Category: Mothering

Prayer for a Child

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God keep my jewel this day from danger;
From tinker and pooka and bad-hearted stranger.
From harm of the water, from hurt of the fire.
From the horns of the cows going home to the byre.
From the sight of the fairies that maybe might change her.
From teasing the ass when he’s tied to the manger.
From stones that would bruise her, from thorns of the briar.
From evil red berries that wake her desire.
From hunting the gander and vexing the goat.
From the depths o’ sea water by Danny’s old boat.
From cut and from tumble, from sickness and weeping;
May God have my jewel this day in his keeping.
~Winifred Lett (1882-1973) “Prayer for a Child“

photo by Nate Gibson
photo by Anna Blake

I pray because I can’t help myself. I pray because I’m helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping. It doesn’t change God. It changes me.
~C.S. Lewis

This “prayer for a child” has hung on the wall in our home for nearly four decades, purchased when I was pregnant with our first. When I first saw it with its drawing of the praying mother watching her toddler leave the safety of the home to explore the wide world, I knew it addressed most of my worries as a new mama, in language that helped me smile at my often irrational fears. I would glance at it dozens of time a day; it would remind me of God’s care for our children through every scary thing, real or imagined.

I continue to pray for our grown children and their God-given spouses, and now for six precious grandchildren, the latest of whom was born yesterday afternoon.

I pray because I can’t not pray, and because I’m helpless without the care and compassion of our sovereign God for each of us, especially when we are brand new, completely dependent and helpless.

May I be changed by my prayers and molded into a truly “grand” mother for our half dozen cherished grandchildren, each a jewel in His keeping.

The Moon-Pale Promise

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from Claude Debussy’s Suite Bergamasque in memory of my mother

There’s D-flat major at the first and last,
but in between, a haze of harmonies
yearns lightward, though the light has long since passed.

I played the notes; she heard the light. The keys
were mine to coax and animate; their sound
was hers to claim: a shimmer of heart’s ease.

And while my fingers stretched and danced and found
their way through black and white, her ear would find
a prism—her own light parsed and unbound.

She had a knack for joy and was inclined
to wonder. Clair de lune had mesmerized
her, in a spell that left me far behind.

After my mother’s death, I was surprised
I still played it so often; I suppose
the effort occupied and organized

my sorrow-scattered mind. So in the throes
of grief, I practiced, as if I’d impress
a ghost with my devotion. And in those

half-haunted hours, I mastered more, I guess,
than just the notes. I hadn’t thought I’d learn
to hear what she did—but through some finesse

of time and skill and need, I now discern
the half-lit murmurings that no midnight
can mute, the moon-pale promise that can turn

unrest to peace, a star-sung appetite
for breath. At last I share my mother’s light.
~Jean Kreiling “Claire de Lune“

photo by Lea Lozano

I never practiced as much as I could have. Since the old piano sat in the living room right next to the kitchen, my mother endured my wrong notes and mis-timed rhythms, but never said a word of criticism. She was not an avid music listener, preferring radio talk and news, but committed to taking me to piano lessons over eight long years, sitting in the car reading a book while she waited for me.

Though not someone who listened to classical music for pleasure, she did love Clair de Lune, saying she could “see” the moon rise when I played it. Thus encouraged, I chose it as a recital piece so I could play it often for her, flowing my fingers across the keyboard smoothly, steadily, faithfully, like the rise of the moon in the night sky.

I want to feel a connection to a piece of music that so grips my heart and waters my eyes. It happens only rarely when I play – as an average pianist, I never truly progressed beyond technique – hitting the right notes and being true to the timing. But this piece comes close. When I hear it, I am no longer the youngster practicing it over and over, trying to somehow bring light to our dark living room. With age, I can now lose myself in the beauty of what Debussy was trying to convey in his choice of progression of notes, his resolution of harmony and key change, his slowing and flowing illumination of the piano keys.

I begin to hear what my mother must have heard, although I made so many mistakes, over and over.

Even so, the moon still rose for her.

Alive and Limber

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Deciding whether or not to trust a person
is like deciding whether or not to climb a tree
because you might get a wonderful view from the highest branch
or you might simply get covered in sap
and for this reason many people choose
to spend their time alone and indoors
where it is harder to get a splinter.
~Lemony Snicket from The Penultimate Peril

Heaven knows how many trees I’ve climbed…
when my body was still in a climbing way.

How many afternoons, especially Windy ones,

I sat perched on a limb that rose and fell with every invisible blow

Each tree was a green ship in the wind-waves,

every branch a mast

every leafy height a happiness that came without even trying.

I was that alive

and limber

now I walk under them-cool… beloved….

the household of such tall, kind sisters.
~Mary Oliver “Trees”

Don’t you dare climb that tree
or even try, they said, or you will be
sent way to the hospital of the
very foolish, if not the other one.
And I suppose, considering my age,
it was fair advice.

But the tree is a sister to me, she
lives alone in a green cottage
high in the air and I know what
would happen, she’d clap her green hands,
she’d shake her green hair, she’d
welcome me.  Truly.

I try to be good but sometimes
a person just has to break out and
act like the wild and springy thing
one used to be.  It’s impossible not
to remember wild and not want to go back.  So

if someday you can’t find me you might
look into that tree or—of course
it’s possible—under it.
~Mary Oliver, “Green, Green is My Sister’s House,” from A Thousand Mornings

As a child, I was always very cautious about climbing anything, never trusting my judgement or my balance. Perhaps this was because my mother was very fearful about all risk-taking in her children and instilled that caution in me from the start, discouraging me from ever reaching for the sky or dangling from a branch.

So when the neighbor children come with their families for an evening at our farm, I marvel and cringe at them being drawn as if by a magnet to climb the tall big leaf maple tree in our front yard. I imagine this tree has hosted several generations of children who have scrambled over its twisted trunk, sat in its central saddle to catch the view of the surrounding countryside, and reached its upper limits before being called back down by a nervous adult.

No doubt it is a feeling of incredible freedom to be limber enough to scrabble up a rough-barked branch, placing fingers and feet just-so into perfectly placed nooks and crevices.

No doubt being just out of reach of a fretful parent reinforces independence and autonomy.

No doubt there are leafy heights of happiness up there I’ll never know, way high above my head.

Yet here I stand in the cool shade and breezy evening, looking up, wishing I could be alive and limber like them, praying they will safely make their way down without a trip to the ER, while still honoring my mother’s cautioning pleas to keep my two feet well-grounded.

Out of a Misty Dream

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They are not long,
The weeping and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.

They are not long,
The days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.
~Ernest Dowson “They are not long…”
“Vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam”
(Our brief sum of life forbids us to embark upon a protracted hope)

photo by Joel DeWaard


When I consider the bittersweet brevity of life,
I don’t think how much I will miss wine and roses.
Eventually, when I pass through the gate,
it will be other loves that determine my path
into the misty night:

My husband’s kind eyes and gentle hands
Hugs and snuggles with grandkids
Worship and prayer and potlucks with church family
Just-baked bread and dark chocolate
The smell and sound of long-awaited rain
Ponies and puppies
Scent of sweetpeas and taste of green peas in the pod
Tunes of bouncy bluegrass and familiar folk songs
Birdsong in the morning and frog chorus at night
Wistful sunsets, and more so, welcoming sunrises

and ever so much more…

We are called forth from here to a hope beyond imagining.
This is only a taste.

photo by Josh Scholten

Meeting Face to Face

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After the months
of his pursuit of her now
they meet face to face.
From the beginnings of the world
his arrival and her welcome
have been prepared. They have always
known each other.
~Wendell Berry  from “Her First Calf”

For our daughter Lea and her husband Brian –
who waited in faith through many complications along the way:
Born early this morning – their healthy son, Levi Jireh –
The Lord provides!


It is the fate of parents to be wrung from,
mightily compressed within the inevitable
emotional and physical labor of birth.

There is nothing gentle in what it takes
to give birth to a new mother and father.

Parenting is sweetness
never tasted before,
a flood of unprecedented devotion,
an unforgettable face to face meeting
destined from the beginnings of time.

You both have known him,
and he has known you all along,
right from the very Beginning.

Now born in covenant promise,
he is set free to return your loving gaze.

Such Fear and Fascination

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My fuchsia is a middle-aged woman
who’s had fourteen children, and though
she could do it again, she’s rather tired.

All through the summer, new blooms.
I’m amazed. Yet the purple and crimson
have paled. Some leaves are yellowed or withering.

The new buds look weaker and smaller,
like menopause babies. But still
she’s a gallant fine creature performing her function.

– That’s how they talk about women,
and I heard myself using the same sort of language.
Then I understood my love for August:
its exhausted fertility
after glut and harvest.

Out in the garden, playing
at being a peasant forced
to slave until dark with a child on my back

another at the breast and probably
pregnant, I remember
wondering if I’d ever manage

the rites of passage from girl
to woman: fear and fascination
hard to choose between.

Thirty years later, I pick the crumpled flowers
off the fuchsia plant and water it
as if before the shrine
of two unknown grandmothers –
and my mother, who was a fourteenth child.
~Ruth Fainlight “My Fuschia”

Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower – but if I could understand what you are,
root and all in all, I should know what God and man is.
~  Alfred Lord Tennyson “Flower in the Crannied Wall”

Each fuchsia flower a reminder
of the fear and fascination of
growing up female

Am I root, or am I bud?
Am I stem or am I leaf?
Am I dancing bloom or frail flower?
Am I fruit about to bear seed myself?

Am I still girl, or mother, or graying grandma?

All in all, throughout my life,
I hoped to be a mere reflection
of the Garden’s intended fertile glory;

Like a bulging fuchsia bud,
breaking open into full blossom,
withering on the stem to seed,
and being readied for the fall…

So much fear and fascination
found in fecundity-
to root and bud and bloom again.

They All Know…

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The squirrel sticks its head from the tree’s knot,
shrieking directions, a village gossip with a huge
plumed tail. It moves down the scalloped bark, swaying
on tiny nails, and stops, eye-level with my swollen belly.
A black blur of bird swoops, the velvet of its wing
against my cheek. It nests among a ruckus of robins,
less interested in being fed than being heard. Around
the curve of the road, I near the farmer’s fence. His
mare lowers her fan of lashes. In the pond, a fish flips,
exposing its silver stomach.
~Tina Barry, “The Animals Know” from Beautiful Raft

photo by Harry Rodenberger
video by Harry Rodenberger

It has been over thirty years since I carried a child in my belly. Each time, I remember having the feeling our farm animals knew I was “expecting” even before it became obvious. Maybe it was because I was so overjoyed, I carried myself differently. After experiencing a miscarriage and two years of infertility workups, it felt almost magical being pregnant. It seemed as if our invisibly growing baby was already welcomed by all the creatures on our farm and were celebrating the anticipation along with us.

While I was pregnant with our first son, after such a long wait for parenthood, we bought a new dog, Tango and moved to a farm from the city. She was a year old and had never been around babies, so we weren’t sure how she would adapt to both new surroundings and new owners. As we drove six hours to her bring her to her new home, she happily settled in for the trip lying on my bulging tummy, pummeled by kicks from a baby she would soon meet face to face.

She loved him as soon as she saw him.
She had known him and understood him as he grew inside.

Now, decades later, our family’s next generation is fulfilling their own hopes for the future: we have four cherished grandchildren in addition to the two we are now waiting to meet — one will be any day now.

The expectation of new life is so sweet. All that lives and breathes anticipates this new soul budding and about to bloom.

Somehow, they just know…

My Own Usefulness

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I’ve learned that even when I have pains,
I don’t have to be one …
I’ve learned that:
people will forget what you said,
people will forget what you did,
but people will never forget
how you made them feel.
~Maya Angelou on her 70th birthday, citing a quote from Carl Buehner

I learned from my mother how to love
the living, to have plenty of vases on hand
in case you have to rush to the hospital
with peonies cut from the lawn, black ants
still stuck to the buds. I learned to save jars
large enough to hold fruit salad for a whole
grieving household, to cube home-canned pears
and peaches, to slice through maroon grape skins
and flick out the sexual seeds with a knife point.
I learned to attend viewings even if I didn’t know
the deceased, to press the moist hands
of the living, to look in their eyes and offer
sympathy, as though I understood loss even then.
I learned that whatever we say means nothing,
what anyone will remember is that we came.
I learned to believe I had the power to ease
awful pains materially like an angel.
Like a doctor, I learned to create
from another’s suffering my own usefulness, and once
you know how to do this, you can never refuse.
To every house you enter, you must offer
healing: a chocolate cake you baked yourself,
the blessing of your voice, your chaste touch.
~Julie Kasdorf– “What I Learned from my Mother”

Moms often know best about these things — how to love others when and how they need it — the ways to ease pain, rather than become one. Despite years of practice, I don’t always get it right; others often do it better.

Showing up with food is always a good thing but it is the showing up part that is the real food; bringing a cake is simply the icing.

Working as a physician over four decades, my usefulness tended to depend on the severity of another’s worries and misery. If no illness, no symptoms, no fear, why bother seeing a doctor? Since retiring, the help I offer no longer means writing a prescription for a medication, or performing a minor surgery. I have to simply offer up me for what it’s worth, without the M.D.

To be useful without a stethoscope, I aim to be like any good mom or grandma. I press my hand into another’s, hug when needed, smile and listen and nod and sometimes weep when someone has something they need to say. No advanced degree needed.

Oh, and bring flowers. Cut up fruit. Bake a cake.
Leave the ants at home.

Covered in Time’s Insidious Wrinkles

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Like Time’s insidious wrinkle
On a beloved Face
We clutch the Grace the tighter
Though we resent the crease
~Emily Dickinson

Let the labyrinth of wrinkles be furrowed in my brow with the red-hot iron of my own life, let my hair whiten and my step become vacillating, on condition that I can save the intelligence of my soul – let me learn just everything that others cannot teach me, what only life would be capable of marking deeply in my skin!
~Salvador Dali

kale

People are more than just the way they look.
~Madeleine L’Engle from A Wrinkle in Time

1971
1976
1980
1992
2021

Just a glance in the mirror tells me all I need to know:

my increasing folds and creases remind me
each wrinkle is grace in action,
so tangible, so telling, so mobile –
multiplying when I smile
so I try to smile often.

I don’t hide them under a mask
nor surgically tighten them away
or inject them smooth.

Instead I grin at the wrinkle of time passing,
knowing each line gained
is a grace clutched tightly
in an otherwise loosening grasp.

Love By Letting Go

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It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day — 
A sunny day with leaves just turning,
The touch-lines new-ruled — since I watched you play
Your first game of football, then, like a satellite
Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away
Behind a scatter of boys. I can see
You walking away from me towards the school
With the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free
Into a wilderness, the gait of one
Who finds no path where the path should be.

That hesitant figure, eddying away
Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem,
Has something I never quite grasp to convey
About nature’s give-and-take — the small, the scorching
Ordeals which fire one’s irresolute clay.
I have had worse partings, but none that so
Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly
Saying what God alone could perfectly show — 
How selfhood begins with a walking away,
And love is proved in the letting go.
~C. Day Lewis “Walking Away” from Complete Poems

You can kiss your family and friends good-bye and put miles between you, but at the same time you carry them with you in your heart, your mind, your stomach, because you do not just live in a world but a world lives in you.
~ Frederick Buechner

Once again I bid goodbye, if only for a little while.  It never gets easier to part from one’s family members when they are called to be far away.

I began writing regularly over twenty years ago to consider more deeply my time left on this earth and what my family meant to me, here and now, and for eternity. Family is carried inside the words I write without often writing about them directly. They inspire and challenge me; they love and stretch me. As our children married, then were blessed with children of their own, I know they are sustained by what they have carried away from this home as each drifted away.

Life is about nurture – helping the cherished seeds you carried deep inside to thrive when let go.  Then we can never really be lonely; our hearts never empty.  We stay connected, one another, forever, even when miles and miles and lifetimes apart.