As we travel toward December 25th, I will be marking the four weeks of Advent with this series – Pregnant with Christmas. With one child born two days after Christmas and my tummy full of another one right now, so many of my thoughts are on that teenage mother of 2,000 years ago and her un-shakeable faith. So, each Sunday I will offer part of my own stumbling journey toward motherhood and what I’ve learned from watching Mary’s. I hope you’ll join me. And teach me.
I sit on a plane between Birmingham, Alabama and Charlotte, North Carolina and try to remember my mom. I try like I haven’t done for years. I lean my head against the vibrating bulkhead and want to picture her. Strong cheekbones, blue grey eyes, glasses, shoulder length, wavy hair. Shapely frame that’s tall and has all the curves it took me two children to eventually earn myself.
We lie in bed looking at each other. I’m on my right side and she’s lying on her left and we have heads on pillows looking directly at each other like we never did when she was alive. I’m a mama and so is she. We lie and look into each other. She strokes one finger down my nose and smiles, crooked, like me.
It’s always awkward to cry on airplanes.
I need to know what she loves about me. What makes me her daughter? Her daughter. How do I fit together the pieces of who I am if half of them are missing – buried in the meerkat vlaktes of South Africa? I let it all back in –the fragmented child’s-perspective, memories half-forgotten and half wished away by years of absence.
She loved marrying into dad’s family. She relished the loud, the energetic; the emotional clash between members, unrestrained in expressing themselves. Meals were often forgotten but people celebrated with pizzaz, aplomb and homemade decorations. Music. There was always music. The louder, the better. The Mamas and Papas, John Denver, Bruce Springsteen, Mango Groove. No embarrassment over showing emotion – good or bad. And books. So many books. To read, to share, to discuss. Books that became like old friends and opened up new ways of looking into the nooks and crannies of God’s heart. Stories were a relished, shared language.
I feel her eyes on me across the span of the bed, eternity, and know that she loves these same things in the grown-up, mama-version of me.
How many mornings did she come out into the driveway wearing nothing but her night shirt to dance us away to school? Skinny, un-beautiful me in the blue high school uniform with the ill-fitting belt and the shoes that were split right open into a gaping grin around the toes that I refused to surrender since the year was almost up. And Josh and Luke. We’d crane around to look back as dad pulled off in the green Volkswagen station wagon.
She would always be dancing.
Crazy, shameless, jig of love right there in the early morning drive way. Wiggling fingers and dimples at us, she’d dance. Always different and always the same. Wild, delicious, ocean of evidence that we mattered. That the children she’d produced were beloved by the person who bore them. That our leaving was noticed and our home coming waiting to be celebrated.
To belong is a truth felt so deep and profound it echoes all the way down to our bellybuttons – the literal evidence of having come from someone else and the indelible reminder that all our needs cannot be met by ourselves.
Love must sustain for nine months and then multiply by a lifetime on the outside.
Someone else must say it, “I love you.”
She spelled it out in pencil in her Bible and in blood in the bellybutton she gave me under that Amarula sky. It is stretched now, from my own daughter growing beneath it. So I am scratching through old boxes in my head trying to find the one with her voice in it. And the way she could make us all feel somehow bigger, serve us bread buttered with margarine and sugar, and know more about me than perhaps she let on.
I will take these memories out of their layers of wrapping paper and treasure them again.
But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart. (NIV).
But Mary kept all these things in her heart and thought about them often. (New Living Translation).
Mary treasured all these things in her heart and always thought about them. (God’s Word Translation).
But Mary kept all these things, and pondered [them] in her heart. (King James Bible)
To treasure: to guard, protect or hold onto to (according to Beth Moore/Deeper Still conference 12/4/2010).
I’d buried that treasure so deep, I’d forgotten where to find it. Then I spent the weekend with 14,000 women. The air was so full of the love and mystery of being a woman – a daughter and a mother – that I wanted to open my mouth like a kid in the pouring rain and let it just run down my face, my cheeks and deep into this heart of mine that’s been so afraid of having a daughter. So afraid of wounding her. Of leaving her feeling unloved, unwanted, unknown.
I will treasure you child. At the beginning of your beginning I promise you are already wanted.
And there will be dancing at your arrival.
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You ooze genuine love, dear girl, and your sweet daughter will soak it up and treasure you for it!
Such beautiful writing and words. You will be a wonderful mother.
We learn and do different by what we experienced and don’t want to repeat. My own ‘mother’ was not able to ‘be a mother other than by giving birth’ the emotional part of it was not able to come towards her and she could not in turn share it.
She often would tell me ‘You will never get in the way of my happiness’… as if a child really wants to do that.
It was a long on going knowing in my heart. Don’t expect anything it won’t be available.
And when I told her about painful things that happened. She said ‘we don’t have to talk about it any more it is water under the bridge.’ What bridge? my hearts?
Anyway… that is a whole book… that has not been written. You will be great~ You will do well ~You are awesome and we can’t wait to meet your new little one.
Oh, how I love this! That verse has taken on such special meaning to me since I had my own children. I think on it so often. Am I treasuring up these moments? Am I locking them away to look back on someday? Am I fully aware of what I have now, or just allowing myself to feel overwhelmed by the moment. How I love my children is so important to how they will allow others to love them. I want them to know that without a doubt, beyond measure, with abandon, they were loved by their mama. I can’t even imagine all the ways having a daughter must be bringing back memories of your mother, but I hope that it brings a sweet peace and joy to you in the remembering. You are going to do beautifully!!
Ah, dear Lisa-Jo….I wish now, that when I had met you I had grabbed you in a tight hug rather than simply extending my hand, and whispered in your ear- you are going to do fine! Because you are.
That same fierce love you have for your sons will translate to your daughter. You know the steps to the dance, it is just slightly a different tune…a different beat. But oh, so rich. You and your daughter will find your rhythm together.
Oh friend! I feel as though you are a sister in so many ways…but this. this is just reading my heart and showing me things I haven’t seen and so want to pour out as you have…
“To belong is a truth felt so deep and profound it echoes all the way down to our bellybuttons – the literal evidence of having come from someone else and the indelible reminder that all our needs cannot be met by ourselves.”
I think this is what I was talking about by “first community of love” in “Tree of Life Out of a Root of Grief”…and the missing and sense of un-belonging relate to losing her…
I loved this first to last and pictured it with my own mama…now, I have a daughter named after her…sometimes I think she is teaching me as she reminds me of her namesake:)
blessings and prayers, abby:)
This is absolutely joyous in its beauty!! A daughter will touch the depths of your soul in ways you cannot imagine. As a mother of four daughters, I am truly blessed. The sons are precious, too! :)
Oh friend, that Amarula sky… this morning I took in my little African hitchikers to get analyzed at the lab and the technician who waited on me was from Mali and had been to Burundi. I love how God gives us daily reminders of beautiful memories smooshed in between the ordinary of our days.
“own daughter” YOU ARE HAVING A GIRL???? I am so excited for you!
Lisa-Jo
Thank you for motivating me to sit still for a moment and remember my mom.
She gave up everything for her kids. She suffered through pain for them – and felt their pain, maybe deeper than they felt it themselves. She listened to music that I sang along to – until the other kids heard me. :)
She lived a hard life – but I never saw it in her eyes – because she wanted to protect her kids from that hidden pain. She even knew she was dying – and tried to pretend, for us, that her life wasn’t ending. Despite the cancer raging through her body, she willed herself through one last Christmas just for us. So Christmas wouldn’t be a dark memory – and so we’d have a year to settle and remember her, as she was, and with a smile, before the first Christmas without her arrived.
That’s how a mom thinks. That’s why I read mom blogs.
The way a mom protects – with strength – and love – it leaves me in awe.
Heartbreaking, and full of love and hope and joy, too. Lisa-Jo, this is a precious, beautiful post. Beth Moore spoke straight into my heart, too, about treasuring — in a different way, of course, but still powerfully. What a gift to hear her in person. What a gift to read your glorious words and memories this morning.
So precious! I too have been contemplating the life of Mary…so many gems in that little story!
“That our leaving was noticed and our home coming waiting to be celebrated.”
Somehow, in the mysterious ways of God, I feel certain your mother’s wild, delicious driveway dance celebrated not only who you were, but who you would become, and the children who would someday make your own heart dance.
Your daughter’s home coming is waiting to be celebrated, too, and the ocean of evidence already overflows in your beautiful words. Thank you.
Love, Jeanne
A lot of dancing!
Even from people you will never meet but who love you and your beautiful mommy so much!
This is your heart writing, and it is beautiful beyond words.
Oh, Lisa Jo, this speaks volumes to my heart. For a number of reasons that I’m not at liberty to expel at the moment, the Lord has been putting on my heart that verse about Mary pondering, treasuring these things in her heart. And oh, I needed to read this tonight. Thank you.
Lisa-Jo,
I love this. I love that you are slowing down to be hopefully expectant. I love that this little girl will have the story of a mom who is wild about her, even before she makes it to your arms.
And I love that she will have the proof of that,
on the pages of this blog.
What a gift of recording, friend.
Merry Christmas from here.
I am really enjoying this series, and I am grateful to share in these beautiful memories with you. Thanks for allowing us to be a part of such personal reflection through the Christmas season.