Time for a New Sweater
By Amanda Reynolds
I watch my youngest daughter run down the street, her arms pumping with purpose and her long, tangled hair flying behind her. She is furiously fast and deliciously free in the small alley tucked behind our house, headed for the neighbor’s garden and tree swing. It’s a trip we take almost daily during the spring and summer, noting the growth of the cucumbers, the plum tree branches as they drop a little lower and heavier to the ground, the number of new tomatoes and raspberries and green beans. Once there, we swat mosquitoes from our legs, and I push her on the swing until her feet almost touch the branches.
We’ve made this little trek hundreds of times. I know the likelihood of a car traveling this strip of asphalt is slim, but, still, it is a possibility because the homeowners on this block use the alley to pull into their garages. We’ve talked about it many times: what do we do when we see a car? I know she knows to get to the side of the road but each time I fight the urge to cling tighter to her wrist as we walk. Instead I give a small nod when she twists her hand from mine and turns her questioning eyes up to my face—can I run, Mama?
I try to swallow the lump in my throat as the thoughts come, unbidden and unwelcome: what if this is the defining moment of my life? What if I let her go and then she doesn’t see the car in time? Wouldn’t it be better if I just kept her right here, so close that nothing bad could happen?
I catalog the worries, one after another, and she chases joy and freedom all the way down the road.
I feel it again when I wake the next morning, as familiar to me as my own skin. It’s a sense of dread as I pull myself up and crawl out of bed. It’s a small rush of anxiety when I hear my husband getting ready to head out the door into the still-dark of the morning. It’s the mantle of worry I pull around my shoulders as I reflect on our night, thinking about how many times my daughter woke up, whether or not she has an ear infection, how long I should let it go before taking her to the doctor, how much it will cost for a visit to the pediatrician that might turn out to be for nothing.
There is something about the night that presses these worries down fast and hard until they feel suffocating.
A door opens, and a daughter slips from her room into the bathroom. I turn on the kitchen light, take a long drink of water. I contemplate coffee then decide to wait to minimize the noise. I finally think to pray.
This early morning feeling of fear is nothing new. I slip it on like my coziest sweater. Even before I had children I would sometimes wake with dread, but becoming a mother has intensified the feeling. The stakes just seem so much higher now. When I love these little people so deeply and powerfully, how can I bear the possibility that one day I may have to let them go? That they will feel pain, or suffer, or be unhappy? How can I bear the possibility that, at some point, I might be the cause of those things for them? How can I accept that they live in such a broken world and that its brokenness will break their hearts?
One of my dearest friends is dying of brain cancer. I have watched helpless, furious, and bone-deep devastated over the past 17 months as her body and her mind offer up one betrayal after another. I have cried futile tears for her two young children and her sweet, gentle husband who wake up each morning with the knowledge that one more of their numbered days together has slipped away. I have missed her at girls’ nights, and I have dropped meals and muffins and poems at her door in ridiculous efforts to make it better. I have ached for her own mother, who accompanies my friend to chemo to sit beside her dying daughter as she is pumped full of chemicals.
I think about this mama, about how she rocked her baby daughter and breathed in her smell just like I did with each of my four daughters, how she watched her grow, worried over her and protected her and supported her as she stretched her legs and tested her wings, observed in wonder as that grown daughter built her own intricate, beautiful life. How could this mother have ever fathomed she would sit by her daughter in a cold hospital room twice a month and pray that the poison flooding her baby’s beloved body would keep her alive a little longer?
And what keeps that same scenario, or a million others like it, from playing out in my own life, or in the lives of my own four daughters? The fear slides itself around me, warm and dense, anxieties knitted closely alongside grief and regret. In my feeble attempts to control these possible outcomes, whether they be car accidents or ear infections or cancer, I worry about them. I tell myself that if I think long enough and hard enough about how to do the right thing, then I can just do it and we can avoid all of the wrong things. I plan and I make house rules and I hold tightly to hands twisting from my grasp. And all around me hearts continue to break, a pandemic rolls into its third year, mamas take their babies to chemo and damn it, people keep dying too soon.
And even still, all around me, in between and under and over my worries and fears, the world offers up beauty and hope like a gift. All around me, right before me, are moments of joy and miracles both tiny and large. All around me there is goodness, kindness, creativity, bravery, redemption. The sunset shines through stark winter trees, and a small kiss is dropped on my cheek. Friends give of themselves in the care of the hungry and the sick and the desolate. They plant flowers for beauty and share an abundant plum harvest. They know just the right moment to tell a dumb joke.
I honestly used to think that if I could just attain a certain level of gratitude and peace I could check it off my to-do list and be done with it, floating above the realms of worry and anxiety for the rest of my life. So there I was, striving and listing and praying and wondering why it kept feeling like such hard work, and like it wasn't working.
I am starting to understand that there is no single moment, no single decision to reject fear that will be a cure-all. I know I can’t erase true suffering with some magical formula of thanksgiving and prayer; the world and our pain are too deep and too complex for that. As each day passes, I see this more clearly. But as I live in this complicated mix of the terrible and the beautiful, I decide to look for the gifts. I name them. I collect them. I hold them close to me—not because I'm afraid that they'll be ripped away, but because the gifts open my eyes to a light that can brighten, even just a tiny bit, the darkness of my fear.
I feel the sun and welcome its warmth, grateful that my daughter lives so free. I snuggle my tired baby to my own exhausted body and breathe in her scent, unable to guarantee a pain-free and healthy future and still thankful to shelter her for today. I squeeze my dear friend’s hand and tell her something funny and gather her “I love you”s like they are precious currency. I store them up for a future when she’s not here.
And today, I push my girl on the garden swing and she sings out loud as her feet soar into the air. A chilly spring breeze blows and I start to understand that instead of someday transforming into a fearless and anxiety-free existence, my life seems to go more like this: I wake up in the morning and without even thinking about it, shrug on the fear that fits like my coziest sweater. Sometimes I’m already buttoning it up before I realize what’s going on. When I notice, I inhale and I exhale and I decide that I will take it off and pick up a different garment, one woven from delicate strands—gratitude, prayer, surrender, poetry, eyes open to joy and beauty, hands loosened to the need for control.
This one doesn’t fit quite so cozily. It’s tight and frayed in some places and hangs awkwardly in others. It’s a bit flimsier; it doesn’t keep much out. But it lets so much in—all that beauty. All that hope.
Guest essay written by Amanda Reynolds. Amanda lives with her husband, four daughters, and assorted pets in a sweet, crowded home in Nashville, TN. A teacher by day, she steals lunchtime and nighttime minutes to write, stitch, garden, and read. After many years as a stay at home mom, she is working hard to come to grips with the fact that her little people are little no longer. Amanda is especially interested in what it means for us to be—and raise—strong, compassionate women.
Photo by Jennifer Floyd.