep talks, no chastisement, no morning noise which is just how I like my mornings especially at 4:30.

Silent.

It is 5:29 a.m. and the phone is ringing thank the Lord! It is the hospice company calling us back. My four year old son, Ben’s pain meds are not working. He is twisting and writhing in pain. He can’t even lay down. We moved his little bed into our room next to my side of the bed last night. I set an alarm and got up every eleven minutes to push the button to deliver more meds. I glove up and sterilize to push Benadryl and Zofran, one every six and one every 2-4 hours. It didn’t work. We lasted at home less than 12 hours. Part of me wishes we had just stayed at the hospital. But he so wanted to be home. “Mama!” he screams. “Mama, hold me!” he shrieks, stretching out his thin arms for me. For some reason, he still believes after 8 months of battling this disease that I can ease the pain of leukemia somehow. 

I want to tell you something about motherhood. I wrote this for that very purpose. But now I don’t know what to say because the pain is so deep and so wide and so gray that it has consumed my words. It has consumed my stars. I am not a sunrise person. Sunrise had never failed to move me yet when I look up at a cloudless night sky-- that rush of fear mingled with wonder makes me believe like nothing else can. I have sat in a glider nursing a baby through many a sunrise. Some I have seen through tears of frustration or sleep deprived delirium, each ray asking me if today I will let the sun in. Into myself, into my heart, where babies really grow.

And then my little boy died and the gray stayed. I keep waiting for the pinks, the purples, the blues and eventual whites and yellows and they don’t come. I scoff at his belief that I could ease his pain and yet I wish for Gramony’s clothes on the clothesline whipping in the breeze to ease mine. I had a great desire to share my story but each time I tried I couldn’t find the words until I started at 4:30 in the morning.  Born in 1910 in a racist world my great grandmother had grit I could only dream of. As the nurses help us wash and dress my little boy’s body we put his jammies on him and a clean pull up. They tie a tag to his toe and zip him up to his neck in a bag, as we wrap him in a blanket and my husband carries him through the halls of the hospital and to the back of the waiting hearse the silence is overwhelming. We gather our things and wander out to the hospital parking lot our hearts confused about why we are leaving our boy behind. The stars are bright and bitter and they don’t tell my soul a thing. Sunrise comes and I am awake but if it speaks I don’t hear it.

I was twenty when my Gramony died. I was away at college when my Mama called. I went out to the steps of my best friend’s house and looked up at the stars. And I sang.

I was standing

by my window

on a cold and cloudy day

when I saw that hearse come a rollin

oh to carry my mother away

will the circle

be unbroken

by and by Lord by and by

There’s a better home awaiting

in the sky Lord in the sky

And I knew that 1500 miles away my Mama was singing it too. I have learned from trying to tell my story and not being able to until I started at sunrise that motherhood doesn’t start with childbirth and doesn’t end with the death of a child. Maybe the sun doesn’t rise and set on the faith of our fathers but on the grit of our mothers. Maybe the sun will rise someday again and will soften the edges of everything cruel in life. If so I don’t want to be found sleeping the day away.

Maybe someday I will again find the strength to rock a new baby at sunrise. Not soon. As I recently told a friend who understands, I don’t trust God enough to have another baby. But somewhere deep, in the part of me that decides who I want to become I find that the sunrise entices me now. The light that brings understanding and perspective. The warmth that turns a child into a mother and then back into a child again. Somewhere deep and still hidden in me is the grit that scrubbed white womens floors and cooked their food. That  lived through two world wars, the death of her eight year old, the hatred and oppression of her country, and still put on her wig and hat and walked to church every Sunday.  A woman who saw more than 34,000 sunrises. 34,000!  And she chose to see them all. Or at least as many of them as she could. Maybe she knew something that I haven’t learned yet. I guess I’ll start at sunrise.

Listen to Your Mother video of reading: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Xg2daEvENA&feature=youtube_gdata_player

I'm still looking up

One of the hardest parts (for me) of child loss is truly understanding the mortality of my children. I understand, like no one can who has has not lost a child, that sometimes kids die. I understand that we are not owed an explanation or a warning. I understand that some things are preventable and somethings are not. I understand that everything-- Everything can change in an instant. And you know what? I don't want to understand. I don't want my kid to know that sometimes God helps people find their lost shoe or their lost keys and sometimes He lets their little brother die. But my kid knows. And I know. And that's life. We want to think that life is what you make of it but sometimes its not. Sometimes it just is. Sometimes no matter how you slice them those lemons just won't give you a single drop of lemonade. Sometimes there is no light. The reality of all this can knock me down with hopelessness and doubt and I will admit sometimes I am laying on the ground hurting too bad to do anything but suck air and cry. But I promise myself and I promise my kids I. Will. Not. Quit. There is too much at stake. It is time we taught our kids to never give up on their spirits as much as we tell them to never give up on their dreams! You want to know what is real? You get down on your knees and you make God show you! I may be broken but I will not bend. God-- I am standing here and I' staying here. I will wait. I will pray. I will search the scriptures and I will believe. I refuse to let darkness win. There will be a light. #Imstilllookingup

A project I just finished painting