When a Sad Ending is an Unexpected Beginning

Loss, when it descends upon you, it's difficult to believe that it is anything other than an end; the sad last line of the story you were writing for yourself. With time and perspective you often find that the loss was not an end but rather a beginning for a new and different story. You, with all your wild imaginings, never thought to start with the sad part first. Then you remember that you were never meant to build a house in the darkness...you only needed to stay there long enough to heal the broken parts of you that lay just beyond the doctor's reach. You were meant for the sun so you pack a few things and set out to find it once again. Stepping out of the shadows for the first time your face turns upward, quite on its own, to seek out the sun's warm kiss. This is your home now. Go on and finish your story...

I wrote the words below one night after checking on my sleeping daughter. Her face, so innocent, so sweet, so different from mine and yet so similar stopped me in my tracks. I realized that she was here because of a series of events (on both sides of the story) that were so heartbreaking I'd never been brave enough to write about them. And yet, in that moment with her, I remembered nothing of the brokenness. I could only recall the love of her, like it was the only thing I had ever known. I realized then that the saddest endings sometimes begin the most beautiful stories.

One day you find yourself on a hospital gurney. The nurses look at you with sympathy-filled eyes. They touch your arm gently and smile. Maybe they've been here too. Maybe you're the third one this week. Either way, they know there is nothing that they can say to make it right. You lie there knowing that when you wake up there will be a piece of you missing. A piece that will never grow back. A hollow that will never be filled. You know that there is nothing that anyone will be able to say to take away this pain...this ache. Not your mother. Not your father. Not anyone. Because no one knows the secrets that you told that tiny, shapeless form. No one heard the prayers lifted for its safety. No one knows the promises you whispered in the night. No one but you knows precisely how life will never be the same again.

And then many years later you lean down to kiss the sweet, sleeping face of your child. The one whose almond eyes, brown skin, and jet black hair tells everyone that she is not of you. You smile as you think about her giggles, her smile, and her tender heart. Her eyes, hair, and skin are not yours. Her eye rolls, wicked sense of humor, and her laughter are most certainly yours. And anyone who cares to look beyond the surface knows that she couldn't be anyone's child but yours.

You think about that time...the tiny being...and wonder if it was ever a being at all. Perhaps it was, instead, an idea...an awakening. Perhaps it was a harbinger. Maybe there was no loss at all. Maybe it was the first sign to point you in the direction of the child who was waiting for you.

You smile because you can no longer feel the pain. You remember the day. You remember the words but there is no pain. There is only peace and love and the thankfulness that exists when you realize that you never wanted life to be the same anyway.

My Daughter Walked Out. Were you Listening?

Photo Credit: Jack Zellweger (mlive.com)

My daughter walked out yesterday. She walked out of class, down the hallway, and onto the playground. And she stood there for 17 minutes; one minute for each child who was gunned down in a classroom or a hallway in Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. I’ve read a lot of derogatory remarks directed toward the thousands of children who left their classrooms. They were mostly made by adults; adults who sit with silent resignation each time word of a new mass shooting screams at us from a screen. We, the adults, sworn protectors of our children have shrugged our shoulders for years, have cried along with grieving parents, and then moved on with our lives to wait until the next shots ring out.

The young people in Parkland, Florida, fed up with the inaction of the people who should know better, started a movement. Many dismissed them, but I didn’t. I couldn’t be happier that these young people whose lives have been so terribly disrupted stood up to shout “never again”.

The night before the walkout I asked my daughter if she knew why she was participating. I explained that I didn’t want her to walk if she didn’t know why she was doing it. She was timid at first but then the words tumbled out; words that broke my momma’s heart. She told me that she wants to feel safe in school, that she wants laws to prevent certain people from having access to guns and that she wants assault-type rifles to only belong to military personnel. Until the Parkland shooting, I don’t think it had ever occurred to her to not feel safe in school. She may have heard the words Columbine and Newtown but I don’t believe she associated them with terror or the deaths of children. She is too young to know. The thing is, she’s still too young. My child should not have to walk out of her school to get the attention of lawmakers, to tell them that she doesn’t feel safe. She should not have to know that one month ago 17 children, some only one year older than her, died because they showed up to learn and by some cruel fate, instead, wound up in the path of a bullet.

I didn’t expect that the walkout would change the world by dinnertime. My greatest hope on that day and every day forward is that walking out changed the hearts and minds of the children who stood on playgrounds and parking lots throughout the country. I hope that they witnessed the power of numbers. I hope that they began to understand that it doesn’t always take a blustering voice to bring change; that sometimes change can be carried from one still, small voice to another until a mighty roar emerges from the assembled. This collective voice is, perhaps, the only one that can drown out the rhetoric and the naysayers. I hope that, in those 17 minutes, a new generation of leaders was born; local, state, and national leaders who will one day bring the change that so many of us have longed for.

I hope my daughter learned that leaders aren’t always the people yelling into microphones. I hope she learned that sometimes a leader is the person who says “come walk with me and let’s talk about this problem.” I hope she learned that a leader looks very much like a teacher who is scared too, but comes to the classroom every day because she must teach her children how to think for themselves even when the world around them says that they are too young to understand. I hope she learned that there is power in numbers. I hope she learned that you don’t have to know everything about a problem to understand that it is a problem. I hope she learned that there are often many different ways to solve a problem. I hope she learned that it’s possible to be both small and fierce. I hope she learned that adults don’t always have the answers and that, if we are smart, we will look to her generation for help in making changes. I hope she learned that we are listening. I hope that we are. Are you?

First We Rise, Then We Build

I wrote the words below a few years ago after living through and rising above a difficult time in my life. It seems particularly meaningful on this day, when we celebrate women throughout the world. Last year, during the Women's March I was taken by the number of references on social media to the word "rise". And, of course, this took me back to the marvelous Maya Angelou's poem Still I Rise.

You see, this is what we do. We rise. When people tell us that we couldn't or shouldn't do something, we may outwardly acquiesce to their narrow view of our worth or talent but on the inside those words stoke a fire that burns fierce with flames that dance around our hearts and souls. And we know that the thing we had only hoped or wished for moments ago has just become the thing we most desire and we will not be stopped. We are determined. We are strong. We are fierce. We will rise. And so we do.

But we are not and cannot ever be content to just rise. No, we must also build. We must build bridges and ladders and staircases so that those who are younger than us, less fortunate than us, or frailer than us can also rise. There is more work to be done, there is more building to be done, and we will do it together or not at all. Let us raise one another up. Let us reach out a hand to those who are struggling. Let us draw strength and encouragement from our sisters. Let us tell the world that we are here to take what is ours.

To all my fierce momma bear friends who run their families, their companies, their offices, and their own lives every damned day, keep rising, keep dreaming, and keep persisting. We've got this.

Phoenix
I was prepared for the worst
I wasn’t waiting to be rescued
How would anyone even know where to begin?
Where was I?
Where was my spirit?
Then you came to me
Were you looking for me or did you just stumble upon the path that led you to my soul?
You didn’t arrive with heavy machinery to tear down the walls of my prison
You simply sat quietly outside the door
You talked
You listened
You wiped the tears when they came
And you were there on the day when I realized that the door hadn’t even been locked
You held my hand as I walked into the sunlight…enjoying the freedom that I thought was lost
You lit the torch and handed it to me
I touched it to the prison wall and it sparked
I stepped back and we watched in silence as the flames leapt high above the walls and onto the roof
Later as the ruins smoldered you held me close and kissed me softly
I sighed
You smiled
We slept peacefully…the sleep of the just
In the morning you took your leave but I knew that you would return
I walked through the ashes and began to lay down the stones of the new foundation
Yes, I will build it here

World Book Day and Why Books are Better than Airplanes

Yesterday was World Book Day. I had no idea! I know I’m a bit late but I needed to take a moment to say what books have meant to me.

When I think back to my childhood I remember family, friends, and pets but, most of all, I remember books. I lived in the country and my closest neighbors were my grandparents and, after that, fields full of tobacco, corn, and cows. It’s easy to look back now and view my childhood as idyllic, and perhaps in some ways it was, but I know that part of that stems from my parents working hard to make it look easy. I know that there wasn’t much money left at the end of the month. I know that even small purchases frequently came with big sacrifices. I know that they went without so that my awkward, teenage self could have something that made her feel a little less like the odd man out in my group of friends.

And while I frequently struggled with “fitting in” in social settings, I knew that I could always find refuge in books. It’s difficult for me to imagine a time when I didn’t have a book with me. I read under trees, in my bed, in plastic chaise lounges, in barns, and a secluded section of woods behind my grandparents house. When I was about 13 I found a fallen tree there and I perched myself on it. I went back time and time again with book in hand to read and to listen to the sounds around me. Right now, thirty years later, I can close my eyes and feel the cool breeze pass through the trees on what was an otherwise oppressive day in the middle of a Kentucky summer. I found refuge there from a world that didn’t understand me and that I didn’t understand. In that little forested sphere that I created for myself I found peace and I also found joy.

I didn’t have many books of my own. They all came from my school library and, in the summer, the bookmobile. That bookmobile was a lifeline for me; a kid who had dreams of grand adventures but a reality that looked like hard work and smelled like limestone-rich dirt. Every week of summer break the bookmobile would roll into our gravel driveway and I would run out of the house with an armful of the previous week’s books and back into the house with an armful of new adventures just waiting for me to discover them. I visited with kings and queens and dined with presidents. I went on adventures with the Founding Fathers and spent a fair amount of time in a little house on the prairie. I felt the bravery of slaves making escapes from places not so far away from my little nest in the tree and I wandered at the power of a young woman, also an Elizabeth, who ruled an entire country. My family never took a vacation that involved a mode of travel other than car but it was fine by me. An airplane could never have taken me to all the places that I wanted to visit; only books could have done that.

I gave up reading for awhile in my 30s. I think I was afraid to get lost in a story; afraid to give myself up to a different time and place. Maybe I was afraid that I wouldn’t want to come back or maybe I needed to hold onto the chaos in my life; to live and feel it in order to move beyond it. Even though I couldn’t, I always encouraged my daughter to read. My agreement with her was that I would ALWAYS buy her books. She clearly knows a good offer when she sees one because she’s never asked for clothes or toys, only books. At 13 she manages her own library account and is constantly reviewing the online catalog for new releases and making hold requests. We stop by the library at least once each week to deposit last week’s armful of books and pick up the latest treasure trove (the parallel is not lost on me). It’s not often that I get to surprise her but, occasionally, I get wind of a new release and pre-order it so that it shows up at our door on release day. There is nothing I enjoy more than the look of surprise on her face when she opens the box and pulls out that new book.

About two years ago, I began to read again and I found myself fully immersed in the Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon. The love of those books quite literally changed my life in ways that I won’t describe here but are pretty evident if you visit outlandercast.com. The love of that series led me to another series, All Souls Trilogy, written by Deborah Harkness. Again, I won’t go into the ways that those books are, even at this very moment, changing my life but you can take a peak at allsoulswitchywomen.com to get an idea.

This is my thank you to the authors of the hundreds of books that I read as a child. Thank you for showing me a world so different from my own. Thank you for telling stories about bravery and resilience so that one day when I called upon them I knew how those who had gone before me had used them. Thank you for describing London, Venice, Beijing, and Shanghai for me so that when I found myself in those cities I was able to say, “yes, I know this place...I’ve been here before.” This is my thank you to Diana Gabaldon and Deborah Harkness. Thank you for stopping to listen to the stories that were inside of you and for being bold enough to share them with the world. Thank you for giving a voice to the characters who came to you asking to be written. Thank you for being generous with yourselves and for letting us share in the adventure with you. Thank you to everyone who is committed to the creation and distribution of books. And most importantly, thank you to everyone who speaks out about the continued importance of libraries. We must maintain them and they must be free.

Books change lives. Happy World Book Day.