December 1 begins the night before when I tell the girls that tomorrow morning, instead of coming downstairs with books, instead of grabbing their screens and sitting down for breakfast, I want them to bring their Bibles and their “Write the Word” journals.
“For Advent,” I say, but really it’s more like a question. “For Advent?” and I guess I do it because I don’t want to demand it from them. Seems like so many people are ruined from religion because they’ve been captured by the rules and not the story. I want Hadley and Harper to be captured by the story.
Captured, and then released to walk around in the world changed and changing because of what they’ve read and also knowing they can always come back to the story with their questions and doubts. I want them chased by the story, and I want them to chase the story.
For every morning they practice this, I tell them, they can have a piece of chocolate from their Advent calendars. I suppose it’s bribery, but the girls will do anything for chocolate, and in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Lupin gives Harry a piece of chocolate every time he has to grapple with a part of his story that is terrifying, mystifying, and potentially paralyzing. I won’t write without coffee, and so I guess a piece of chocolate is the right thing to have when figuring out a verse like, “God so loved the world that he sent His only son…,” or “It is finished.” Chocolate seems like the right thing to help digest those words.
So Sunday morning they come downstairs with their Bible and their journals and they write the word and eat the chocolate and off to church we go.
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“You finally got a phone case,” Hadley says as we drive to church. She lifts my phone from the cupholder and admires my case. For a couple of years now I’ve refused to get a phone case because these phones are so expensive, my feeling is if they needed a protective barrier, they should be included in the price. Also, the cases remind me of the retainer I had to wear (was supposed to wear) after my braces came off. There’s something adolescent about them.
“I like this one,” Hadley says.
On the radio, Sara Groves sings, “A mother tonight is rocking a cradle in Bethlehem.”
She turns my phone over and admires it.
Sara sings, “Wise men follow through the dark that beckons them.”
“We could switch,” Hadley says, pulling out her phone and showing me her case.
“Oh, no,” I say. “Your case is the only one I wanted and you wouldn’t let me get the same one as you, and now you want my brand new one in exchange with your old case with the Birkenstock sticker on it? No, thanks.”
Hadley chuckles and puts my phone down. We drive for a while and she says, “I could switch and you wouldn’t know.”
“And I’d accidentally take your phone, and you’d take mine, and Hadley, let’s just be real honest: we’d both be devastated with what it was we’d find.”
Hadley laughs again, and Sara sings, “In storm and tempest keep ’em until the bell is tolled.”
I think of all the notes I wrote to friends and boyfriends throughout my teenage years – notes I folded in neat triangles and rectangles and maybe I’d have understood algebra if I had taken as much time to study it as I did write and fold notes.
They’re stored in Gap and Limited bags, my letters. Well, the letters to me. I don’t know where the ones I wrote went. Growing up, I stored them in the back of my closet. I wasn’t hiding them, maybe just keeping them safe. It never occurred to me that my mom would ever read them, and I’m imagining now she and my dad saying, “It’s note check time – hand ’em over,” like Jesse and I threaten to do with Hadley’s phone.
The three of us would all die.
‘Tis the season of thinking about Mary and I’m wondering if she ever thought of or even told God, “But I don’t know what I’m doing! I don’t know how to keep him safe!”
I imagine God and Gabriel holding their bellies from all the laughter. “Oh, Mary,” they’d say. “Whoever said you had to know what you’re doing? Whoever said you had to keep him safe? He’s here to live.”
We’re here to live, I think, and I lift my arm from guarding Hadley as I make a left turn into the parking garage. As though my arm will save her. As though she needs my arm to save to her.
//
In church, during the Children’s Moment, Harper gets two buttons – one for herself and one to give away. They say, “God loves you,” and Harper walks back to her seat with the two buttons that I realize are not buttons like you’d put on a sweater, but the kind you’d pin to a jacket.
Harper, who is my angel girl, is also a menace. My guess is she and Gabriel would have a good old time stirring up trouble, and as she sits down she tucks one button in her pocket, and slowly turns the other one over, pops the pin out, and begins to giggle.
Our pastor is at the pulpit reading from the Bible verses he’s going to preach on. He’s going to pray and ask God to help him deliver this sermon. He’s going to ask God that his words don’t fall on deaf ears. We are all supposed to be quiet – and for Pete’s sake, serious – and Harper’s shoulders are shaking from laughing and her eyes are wide and wild with what I know she’s about to do.
She lifts a trembling hand slowly, turns the button proclaiming God’s love so the pin is pointing – aiming – at her sister’s leg.
Readers might wonder why I didn’t stop what is about to happen but those of you who are parents, can you really? The four of us recently had an hour and half conversation about why, every single night, after we’ve said goodnight to Hadley and Harper, and Jesse and I head downstairs, the second we sit down, the two of them are wrestling and screaming and slamming doors and calling each other butthead and trying to fart in each other’s faces, and that’s when they’re getting along. That’s being friendly.
“Why?” we asked them. “Why does this happen every night?”
There is no answer, folks. Jesse and I may as well have been asking why God so loved the world, and now Harper’s poked the pin on Hadley’s leg and Hadley, who will one day win us millions of dollars with her poker face, doesn’t flinch but takes a hand to the air, shifts it into a claw, and before you can say, “Mary, you have found favor with the Lord,” gives Harper a horse bite that even I can feel just watching it. Harper throws her head back both in shock and delight. This is exactly the reaction she was hoping for.
It all happens so fast, this moment. Jesse, who is sitting next to them, doesn’t even notice (or maybe he’s ignoring them), and so I nudge him in the side not because I want him to do something about it, but because I am laughing and I want him in on the joke. He looks at me, then looks at his girls, one of them shaking with the giggles, the other solemn faced and staring straight ahead. In one hand, she holds the button, and in the other, her sister’s hand. Their fingers are laced together.
I wonder if Mary had moments like this, when amongst all this dark, all this seriousness, all the heaviness of raising and loving a child she’d know she’d need to let go of – that letting go of him was the only way to let him live – I wonder if the promise of God’s love stabbed her so that she remembered a slant of light, and the comedy of this wondrous love. I wonder if she laughed, and laughing gave her faith that this story would not be a tragedy.
I hope so.
Resources:
Hadley and Harper use this journal during Advent (and hopefully, after).
These journals are available for adults, and I use this one. However, during Advent, I am reading God With Us, and journaling from the following prompts:
- One line that struck me:
- One new insight:
- Something unexpected:
- One slant of light:
- Something mysterious:
- Something to tell God:
I use these prompts with the books I’m reading this season as well. Currently, I’m reading Pan’s Labyrinth: The Labryinth of the Faun.
As the mother of girls, I love this!