Wrangler Dani

My kids wake up at 5:30 these days, they are just too excited for the day to begin to spend one more minute in a cocoon of comfort. By 6 I’m doling out cheese and bananas, oatmeal and eggs. I’m drinking hot coffee, roasted locally because I want our local coffee shops to still be beautiful places for creativity and community when this is  over, and buying my coffee at Costco doesn’t support that end, at least not directly.

After my brief stint as a particularly unkempt diner waitress/cook/busboy, I pull on a new pair of shorts. I bought them on the Target app, they got here a mere 24 hours after I pushed “purchase” and, before I could be grateful for this technological marvel, I gulped at the size on the tag. I am not who I used to be, that much is clear. It remains to be seen if I am maturing in the ways I hope.

Spring is a time for newness but the world is stuck in pause, like a song that keeps skipping at the same place. Adam asked me what I wanted for Mother’s Day and I said “champagne brunch and a pedicure” aren’t I funny? Of course I’d love to be pampered in the traditional ways, but what I wanted for Mother’s Day for years and years was to be allowed to participate in it. There isn’t enough brunch in the world to overshadow the great gift of getting up with the sun and the calls of “Mama!”

Kids remind me that the world is new even when it seems old. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches become fuel for pirates and archeologists when eaten out of a plastic baggie in the backyard, the sun rises every day but we have to get up and see it today, this very moment, because “look, Mom! The sky is pink!” I get called to watch sprinklers, hawks, the delivery truck, chipmunks and a thousand other daily miracles, to pause in my pursuit of boring grown-up to-dos and engage in wonder.

The push and pull of productivity, stagnation and amazement tears at my heart but it is the kind of gentle ripping that that gives good gifts. I throw away torn dishrags and broken toys, but what if this is a purposeful rip, a beautiful widening that offers glimpses of heaven, one that should not be summarily dumped and forgotten? I recently read a biography of Flannery O’Connor, the incisive Southern writer of grotesque, flawed, deeply uncomfortable characters. She wrote this way because she was looking for the divine; she didn’t write about ugly things for ugliness sake, she warned about what she called “the terrible speed of mercy”. She observed, through this cast of misfits, that redemption finds even the least likely characters, that even the scrappiest and most self-determined souls give up eventually, to forces larger than themselves.

When this pandemic first became real here in the U.S., I hoped I would emerge from a time of quarantine with more written and more done, with creative inspiration and accomplishment, with a cleaner house and a better body and an award-winning essay. I liked the thought of myself in the driver’s-seat of tragedy, tastefully using a forced seclusion to produce brilliant Big Thoughts and look good doing it. I like to be in control, y’see. I’m not a compliant person, I dislike authoritarianism and I am suspicious of righteous pronouncements from on high. But I decided early on that I would be obey the rules, and it has not made me more brilliant or certain – obedience has made me cranky and lonely and stifled and restless and scared. (Also, for the record, my house is as untidy and my body is as (ahem) body-ish as it was before.)

This discomfort is making me stop and think, to question my assumptions about how easy or understandable the world is, how the future will play out. Maybe this tragedy isn’t about me, after all, what a thought. Maybe like Flannery’s characters I am always running, looking for the divine in the folklore and mythology of my time, and I find it in the good gifts of a good Father instead, a love that will not let me live in the prison of myself.

Although I chafe against the restraints of the these strange days, although I deeply desire more – look here at this beauty. The sunrise really is a thing of magnificence, one that I might miss without little hands on my face, making me see. The eggs that my kids want fried every morning (with cheese, please Mama?) are miracles in themselves, yellow and white and gently browning in butter, bites of home and comfort, pictures of humble provision. The company of my family and no one else is teaching me joy, the pause of the world is teaching me gratitude, the incredible gift of technology is teaching me wonder.

“In general the Devil can always be a subject for my kind of comedy in one way or another; I suppose this is because he is always accomplishing ends other than his own.” – Flannery O’Connor