Apron Strings

How beautiful is it to be the root and soul of our little girl’s life? That her entire world revolves around us? That she can hardly spend the night somewhere else because she will miss seeing our faces in the morning, or, if needed, in the middle of the night? To know that we are so important to this child that her very existence is wrapped up in ours…the inhale to our exhale.

I’m doing dishes, and the water squeaks through our old pipes, and she jumps out of bed and pops to the top of the stairs.

“Mom?”

“Yes, Ryley.”

“What was that noise?”

“I’m just washing dishes.”

“Oh, okay. Good night.”

“Good night. I love you.”

“See you in the morning.”

“Okay.”

“See you in the morning?”

“See you in the morning.”

And this is how it always is…her watchful eyes and ears searching for any sign that her happy world might someday be disrupted…that something might go wrong.

We’ve prayed with her about her fears. I’ve explained time and again that she’s wasting perfectly happy moments in her worry that there won’t always be perfectly happy moments.

I remember having similar feelings myself…And I remember my tiny little brother always interrupting our play to yell, “Mommy? I love you!” -- just making sure she was still there.

All the same, I feel the pressure to stay alive….to ensure that my clock keeps ticking…to make sure I am always still here.

She links her arm through mine at the grocery store, cuddling up against me so that we are one unit…RyleyMomGroceryCart. She grabs my hand when we’re walking, out of a habit built when she was little and we were crossing the street. Now, it’s just because she loves her mom.

I can see her love in her tired but earnest green eyes, trying desperately to stay open under those heavy long lashes. She’s attempting to tell me the plot of the book she’s been reading, but her voice is cracking with exhaustion. I bend over and kiss her warm, freckled cheek.

It is wonderful and indescribable to be loved and trusted so thoroughly and so intensely. But above all, I want her to love and trust God even more. We can’t always be here, and unfortunately, we won’t always be here. And so, we tell her of God’s goodness and His grace in our lives. In a thousand ways, we introduce her to our Heavenly Father, day after day, moment after moment, and we trust that as the years pass, her childlike commitment to following Jesus will keep growing amidst unspeakable challenges and struggles the world will throw at her. We ever so gently pry her slender fingers from the ratty strings of our threadbare apron, then help her take hold of God’s.

I want her to go to camp, to outdoor lab, to my parents’ house, on a missions trip, to college. I don’t want her to go away. I just want her to be able to go away because it’s good for her…because life holds so much more for her than what Ryan and I can give.

In her sixth grade class, there has been talk of suicide, of cutting, of depression. My sweet little baby, suddenly 5’3” and lanky, had to bravely approach a teacher and report what she had heard so that her conscience would be clear, so that her friends could get the help they needed. How do you handle that? There is deep darkness in the world, and nobody is exempt from it. We keep telling her that she is a light…that light overcomes the darkness.

“That’s why we hide God’s Word in our hearts,” I say, tucking the quilt my aunt made under her chin.

She blinks, and questions fill her wide eyes, as they do hundreds of times each day.

“Hide it? Why do we hide it?”

“Hmmm. I guess it’s more like we’re memorizing scriptures and putting them into our hearts so they’re always there, even when we don’t have our Bibles handy.”

“And so nobody can steal it?”

“Exactly.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Every day it’s something new. Tonight it was her math homework. Yesterday it was the fact that Ryan got on her case about wiping down the kitchen properly. Tears and anger and whining, followed by singing in the shower and skipping around the house with joy. The drastic mood swings! The hormones! We never know what will set her off or cheer her up. And she doesn’t know either, which makes it all the more exciting!

She’s eating us out of house and home. The breakfasts and snacks and brunches and lunches and snacks and early dinners and bedtime snacks….She marches off to school every day armed with enough food to feed an army, and every bit of it gets eaten. And in return, she’s growing. Her uniform pants are too short for her; we can wear each others’ shoes. She has growing pains nearly every night, and she’s clumsy and bony and downright gorgeous.

Sometimes she’s afraid of roller coasters, and other times she takes my debit card and runs into the store to get a few groceries on her own. She is on the brink of young womanhood, yet still absolutely a child. She’s caught somewhere in the middle, straddling the fence, a foot in each pasture.

And that’s what parenthood looks like for us right now--this messy knot of apron strings tangled with strands of long blondish hair. We’re trying to keep her stomach full and her stubbornness at bay, her fears alleviated and her soul at peace.

And trying to hold onto our sanity in the meantime. :-)