Butterfly wings and big jumpers

The other day I was surfing aimlessly - I mean, writing something profound - and I was distracted  by a ping from my inbox. As every writer knows, a ping from the inbox requires immediate attention, so I answered the call.

It was an alert to say that there had been a message from the child we sponsor in Uganda.

His name is Brian, he's ten years old and he likes football and animals. He's doing well in school, and passed his exam last year. He wants to be 'an army man' when he leaves school. Or maybe a doctor.

***

Continued over at The Association of Christian Writers' Blog, which is called 'More Than Writers' I contribute on the 23rd of each month. 

Come and say hello and have a look around. 

A black eye and a taste of heaven

This is an old post; I wrote it when Lizzy was eight, and it's only needed a little updating now that she's eleven. Yesterday was her birthday and it all came back to me once again.



Yesterday was my little girl's eleventh birthday and she was more excited than an excited thing. We did all the stuff; we did presents, we did birthday-tea-full-of-treats-with-little-nutritional value, we did balloons, we did singing, we did blowing out candles. We did hugs and we did great big smiles. We did reminiscing, Daddy and me.

I gave birth to Elizabeth after a rapid labour that confounded the midwives. I had a single paracetamol for pain relief at about half past eight because the midwife who examined me thought I had a very long way to go and assumed I was a bit of a wuss to be asking about it so early in the game. When I got hold of the gas and air I left teeth-marks in the mouthpiece and nail marks where I had it clenched in my fist. Daddy arrived at half past nine fresh off a train from London and walked in nonchalantly just in time for the punchline. 

At 10.16pm, Elizabeth Lucy took everyone by surprise and was born on a plinth in an examination room on the hottest day of the year 2005, and all the fans were in use elsewhere. It was warm work.

I held my little girl in my arms and I was filled with wonder. Long fingers, a mass of light brown hair, button nose, little chin just like her Daddy's and a big black eye. She was brand new, moments old,  with a lusty cry before she was even fully born. 

Red and bruised, head slightly elongated, one eye bloodshot and swollen shut, little rosebud lips giving us glimpses of a little pointy tongue, the sharpest of tiny fingernails. Beautiful? Well, yes and no. Or more accurately, no - and yes, breathtakingly beautiful. A whole person made up of half me and half Daddy. Two of everything down the sides and one of everything down the middle. Breathing, crying, suckling, waving, kicking, snuggling. Fragile and yet so strong. Miraculous. 

I can't explain it, that thing that happened that night. The way that I went in to the hospital someone's wife and someone's daughter and came out still those things but now someone's mother too. Everything changed that night. The world tilted slightly and never righted itself; it's strange that nobody ever noticed but me. 

Even after the midwife cut the cord, Elizabeth was attached to me. She always will be. I tell her that she's my baby girl and sometimes she snuggles closer when I say that and other times she stiffens and tells me in no uncertain terms that she's not a baby, she's a grown up girl. She has a little sister, also my baby girl, and Lizzy sometimes feels the weight of older sister responsibility very keenly. Lizzy is my oldest, my firstborn, my worrier. She's my vibrant, energetic, imaginative, complicated, softhearted, fearless dynamo of a daughter.  

Things weigh heavily on my Lizzy, her self-esteem sometimes is tissue-paper fragile and we work and we work to build her up. 

I know it's not the way to bring up a brave, strong woman, but I'd spare her every second of pain and hurt if I could, for the whole of her life. I'd rather the rough stuff happens dot me than her. From complicated and painful orthodontics to disaster in the final of the 100m butterfly to the boy who asked her to a party and then told her he'd been joking when she said yes.

And since I'm no stoic myself, it's nothing short of a miracle that I'd do that, and do it in an instant. But a miracle did happen that night when I had my baby. I became someone different when I became a mummy. I'm still growing into that person; I suspect it might take me the rest of my life. It's not easy.

Not easy at all, but often wonderful. I sat on the side of her bed last night at 10.16pm and I stroked her hair and kissed her forehead and inhaled the fragrance of her as she slept.

When she was a baby I used to carry her with her head on my chest and I would breathe in her baby smell and I remember offering her to another family member to sniff because she smelled so beautiful. They smiled politely but they didn't get it. I wonder if it's just for me - some primal thing, some deeply profound connection just for mother and daughter? I don't know. I do know that from the moment I took my first breath as a mummy, it's my favourite fragrance in the world, matched only by that of her little sister. 

They say that smell is the sense most closely linked to memory - then maybe that's why. Last night I remembered like yesterday that night in the tiny room on the hard, high, narrow examination table, hot and exhausted and dazed, with my baby girl on my chest. 

Inelegant, undignified, undone. 

Nobody tells you these things about having a baby. Nobody tells you the true horror of the sleep deprivation that makes you feel as if life is not worth living. Nobody tells you about the dilemmas of high temperatures and endless crying and inoculations and school selection. No-one teaches you how to untangle baby-fine hair or comb for nits or how to use hair straighteners because that's what all the girls at school do. No-one tells you what to do when your baby girl is bullied, or bullies, or doesn't get on with a teacher. Nobody tells you how to prepare your daughter for senior school, or puberty, or ready her for success and failure.

You play it by ear, and sometimes the notes are all muddled up. 

It's a good job you don't get a glimpse of the soul searching that goes on when your baby girl has no confidence, or loses sleep to anxiety, or cries too easily when things go wrong. Was it me? My inadequacy complex was genetic? Or have I criticised too much, encouraged too little, corrected too forcibly? Crushed when I should have coaxed? Demolished when I should have built up?

Don't get me started. I'm eleven years in to this motherhood thing and the truth is that I don't know what I'm doing any more than I did that night in June eleven years ago. There's no instruction booklet and no map. I just feel my way; every year I have fewer answers. Sometimes we skip along at a lovely pace, everyone smiling, and the scenery is wonderful. I take lots of pictures and get very sentimental with souvenirs. Other times I get completely lost. I hit dead ends and unexpected detours and I have to crawl my way back. I ask a lot of questions and cry a lot of tears, inwardly and outwardly. 

 Nobody tells you how to do it. I think that's pretty normal, isn't it? 

But the most breathtakingly powerful thing that nobody ever tells you is that the whole world changes. 

The whole world changes. So much that I'll never forget a single detail of 10.16pm on that evening eight years ago and when I look down at the long, lean frame of my beautiful sleeping girl, arms flung out in her birthday pyjamas, my head fills with memories of first breaths, first smiles, first steps - and my heart swells.

Nobody tells you how much you'll love them. 

It's a little taste of heaven.

In the night and in the morning

I like sleeping, and I'm good at it.

The secret to my success is practice. I practice often, and for as long as I can. I hope that when the time comes for me to depart this world the end might come while I'm asleep, and then those who know me well will wipe away a tear and say, 'Well, she died doing what she loved doing most...'

The thing is, sleep has not been going well, lately. I've lost my mojo. Most often it goes like this: I wake in the night for no obvious reason and my head is so cram-jam full of things that I can't get back to sleep again. I lie and watch the red digital numbers on my bedside clock as they flick closer and closer to the awfulness of Getting Up Time and try in vain to empty my mind of all the stuff that's clogging it up and stopping the dreams from coming.

Here's a little story from the other night.

2:26am. Desperate shrieks from Katy's room.

Read the rest over at The Association of Christian Writers' More Than Writers blog. I post there on the 23rd of every month. They're a friendly bunch.

Easy like Sunday morning

One day I'd like to get to church on a Sunday and not get whiplash from the change in pace.

The other week I was doing one of the readings in church and so was meeting with others in the vestry just before the service to pray. I couldn't think of a thing to say, and I stood, mute and unfocused, managing the occasional 'Amen'.

The whirlwind of Sunday morning had one again left my head full of static, and it was going to take me longer than the distance between the main doors at the back of church and the vestry at the front to calm it down, and this was not an unfamiliar feeling. I usually arrive at church in that state.

Whoever said, 'Easy like Sunday morning,' clearly didn't have children to get to church. My two require endless nagging to get them dressed, brushed and in their coats and shoes round about the right time to leave. We're inevitably just stumbling out of the front door five minutes before the service is about to start, with the church a ten minute walk away. On the day when I'm reading, or doing the prayers, it has been known for me to form an advance party to scuttle down the road ahead of my husband who undertakes to herd the children there when the missing shoe has been located, or the correct toy selected to accompany them. Sometimes when I appear from the vestry in my state of calm serenity (ahem), they're there sitting buffed and alert in church (haha) and other times they appear, grim-faced and pale during the first hymn.

It's not only the children that make Sunday mornings so fraught, however. Some of it may be down to my keenness to extract any last moments in bed on the only day free from school runs or (now) early morning swimming training, and I always underestimate how long things are going to take to get ready.

So much for the practical things, and I'm sure we're not unique - but the real chaos is going on in my head, and that's the thing that perplexes me the most.

I come into church, and it feels different. Whether it should or not is another debate, but I find that eventually, after I've calmed down and soaked up the atmosphere, listened to the liturgy, sung some worship songs, closed my eyes to pray, heard God's word read aloud.... I am in a different place from where I was when I shrugged off my coat and sat down, out of breath. I have slowed; refocused. I am outside myself, for once, and my eyes are on Him.

It feels so much better.

I want there to be less of a difference between that feeling that the breathless avalanche that is my arrival at church. I want there to be less of a difference between one state and the other - my outside church state of mind and my in-church state of mind.

I don't want my head to be so full of things that to slow down and seek God is such a stark contrast from my normal way of being.

I want Him to seep into my normal, everyday consciousness more and more. I know that family life and circumstances are always going to raise the likelihood that the trip down the road on a Sunday morning might be more hairy and exhilarating than serene, but taking that into account, I would love there to be less of a contrast between the spiritual and the secular. Let's face it, it's me that makes the distinction in the first place, isn't it? God doesn't think that I should be in one frame of mind for an hour and a half on a Sunday morning and a different one all week, does He? It's not as if school runs and supermarket shops and sitting at the poolside are beneath Him and He's only interested in me between 11am and 12.20pm on a Sunday.

I am not generally someone who compartmentalises things. I know people who have one pigeonhole for family stuff, one for relationships, friends, work, health etc., but I am not like this. My life has always been more like a sandwich - my children are one layer, my marriage another, work and health and so on the other layers - if one of them is bad, the whole thing tastes wrong. One part will infect all the others and so if all is not well in an area of my life, the whole of me is upset.

I think this is why I am uncomfortable with the feeling that sometimes I put worshipping God in a compartment only to be accessed on Sundays. Because I've done this, the rest of my life has to be awkwardly contained in the same framework and it just won't do it. So the other jumbled-up compartments labelled 'The Rest Of My Life' all swish about and froth up and overflow all on top of the 'Sunday morning' compartment and it gets swamped. And then in the vestry I find that I am waiting for 'Life' to drain away so that I can find God.

Perhaps it's not always like this. I suspect there have been times when my Life Sandwich is liberally spread throughout with spirituality and the whole thing is much richer and tastier and more satisfying because of it. Every bite has God in it.

Maybe I've just lost that at the moment; after all, Christmas is a huge and ironic distraction from one's spiritual life, isn't it? I find that I am all on to focus on the nativity advent calendar with the children once a day in the maelstrom of preparations and purchases in December. I missed the Carol Service this year, my annual advent devotional got pushed out as life got too busy and no sooner were the Christmas festivities over than I succumbed to a chest infection and sort of opted out of everything for the next week, which meant that my usual New Year musings and preparations were somewhat truncated.

That's probably not a bad thing. I over-think most things.

So, here I am in January and I am feeling a little out of sorts. Breathless from the speed with which I've found myself in another New Year and a bit reluctant to embrace it as I liked the old one.  Head spinning a little, trying to find something to focus on that isn't moving, something that will stay the same even when everything else is constantly shifting shape.

That'll be you, then, God.

Spread through my sandwich, will you?  I'm inviting you in - access all areas. Be the main filling, be the crusts, the salad, the pickle, the condiments, the mayonnaise on the side of the plate. Overflow and affect everything.

Peace, please.

Family Rules

There's a plaque on the wall in my kitchen; one of those cheery wordy ones with an inspiring message that are so popular at the moment. It's even made to look distressed, as if it's old, thus lending it more gravitas, I suppose.

It would be easy to fill my house with words on the walls but one can certainly overdo it. Even with just the odd one here and there it's so easy to become so familiar with them that I no longer read the words.

However, I find myself examining this one afresh, because I have changed the way I do things. For the sake of my back and the proximity of the radiator now that the nights are drawing in, I've moved my primary spot for writing to the kitchen table, rather than my perch on a stool at the island unit. Here, the chair may be hard, but it has a back on it, and the fridge is no longer at arms length. This can only be a good thing. Now, from this 'desk', I am straight opposite the plaque. 

FAMILY RULES, it says. 

Yes, one of those. Bought with the children in mind, because children need rules, don't they?  Children need reminders of what's right and what isn't. The problem is that as I sit here nursing my coffee I realise that I need reminding too; possibly more than they do. After all, they're only seven and nine, and I'm supposedly all grown up.

Family Rules. 

'Keep your promises'

Right. Problems here right away. I don't like promises, for a variety of reasons. First of all, it says in the Bible,

 'All you need to say is 'yes' or 'no'. Everything beyond this comes from the evil one.' NIV (Matthew 5:37)

I want my children to grow up trusting my word; that if I say I'll do something, I'll do it. I can see the sense in being very careful what you say you'll do. On a practical level, I learned very quickly that small children have highly selective memories that are totally incapable of retaining information about likes and dislikes ('Yesterday you liked bananas!') but perish the thought that you should blithely say 'yes' to some outrageous plan one evening only to find it impossible (or impractical) to follow through the next day.

Mum, you promised. Then you're left in the no man's land of 'well, I didn't technically promise...' and I hate that sort of wriggling. So I say annoying things like, 'We'll see.' or 'I'll think about it.'  A distinction without much difference, perhaps. But I don't promise, and I tell the children not to make promises, but to let their word be enough. If they say they'll do something, do it. Don't swear on anything, don't bargain, just say yes or no. I'm not sure they see it quite as simply as this.

Under 'Keep your promises' is:

Share

Oh my word, there's a can of worms. My daughters are sometimes remarkably generous with their things, and other times meaner than Scrooge.

'Can I borrow your green crayon?'
'No. Get your own.'
'Mine's broken.'
'Tough.'

That kind of thing. I find large portions of my life spent brokering peace deals about who has the gadget for how long before having to hand it over in order to avoid A having possession of it for a nanosecond longer than B. Also removing said gadget from both as a potentially expensive tug-of-war begins. So the 'Share' part is definitely for the kids, then.

Or not. I recall just the other day becoming rather animated (shall we say) when my favourite pen was missing from the pen pot on my desk for the millionth time when I wanted it. On numerous occasions have I retrieved it from wherever it turned up but this time it was Gone For Good. I made dire pronouncements about nobody ever begin allowed to touch my pen pot again, ever. The following day my mum handed me a package containing a replacement pen. Ahem.  The kids so far have been afraid to touch it.

Good sharing, then.

Think of others before yourself.

Haha.

This is written rather small, and is easy to miss. This is quite convenient as quite often I would rather pretend that I haven't seen it.

I have to say that having children is a painfully good way of finding out how selfish you are, should you want to know, and I can't say that I did.

Since my babies came along it's been a long, drawn out battle between their needs and my desire to please myself. They won't/can't give in, and I don't want to, so the battle continues to rage. I want the house the way I want it, I want to spend my time the way I want to spend it, I want to eat when I want to, sleep when I want to, and so on. I don't want to wipe bottoms, make endless meals and find an inordinate number of replacement batteries for things that beep.

I love my family more than I can possibly put into words, but it is not easy to think of others before yourself. It isn't. And when I get a good run at it, and keep everybody happy for a while, the little voice in my head might pipe up with things like, 'So what about you? Who's making you happy?' and spiky little things called Resentment and Self-pity and Irritation dig in.

St Paul knew it would be like this. He said:

'Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, rather, in humility, value others above yourself.' (NIV) Philippians 2:3

It's hard to put others first. It's dead easy some of the time, because I love my family and I want to make them happy, and I love it when they are happy, but consistency is key and that's downright difficult. I like peace, and giving in and choosing your battles and letting go of control-freakery and so on are ways of keeping the peace. But sometimes, just sometimes, I throw all this up in the air and inwardly shout, ME ME ME.

Moving on...

Say I love you. 

This part is easy. We say 'I love you' lots. Several times a day. I am blessed beyond measure to have a family that loves each other and I tell my husband and he tells me, and I tell my girls and they tell me, and he tells them and they tell him... and so we are pretty much loved up most of the time. So we nailed that one, didn't we?

Well, it occurs to me that there are times when those words are the furthest thing from my head, and sometimes that's when they're most needed. When I've locked horns with one of the girls over something vital to their wellbeing - like whether it's cold enough for a coat, perhaps - how much I love them is not foremost in my mind. When my daughter is in the  middle of a tantrum because the same shoes she's worn for three months suddenly 'feel weird' and can't be worn today, the last thing on my mind is to tell her how loved she is. Perhaps that's when she most needs to hear it.

Listen to your parents

Of course. This is 'a no-brainer' as they say. Most of what I say is definitely worth listening to. Children should always listen to their parents. Just like I did.

Hmm. I'm not sure whether the most senior member of my household might agree with that one. I remember a conversation from way back when that went something like this:

'Have you done your homework?'
'It'll get done, mother.'

Still, I grew up pretty well, didn't I?  Maybe they will, too.

Do your best

We do our best, in this house. Most of the time. One of my daughter's teachers at parents' evening a while ago said, 'She does her best, usually, except when she doesn't.'  I can understand that. Sometimes we cut corners. Sometimes it's too hard.

We do our best to do our best.

Say please and thank you.

Last night, an exchange in our house:

'WILL YOU GET YOUR WELLIES OFF THE TABLE RIGHT NOW!' (Not actually a question)

'Mummy, you didn't say 'please'.'

The conversation didn't end there, but we'll draw a veil over the next bit.  My example might not be perfect, but I have been known to offer a plate of biscuits to random visitors to the house and automatically say, 'Thank you, Mummy' when they take one, before clamping a hand over my mouth. Parents of my daughters' friends tell me that they are polite and remember their please-and-thankyous when they're out and about and so I think we do okay. Always room for improvement, though.

'Please, if it's not too much trouble, would you mind removing your wellies from the table?' might have been better, I suppose.

Always tell the truth

Oh, another can of worms. Straightforward and black and white?  Yes, on one level, it certainly is.
Witholding the full horror of the truth from a small child is sometimes required, however, as it was on the day some years ago when my littlest girl asked me how much I loved Scruffy Barney (her favourite, special toy). I said that I loved him very much, because she loved him. She then went on to ask me if I had to save either Scruffy or her sister from a dinosaur, who would I save?  She was devastated by the answer and cried for about half an hour.

Always tell the truth?

Always tell the truth to your mum, that's what I say. I have always known when my daughters are telling lies, but as they get older it gets harder and harder, as does making them believe that Mummy always knows when they're not telling the truth.  There's a felt tip pen scribble on the bookcase and both of them deny having anything to do with it. Was it Daddy? Or Grandma? Or maybe I did it by myself without realising? All these were serious suggestions.

I still don't know who did it. I moved the lamp six inches to the right and now you can't see it any more. Sometimes moving on is the best thing you can do.

Laugh at yourself

For someone like me, among the most self-conscious souls in the world, this isn't an easy one. I'm better than I was, but still not that good. My daughters take after me - or maybe it's just because they're little - but we need to work on not taking things so seriously.

They have such a wonderful sense of humour (when it's not bottom jokes, or cackles over Uranus and its gassy atmosphere) and sometimes a very clever wit. Quite often, though, one of them will say something funny and we'll all laugh, and they'll be embarrassed and cross. Laughing is good, we say, it's a gift to make people laugh. We're laughing with you, not AT you; 'But I wasn't laughing,' they say.

Ah, well, that's where we come unstuck, then.

Hug often

This is a bit like 'Say I love you'. We hug all the time. We have different levels of hugginess, but we are a fairly tactile family. One daughter creeps onto my lap at any excuse and the other needs to be sneaked up on, but I love that we hug. There are moments when a hug is exactly what's needed, however, and it's the hardest thing. The mean times, the irritable times, the tantrum times. The refusing-to-admit-I'm-wrong times. Hug then, too. That's when a hug really does say more than words.

Use kind words

Sigh.  For someone who loves words, who enjoys playing with them and trying to get them to do what I want them to do, I sometimes get it spectacularly wrong. Words can build up or destroy, and I know how easy it is to disregard the dozen nice things someone says and remember only the bad thing.

Whoever said that 'Sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me,' had no idea how words can penetrate the heaviest armour and wound on a profound level. I have been guilty of saying terrible things to the people I love and have carried that guilt for a long time. Controlling my temper and making sure that in the middle of the anger and the confusion and the excesses of emotion harsh and hurtful things don't slip out is very difficult indeed.

I need a lot of help here.

And finally:  Love each other

And this is what reassures me. Most of the prescriptions of the plaque look straightforward enough in theory, only to turn out to be complicated in practice. Most of them I fail at on a daily basis: we all do. It's hard to share, to do your best, to be unfailingly truthful, to use kind words. It's just hard.

So is loving each other, but we do.  And because we do, we try, and we keep on trying. It was very easy to buy this little plaque and choose where to hang it, and indeed, I showed it to the girls and got them to read it out loud. They weren't that keen, and I can see why. It's a lofty ideal to have words like that on the wall, and I need to remember that I don't live up to them any better than my little girls do. It's good to have them in front of me to remind and inspire me; to have them there on the wall to say, 'This is what I'm aiming for. This is what I want to be like - a person who does these things' . And then I can try, and keep trying.

I know I get it wrong, and often, but I am not crushed or discouraged by the distance by which I fall short.

The reason I'm not is that I know that I am loved anyway, just as I am, with all my failures. Just as I don't stop loving my girls when they are caught out in a lie, or when they don't do their homework, or when they fight over a crayon, I am loved. Even when I snap at my husband, or do what I want to do at someone else's expense, I am loved.

A long time ago Moses had a different plaque with ten Family Rules and they're downright impossible to live up to.  There's only ever been one man in the history of the world who managed it. Moses even hurled them on the floor until they smashed into small pieces because he was so frustrated at the people's disobedience, but God never stopped loving His people.

Even though I have the Rules before me and I forget them and choose to do something else over and over again, even so, I am forgiven. Even when I try to reinterpret them and wriggle out from underneath my failure to keep to the rules, I am forgiven, and I am loved.

There's so much to learn.

Keep Forgiving. That should be on the plaque as well.

Keep trying. 

There is always another chance.
It's never too late to try again.

Amen to that.

Feeling sort of gorgeous

I did Katy's hair differently this morning. 

She wants to grow out her fringe. I said yes, because when her hair is wet and away from her face after a shower she looks even more beautiful than she does with those big eyes peeping out from under. 

She has short, dark, naturally glossy hair in a vaguely bob-like shape but she hates me brushing it. She loathes having it messed with and yet she was blessed with a double crown which means that her natural parting is like a donkey's hind leg. Her resistance to brushing and styling mean that quite often she goes to school with her hair pretty much as it got out of bed.

Wow. This is a profound post, isn't it? 

Anyway. The fringe. I said yes, because the more of her lovely face that I can see, the better. Today we crossed a bit of a Rubicon in that it became clear that it's now long enough to need the heavy fringe kept out of the way if she is to continue to see out. Let's see whether she's going to grow it out or have it trimmed back in again, then. Time will tell. 

I carefully separated out the fringe, brushed it together, put a twist in it and clipped it on top of her head with no less than three hairclips. Two blue and a pink. Some wispy bits came down immediately and I'm quite sure that the whole lot will be out on the playground by lunchtime, but she looked just lovely. 

I said so, Daddy said so, Grandma said so. Big sister sort of grunted, which Katy took for agreement as well. On the way to school, a neighbour complimented Katy on her hair and another Mum commented, 'Great hair, Kate,' as we passed by. Katy stood tall and flipped her hair about a bit, looking pleased. I checked her clips. 

Leaning down close, I whispered to her, 'You are gorgeous. Are you feeling gorgeous?'

Pink cheeked, she whispered back, 'Sort of.' 

We squeezed hands and walked in the school doors. 

A tiny moment. Nothing earth-shattering, nothing important in the eternal scheme of things. But I thought my heart would burst and I wanted to say thank you. 

I look at my daughters, both of them, and I am amazed at how beautiful they are. I suppose that I have to take into account that I am their mother, and so I would see their gorgeousness whether it was really there or not, and so I count myself lucky that they are actually gorgeous, and so I do not have to delude myself. But my point is, I love them with a ferocity that I didn't think was possible before I had babies of my own. 

I look at my children and I see their beauty.

I am your child, Lord God. I know that you look at me and think that I'm beautiful. You know how hard that is even for me to type, because for all I know about your endless love, and your inability to make mistakes, I think that you're wrong.

I'm not touting for compliments or asking for reassurance. I know what there is to know from a head-perspective. I tell my girls that the world's definition of beauty is not real and they should never measure themselves against it. I tell them that they shouldn't compare themselves to anyone else because everyone is unique and special and no two people are alike. I tell them that beauty is far more than good skin and good hair and slim thighs and a narrow waist. I tell them that they are beautiful just how they are and they should stand tall as princesses, for you are their Daddy.

This applies to me, too. I know it does, I know. I just can't seem to move the knowledge from my head to my heart. I look in the mirror and I don't like what I see. I compare myself with others and find myself wanting. I see the airbrushing and elongating of models on the magazines, the billboards, the television and still, I wish...

There's just a huge hole in me that needs filling. A deep, old wound that needs healing.

You are the Healer. In your time, Lord. 

I wonder if you ever try to whisper to me, 'You are gorgeous. Are you feeling gorgeous?' and I plug my ears, shake my head and turn away. For I am your little girl just as Katy is mine. And strange as I might find it, I know that you love me with a ferocity that makes mine for her look half-hearted. 

I'm glad that Katy started today feeling sort of gorgeous. Long, long, long may it last. I suspect she'll come out of school with her hair in her eyes and two out of three clips (if I'm lucky - we get through hairclips faster than biscuits round here) and we'll have to start again tomorrow, but I like that she went into school this morning feeling special. 

I bet you want that for me. I know that you love me, and you approve of me, and you look at me and see beauty. 

Abba, Daddy?

I would like to feel sort of gorgeous.

Popular posts: With butterfly wings

Well, there I was just about to put this post up again because it's one of my most popular posts, and as I read it, I realised how little has changed. I find it both depressing and comforting that a year ago during the summer school holidays I was struggling to find time to spend with you, Lord God, and struggling generally with day to day trivia of life.

The more things change, the more they stay the same, hey.

I was flat on my tummy yesterday in the garden photographing a butterfly.

For all these reasons it seems apt to repost this:



Evening, God.

It's been a while, hasn't it? Busy busy busy, you know; school holidays, packing for trips, the odd tummy bug. I'm wanting to catch up. 

Today we went to a Butterfly Centre. We went in bright sunshine, came home in torrential rain and picnicked in a howling gale, but we had a wonderful time. 

Butterfly

What a fantastic place. 

Birds of prey, fabulous peacocks, ancient tortoises, snakes and spiders and butterflies. Amazing, delicate, extravagantly beautiful butterflies. They lived in a recreation of a tropical rainforest complete with pools and tropical flowers, creepy crawlies, bats and birds. Everywhere things scuttled and crept and fluttered and slithered. The air was hot and humid and the sun shone through the transparent roof and transported us to another place. A large scaly lizard like thing as long as my arm perched up in the roof and a display of tiny, jewel-like poison dart frogs kept Katy occupied for ages. Elizabeth was mesmerised by a large snake slowly consuming a white rat and I was transfixed by the beauty of the butterflies. 

In our garden we often get butterflies. We have buddleia and cornflowers and marigolds and lots of (ahem) 'wilderness' areas and we're used to seeing what I've always thought of as cabbage whites and something that looks a bit like a red admiral (but probably isn't, I realise). I don't know much about butterflies and I confess that even today I was more interested in gazing at them and trying to take a decent photograph than I was in reading the educational material available. 

Fragile, but strong enough to do what it's meant to do.

Stunning colours, so fragile. Amazingly detailed; some of the butterflies looked as if they'd been coloured by hand. Elusive - they landed on a leaf at eye level but before I'd raised my camera they were off again, flitting between luscious blooms from petal to petal, weightless. They've been described as 'living flowers' and I like that. 

Apparently the average lifespan of a butterfly is about a month. They don't live very long, but while they live they are spectacular. They are pupae, then caterpillars, then they snuggle into their chrysalis for a while and then they hatch into gorgeous creatures that flutter and dance and sit on flowers waiting to have their picture taken, if any huge and clumsy human being stumbles near. 

Each of these tiny insects is unique. You made each one different. You chose their colours, the design on their wings, their size and shape and habits and flight pattern. You watch over each chrysalis as they sleep and you count very wing beat. What a Creator you are, to take such joy in the tiny and helpless. Even the fleeting life of a butterfly has meaning in the fragile eco-system of the rainforest, just as it does in my back garden. 

You made them beautiful just because you could. Your attention to detail never fails to amaze me. You could just have made a red one and a blue one and a yellow one, but the intricacy and detail are breathtaking. Today we even saw transparent butterflies. How cool is that? 

You know what captured my imagination today, though? It was when I came to the cabinet where the butterflies emerge fully formed from a chrysalis spun by a crawling caterpillar.  Ranks of chrysalises (is that the plural of chrysalis?) hung in rows - bright green, dark green, yellow, red, russet, even shiny gold. Some butterflies were in process of struggling slowly out of their cocoon and this is where it got to me. 

A butterfly has to battle to leave the chrysalis. It's not easy. It works hard to tear its way out and it has to fight, then rest. 

Fight, then rest. 

It is in the action of pushing its way into the world that the butterfly gains enough strength in its brand new and breathtakingly beautiful wings to fly. If I were to help a butterfly out of it's chrysalis, it would die. It would never fly. It would never become what it was meant to become, because it had never built up its muscles. If butterflies have muscles. I'm not sure about that, but you get the drift. 

Wow. 

Maybe I'm like a butterfly. I know that I live longer, but that's nonsense really because I know that my lifespan is only a tiny wingbeat in eternity. A blink. I know that I'm not as wonderfully beautiful as a butterfly, but then you tell me in the Bible that I am just those things; wonderful and beautiful. As I peered at those tiny insects today, feeling enormous and substantial in contrast with their delicate fragility, it made me think of the way you look at me. I am as vulnerable and ephemeral as a butterfly. 

I am nothing without you, my Creator.

Struggle, then rest, then struggle...

I too have a purpose, and I need muscles to fulfil it. If you helped me out of my chrysalis every time I tired and moaned and cried out to you to do it for me, then maybe I would never fly. 

So often I don't like how life is hard. I don't like that it takes so much effort and that even the good things, even the blessings, are hard work. We went to the Olympics last week and we visited family and we did wonderful things that are good gifts from you, opportunities that are rare and to be cherished, and yet I found myself exhausted simply with the daily job of negotiating life with two small energetic children who are programmed to get up early, stay up late and make much noise in between. 

I keep asking you, Father, why is it so hard? Is it just me? The generations before me just got on with things, why do I struggle so much? I want you to take the difficulty away and give me a break. But maybe, I wonder, if you did, then I might never have the strength to fly.

'Mummy, it's you with butterfly wings.'

Is that it? Do I need to push my way out, struggle, rest, struggle, rest, until I emerge into the light and open out my beautiful wings? Only then I'll be strong enough to take off and do what I was made to do. Fulfil my purpose in life. 

A few days ago my little girl, Lizzie, gave me a picture she'd drawn on a bit of notepaper. She handed it to me as a present. 

She said, 'Mummy, it's you. It's you with butterfly wings.'

Ah. 

So here it is. 

I'm as unique and beautiful as a butterfly, and my life is just as fleeting.

If you created and painted the butterflies with such painstaking love, then what a work of art am I?

A butterfly is just a tiny insect but has a vital, God-given role to play in the world, and so do I... 

Fragile as they are, they need strength to do what they were created to do. They struggle, and rest, and then one day they spread their beautiful wings and fly.

And you smile.

That's good enough for me. 

A black eye and a taste of heaven

Well, thank you for another year, Lord God.

Yesterday was my little girl's eighth birthday and she was more excited than an excited thing. We did all the stuff; we did presents, we did birthday-tea-full-of-treats-with-little-nutritional value, we did balloons, we did singing, we did blowing out candles. We did hugs and we did great big smiles. We did reminiscing, Daddy and me. 

I gave birth to Elizabeth after a rapid labour against all the expectations of the midwives. I had a single paracetamol for pain relief at about half past eight because the midwife who examined me thought I had a very long way to go and assumed I was a bit of a wuss to be asking about it so early in the game. When I got hold of the gas and air I left teeth-marks in the mouthpiece and nail marks where I had it clenched in my fist. Daddy arrived at half past nine fresh off a train from London and walked in nonchalantly just in time for the punchline. 

At 10.16pm, Elizabeth Lucy took everyone by surprise and was born on a plinth in an examination room on the hottest day of the year 2005, and all the fans were in use elsewhere. It was warm work.

I held my little girl in my arms and I was filled with wonder. Long fingers, a mass of light brown hair, button nose, little chin just like her Daddy's and a big black eye. She was brand new, moments old,  with a lusty cry before she was even fully born. 

Red and bruised, head slightly elongated, one eye bloodshot and swollen shut, little rosebud lips giving us glimpses of a little pointy tongue, the sharpest of tiny fingernails. Beautiful? Well, yes and no. Or more accurately, no - and yes, breathtakingly beautiful. A whole person made up of half me and half Daddy. Two of everything down the sides and one of everything down the middle. Breathing, crying, suckling, waving, kicking, snuggling. Fragile and yet so strong. 

I can't explain it, that thing that happened that night. The way that I went in to the hospital someone's wife and someone's daughter and came out still those things but now someone's mother too. Everything changed that night. The world tilted slightly and never righted itself; it's strange that nobody ever noticed but me. 

Even after the midwife cut the cord, Elizabeth was attached to me. She always will be. I tell her that she's my baby girl and sometimes she snuggles closer when I say that and other times she stiffens and tells me in no uncertain terms that she's not a baby, she's a grown up girl. She has a little sister, also my baby girl, and Lizzie sometimes feels the weight of older sister responsibility very keenly. Lizzie is my oldest, my firstborn, my worrier. She's my vibrant, energetic, imaginative, complicated, softhearted, fearless dynamo of a daughter.  

We found out last week after Xrays at the dentist that Elizabeth's adult teeth have not formed properly and many of them won't be coming. The dentist talked me through her Xrays and showed me the spaces in her jaw where lurking teeth should be. Her baby teeth haven't been a great success as a few of those formed poorly before she was born and so we've been hanging our hopes on their temporary nature, but alas they're going to have to last. She's got a decade or more of intervention ahead of her, poor love, extractions, orthodontics and implants, just to work on a smile. 

Elizabeth heard the dentist say that there was a strong likelihood that at the end of all the treatment, as a young adult, she'd have a nice smile. Afterwards, on our subdued ride home, she asked me, 'Isn't my smile nice now?'

That's one of those moments that made me catch my breath. 

Oh, my little love. I remember the very first smile, wide and toothless. It was the most wonderful thing I ever saw then, and still is, at eight years old with gaps and unevenness and trouble buried beneath the surface. It will be at twenty when it's wide and white and even and the braces are off and the implants are implanted and she's buried the trauma of the season-ticket to the orthodontist. If I were only around to see it I have no doubt that it would take my breath away at ninety five when only those implants remain and there are gaps once again. 

My heart hurt for her. Things weigh heavily on my Lizzie, her self-esteem sometimes is tissue-paper fragile and we work and we work to build her up. This problem isn't going away any time soon. The dentist told me that things were not as bad as they could be; there are many worse off. Of course there are. It's just that I don't want my little girls to go through stuff like this. And to be honest I don't want to go through it either; holding hands, drying tears, whispering love and encouragement and support as they struggle, just wishing that it was me, because it would be so much easier that way.  

I know it's not the way to bring up a brave, strong woman, but I'd spare her every second of pain and hurt if I could. And since I'm no stoic myself, it's nothing short of a miracle that I'd do that, and do it in an instant. But a miracle did happen that night when I had my baby. I became someone different when I became a mummy. I'm still growing into that person; I suspect it might take me the rest of my life. It's not easy.

Not easy at all, but often wonderful. I sat on the side of her bed last night at 10.16pm and I stroked her hair and kissed her forehead and inhaled the fragrance of her as she slept. When she was a baby I used to carry her with her head on my chest and I would breathe in her baby smell and I remember offering her to another family member to sniff because she smelled so beautiful. They smiled politely but they didn't get it. I wonder if it's just for me - some primal thing, some deeply profound connection just for mother and daughter? I don't know. I do know that from the moment I took my first breath as a mummy, it's my favourite fragrance in the world, matched only by that of her little sister. 

They say that smell is the sense most closely linked to memory - then maybe that's why. Last night I remembered like yesterday that night in the tiny room on the hard, high, narrow examination table, hot and exhausted and dazed, with my baby girl on my chest. 

Inelegant, undignified, undone. 

Nobody tells you these things about having a baby. Nobody tells you the true horror of the sleep deprivation. Nobody tells you about the dilemmas of high temperatures and endless crying and inoculations and school selection. No-one teaches you how to untangle baby-fine hair or comb for nits or do a French plait because that's what all the girls at school have. No-one tells you what to do when your baby girl is bullied, or bullies, or doesn't get on with a teacher. You play it by ear. 

It's a good job you don't get a glimpse of the soul searching that goes on when your baby girl has no confidence, or loses sleep to anxiety, or cries too easily when things go wrong. Was it me? My inadequacy complex was genetic? Or have I criticised too much, encouraged too little, corrected too forcibly? Crushed when I should have coaxed? Demolished when I should have built up?

Don't get me started. I'm eight years in to this motherhood thing and the truth is that I don't know what I'm doing any more than I did that night in June eight years ago. There's no instruction booklet and no map. I just feel my way. Sometimes we skip along at a lovely pace, everyone smiling, and the scenery is wonderful. I take lots of pictures and get very sentimental with souvenirs. Other times I get completely lost. I hit dead ends and unexpected detours and I have to crawl my way back. I ask a lot of questions and cry a lot of tears, inwardly and outwardly. 

 Nobody tells you how to do it. I think that's pretty normal, isn't it? 

But the most breathtakingly powerful thing that nobody ever tells you is that the whole world changes. 

The whole world changes. So much that I'll never forget a single detail of 10.16pm on that evening eight years ago and when I look down at the long, lean frame of my beautiful sleeping girl, arms flung out in her birthday pyjamas, my head fills with memories of first breaths, first smiles, first steps - and my heart swells.

Nobody tells you how much you'll love them. 

It's a little taste of heaven.

Give me Jesus

God, I'm exhausted. 

You know what this week has thrown at me and it's no surprise that I'm ready to call it a day. I'm tired and tearful and probably hormonal and at least I know that you're the one person who won't roll their eyes and put all this angst down to hormones; you invented them. You know what they can do to a person. 

Lord, it's been a crap week. Not to put too fine a point on it. Sorry.

I haven't even got the energy to tell you all about it - but that's alright because you know already. You were there. You think I can handle it. You're probably right, I suppose - what choice do I have? But I'm going to need some help. 

I came across this picture on the Internet. I love it. It's a beautiful picture of a sunrise and the caption is:

'In the morning, when I rise, give me Jesus.'

It turns out that it's a quote from a traditional spiritual song that I don't know which was famously arranged by a lady called Alma Blackmon. The words are very simple, and beautiful and the refrain: 

'You can have all this world

Just give me Jesus'.

That's about it. 

There have been a handful of times in my life, Lord God, when I've run out of... well, everything. Energy, ideas, patience, peace of mind. This week is pretty much one of those times. Bad news has piled on top of bad news and anxiety and worry linked arms and barged their way back into my head where they set up camp and made themselves comfortable. Fear crept in quietly and ominously and now huddles with them round the camp fire and depression and defeat are waiting in the shadows for an invitation. 

Give me Jesus. 

Lord, give me Jesus when I rise, and before that, when I lie in bed and stab at the snooze button and try to stay asleep because it's easier being asleep than awake. Give me Jesus when I come downstairs and start to nag the children about eating breakfast, brushing hair, brushing teeth, getting dressed, finding bookbags and finding shoes. 

Give me Jesus on the school run. Give me Jesus as I walk away into the grown-up bit of day which this week hasn't been a whole lot of fun. As I spend time with people I love, give me Jesus so that they can see Him, not me. 

Give me Jesus as I collect the kids and make tea. Give me Jesus as I run baths and find pyjamas. Give me Jesus as I put them to bed and then do it all over again. And again. 

Lord, Give me Jesus. You can have all this world, just give me Jesus. 

Lord, you can have all this world. I don't want it at the moment. It's a world full of broken marriages and pain and illness and hospitals and doctors and X rays and bad news and low self esteem and tears and waiting on hard chairs and lying awake at night not-knowing and filling the gaps with imagination that just loves to paint everything bleak and grim. 

It's a world full of shadows that are so dark that sometimes it's hard to see you.

It's a world where you are visible in the huge extravagant beauty of the first poppy blooming in my garden and in the promise of the flowers on the tomato plants and in the baby radishes peeping potential above the soil. It's a world of purply-grey stormy skies and lashing rain then watery sunshine and subtle rainbows and the smell of wet dusty ground. 

It's a world where those that have eyes to see and ears to hear can find you all everywhere - and all that's just lovely and great but right now it's not enough, Father God. I don't want to discern you in subtleties, I want to run actually, not figuratively, into your real, solid, faithful arms and feel the weight and strength of your embrace. To let my legs go as wobbly as they feel and let you pick me up effortlessly and hold me close like a little girl. 

Daddy, I'm tired.

I don't want to be strong. I want to give up. I want to stay asleep. 

I don't want to keep trying to communicate when I don't have words. I don't want to persevere with the goals you've set me, I want to sit down and not move. I don't want to make decisions and I don't want to explain bad things to small children and I just don't want to do any of it any more. 

I don't want to run the race, I'm tired and I want to rest. 

You can have all this world. Just give me Jesus. 

Amen. Just...amen.

Back to basics

Morning, God.

I've wondered what to say. I've been sitting here long after my coffee's finished and I've been reading the brilliance of other people's thoughts and ideas and feeling totally inadequate and I've been chewing the side of my left thumb until it's bleeding and I'm not going to mention that to anyone here because hubby hates my finger-chewing and little Katy has started doing it too and I'm held responsible for that bad habit. 

As inspiration and good grammar are concerned, that was a pretty duff start.

I'm going through one of those phases (this is the second this year) where coming here and talking to you has become a difficult thing. I'm not sure why. 

Part of it is that it feels a bit as if I have nothing to say, yet too much all at the same time. I know that you've been speaking to me recently and I'm trying to translate some of those words into something that I can talk about and clarify and develop, but I'm finding it hard to nail down. Some is deeply personal and very important to me and I need to sit for a few hours, just you and me, and try to understand. I know that you're waiting, patiently for me to do just that. 

Thank you, Lord, that the invitation to talk, to listen, to lean, to sink a bit deeper into you doesn't expire. Thank you for not taking umbrage and withdrawing your offer of help and healing just because I'm too wrapped up in things to take you up on it. 

My train of thought is still boarding at the station.

I have a myriad of reasons and excuses; the children have been on holiday, my husband is working from home, the (somewhat unwelcome) change in my routine (oh, my precious routine. I read somewhere that routine can become an idol, and I found myself wincing...) All these things have disturbed my rhythm and I'm finding it hard to get it back.

I want to scream. Or cry. Or go back to bed. 

What I should do is just lay it all down - there - and leave it with you. 

Right. Here's back to basics. Profound insight is beyond me. Intricate word play also out of my reach. Humour - no, not so much, today. So, then, what shall I say?

Someone once taught me the structure of prayer, years ago, and it sort of stuck on a basic level. 

ACTS.  Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, Supplication.

When in doubt...

Adoration

Lord, it's a beautiful day and you are everywhere. 

You are in the sunshine and shade, the birdsong and the neighbour's cat stretched black and glossy, lazy on our garden bench. 

You are in the vivid, improbable green of the trees and leaves, chlorophyll singing health and new growth and bright June potential. 

You are in the church bells chiming ten, reminding me that one of my favourite places in all the world is just down the road from here; worship is not just for Sunday, but here, now, in my back garden, at this keyboard, in that greenhouse, that shed, that kitchen. 

You are in the blue sky, the pompom white clouds, the daisies and buttercups and irrepressible clover that makes my lawn very unhealthy but oh, so soft to bare feet. 

You are in the beautiful faces of my two girls smiling at me from last year's school photo propped against the fruit bowl and you are there in the sheen of ripe pears and apples. 

You are in the wind blowing the washing on the line and you there in the fragrance of clean sheets. 

Oh, my God, you are sitting on the spare stool to my right and you have your arm around my shoulders and you care not a bit if my words are profound or well chosen or even spelled correctly; you just revel in the fact that your precious daughter wants to talk to you. 

Lord, I do. I do. I love you.

Confession

My heart sinks when I realise that I don't know where to start. 

Alright, how about yesterday when I was so angry with my oldest daughter, seven-going-on-fourteen, who sulked and grumped around on a beautiful treat-day out and did her best to spoil it for everyone? I cajoled, I encouraged, I sympathised and eventually I threatened. I said things that crushed and wounded and I'm sorry. 

I can make excuses by saying that I don't know what I'm supposed to do when faced with incessant whining and whinging and rudeness, but it's no defence. 

I was mean, and I'm sorry. 

I'm sorry for the things I thought as well; I demolished her in my head. I'm sorry for the things that are in my head that nobody knows about but you. I stoke up the negative things in my mind until they glow hot and spill over into words. 

I am full of self. I'm sorry that I turned my back on you last night when you waited for me to come and chat at bedtime; I said, in a minute, in a minute, while I checked Facebook and Twitter, then my email, then Facebook again. I played a game on my phone, read the news headlines and dipped in and out of YouTube until I was slouched so low in bed that sitting up with my journal and a pen and comparing notes with you was too much for me. Maybe I always knew it would be. 

I'm sorry. I don't understand why I do that because I know for a fact that meeting with you at the beginning and end of each day makes things so much better on every level. 

Thanksgiving

So, so much to give thanks for. 

For days like today when the view from the kitchen window is full of colour. 

For the days when it rains so that I don't have to go round with my watering can in the evening. 

For bees and garden chairs and books and notepads and ideas. 

Thank you for my girls' painted handprint pictures that freeze in time the smallness of their palm-prints for sentimental people like me. 

For the nothing-like-it feel of a small hand in yours as you walk along to school. 

For sausages for dinner and for mayonnaise, because there is no food that is not enhanced with the addition of mayonnaise. 

Thank you for your faithfulness, for your mercy, for your fun; thank you for swings and roundabouts and shouts of joy. 

Thank you that as I sit here with the windows open I can hear the sound of children in the playground at Katy's school; it's a happy sound. 

Thank you for all the blessings of our comfy existence - for education and freedom for children to play and not have to work, for running water, for plentiful food and for medicines when we need them. 

Thank you for being there, always, no questions asked, without fail, always loving, always forgiving, always loving some more, asking from me nothing and everything at the same time. 

Supplication

Right now, what's it to be? What should I ask you for in the state of mind that I'm in right now? 

Peace.

Help me to find peace whatever the circumstances, will you, Father? 

I know that true faith and trust in you would mean that I'm not at the mercy of the prevailing mood of the household, whether that mood emanates from me or anyone else. I want to depend on you so absolutely that it doesn't shake me or throw me if someone else is walking round with a thundercloud of discontent or anger. 

I want to be someone who has her own microclimate of peacefulness and calm. Is that too much to ask? 

Unlikely this side of heaven? Surely not. 

Lord, help me get a better grip of the things I say. Irritation and bitterness spill out of me sometimes and I can't stop it - or I choose not to. I talk to other people too much and to you not enough. 

I read somewhere recently one of those little illustrated ideas that do the rounds on the internet and it said:

Have you prayed about it

As much

As you've talked about it?

...and the answer is no, rarely do I pray about things anywhere near as much as I talk about them. And on the odd occasion where I put serious prayer (by my standards, I note your wry smile), I realise that prayer does change things. 

So change me, Lord. Teach me to control what goes on in my head so that I can control what comes out of my mouth. Help me to grab onto you when I want to grab someone by the throat. 

Help me cultivate calm and find peace, rather than stoking up my temper and doing the devil's job for him, for I know that he would have me constantly irritated, annoyed, criticising and lashing out. 

Above all, don't let go of me, for without your hand on me I'm in freefall. 

Don't stop talking to me. Make me listen. Remind me, call me, tug at me. 

Make me more like you. 

Amen. 

Let it be.

Do what you do

Dear God.

Everyone has something to say about what's happened in Oklahoma. The way a tornado flattened an area miles wide with so little warning that some people didn't have time to find a safe place, not that there were any if  The way some were safe in a vault at the bank, customers huddling with staff. The way a lovely old lady wept in thanksgiving when her little dog scrambled out of the wreckage of her home. 

The way schools was destroyed and children were trapped and crushed and drowned. 

In the world of social media everyone has something to say. I suppose I do, too, because I sort out my feelings when I write them down, and after half an hour reading about this disaster on the internet news I'm a bit of a mess of feelings. I haven't got anything to say that is helpful, or wise; I wonder if there's anything that anyone can say that helps. 

Nobody told me when I was expecting my first baby that I would one day only have to think of another mother an ocean away one day and find tears running down my face. Nobody told me that a picture of a mother desperately waiting for news would break my heart. 

I've always been a bit of a softie, and I know that even before my babies came along I'd have watched this footage with horror and shock, but when I went into a hospital as somebody's daughter and came out somebody's mother, something shifted. Suddenly there was a little life - and nineteen months later another little life - more precious to me than mine. 

There were mothers and fathers standing in rubble as the emergency services lifted debris, waiting to know if their child would come home that night. Someone with a megaphone started shouting the names of the kids who were alright, who still had breath in their body to say who they were. Imagine waiting to hear your baby's name, waiting and waiting as people around knelt in relief and scooped up their battered, wounded but living-and-breathing child and your little just didn't come out?  

They must have been so frightened, those little boys and girls. They must have cried and shouted for their mummy or their daddy and they didn't come. 

Oh, God. 

The other night my little girl Katy was so tired that she thought of something that upset her and she thought of it so much that she dissolved into tears and she couldn't get herself right again until we'd cuddled and snuggled for a long time. Other people's mummies were to go on a school trip with them next month but I wouldn't be going. Lots of reasons for this, (the main one being that I didn't want to go; I didn't sign up to go) but Katy suddenly, surprisingly, decided that the most important thing in the world was that I would be with her when she went on the school trip. Alas, too late. The class teacher had been inundated with offers of parent helpers (why? I don't understand it) and so it was too late. Katy, for reasons that escape me, inconsolable. She so, so wanted me to be there. 

And this is only a school trip. I felt so guilty. Guilt that I wouldn't be with her on a lovely school visit. That I should be there for her. That in not being there I was letting her down. 

How much more could a heart take - not to be there when your little one is terrified in the midst of a hugely powerful hurricane? When the winds are blowing at over two hundred miles an hour and the roof is torn off and the walls are collapsing and cars are flying through the air? When they're lying contorted and hurt under the rubble of a collapsed building?  Gasping for air before unconsciousness and suffocation?

Nobody told me the all-consuming love that I have for my children. Yes, they get me down sometimes. Yes, I find the job of being their mummy relentless and frustrating and overwhelming sometimes - much of the time. But not to be there when they needed me?  

Far away there are mummies and daddies who will somehow have to find out if peace is possible again the other side of something like this. Like the time a man walked into a school and carelessly took the lives of all those small children and their brave teachers. Like the time a huge factory collapsed in Bangladesh and more than a thousand people lost their lives, some of them barely old enough to operate a sewing machine. The time that we saw on our televisions scenes of skeletal mothers and babies in Somalia in the last stages of malnourishment sitting on the parched ground, waiting for death. 

Why do we think that those mothers love their children less than we love ours? 

I breastfed my babies and I had excess milk that I froze for convenience. I eat so many calories that my hips are well padded for carrying my well-fed children. What must it be like to have a baby knowing that you have no way to feed it, to keep it alive?

What must it be like to send my little one to school with a lunchbox with a cheese and ham sandwich (Elizabeth's favourite) and a bag of raisins and a chocolate biscuit. To put a little 'I love you' note in the lunchbox - or that morning was I too busy to write one? - and then to find out that today was the day she wasn't going to come home? 

What must it be like to wait in the twisted remains of a building for news of my whole family and then the building starts to burn?

It's all misplaced, of course, the guilt, but it goes with the territory of motherhood. To protect and nurture and kiss it all better. To be there to make things right when knees are grazed or bullies say the mean things. It's so deeply ingrained in me that to deny me that need to respond is to rob me of something fundamental. I can't imagine the pain that those mothers must be going through. 

Where were you, Lord? I think you must have been there; surely you couldn't have stayed away. I pray that you were there with those little ones as the roof was ripped off. There when the teacher shielded their little bodies from the bullets. There when the factory collapsed like a house of cards. 

There as every mother cradles her baby and feels the raw power of the new love in her heart.

You must be. It comes from you.

Oh, God, what's it all about? I've read blog posts about comfort and about your tears falling as rain. I've read articles about why there's suffering in this broken, dysfunctional, terminal world. I've seen people railing against your injustice and hard-heartedness and others thanking you for your mercy and never-ending love. 

I just can't get the images out of my head. The mothers waiting for news. The sure knowledge that I would a million times rather die with my daughters in my arms than live knowing that they needed me and I wasn't there. 

I haven't anything to say. It makes no sense to me.

Well, I have one thing. I don't understand it one bit, but from the very deepest part of me, all I can say is that I know you, Lord Jesus. 

I know that you are love. You are compassion. You are the healer.  I know that you loved those children of yours in Oklahoma, in Connecticut, in Bangladesh and in Somalia. I know that you loved the five little souls who died in Derby in a house fire set by their own father and the little girl murdered in Wales whose body they have never found...and so on, and so on. 

I know that you care. 

I know that we are not lost. Somehow, and don't ask me how, as we stand in the middle of grief and horror in this beautiful and terrifying world, we aren't consumed, for you stand with us. 

You won't be defeated by evil in any of its forms. 

You say that you can bring good out of the most desperate circumstances, but I'm guessing those mothers don't want to hear that right now. There isn't any good, surely. 

When they wake up tomorrow morning and the next day and the days after that and for just a fraction of a moment they can't remember what immense, towering grief it is that looms over them - Lord, do what you do. Comfort, soothe, protect, heal. 

Loving Lord, do what you do.  

Image credits:

IMGP3231.JPG by spiroll

Katrina_LynnMeadows_2.jpg by msand39

downedtree.jpg by taliesin

all from Morguefile.com. Used with permission.