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

Hanging out with Lena Dunham

It was so good to hang out with you today, Lena, and I would like to thank Terry Gross for facilitating the conversation and asking most of the questions I would have asked and some I wouldn't have thought of but was glad she asked you anyway, snorty laughter notwithstanding. I am still dancing around in the echo of what you said about how oversharing is a "gendered term." You said men who share about their experiences are deemed brave, but women are relegated to oversharing. I agree. I've sat at plenty of lunchtables with men talking perversion and misogyny and using expletives every other word and I got the impression that I was just supposed to hang. Whereas women asking for a tampon at anything above a whisper is considered gauche. I don't know if this is a battle we will ever win, dear Lena, the war of who gets permission to share true things, but that reminds me of something else illuminating you said. You explained how Hannah, the character you play in "Girls," is the one who feels charged with saying all the true things out loud, except she forgets that there are social constructs in place for a reason.

I feel this way. All the time.

I live in reaction to a very private family. I think my temperament is also pretty no bologna and having spent a decade in New England, I'm wicked blunt. But to my family, I'm all, "Okay, people, I'm calling everyone onto the floor who is still wearing a scrunchie from 1994" and my family is sort of, "Anybody care for some tea?"

So what I'm saying, Lena Dunham, is that I think we get each other. Also, did I say how cute your hair is looking on your Vogue cover? Ah, and by the way, congrazzles on the rave reviews of your book. Michiko Kakutani? Girrrrl.

Full disclosure, though: I couldn't get into "Girls" and it's not for the lack of trying on my part or a lack of talent for writing and acting on your part. It was just one of those salt-in-the-wounds reminders of how I sort of forgot to live in New York in my twenties and how I cannot fathom how many sexually transmitted diseases would be involved if life were really like that. That's where my brain goes. Everybody else is, Look how brave! Look how true! And I am tar-heeled paralyzed in the corner, pondering whether or not all those characters would be filling prescriptions for crabs.

Was that the sound of me oversharing again?

::presses publish because knows Lena Dunham won't mind::

29 Days

"I think our music exists in the 29 days," said Jars of Clay frontman Dan Haseltine on a recent Relevant podcast.

I couldn't believe what I was hearing.

The foundational voice of one of the preeminent Christian music forces in the last century thinks his music really comes out of and speaks into the 29 days. That is, the majority of days in the month that are just not really all that dreamy. Jars of Clay says that because Jars of Clay must know about that: The good days, the golden days are the exception. The rare block on that calendar with forecast sunny, all day long. Most days are full of anxiety that grips us at a stoplight for no reason, heaviness because we misinterpreted a text message, avocados that are already rotting, and unanticipated bills.

There are blessings but the 29 days remind us that we are not home yet.

I love Jars of Clay. Each album has its own tone, its own mature sound. I especially like songs like "Safe to Land" and "Reckless Forgiver" and "Boy on a String" because they talk about what I now know are the 29 days. Dealing with our own concept of God in the midst of our mess. Seeing him show up to our landfills and begin plowing and packing through the garbage piled high.

Haseltine has contended with some well-earned controversy for his ponderings on Twitter recently, which he addresses in the podcast. Less interesting to me was his confirmation that he had thought about these things for a long while. More interesting to me was that he believed that church was a place to wrestle with doubt, to question and reason and help one another--because why else are we here? To be nothing but upstanding, confident in our every position? To pretend as though we are having 30 full days of bliss?

There are reasons why a band like Jars of Clay has survived and evolved through the last 20 years and we who are not on the inside nor omniscient will never fully understand. I have to believe, though, that there's a key to survival that is offered in the 29 days, in the doubt, in the embrace of all that is not sunny and certain so that it may be examined and held to the light, for many months, for 20 years, and perhaps for as long as our little clay jars endure.