Friday Southern-style Faith

Our Story Continues (Part IV)


A funny thing happens when you're rearing children, whether your own or helping someone else. Time has a way of getting away. When they are little, very little, and getting into everything, we think the days will never end. Sometimes the hours. The minutes. We look forward to their nap time. But, when it comes, we wonder what to do with ourselves.
Do I sleep, too?
Do I read?
Clean the bathroom? Mop the floor? I can't vacuum. The noise will wake her ...
So we do a little of it all and never really get it done.

When we are young mothers, we cannot see the joy in this. But when we are mothers for the second time around--grandmothers or old enough to be the grandmother of the child whom we are caring for--we understand that the old saying "this too shall pass, and pass quickly, it shall" is true.

2nd Generation mothers don't care about fingerprints because we know they'll wipe away and soon, too soon, there will be no fingerprints to fuss over. We don't care about bath toys left wet and ripe for mildewing in the tub because we know that Clorox makes bleach. We don't care about wet footprints marking the tile or the carpet because ... it's gonna dry. And it's just water, after all. Later on, we don't care about smeared makeup in the bathroom sink or clothes strewn on the floor because "I can't find anything to wear" when there is a closet full. Okay, maybe every so often we care about that. Maybe every so often we say things like "pick up this pig pen" but only because we are trying to teach discipline and order into what is a chaotic span of life. Adolescence. Oye.

Sometimes we walk into the bedroom of our 2nd Generation teenage daughter's bedroom and we see that new "things" have been added. For Jordynn it was the shape of a heart. She drew a large heart on her closet door, made of cedar, with chalk. She put a piece of tape on the wall and drew drew a heart with lipstick. With a pen, she drew a heart on the baseboard of her white wrought iron bed. And, with gloss on her lips, she kissed the white-wood desk by her bed, leaving the shape of a heart.

Time stamps that say, "I was here and now I am not."

I want to tell you more. I want to share with you about the hours in between. The weeks, the months, and the years. Start to finish. 2000-2011, nearly to the day of having laid eyes on her for the first time.

Eleven years of love, devotion, worry, and ... joy. Joy shattered by a thing we call "mental illness" but that the state I live in, Florida, has yet to recognize. What we don't understand, we ignore. But first we remove, like a piece of lint from a pair of black slacks. We can throw it away. We can flick it into the air. We can move forward and pretend it never was.

But, truth be told, it was. And it still is. I know. I have the time stamps to prove it.

To read Part I: http://evamarieeversonssouthernvoice.blogspot.com/2012/01/fridays-southern-style-faith.html
Part II: http://evamarieeversonssouthernvoice.blogspot.com/2012/01/friday-southern-style-faith.html
Part III: http://www.evamarieeversonssouthernvoice.blogspot.com/2012/01/friday-southern-style-faith_20.html