Mending the Seams (Christmas Letter 2012)

Dear Family and Friends,


This past semester in college did a number on me. I feel a bit wrung out. I just wrapped up another religion class, Theology 301. For a while there, I thought I had everything pretty much figured out, which is usually the first big clue that I am totally lost. And when I feel lost and messed up, I am ironically closer. Isn’t that refreshing? The questions are what lead us to reach beyond ourselves, don’t you think?

I shared Theology class with six amazing people, and our guide was a remarkable professor, named, Barbara Brown Taylor. Google her name on the internet and you will understand why I would be at a loss for words if I were to try to describe who she is.

As a class, we wrestled with some pretty big things in Christian Theology. Each of us comes from a slightly different religious tradition, and yet, we found ways to come together. We found the in-between places. It’s all in the seams. Those are the places we can tear apart, and they are also the places where we can do our mending.

So, this is the place from where I am coming--a place where I just spent the past month working on a ten point personal credo, a project that worked on me much more than I worked on it. For me, personally, it is a place of reconciliation. It’s in the seams where I find the paradox of a benevolent God and human suffering.

I discovered that I’ve actually been working on mending those seams for years, and I didn’t even realize it. It is why I write that silly Christmas poem every year, why I indulge in making fun of myself throughout this blog, and why I continue to write a weekly advice column for the newspaper. I have been mending those seams. It’s why I have found laugh lines and smile lines in the mirror as I get closer to middle age. I have been laughing for years. I’ve been reconciling my faith in a benevolent God and my recognition of human suffering all this time, and I didn’t even know it.

I mend the seams when I tell you about raising teenagers. Talk about suffering! Teenagers can break a parent’s heart. It’s why Adrian wrote the song about being a father of teenage girls, he lovingly titled, “Shut Up and Give Me Yo’ Money.”

It’s why I hold on to the story of when Jolie was in kindergarten, and wouldn’t let me drop her off. She made me carry her, and walk her in every single day. I tried to be firm, but I gave up when she kicked the little old man who was the crossing guard, as hard as she could, when he opened my car door, to offer my curly haired, 30 pound midget his hand.

Jolie never wanted to go to school, and yet, she finally made it to the end when she graduated this May. And let me tell you, it wasn’t easy to get there for either one of us.

It is why I can laugh about the entire journey of calamities and mishaps it took to get there. I cannot express in words how proud we were of all her honors and accomplishments the night she walked across the stage.  And it is why we released 12 balloons into the air for her Boompa when she walked acorss the stage.  12 balloons represented the 12 steps of A.A. that gave my father hope for the last 24 years of his life, signifying that when a broken heart is mended, it becomes stronger than before.  She earned that diploma and several theatre awards, with her courage to find hope in a life that had seen too many hardships for one little girl. 

Jolie found her smile. It shone brighter than the stadium lights that night she graduated. She is moving on with her life, in love with Dylan, her high school sweetheart. She will begin her studies of dance and yoga in January, and hopes to be an instructor of both when she “grows up.” She’s working, saving money, and enjoying the life of an optimistic, hopeful, energetic, deeply spiritual young woman, mending her seams as she goes.

It is why Sydney found her calling of being a stand- up comedian when she was only two years old. It is why she tells me to “Just we-wax” when I am about to blow my top, the same way she’s always said “we-wax” before years of speech therapy, advising the world to just relax and stay calm. She once said it after she had poured gallons and gallons of water in her bedroom, turned up the air conditioner, ran some fans, all in a tremendous attempt to turn her room into an ice skating rink. She managed to keep me calm when I discovered the mess. Within minutes, I found the funny in it. Sydney has this ability to make people smile, even when they are hurting. She’s down- right hilarious, and when she laughs, I hear God. It is like an earthquake.

With the challenges she has always faced in school, trying to navigate through learning disabilities, I can honestly say that in tenth grade, she has come out the other side. She just made the second highest grade of her class on her state biology exam.

In fifth grade, when Sydney was reading on the kindergarten level, her teacher told me she was “not used to teaching children who were not gifted” as her excuse to why she didn’t like my daughter. Ha! Talk about gifted! Sydney is one of the most gifted people I know. She has big plans to go to college and major in biology. She wants to be a doctor. In the meantime, she stays busy working on her beautiful paintings at home, and in the theater, she makes people laugh with her out of this world talent in improvisation, all the while, mending her seams. If the doctor thing doesn’t work out, I highly recommend her to audition for Saturday Night Live as a back- up plan.

It is how I can hear an honorable masterpiece while listening to the various honks, squeaks, and toots coming from Fischer’s trumpet as he practices for the Middle School band. It is why I drive him to and from school every day so he won’t have to ride the bus anymore, and how he can make up funny songs about all the awful things he learned from riding that bus earlier in the school year. You know, songs about kids his age who download pornography on their cell phones, while they dip snuff and talk about smoking pot.

I’d like to say it’s a “different world” these days, and how the youth is self destructing before our eyes, but if you know my 11 year old son, Fischer, it would give you a bunch of hope for our future. If it rests in the hands of children like him, who instinctively know how to stand up for what is good and righteous, we will all be just fine.

Fischer is doing another round of torture… I mean physical therapy. He was in two stretching casts last winter and learned how to pop wheelies in a wheel chair. But now his tendons are contracted and as tight as ever before. Part of the problem is that he is growing so darn fast. He’s taller than me when he is wearing his new orthotics. He is in constant physical pain, and some other boys still make fun of him. Fischer takes it all in stride, and he knows that he is one lucky child to be able to get around physically, even if it hurts.

Fischer has discovered his musical gifts this year. The honks and squeaks have blossomed into music other people besides his mama, can appreciate. He has earned the second chair out of 24 trumpet players, and that even had to be decided with a tie breaker. He is also a self taught guitarist, one of those folks who can hear a song, and then play it from his heart. With a brain like his, that can retain such enormous amounts of information; that kid is going places. As he mends his seams, he brings us hope.

It is why Mollie is the sweetest and weirdest kid I know. It is why I collect her prayers, like the ones where she earnestly prays for physically “ugly people...because they just can’t help it, God.” It’s in all the ways that she has learned way too much, too early, from having older siblings, who teach her all the stuff I used to teach my little sister. It’s called what goes around, comes around. She’s corrupted just enough to make her funny, and yet her heart remains so pure and kind. It is evident in her drawings, where she can knock out that wonderful outdoor scene that 8 year olds all over this world are famous for: the ones with a tree, a sunshine, some flowers, and some birds. Only hers have such depth and perspective in the “angry mobs” she draws coming down the hill in the background.

Mollie participated for the third year in a row, in being a cheerleader for the White County Tiny Mite Football Team. She is quite the cutie pie on the field at half time, doing her dance routine. She is my only child who claims to love school. She is a voracious reader too. Mollie continues to be the happiest kid on the block, as she mends the seams that she is only beginning to discover.

It is how Nicholas stays out of trouble. I fear that if Nicholas had been a blessing to a different kind of family, his spirit would have been broken by now with well-meaning parents who would have tried to teach that boy a lesson or two. As we mend the seams, we’ve learned that children teach us way more than we could dream of teaching them, especially children like Nicholas.

He takes things apart, and the cost of his destruction must have reached into the thousands by now. Nicholas has a built- in- radar for things like screwdrivers. He has disemboweled my entire computer in less than ten minutes. After seeing this horror, I figured I’d put all the pieces in a bag and haul it back to our computer guy, again (Nicholas has crashed this computer 5 times, he’s been resetting my password and settings since he was four years old, you know, the age he was when some doctor in Atlanta diagnosed him with being retarded.) By the time I got ready to take the computer, I found Nicholas sitting on the floor, putting the whole thing back together, piece by piece. I just watched. He turned it back on, and that computer worked better than it ever had before.

Nicholas will be 7 in February. He has not outgrown clothes or shoes for two years, and still hasn’t made it past 30 pounds, but may I tell you how pleased I am that he is finally officially out of diapers! He is in first grade, and is doing so well that his special ed teacher told me that she finds it challenging to set goals for him, because he keeps mastering them. He may do things a different way, but we feel so grateful that he is in a school environment where he is well loved. He comes home often smelling of his teacher’s perfume, and I know it is from the hugs he gets. His teachers guide him to follow the routine, but they still allow him to be himself. Nicholas helps a lot of people mend their seams just by being his special little self.

People always tell me they don’t know how I do it all, being a busy mother and all. But honestly, I don’t know how Adrian does it all. I know the children and I have driven that sweet man out of his mind, and yet, he still claims to know us in public. He literally holds this whole shindig in his hands. He is our fiercest protector. He is our gentle teacher. He is the smartest and wisest human being I know. And just being with him, makes me want to be a better person.

It is hard to believe that it’s only been thirteen years since he asked my daddy for my hand in marriage. Oh, I could just cry when I think of all the heartbreaks we went through before we met, and how somehow, very mysteriously, we helped each other mend the seams of our brokenness. Together, we become so much more than we ever could have been as separate people. Love does that. Love mends the seams.

And so it brings me back to my theology class, as I wrestled with questions about human suffering and the benevolence of God. I haven’t found the answers, but I find my peace, right here at the appropriate time of the year... where there are reminders everywhere I look: with lights on trees, wreaths on doors, busy shoppers in the stores, stockings on the mantel, Santa ringing the Salvation Army bell, and nativities displayed. It is Christmas: a time we remember that God so loved the world, that He sent His only begotten Son to mend the seams. It’s all a love story. It is about being torn apart and being mended back together over and over again, constantly.

Merry Christmas!

Xoxo Abigail