By Katie Blackburn
@katiemblackburn

I push the double stroller down the sidewalk, lifting it onto its back two wheels when we come onto curb entrances. The broken front wheel that no longer sits up straight but drops down at a harsh diagonal can barely handle flat surfaces, much less a bump, at this point. But we keep walking. For both practical and sentimental reasons, I’m not interested in a new stroller at this point. 

It’s been good to us, this stroller. For nearly ten years it has held six little bodies over thousands and thousands of miles. The zoo in Seattle, twice. A few airplane baggage claims which we all know are not kind to equipment. Soccer fields and parks and all manner of surfaces and weather. Once, on a trip to Sedona, Arizona, I left our beloved double stroller outside the hotel in some kind of monsoon of rain and dust mixed together, and when we woke up in the morning there it was, waiting for us, soaking wet and caked in the color of rust. I wiped it off as best I could and buckled two children back in, and we went on with our trip like nothing ever happened. 

Today, our stroller carries us to the park in our neighborhood again. My view has changed over the six years we’ve lived here, and yet remains largely the same. Turn left, go straight, walk through the greenbelt, around the bend in the road, the park is on the right. What was once a walk with two toddlers buckled safely in became a walk with first one, then two, and now four growing kids on bikes or striders, either far ahead or a good bit behind me, two sets of little feet still bopping along in the stroller. Six of them. They all know the way to the park. 

We go to this same park when it's nice, and we put winter gear on and go when the temperature is barely above terrible. We go when the kids are arguing and need a change of scenery, and we go when the witching hour is just too loud for the four walls of our home to contain. We go for the 8-year-old, whose sensory needs are immense and he must climb something safe, like a slide, or he’ll choose stairway railings—which are decidedly less safe. We go for fifteen minutes sometimes, an hour others. We have pushed swings and taught animal sounds to toddlers as we did under-dogs for big kids. I’ve stretched my hip flexors to max capacity trying to fit on the teeter-totter because I cannot resist the “Mom, come on!” call for too long. I told my husband we were pregnant with our sixth child at this park. It’s our park.

On the way back to the house today, looking down at four little feet sticking out from the shade cover of the stroller and counting the bikes ahead and behind us on the sidewalk, reminding everyone to “wait at the corner, y’all!” I turned to my husband and asked him, “How many times do you think we’ve made this walk to the park?” 

He chuckles and shakes his head lightheartedly. “Hundreds, maybe a thousand? I mean, the two-year-old knows how to get here! So, a lot. We’ve made this walk a lot.” We both smile at the thought that one measurable piece of our lives has been spent walking to our park. 

***

It’s 8:00 a.m., and I’m buckling my 3-year-old boy into the backseat of the car for the 25-minute drive to therapy. The autism diagnosis we anticipated came six months ago, and since then, we’ve been showing up to the gray office building five mornings a week for what we were told was the best therapy available for children on the spectrum, a step more intense than the speech therapy we’ve been doing together for the last eighteen months.  

So far, “best” is certainly not a descriptor I am using.

I am so tired of this. My son is so tired of this. Most mornings, I have been pulling him inside the building he does not willingly enter, his hand gripped tightly in mine. Once we are finally in the tiny room with the therapist —who is, without a doubt, the most patient young woman on the planet, but who says very little to me about what she is thinking or seeing—Cannon will crouch down with his knees up by his ears, his preferred play position, and start manipulating whichever toy grabs his attention first. After a few minutes he usually tries to leave, and I’ll sit and block the door, doing my best to ignore the hitting and the yelling he uses to show me what he needs because he cannot tell me with words. Ignore it if you can, they tell us. Attention reinforces behavior, so when we want a behavior to stop, we cannot reinforce it in any way. So I’ll keep a straight face and stare at the wall ahead even as my cheek is being hit over and over by a tiny hand. Even as the tears roll down his face. Even as his yells could be heard from outside. I am in the way of the door and he is desperate to get out. I will look down at my watch and see we’ve been in the room for ten minutes. Eighty more to go. Then I’ll sigh, and try to remember everything I know about God, because most of it doesn’t feel true in those moments. 

At least, that’s how it’s been for the last six months.

But on this day, an ordinary Thursday, there’s a moment. Cannon and I are making our usual, quiet drive to therapy. He’s looking out the window, and I’m talking to him, wondering if he hears me. We walk in without a fight, and Cannon finds his usual room, fourth door on the left. As the therapist, Kelsey, and I exchange greetings, Cannon grabs a puzzle from the shelf, a clock with different shapes at each hour. He dumps it out on the ground, and as he begins to put the shapes back in place, there it is, the moment, the miracle, just barely above a whisper.

“Circle.” 

The therapist and I look at each other with wide eyes, wondering if we both heard the same thing.

“Square.” 

We definitely did. My mouth falls open in disbelief.

“Triangle.” 

Is he saying the shape names? He sure is. “Kelsey! He’s saying the shapes!”

“Oh my goodness,” she says in her classic, calm and gentle demeanor.

Meanwhile, I am happily freaking out and clapping and grabbing my phone to try to get his voice, his precious, 3-year-old voice that is so elusive to us, on video. Over and over, he shows it off: Circle. Square. Triangle. Circle. Square. Triangle. 

I know Kelsey wants to keep the room calm, to keep building on whatever tiny bit of momentum Cannon brought in with him today, so I try to reign in my joy, my hope. But I can’t stop smiling. 

On something like the 218th time we showed up for therapy, seemingly out of the clear blue sky, he said three new words.

But really, it wasn’t out of the blue at all. It was standing on the 217 days before it. 

***

I’m 13 minutes into a 20-minute tabata ride on what has become the best thing I ever purchased, my Peloton bike. I’ve had it for just over a year, a splurge from our tax return, one I was desperate for after having our sixth baby and knowing full well I was never going to make it to an actual gym with six kids in tow. 

Today, with burning legs and heavy breath, I’m chasing a personal record because I have a silly amount of pride wrapped up in those numbers known only to me. Robin, my instructor, calls out new challenges and coaches me through each minute. Then she says something I cannot stop thinking about, something that goes far beyond the bike ride. “I am not all that interested in what difficult thing you are willing to do one or two times. Anyone can do something hard once or twice. I’m interested in what you are willing to show up and do 10,000 times. That,” she emphasizes, “is who you are.”

Once I finish my ride, breathless and sweaty, I lay down on the ground to stretch, and I think about my thousands list:

The walks to the park.
The therapy.
The “apologize to your brother” conversations.
Returning the plastic bags the toddler threw off the pantry shelf to their place.
Rubbing the back of a crying baby.
Seeing the clock at 3:30 a.m.
Washing the high chair tray.
Folding laundry and giving up on the socks even matching anymore. 

I don’t always know everything about God—about what He is teaching me or why things sometimes are the way they are—while I’m working through the thousands, but I do know this: he made moms ten-thousands kind of people. That’s who we are. 

Photo by Jennifer Floyd.