Sometimes You Keep It In
Sometimes when I had a problem, my mother would recite this little ditty:
For every problem under the sun, there is a solution or there is none.
If there is one, seek and find it; if there is none, never mind it.
It was completely infuriating. At least tell me which kind of problem this is! That is NOT helpful advice! That is not advice! What? NEVER MIND IT??? Aaaaaaargh.
One of my boys had a health scare that led us to NIH a few weeks ago, which called the biggest fears to the surface. I’m really good at telling myself everything is going to be okay and outrunning my anxiety by being busy and jovial (never minding it, perhaps). I had been quieting my fear voice for weeks–the time between the initial tests and the big fancy appointment. Getting to NIH is such an ordeal. Security and paperwork and signatures–the logistics kept me occupied as we got close. Once we were finally sitting in the waiting room, boxes checked, badges on, I finally felt it rushing at me. The last time we went through something like this, we went to Johns Hopkins. And I told myself everything would be fine. And it was absolutely not.
This time it looks like it is fine. When I finally spoke about it to my dearest friend the night before the appointment (the Gayle to my Oprah, if you will), he kept pressing me to talk more about how I feel (role reversal, anyone?). But in this case I think that wasn’t the course of action I needed to take. I couldn’t do anything about it, my fears were all conjecture and giving them voice wouldn’t be helpful, would only make me more anxious. This wasn’t a problem I could talk through and solve, it was a wait-and-see problem. Sometimes they are.
This poem below, from the Writer’s Almanac this week just makes me sigh. What care would you ask God for (if you have some disbelief, suspend it for the sake of this exercise) if you had the strength to ask? How would you like to be held, when there’s nothing that can be done? Oh beauties, take good care. This world has a lot of sad things in it, but it also has you, and for that I’m grateful.
by Keetje Kuipers
Perhaps as a child you had the chicken pox
and your mother, to soothe you in your fever
or to help you fall asleep, came into your room
and read to you from some favorite book,
Charlotte’s Web or Little House on the Prairie,
a long story that she quietly took you through
until your eyes became magnets for your shuttering
lids and she saw your breathing go slow. And then
she read on, this time silently and to herself,
not because she didn’t know the story,
it seemed to her that there had never been a time
when she didn’t know this story—the young girl
and her benevolence, the young girl in her sod house—
but because she did not yet want to leave your side
though she knew there was nothing more
she could do for you. And you, not asleep but simply weak,
listened to her turn the pages, still feeling
the lamp warm against one cheek, knowing the shape
of the rocking chair’s shadow as it slid across
your chest. So that now, these many years later,
when you are clenched in the damp fist of a hospital bed,
or signing the papers that say you won’t love him anymore,
when you are bent at your son’s gravesite or haunted
by a war that makes you wake with the gun
cocked in your hand, you would like to believe
that such generosity comes from God, too,
who now, when you have the strength to ask, might begin
the story again, just as your mother would,
from the place where you have both left off.
Also–this just went live, and I’m pretty pleased. If you like it please share it.
