SEPTEMBER

I worry about repeating myself here, the way my heart wants most to write the hard stuff, skewing my reality and what filters out to you. Pete and I have cycled back down into some kind of emotional low place. Part life with teens and part life with cancer, but mostly because we’re human and messed up. At least know we know to expect it from time to time. Please remember, so much goes unwritten, the beautiful mundane that holds us together.

Just yesterday, a colleague showed me her broken finger. Definitely a metaphor for life. I mean, that’s what we are. That's what we do. Sometimes I'm the broken finger. Sometimes it's you.

Here's what I know today about love - it demands every cell of me. It requires long stretches of wandering through the parts of life that have had the color sucked out of them. It means losing sleep over children who call me "Mom," adults who call me friend, or people who don’t call me anything at all. It means almost giving up - almost - before remembering the heart truly does not choose who to love, and my heart loves folks who might fall into early graves, who might not appreciate me, who might not even like me, who might not even know I exist. It might happen. It might be happening.

Love means sitting together in sadness, in a friend’s sun room that I dearly covet, openly sharing our sinful tendencies.

Love means powering off the phone.

Love means burning the food and making oven pizza - this is all I have to offer. It means you'll heap it onto your plate, tease me, and talk to me about what's real.

Love means hearing, "I'll do anything to make it up to you. Anything," and realizing the only thing I want is to feel his touch, to have him near, to know he believes in us.

Love is visiting a friend in the hospital on an exceptionally busy day.

Love is a back-rub. A pile of tear-stained kleenex.  It's telling the hardest truth and believing we'll survive. It's answering the phone after midnight. It's asking the complicated questions.

Love is holding back the "I told you so's" and criticisms. 

Love means being willing to be lonely. It means feeling out of place so others can feel known.

Love means having little but offering it anyway. It also means having a lot but realizing it's not helpful in the first place.

At first glance, my September offered little opportunity to love and be loved. I hate feeling ordinary. I miss the days when life buzzed with double-shots of emotional espresso. It made for good stories. It made me feel useful. It made the days fly by.

Then I took a second glance, and I notice that love often lives somewhere in the making of school lunches, the whir of lawnmowers, the calendar reminders, the timer on the stove. Love also loves the slow and quiet places. Where we cannot be distracted by the bustle and where emergencies show up small.