I spent the better part of last week side by side and shoulder to shoulder with an old and dear friend. These days I can't imagine a nicer place to be. I've stumbled into a stage of life where friendships are easy and free from angst (mostly) . . . and I am able to look back over the years and recognize and value each one as an integral piece of my life puzzle. 

I managed to fit in a lot of reflection on this as my friend Dawn and I worked our way through a college class full of material from Tuesday-Friday in attendance at an educational coaching seminar in Downtown Detroit. It was the perfect next step for both of us and we were in our element, remembering how we used to coach each other through the daily roller coaster ride of teaching 6th grade, and then as content specialists in the inner city. We complemented each other perfectly. She did the math and science, I did the reading and social studies . . . then we'd flip kids and teach the same lessons in the afternoon, debriefing during the transitions and often in impromptu meetings at our adjoining classroom doors, commiserating on which kids to give hell, which kids to go easy on (Johnny's in rare form, catch him early . . . Tiffany doesn't feel well, I already called home). We were sympatico. . . partners in the Bell Tower . . . Yin and Yang on the sixth floor. And then . . . there were those other days, those stretches even. . . of power struggles and standoffs, cold shoulders and rallying side conversations with other colleagues about who was wrong and what was right . . . early morning and late afternoon shouting matches and meltdowns. There was silence and space and soul-searching. And apologies and forgiveness because in the larger scheme of things, it just didn't seem so important anymore.  And I think, really, that these are the truest and most enduring friendships, the kind that can face down differences of opinion and diverging paths and different seasons, and then maybe even skip over a few seasons to come back around when it really counts. . . the kind that add to us . . . the ones that once made us better.

I was working all of these things out for myself on Tuesday, marveling that here we were, in another stage of life with eleven years of history bonding us, cultivating that Yin Yang again . . . I thanked her for the work she had done to get me into that seminar last minute, and she said, "But don't you remember? You did it for me . . . the year you pushed for me to get the job as the math specialist . . ." And I did remember, and I had to laugh when I got home because on that very afternoon, my daughter had blogged about suddenly being overwhelmed in the midst of intense emotion at a Christian conference of hundreds of passionate, powerful ladies and confessed frustration in her quest for authentic female friendship because "women scare the absolute hell out of me."  I laughed because I had to acknowledge that in the world of women, true friendships are not for wussies. Thankfully, her blog is entitled Not Waving the White Flag:) . . . and I'll let her tell her own story, but I'll also tell you that things came full circle on Saturday morning when she texted me to ask for friendship advice about her daughter . . . my granddaughter. 

Mackenzie is the sweet blonde at the top of the page and this is a real photo snapped at the exact second a friendship was born. Dahlia had kindergarten jitters that morning, so Kenzie took her hand and walked her through -- and it's been a "bumpy yellow bus you're not my best friend anymore sit with me don't sit with me you're not invited to my party kind of ride" ever since. So much so that momma is wondering if it's time to climb in through the emergency exit and take charge. We worked out ensuring a separation in classrooms next year to give them some space. Between that and the summer months, it is our hope that their little hearts will prevail in love and grace at some point. I told Brittany what I am praying for little Dahlia and Mackenzie . . . that that very first moment will be the defining one that they will always remember, and not all those painful, mean girl moments in between. 

And it matters. It really does matter. Just ask my seventy-six year old mother-in-law. I told her about this blog in draft, and asked if she had any good friend stories. Without hesitation, her eyes lit up and she told me about a "wonderful friend" she grew up with in Chicago named Gloria. And when she moved to Wheaton, Illinois, Gloria's parents, recognizing the depth of the girls' friendship followed and the families opened a business together. Later, in their high school years, they inexplicably grew apart. So far apart that they would see each other coming and cross to the other side of the road just to avoid talking. It seemed they had nothing to say anymore. But years later, after my mother in law married, had three sons, and was tragically widowed, they reconnected. She would spend long afternoons with Gloria, talking with her for hours, and was comforted by her presence, her familiarity, their history. I asked her where Gloria was now, if she was still alive . . . she looked wistful, and said that they hadn't connected for a while, and that maybe she would search for her on Facebook. I hope she finds her. 

If you've been a piece of my puzzle -- and you know who you are -- I am thinking of you wistfully right now, counting back over the years and remembering exactly where it was that you fit in. Maybe you sat on my desk in math class one day, and I was having a bad day and told you to get off . . . and then you became my best friend. Maybe you moved away to Georgia and had about a dozen babies just like you always said you would, but I never forgot that you made me believe that Jesus really did love me. Maybe you showed up on my front porch one afternoon with a baby on your hip because I wasn't brave enough to show up on yours. Maybe you charmed me with your British accent and then typed up my first college paper for me. Maybe we played Boggle and watched the Gulf War on CNN late into the night while our babies slept and our husbands worked. Maybe God sent you to step in just at the exact second when my world was falling apart and you were the only person I would have, could have handed my baby over to right then. Maybe you taught me to nurse my babies and you think I'm one of the smartest people you know when you are actually the one who speaks fluent Japanese and missed your calling as a dietician. Maybe I consider you my very first real friend because you melted my frozen heart . . . and then you told me once that I thought my daughter was perfect . . . and years later, after a few seasons had gone by, you agreed . . . when your son married her. Maybe the letters that you sent on colored stationary every week or so when I moved across the Atlantic mattered more than you can imagine because I never told you so. Maybe our daughters were inseparable and so were we and I drifted away when it wasn't your choice and was sorry for it later. Maybe our friendship has survived longer and stronger than our daughters' and we celebrate this every autumn over Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Lattes. Maybe our hearts will be forever sealed because we taught and fought with all our hearts from the same classroom(s) for the same children for the same years. Maybe you read between the lines from the Wicked poem I left on your desk or from the words we listened to in our balcony seats that said you changed me for good. I really meant it. Maybe when we come to visit you in Florida, we'll stay. Maybe we'll walk the Appalachian Trail someday and we'll drink wine in the mountains while you deliver more sage advice to keep me sane. Maybe you showed up just in time to inspire me in a way that changed my life. Maybe you're the best friend I've ever had, or the missing piece that I haven't even met yet. Maybe I'll be telling my granddaughter about you someday. If we had any knock down drag outs, all the better. If we just drifted away, maybe you're on your way back just around the next season. We have history. And you matter. Friendship matters.

This morning I gave myself a mother's day gift. I spent an hour and a half clicking through posts on an Instagram movement my daughter started last summer with the tag #letsgetrealmoms. There are about 650 posts -- many of the moms have become quite regular -- of imperfect momma moments.  Brittany says she just got tired one day of all the choreographed perfection displayed on social media -- hers included -- and decided to drop the facade and get real. Brave girl. Conscientious girl.  A girl of rare honesty. My girl.

The photographs (and the captions) are entertaining and hilarious, honest and courageous . . . and sometimes touching. They are mostly of babies and toddlers because that's the target demographic of my daughter's peer group right now. There are babies crying and babies laughing at their own naughty antics. There are sick babies and robustly healthy runaway babies. There are babies sleeping in piles of laundry and other strange places. There are babies running wild, babies running naked, babies in time out, babies locked in cars. There are babies swimming through food, ransacking groceries, and clobbering their siblings. Some babies have bedhead and mismatched clothes, and some are covered in paint or marker or dirt or food. There are babies glued to Doc McStuffins and Frozen rewinds and waiting on chicken nuggets in fast food drive throughs. There are messy houses  -- lots and lots of messy houses -- and tired looking mommas. There are mommas chasing dogs and mommas chasing groceries and fleeting, uninterrupted moments with trendy, steaming coffee cups. There are desperate looking mommas who likely need showers or naps . . . and one with a toy train stuck in her hair (that one looks familiar:).

None of the photos are all that shocking. And I would be the very last person to criticize . . . because in my browsing I was taken back . . . way back to the days of my own parenting imperfections and blunders. And I really want to tell all these mommas chasing after their babies . . . that . . . well . . . it doesn't get any better . . . And I mean that in a very literal sense. Right now is the very best time for you to get away with stuff. As entertaining as it is . . . Why you would want to put it out there for the world to see?! As your babies grow, things get more complicated. There's more room for error. And kids get smarter. They remember things. They will point out your mistakes. And they will tell on you!  My advice would be to keep your secrets while you can;)  

I'm joking, of course. And, honestly, I couldn't be prouder of my daughter who has created an outlet for the inadequacies that we have all felt when faced with the monumental task of keeping tiny human beings alive and raising them up to be healthy and whole. And while some things stay the same, in paradoxical ways, it's got to be more difficult to raise children today than it was a generation ago. Parenting now must be like chasing your children around a fishbowl of social media. Even if you choose not to participate, it's out there and it's dictating the culture. And with information overload -- all the things parents are supposed to know coupled with the overwhelming ambiguity of what they might be missing -- there has certainly got to be more angst involved. I don't offer many opinions. My default mode (beyond tell them about Jesus and give them a book) is that I would not want to be making the kind of decisions parents have to make today for their children . . . things that at one time were relatively simple, or non-existent. Whether to feed them bread, or whether to vaccinate them . . . how to discipline them without ending up on a social worker's caseload . . . how much internet and when to buy them a cell phone . . . how to adequately protect them from environmental toxins and cyber bullying . . . whether to publicly educate them in standardized test hell, or even let them play outside. It's a daunting task to imagine, and it makes me glad for my day when a tough decision was to either let them cry it out or rock them (I hear that's still a thing, but it's called sleep training now. . . really?). 

Still, it's a brave and noble thing to bring people together in their vulnerabilities. So since most of my stories are probably out there already, anyway . . . and there is a statute of limitations on recriminating adolescent glares and arrests for more serious parenting infractions (I think), here are some of my best worst mistakes . . . 

Lost children - 

I have lost my two children a total of five times.  One each in department stores, one each in the neighborhood, and one in a locked garage. Brittany was in a very impressionable Sesame Street phase when I took her to the Base Exchange one day when she was two and a half. She was also a runner. I should have seen it coming. Her most recent favorite book was Ernie Gets Lost. It read that Maria takes him to a department store and he ends up on a security counter, feet dangling, chatting up the store clerk, brave and sure that she will find him. We read that book about thirty-seven times before that fateful day when I turned to a clothes rack for four seconds and looked down to find my pixie blonde gone and felt my heart sink into my stomach. She was quick and she must have memorized directions to the security counter because there was only about ten more seconds of heart pounding panic before I heard over the PA system "Can Brittany's mom come to the security counter, please?" And there she was, feet dangling, goofy Ernie grin on her angelic little face. And this incident came after she wandered three doors down to pet the neighbor's dog while I was hauling in groceries and was sure she was tagging along behind me. Fool me twice. Kelsey Brooke actually hid in Kohl's on purpose. She was just about in the same age bracket as Britty with the Ernie impression. But there were no store clerks involved. Just a low-hanging clothes rack and some tiny, pastel pink tennis shoes peeking out. Oh, those blessed pink shoes. That's three. Four. We lost her in the snow. Same kid. There was three feet of snow, and she was only two and a half feet tall.  I thought her daddy was carrying her from the car to the house, but she had run to catch up with him. He thought I was carrying her, so he kept going, leaving her behind. There was about fifty yards of total darkness between the garage and the house, and she had fallen off the shoveled path into a snowdrift. When we found her, she was struggling to upright herself in her snowsuit like a turtle on her back. I still don't know why she didn't call out. She was just lying there, rocking back and forth, grunting. Just about the same scenario a few years later, except that eight year old Britty thought it would be a fun joke to hide in the backseat of the car. And was still crouched there after we closed the garage door. Again, he thought I had it. I thought he had it. We're slow learners sometimes. By the time we figured it out, she had screamed herself hoarse, and had beat her knuckles bruised on the inside of the garage door. She still has an aversion to garages.

Accidents,  Injuries, & Unfortunate Events

Once Brittany shoved a rolled up sticker up her nose and we didn't figure it out for three weeks, and only then by the smell (would you believe it was an Ernie sticker?). Kelsey swallowed a German mark, which is the equivalent and size of an American quarter. The X-ray showed a perfect circle, and the doctor told us not to worry and that it would pass, but it was important that we verified that. Really? I lost my grip on Britty at the top of a giant slide when she was two and could only watch in terror as she went sailing down at a hundred miles an hour and launched into the air like a pinwheel, her momentum carrying her forward and dumping her face first into a sandpile (mercifiully). The quickest way to get to her was to slide down after her, so that it must have looked like I was having loads of fun while my child was bleeding from the nose into the dirt. A few years later, she broke her arm rolling down a hill and we didn't take her to the doctor until two days later because I didn't believe that an injury that serious could result from such a benign activity. I once burned Kelsey's forehead with a curling iron. I winced for weeks every time I looked at the mark above her eye. But she let me curl her bangs again. She was just as forgiving when I was running late to pick Brittany up from kindergarten one morning and forgot to strap her into the umbrella stroller. Instead of sticking to the sidewalk, I decided to cut across a field. I was really late, and I began to run. Kelsey thought it was great fun until the stroller wheel hit a rut. I watched, horrified, as my toddler catapulted through the air and landed six feet in front of the stroller on her belly, arms outstretched, with a resounding thud. We stayed on the sidewalk after that. 

Pet Blunders

We once had a Cockatiel named Emmett who liked to sit on our shoulders as we moved about the house. One morning as I was feverishly preparing for a garage sale, gathering everything that wasn't nailed down or that we hadn't used in three days, I quite forgot that Emmett was there, perched on my entrepreneurial shoulder. I stepped out the back door, and before my daughters had even finished shouting up a warning, Emmett jubilantly flew off, soaring higher and higher into the breezy sunshine until he disappeared. We stood there, gazing upward, all of us, in complete, bewildered silence for the space of about five seconds. In unison, my girls' lips had begun to quiver, but in my visualization of dollar signs, I had already recovered  and was slapping a price tag on the bird cage even as they looked on through their tears. That was bad. This is worse. Over the years after that, Kelsey had acquired a string of rodents to which she had grown quite attached. Her favorite was a mouse named Reepicheep (after a C.S. Louis fantasy character) who used to perch on her feet as she lay on her stomach doing homework. One morning, Reepicheep escaped from his cage and met with an unfortunate ending with one of the family cats. And then I made her go to school, anyway. Yes, I did. I really did that. Not long after, it was my contention that one of our family cats, one belonging to Brittany (not the killer cat) was wholly underappreciated and neglected. Britty disagreed. To make my point, I took the cat to work with me one Thursday morning and passed her along to a coworker. And since nobody, not even Britty, took note of her absence til the following Monday, I don't feel quite so guilty about that one.

Miscellaneous Bad Parenting

One Christmas just after a big move I was too tired to wrap Christmas presents, and on Christmas morning I just handed each kid a plastic garbage bag full of new toys. I can still see the disconcerted looks and the disappointment on their sweet faces. I wish I had a do over. I would have chugged coffee and stayed up all night. I was still tired (it was a stretch during my college years) when I volunteered to chaperone Brittany's eighth grade field trip to Toronto. So much for quality time. In our weekend whirlwind tour of the city, I fell asleep in virtually every stop along the way -- in every museum, at the mall, in a box seat at the Rogers Center where the Toronto Blue Jays play. I even dozed on the bus rides in between. I actually slept through the last three quarters of The Phantom of the Opera. And I'll confess . . . there wasn't even much chaperoning going on between snores. And then there was the time that a friend and I took our girls to the clinic together for Hepatitis immunizations, and Brittany, frightened, had a meltdown of epic proportions before the needle even touched her arm. No worries. I just pretended she belonged to my much more sensitive friend who took over like a boss. It worked inasmuch as she has never contracted Hepatitis. I did not earn the mother of the day award for that one either. And that holiday play that Kelsey narrated -- I still remember that my daughter was the loveliest child onstage in the velvet purple dress and the matching purple bow in her long, flowing hair. She probably remembers her mother's laughter ringing out loud and long over all the gasps in the ensuing silence when she tripped over the microphone stand. I do not know what came over me. 

If there are any contributing respondents to the #letsgetrealmoms movement who might have been harboring the slightest bit of residual guilt over any parenting 101 mistakes, blunders, or shortcuts before reading this post, I am trusting that you're cured. You're welcome.

Some days there are no words. But a simple, sweet text message brought color and clarity and perspective to my melancholy world this morning. How do you measure the impact . . . and how can you adequately honor the the gift . . . of a golden friend and a few well-timed words of encouragement in a dark place?  So in the abyss . . . in my brain blog fog . . . I am re-posting this "love story" from Autumn 2013.

It was the most likely of friendships that began in the quiet halls of a military hospital. It was likely and inevitable, and the fact that I was completely oblivious could not have stopped it from happening. 

The youngest of our two daughters, five and two, had recently been diagnosed with Cancer. The oldest of their two daughters, five and two, was recovering from an operation for hip dysplasia. Theirs was an unfortunate event; ours was one that rendered us shell shocked and curled inside ourselves. They watched our family, the four of us ghosting through the halls of the pediatric wing, and they speculated, but kept their distance out of respect.

Fast forward several months later. . . our five year old, Brittany, is beginning kindergarten. I stand outside on a crisp and colorful fall afternoon waiting for dismissal amidst the clatter of other kindergarten mothers pulling wagons, pushing strollers, holding toddlers.  We’re pretty much all in the same stage of life. This is how friendships begin. But I stand off to the side, friendless. It’s late November, and we have just settled on the military base, our fate having been in limbo for months due to Kelsey Brooke’s illness. She is stable now, and our lives interrupted, paused like the most mundanely curious scene of a movie in which a young mother is stoically holding a pale, bald child tightly in her arms between an empty playground and typical redbrick school suddenly resumes. She approaches tentatively, her own sweet little girl in tow, and I take notice of the abundance of white-blond hair and the bow that matches the blue of her Kayla’s eyes. I wait for her to ask the questions. Instead she surprises me with a smiling, “I remember you.” “You do?” I say, blankly. And she tells me the story. “We didn’t want to bother you,” she says of that time in the hospital. And with the ringing of the school bell, a blessed degree of normalcy returns, and an epic friendship begins as our daughters come pouring out of separate classrooms to find us in the crowd, together. Her Rachael with the flowing dark hair gives me hope, and I take note, with pleasure, of how her youngest favors my oldest; petite pixy blonds with shy, mischeivous  grins.

Fast forward five years. . . our family separates from the military and resumes civilian life among family in Michigan. Her husband, Shawn, makes Captain, and they move away from family to Colorado. But layers of life leave their mark and seal us all into one another’s hearts and souls.  . . forever, maybe?  Five years of seasons. Preschool carpooling, more kindergarten, first days of everything spent side by side. Dance recitals in the spring.  Barbeques and family baseball games and swimming at the base pool on languid summer afternoons. Soccer games in the fall that move into winter huddles grasping coffee cups beneath a warming tent celebrating and straining to spot four healthy children flashing red on a frosty field. Holidays, Halloweens with parties and creatively conspired costumes, Christmas seasons marked by school concerts, the glowing lights of weekend Winterfests, and the spontaneous delight of occasional snow days (Hey, come on down!  We’ll make hot chocolate and put in a movie for the girls!). I wish I hadn’t done that parenting mistakes (did we actually enter them into an Easter pageant?. . . cheerleading for six year olds? Really?) and shared victories . . Potty training down. . . check. . . no more chemo. . . check. . . Rachael got the class citizenship award?!  So did Kelsey! Two and a half minutes of holding our breath as Brittany gets every step of her Christopher Robin ballet routine down, Rachael rocks Cotton Eyed Joe, and Kayla and Kelsey stumble adorably through Sweet Georgia Brown. . . High five! High Five! And we celebrate at the Old Spaghetti Factory in the city every year.  More seasons, more birthdays. . . October, December, April, and August. . . and our paths diverge. . . I go back to school, and am wistful when she brings home a son.  And then, this season is over. We are leaving first, and while our house is being packed up over the course of a week, she insists that we stay with them. Our daughters play and are bewildered, a shadow hanging over everyone and everything - especially Brittany. Ohio is our home, not Michigan, and she vows to come back here some day with Aunt Pam and Rachael and Beverly Gardens Elementary School because when you are nine, nothing should ever change when you love your life and your best friend.

Fast forward a year, five, fifteen . . . At first the three hour drive distance between us is bridged by occasional weekend visits, exchanges of children during summer vacation weeks, and Sunday dinners at Cracker Barrel in Findlay, Ohio – a halfway point between Dayton and Detroit. Then, over the course of the next decade, they move to Colorado, then the Netherlands, Tennessee, and they’ll always be a part of our lives, except they’re not anymore. 

Fast forward some more years to November 2013. . . They have been back in Ohio for a few years, and we are still in Michigan. . . routinely, we stop on the way to or coming home from a vacation . . . we drive three hours to attend their granddaughter's birthday party. . . meet them half way for a Christmas season dinner.  . . they attend our daughter's wedding. . . and on a random, crisp November morning we talk of the years, over coffee and amidst the swirling leaves of autumn in my backyard. The sun is enough to warm our hearts, but not our hands as we clutch our mugs and pull our blankets closer.  We sit in tilting patio chairs and talk of empty nests and the hold of children and grandchildren on our hearts . . .  and retirement. . . Would we consider Florida with them? It is the first conversation I have ever had of retirement, and I am thrown. Neither of us, none of us have reached 50. There is so much living left to do. But our chidren are grown, and the years fly by. No matter what is in between. . . it is never to early to plan to be a part of each other's lives. I can feel the morning, the moment coming to a close as the breeze becomes a chilling wind, and I'm disappointed, because I want to prolong, and savor this moment when I realize that this friendship spanning twenty-two years has crossed a line. It has become infinite and irrevocable, defining who we are and who we've become. The swirling sun-warmed wind becomes an ocean breeze and a promise of tomorrow that takes my breath away.

How absurd is it that in the face of our own personal tragedies . . . betrayals that shake our foundation, devastations that change the course of our existence, nightmares that come to life . . . that the Earth should just keep right on spinning? How is it that laughter can still ring callously from the playgrounds, that runners still pass by in blithe oblivion, bank tellers engage in trivial conversation with customers ahead of us, traffic keeps moving, planes fly over, and church bells chime merrily? How is it that life goes on?

The first time I remember feeling this . . . and I have felt it many times since, but with a wiser heart . . . was in July of 1991 on the day that my three year old daughter was diagnosed with Leukemia. I was no stranger to calamity at twenty-three years of age. I was a child of divorce -- and not a happy we still love you it's not your fault kind of divorce. The ugly kind with rage and untold abuses and poverty and here take your brother and raise him and growing up too quickly kind of divorce. But none of it was anything that actually growing up couldn't solve. Because we've all been young and naive enough to believe that adulthood means that we get to control things. It's the fleeting hope of everyone. So I remember with vivid clarity that sucker punched, can't breathe, life spun out of control mid July day when I held my baby in my arms and a doctor told me that she was dying. I remember how ridiculous it was that people still talked about the weather and planned their next meal and that the sun was still shining on such a paradoxically glorious beautiful day, and in the ensuing months, how surreal any life outside the walls of a hospital seemed. And on a really, really bad day I remember beseeching God with why her why me why us and the profound shame I felt as the thought was still hanging on my grief. Why not her? Why not me? Why not us? Who were we that life should spare us? And who else would I choose? 

That was the day that I truly grew up . . . and the day that my heart grew . . . and the day I looked beyond myself in horrified wonder to acknowledge the ubiquitous, invisible, excruciating pain that the rest of the world had been silently enduring outside my bubble. Amidst the laughter on the playground, there are children with bruised bodies and hearts and broken spirits. That jogger passing by is trying to outrun the grief of a devastating abandonment. The driver in the car in front of us -- the one that cut us off and the one we cursed at -- is on his way to his thirteenth job interview in as many months and his unemployment ran out just before his twelfth. The plane that flew over is bringing back the body of a soldier -- someone's son who won't see his own son grow up.
  
I read somewhere recently that in pioneering communities, death was so prevalent that the church acknowledged each passing by ringing the church bell one time for each year of the person's life. The people, having a general knowledge of the community, would gauge who it was by the number of chimes that reverberated throughout the woods and over the fields and hollows. They would stop their work long enough to bow their heads in remembrance, gather to pay their respects, help to bury the dead, and then go back to work. Life moved on. There was very little outside of death that could be allowed to interrupt the flow of survival of such a hardscrabble existence. But I would be willing to bet that the hardiest survivors among those people that we're all descended from were the ones that discovered that in the in between of life and death, that kindness didn't cost anything, that grace was never wasted, and forgiveness was as necessary for living as water.

What if you lived your life by the supposition that we are all reduced to an equal playing field? That inevitably, you're in line for tragedy? That the circumstances of your life will be irrevocably changed in a happy heartbeat on a random Tuesday in September?  Would you be kinder? Slower to judge, and quicker to love? What if the the very realest difference between us is how we how we react to our circumstances, and how we treat each other as a result? One thing I know for sure (Oprah-esque) is this -- the choices we make in our deepest despair make us who we are. Will we turn inward, bitter and mean, blame others for our misfortunes, project our misery outward to the rest of humanity? You know that hateful, grumpy old man who lives on the corner and calls the police when you cut across his lawn and won't give the kid's ball back when it rolls into his yard? The kind of guy that every neighborhood's got. He's the one haunted by the death of his father when he was twelve, and then saw terrible things in Vietnam. His wife left him, his children won't talk to him, and he's been battling cancer alone for the last three years. But you don't know any of those things, so you hate him right back. And you might even hate your own mother, too . . . or the boss or the doctor who had the power to devastate your life. Maybe it's justifiable. What if our calamities really are a result of someone else's mistake or callous heart, or worst of all, a true malevolence . . . the result of someone else's tragic self-preservation so deep and toxic that you are one in a long line of their string of victims?  How is it possible to love then? How is it possible to grow? For sure, it's an extraordinary thing. But I want to be extraordinary. Don't you? Doesn't everybody? I wish I could tell you that there's a way to get there outside of the hard stuff and extraordinary choices. But I don't know it. I only know that I have a choice to become who I want to be. I've come to understand that It's one of the few things that we can truly control in life. 

I know a lovely young woman who has been lovely since the day I met her, but who I've had the pleasure of watching grow into one of the most extraordinary people I know. She is a former colleague who teaches inner city kids with a magical combination of a firm hand, grace, and a fierce protectiveness that can only come from a heart of compassion. It's also a heart that has been broken over and over. In January of 2013, three years after the birth of her daughter, her son was born ten weeks prematurely due to complications in her pregnancy. In spite of that, he was remarkably healthy, but she never got to hold him before he was whisked off to an incubator that was simple protocol for preemies. When Nathan was a week old, she was up in the middle of the night pumping breast milk for the baby that she would soon bring home, and she got a phone call from the hospital telling her to come. By the time she and her husband arrived, their son was dead due to hospital error. Four days later, on her birthday, she buried the little boy that she had never held. And shortly after that, her husband, lost in his own grief, left her. A few months later, she came back to work and her tough love for the children in her classroom never wavered. Eventually, her husband came back and they conceived another baby. She was into her second trimester of pregnancy when she lost that baby, too, the day before Thanksgiving 2014. She came back again, and her husband left again. Melissa would be the first one to tell you that on her darkest days, she has been difficult to love. But she keeps coming back, over and over, rising like a phoenix to love her daughter and to love her children year after year, some who have desperate needs and are, themselves, hard to love. She's a tragic hero, and on my darkest days, she has been among my most loyal friends. 

And there are more. My father in law, whose first wife died beside him in a car accident over fifty years ago, and who has faithfully loved and trusted Jesus ever since . . . and prayed for his three children, his three stepchildren (my husband being one who lost his biological father when he was eight months old) and his 23 grandchildren every single day since before each of them were born. The heritage he has provided cannot be measured in this life. The friend who was a week into her dream job when her beautiful daughter was horrifically brutalized and whose courage and determination for everything life has to offer never faltered. My husband, whose servant's heart and unfailing love has produced two of the most remarkable young women I have ever known, and who invested nineteen years into a job where he was offered little appreciation and unceremoniously dismissed without explanation. And there are my own girls . . . my very own God given heroes. My tiny, beautiful and irrepressible daughter who regularly runs 26.2 miles at a stretch and who inexplicably experienced a post-partum depression so debilitating that it altered the course of her life, but who chooses to share her experience every day in encouragement to other mothers. And my lovely, strong daughter who survived cancer to travel the world for Jesus, and who loves everyone she meets unconditionally. These are the people that I've been blessed with . . . the people who choose daily to transcend life's painful circumstances and still find the joy in loving others. These are the kind of people who I want to surround myself with in the time it takes to complete my spin on this cruel planet, and the people who inspire me enough to risk my own love every day.