paradoxes

I am making my mother’s quiche this morning from our childhood in France, from notes scribbled on the back of an envelope two decades ago when I called her from my apartment in Chicago to learn how to make it. I’m using my Grandma’s reliable oil pie crust recipe, tested over dozens of camp and family dinners (it includes directions for quadrupling the recipe). The eggs are from the farm of a friend with whom I would normally be singing on this Sunday morning except that the churches are all closed for now. I feel simultaneously connected and isolated.

The quiche is for my girls – girls who are permanently mine, but who remind me often that I am not their real mom and never will be. They are safe, happy, and loved; and they are frightened, angry, and rejected. I feel both blessed and cheated.

This day feels peaceful and solid, but the echoes of complex trauma stir in the beds. Today I will rest. Today I will fight. Today I will be strong and collapse. Today the dishes will be washed, and the floors vacuumed. Perhaps. Or they may not. Today we will cry, we will fight, we will laugh, we will create. Or we may curl up in silent sadness and binge watch Disney movies.

This is not the season for predictable outcomes and explanations. This isn’t even the season for planning a day ahead. Yet later today I will pick up groceries and prep two weeks’ worth of meals, and tomorrow morning I will outline our tasks for the week on organized little notes on a chart, not accounting for emotional meltdowns that will throw an entire day into a tailspin. I have the preposterous kind of bravery that makes laminated charts during a crisis.

I read a plain little verse this morning. A children’s song with the same words repeated through my brain. “When I am afraid, I will trust in you” (Psalm 56:3). Too simple for these complex times. Too trusting when no authority seems trustworthy. Too dependent for an independent adult. But, oh, the peace of surrendering to one greater than myself. To take a deep breath and let it out, sinking back into the very present arms of an invisible God. I illustrated it in the margin by sketching a little drawing of me sitting in the palm of a giant hand. I am totally in charge of this little household. Only I’m not.

To tell the truth, living in unpredictable times is a little fun. It’s one of those old choose-your-own-adventure books with multiple endings. Faith means you can be certain all the endings will be good somehow. Or at least the book will end, and you can pick up another. When the rock beneath it is solid, the lighthouse doesn’t fear storms. We won’t come out of this season unharmed, but perhaps it will be the same kind of harm that winter does to trees, or a surgeon’s scalpel does to a body. We will be bruised but not beaten. Discouraged but not destroyed. Heavier, lighter. More mature, more childlike. Better. And worse. But held. Always, always held. And today, for me, that is enough.