In the Waiting
on tricky brains, math nerds, and the kingdom (not yet) come
Welcome to the Back of the Flock, where we are slowed down by packing lunches for school, hunting for the shin guards left from last September out in the garage, and completely restructuring our days because the baby is no longer napping in the mornings.
In the last few weeks, fall has come in like a wrecking ball — we went from a high of 100* F to 65* F the next day because Minnesota is drunk on its own erratic power. I’ve had bronchitis and have been sleeping cuddled up next to an economy sized bag of Halls Mentho-Lyptus cough drops. My kids have been taking turns having fevers and sore throats. It’s been a lot.
But the garden is having its moment (as are the fruit flies in my kitchen), and today’s essay is all about harvest…or rather, the waiting for the abundance that is to come.
Last week, my oldest found me on the south side of our house, where I was watering the garden for the billionth day in a row of the drought we’re having. I paused my audio book and prepared myself for a coming treatise on the merits of his latest Pokemon trade or a lengthy description of his last round of Mario Kart. With the words of Shauna Niequest ringing in the back of my mind — about how important it is to cultivate actual care about what our kids are interested in — I revved up the Genuine Interest lobe of my brain, but I was surprised at what he opened with.
“Mom, my brain is telling me I should be doing school work so I don’t forget all my math from last year.”
Let’s back up.
Owen and I are eerily similar in many ways — we both enjoy a good pun; we’ll try just about any food with an open mind, and we can both be paralyzed by the same tendencies towards perfectionism. But what we do not share is a love of math. At the end of the last school year, I told him he could essentially be done with fourth grade once he’d completed his math book.
He did twelve lessons in one weekend. Twelve.
If I didn’t vividly remember how the entire midwife staff yelled “Look at all that hair!” the moment he crowned, I’d be looking into a DNA test because math and I have a complicated relationship at best.
During the last school year, he was regularly worried that he wasn’t going to be able to retain the things we were learning…from the feudal system to fractions. Despite my assurance that so much of schooling is looping back to content to ensure retention, it was a regular conversation that he and I slogged through. Fast forward to the very height of summer - to mid-August and ripe tomatoes and sleeping in - and we were right back in it.
But rather than roll my eyes or stifle a sigh, I nearly began dancing for joy, hose in hand, at his words, “Mom, my brain is telling me…”
Beyond our penchant for word-play and identical hazel eyes, Owen and I share a struggle with anxiety. I recognized similar patterns to myself in him at a young age - easily overstimulated, high highs and low lows, fears and worries spilling out of him at bedtime or as we tied his sneakers before social situations. And for YEARS, I have been passing along strategies and wisdom from my own therapist and from the countless books I’ve read in my efforts to live a life marked with peace.
Since he was around five, I’ve been telling him that our brains don’t always think true thoughts. I’ve been telling him he can talk back to his brain. I’ve been telling him that he needs to question his thoughts: Is that true? Is it 100% true? All this time, I’ve been trying to teach him what I learned in my thirties: that our thoughts are just that — thoughts — and that our brains are constantly telling us a story, and we can decide if the story is true and helpful or if the story is being written by our amygdalas, drunk on fear and assumptions and power (and likely dehydrated and in need of a good nap).
And throughout all this time, he’s mostly rolled his eyes or tensed his whole body or told me, in a thousand verbal and non-verbal ways, that I don’t know what I’m talking about because a hallmark of this child is that in dysregulation, he turns to stalwart resistance as a way of being.
But last week, he used the language I’ve been trying to weave into him for half his life when he began our conversation with “Mom, my brain is trying to tell me…” I couldn’t believe that he had internalized at least some tiny portion of the idea that our brains don’t always tell us the truth and that we can talk back to them.
Once we finished talking and he went back inside, I sat down on the edge of my raised bed and let the tears I’d been holding in fall. Raising this child so much like myself so often feels like a Sisyphean task, so I let myself feel the joy and relief of a moment in time that indicated that something got through, something I’d worked so hard at was finally, finally bearing fruit.
As mothers, we are no stranger to these moments, sprinkled sparingly throughout our child-rearing years. We clap like lunatics the first time they poop in a tiny, plastic potty; we suppress audible cheers when they say their first unprompted I’m sorry to the sibling they’ve just thrown a duplo at. We bless the Lord when they finally buckle their booster seats unassisted, and we tap dance across the kitchen when they remember to bring their dinner plates to the kitchen sink without being asked.
But so much of our time is in the waiting, in potty charts that remain half-filled for months at at a time, of deep breaths and forcibly gentle reminders to say thank you and please. We till and plant seeds and water and wait and wait and wait. We pray and wonder if any of it is getting through, if we’re doing any of it right (or more likely if we’re doing it all wrong), and in truth, we just don’t know, can’t know if and when any of it will come to fruition.
We serve a God who at the moment of the resurrection, emerged from a tomb and declared kingdom come as the sunshine hit his face — a kingdom of death and sin defeated, a kingdom of lasts became first, of hungry bellies filled, of the humble lifted up. A kingdom that is bearing the fruit of the words seeded and spoken by the King’s mother1 when she first touched her belly in awe and wonder.
I think of Mary who potty-trained this king and taught him the words of the Shema until he knew it by heart and who almost lost her mind when she thought he was lost before she found him in the temple2. I think of how she waited three long decades before she spoke with surprising authority to the servants in the back room — “do whatever he tells you” — after what I imagine was a heated exchange between a son and his mother who longed to see the promised fruits of her labor poured out from water jugs as a rich, red wine3.
And I think of God who fearfully and wonderfully wove Eden into our bones, who waits the long decades of our lives to pull us to His chest like a mother her newborn baby and declare us beautiful and beloved at first sight. I think of God who sees us mired down by cancer and anxiety and broken bodies and souls, who waits to bound with us into a new day when the sound of weeping will be no more. I think of God who planted cottonwoods and constructed Appalacian mountain tops and threaded the Amazon through the jungle, who watches over the the land that we burn and pillage for our own short-sighted ends and waits and waits and waits to restore it all.
I know that when I am told to not grow weary in doing good, I am listening to words spoken by a God who has waited millenia to make all things new, who doles out brand new mercies each day along with the sunrise to each and every one of us4, despite our struggles the day before.
In this, I know a God who is intimate with waiting, achingly familiar with patience, who left despair behind with his tomb-wrappings and calls out to me in the moments I wonder if I’m doing any of it right and says, So let’s not allow ourselves to get fatigued doing good. At the right time we will harvest a good crop if we don’t give up, or quit.5
So, in the midst of your sowing and waiting, I pray over you a bountiful harvest today, or if not that, one ripe, red tomato from a branch you thought was dead. I pray you are surprised today by what emerges from ground you had deemed infertile. I pray you endurance in the face of endless reminders and weeping prayers and in the middle of the night when you are needed by a child. I pray you bathed in new mercies, found and swaddled in your fatigue, graced with goodness as you give and give and give.
I pray you will not grow weary in all the good you’re doing.
What is your latest parenting “harvest”? What are you still waiting on? I’d love to hear it in the comments.
What I’ve Loved Lately:
READ - Well, surprising absolutely no one, Barbara Kingsolver’s latest, Demon Copperhead, pretty much ate me alive — a gripping story, societal commentary, characters you can’t help but love and hate, it has it all. I also read my second book by Mary Roach, nonfiction writer extraordinaire. There is no one I’d rather learn random facts about the digestive tract from, or in the book I most recently read, about the many unexpected times when nature breaks the law, while laughing along with her journalistic mishaps and incredible self-deprecating humor.
WATCH - I’m enjoying season 3 of Only Murders in the Building way more than season 2 (Meryl Streep is a national treasure), and old episodes of Modern Family have been my companion of choice as I’ve battled bronchitis from bed. Eric and I also just watched Frances Ha, which made me nostalgic for college and made me think about inside jokes with my roommates (Greta Gerwig is quickly becoming a national treasure).
LISTEN - I stumbled on the song Always With Me (Song for Anxiety) by iAmSon on a recent Pray as You Go, and I stopped mid-walk and openly cried. The song just nailed me…especially the very end. Took me right back to Sunday-night church as a kid. Aaand, I’ve always been a big fan of the richness of the lyrics of hymns, but I get physically anger when artists cover them in a way that I don’t approve of because I am a joy to be around. This version of O The Deep Deep Love of Jesus by Paul Zach hit me right in the minor-chord feels.
EAT - I’ve been making jars and jars of roasted tomato sauce (roast tomatoes cut side up + onions and garlic, drizzled with olive oil, balsamic, S & P, at 425* for a half hour, then blitz into a sauce) and this simple salsa verde (I broil the onions and jalapenos and add more lime) from the tomatoes and tomatillos taking over my garden right now. (I freeze them, not actually can, because that feels daunting). I also had what was arguably the best friend green tomato sandwich of my life last night, and here is a picture of the recipe that was shared with my by amazing writer Leslie Trovato when I asked for recipes on insta a few weeks ago.
A Few Laughs:
God is ‘achingly familiar with patience’.... I’ve never considered that! This blessed me, thank you!
Love all of this. I am an anxious oldest child raising another anxious oldest son. So many gems to add to my toolkit.
Just this week my son was sick in the night and paralyzed with anxiety about throwing up. He asked me to add “throwing up” to my Etsy print on the fridge as a daily reminder of things I cannot control. <3