Author, ready for close-up

Last spring, precisely during the height of the season when I was writing exams and collecting exams and grading exams and generally sitting on my booty for hours on end and practicing peanut M&M therapy on my exam stress, I asked one of my students to take some author photos for me. Net net, it didn't happen. Too stressy of a season. Also, I would have all summer to get back to my fighting weight, to achieve that sun-kissed glow on the apples of my cheeks, to rest and recharge and to generally appear like I fell out of a Hanna Andersson catalogue, wearing brightly colored Dutch clogs to boot.

Net net, it didn't happen during the summer either.

So here I was, back in exam-dispensing land and not at my goal weight and generally feeling haggard about my appearance and searching in vain for that elusive twinkle that fell out of my eye sometime when I wasn't paying attention, when I was probably pinning Dutch clogs onto a Pinterest board named "Footwear Fantasy."

Then my friend Foxy wrote something on the social media about stepping onto a scale and realizing she was 20 lbs. lighter than her heaviest ever and it was not due to a crash diet or a wicked case of mono. She had just practiced eating healthier over a period of time. She had, in so many words, learned to love the body she'd been given and was seeking to live a life more abundant through this body mind soul gift.

I decided right then and there to book my portrait session with my wonderful student Jordan of JCorr Photography. That mystical moment where all the smoke would clear to reveal my size 4 self was never going to arrive. The best I could do was spare a little love for this lady and take a moment to capture the blessings of this season, because there are so many.

I'm pleased with the results, not because of my own vanity, but because these represent one woman whose time is rarely spent by herself, whose goals are often riding on the shirttails of others', who woke up one misty morning and felt fully alive and blessed and a little bit sassy with her lucky ladybug helmet.

P.S. Book a session with Jordan. He's amazing.

6.75 years

Dear Baby Girl, Last week you were bucked off a horse, and seven days since does not allow me any further eloquence...

I can tell you this, though: there is/was a space between the time I realized what was happening and the time I was picking you up from the ground as you were gasping for air when I was changed.

In between the time I was trying to figure out if the horse was going to trample you and the time I was trying to figure out if you would be paralyzed--I leaped over a few lifetimes.

My love deepened in a way that is different from the eyelash winking increments that it grows for you each day. It plummeted to the depths of someone being thrown from a building. Of a six year-old being thrown off the horse.

In that space, in those seconds that felt like the worst nightmare looping in slow motion, my heart reaffirmed something. I'm not sure if the heart spoke any words but if it did, they would have sounded something like, "Mine. Beloved. Will fight."

Within moments of my picking you up, you proclaimed, "That is the last time I ride a wild horse! I am only riding Western from now on!" That was sort of snobby of you, but we all decided to forgive you, since you had been thrown off a large animal and all which probably addled your brain a bit.

In the days since, I have been trying to memorize your face, your sweet face just as it is. I now know more acutely how quickly you could be snatched from the safety of this moment, a false safety if ever there were one.

And the truth is that you are being snatched each and every moment from me. The moments are taken, seized without warrant. I should be used to it by now. In parenting we are forever straddling our own little heaven and hell at the same time; the heaven of the moments we want to preserve, the hell of having to will these moments away to cruel time; the hell of wanting the hard times to pass more quickly, the heaven of looking back on things when they felt so much simpler than the complicated present.

I will return to the horse and to you on the ground and I will pick you up thousands of times in my mind and my heart will reaffirm millions of beats more resoundingly that you are, indeed, my beloved and I will never stop fighting--time, distance, darkness, pain--to make sure you know that wild horses couldn't keep me away.

Love,

Mama

The quilt I made on Beyonce's birthday

I overheard that Beyonce turned 33 today, one of the little quilt squares the radio handed me this morning as I was rushing out the door. Every day I make a quilt from these handouts: worn bits of fabric, the crusts of bread cut from sandwiches, sneezes and spilled popcorn and half-comprehended news bulletins from the radio. I thread them clumsily together throughout the day, grabbing a moment to stitch and form a seam, fumbling through the hallways of academic buildings as the threads come unspooled.

I will try to wind them around the spool later as I sit by the beds of my children; I am held a willing hostage to the Frozen soundtrack, which we cannot let go of--the irony.

I try to add the moment this morning where I stood outside of my son's classroom, a spectator to him calling his sister, already at the other end of the hall. I grab the square where she turned on her heels and came back and hugged her little brother. Where we could have had loose ends, a gaping hole in the quilt where the hallway meltdown ripped apart our efforts to all have a good morning, our girl busted out one important stitch.

I will patch the part later where our boy told me my stomach was the size of a chicken. I will try not allow that patch to call too much attention to itself, as did our boy when he told me over frozen yogurt, "Well, your tummy IS really BIG." I will remember how I accepted his apology, just as the other quilt squares will absorb this unwieldy one into the whole.

This is the quilt I will wrap myself in at the end of the day, pondering what Beyonce will do as she begins this new year of life. What kind of silks and imported fibers will she have to work with for her own quilt; how will the couture fitting go and will she wear it better than anyone else?

I am the only one who will see my quilt, who will know the places where I pricked myself trying to bridge all the scattered pieces. I will run my hand over its ripples and edges and shoddy patchwork and I will call it significant, real, mine, beautiful.

P.S. Happy Birthday, Bey.