By Molly Flinkman
@molly_flinkman

When my four-year-old son, Sawyer, dragged a dead tree branch into our yard last fall, I didn’t expect that the story would end with a broken-winged monarch butterfly living in our kitchen for 18 days, but, then again, 2020 wasn’t the year for predictable storylines, was it?

Sawyer was the one who spotted the bright green chrysalis first, but I’ll take credit for suspecting it to be a monarch. The green shell was flecked with sparkling gold, and I couldn’t imagine anything else could possibly reside inside. We looked it over for a few minutes, and then, carefully, I pulled the branch over to our house and propped it up next to the garage.

Fully invested in this tiny piece of life, I went outside the next morning at 5:45 a.m. to check on it. The cocoon had thinned, and I could see the black and orange wings within. When my husband, Jake, left for work an hour later, I called down the stairs, “Look at the chrysalis before you leave!” 

He came back inside about 30 seconds later. “You’re going to want to come see this,” he said. The kids and I hurried outside to find our monarch hatched and sitting still on the tree branch. 

The kids were instinctively excited, but my first glance gave me pause: Only one of her wings was fully straight; the other was crumpled. I cocked my head and furrowed my eyebrows, and Jake said, “I’m sure it will straighten out. Just give it some time.” I wasn’t so sure.

My Google search history for the rest of the morning tracked her progress:

How long does it take monarch wings to straighten?

Will a crumpled monarch wing ever straighten?

Can you straighten a butterfly wing?

How long do butterflies live?

How long do butterflies with broken wings live?

At some point that afternoon, Sawyer and I went outside to check on her, and her one good wing was frantic. It fluttered furiously, but all she could do was hop around on the branches of that dead branch. “Hey Saw,” I said as I reached down and let her crawl onto my finger. “Let’s move her somewhere greener where she’ll have better food to eat” which was the kid-sized translation of “I can’t bear to watch her any longer.” Together, we moved her to a small bush on the side of our yard, and as I turned my back and walked toward the house, I figured she’d get eaten by a bird. At least I would no longer have to see her struggle.

For the rest of the day, I pretended I was unfazed by the little bug, but the truth was, I thought about her constantly. She had emerged from her cocoon to a world she was not equipped to live in. There was no one to help her; she was all alone in her desperation. Maybe that’s why when Sawyer scooped her up the next day—only a few feet from where we had left her—and asked if she could live in our house, I said, without hesitation, “Yes.”

On the way inside, I pulled off some wide hosta leaves and a few flower stems before rescuing a long, flat Tupperware container from the trash. It had a crack on the side but would house a butterfly habitat nicely. I laid everything flat on the bottom, filled an orange teaspoon with water, and then Sawyer carefully set our little monarch inside. She crawled on top of a pale purple flower and flattened her full wing out wide.

Mary Oliver would have something really beautiful to say about all this. I once read a poem she wrote about loons who kept dying on the seashore and another about a fox she found dead in an old tractor wheel, and I walked away from both of those poems feeling—and this might sound strange—hopeful.

The loons cried out a long, beautiful, sacred song on their last day. I tell you this, she wrote about them, to break your heart, by which I mean only that it break open and never close again to the rest of the world. As for the fox, she noted that it must have looked out into the world until the last possible moment. Then, she crawled inside the same tractor wheel. She took the same posture. She took the same view. Oh, beautiful world! she wrote.

Mary Oliver never hesitated to look brokenness square in the eyes.

One day last April, my oldest daughter wouldn’t get out of bed. At 8 a.m. (which, for my kids, is astonishingly late), I went to check on her. She was awake in her top bunk, snuggled into the yellow and gray blanket my friend knit her before she was born. She joined me downstairs just long enough to quietly eat a piece of toast, and then she promptly put herself back to bed until 10:15. 

I checked on her frequently and always found her either sleeping, crying, or complaining of a bellyache. At one point, she said, “I don’t know what’s wrong,” while big tears slipped down her cheeks.

“I know,” I said as I pulled a few blonde curls away from her face. “I know. You’re feeling a lot of feelings. It’s okay.”

As I walked out of her room each time, I didn’t know what to do. The circumstances of the world all felt too big and too broken—a theme not limited to that single spring day.  

I was tempted to ignore it. I could have left it alone once she came downstairs and distracted her with ice cream or an episode of her favorite show, which, no doubt, would have taken her mind off things. Instead, I leaned into the broken things. Together, we gave the big feelings names like “sad” and “worried,” and I tried to help her understand that it wasn’t supposed to be this way—that it wouldn’t always be this way. 

I wonder how Mary Oliver would have said it. She mostly writes about nature and not first graders curled up with baby blankets, but I suppose the brokenness of nature isn’t really all that different from any of the brokenness I come face to face with on a daily basis. Pain is real. Death is inevitable. Things will continue to bring us grief. We lift them to our shoulders, Mary Oliver wrote about the things that grieve us. We continue walking into the future. 

In the face of brokenness, will I ignore it? Or, will I pay attention?

I could tell when our monarch was dying. After three weeks of living on my kitchen counter, her color faded, and her movement slowed down. One day, I came into the kitchen and found her completely still. I picked her up, carried her outside, and buried her beneath a tree.

I stood there for a few minutes—thinking and pressing the soil down with the sole of my sandal. I didn’t save that little butterfly. I didn’t save Lily. I can’t save anyone from any of the hard and painful things they will face. All I can do is steward well the brokenness that crosses my path. I can change my vantage point. I can break my heart open and never close it again to the rest of the world. 

Poems from Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver.

Guest essay written by Molly Flinkman. A lover of side braids, houseplants, and good books, Molly spends her days in central Iowa with four kids and a husband who works unpredictable hospital hours. In her margins of free time, she writes about how her faith intersects the very ordinary aspects of her life. You can find her on her website or Instagram.