It's no small thing

...even though it feels like such a small thing

For paid subscribers, there is an audio version of this week’s Field Notes over on The Secret Field Notes Podcast, too. Here’s the link to listen to that (and here’s an article explaining how to add this Secret Field Notes Podcast feed to your podcast app, too so that you have it in your preferred app as soon as it’s published).

Hi friends,

The snow began falling on Sunday night while we slept. I woke up on Monday morning to heavy snow blanketing the neighbourhood brown lawns and spindly trees, the streetlights illuminating the still-falling flakes. It was all beautiful again. Our sixteen-year-old and I suited up for the shovelling of the driveway and walks. My husband travels a lot for work right now and I forgot how to get the snowblower going, so manual labour it was. We shovelled steadily in the pre-dawn darkness together, alongside our neighbours, exchanged mittened-hellos to each other and kept clearing sidewalks together. I made an appointment with the physiotherapist later for the inevitable toll this will take on me. It’s no small thing to do this work.

When I sent the younger two off to school at last in the weak light of morning, they were bundled up with boots on their feet, scarves around their necks. We had to buy new gear this winter, everyone keeps growing out of everything. The elementary and junior high kids are thrilled by the snow, of course, darting down the hill with crimson cheeks and tumbling like puppies into the banks below, shrieking. As I turned the minivan around to leave, I could hear a playground’s worth of laughter; some things at least don’t change. Then I took their freshly washed, now-too-small snowsuits and boots over to the mission and placed them in the bin for kids at the shelter to claim.

One evening a couple weeks ago, I gathered with a dozen other folks from church and we cooked for hours in a local commercial kitchen, making meals for mothers without support or a family or a village nearby, the new mothers sitting in NICUs alone. We packed up the stir-fries and apple pies and burritos, we created more than 500 meals together. We tucked them in the freezers for delivery the next day. It was no small thing even though it felt like such a small thing.

My parents came over to our house for supper that icy night. My mum made a chicken casserole for us and pushed it into my oven, pulling bread out of a shopping bag and apple streudels for dessert while I set the table. I thought of those lonely mothers with sick babies, now eating the food we prepped in that kitchen, and hoped that they felt that same love of good food in the oven on a snowy evening. I I think I was hoping they were not alone.

We put the kettle on and ate together, talked about all the things happening in the family right now: teenagers, long conversations, phone calls with teachers, social worker agreements for the next season of support and services, travel schedules, work deadlines, prayers we are praying. It’s no small thing for the people in your life to acknowledge a season of heavy lifting. At one point, my dad admiringly informed me that I was “up to my ass in alligators” and I felt strangely validated.

I read once that having an emotionally-regulated parent is one of the most unsung privileges of our age. I think that’s true: to grow up in a stable, loving home without fear or egg-shell-walking or yelling, no need for masking needs or feeling shame for accommodations, is no small thing, especially for neurodivergent kids. I know that it’s also a tremendous privilege to have grandparents like this, who show up with casseroles and conversation when you’re holding it all in your arms, just to feed you and tell you that you’re doing a good job, to remind you that it feels hard because it is hard, and they are proud of you. It’s no small thing.

These days, it feels like running the small kingdom of this family, with all our diverse needs, is the hardest and the best work of my life - and no one will really know about that, but us.

Then I drove off into the cold darkness for basketball practice at the local school with our youngest. Everyone takes off their wet boots at the entrance out of respect for the janitors and so pads around the empty school in stocking feet. It’s oddly intimate. Next time I’ll have to remember to bring my slippers. I sat in the cold school foyer with my knitting, just in case she needed me, just in case she got overwhelmed by the noise again and needed my help to regulate.

We came home to the warm house. I never take that home light for granted when I come around the corner of our street. It’s no small thing to belong somewhere.

There were conversations about homework, another about politics, later we will talk about resilience and self-care in the face of a world that profits from your self-loathing. Another teenager is talking about university now, wondering what to study, what life to choose. One is grounded from phones but honestly, it’s been a great two weeks because of it, highly recommend. Empty the dishwasher, start another load of towels, shovel the driveway again because the snow keeps falling, salt the steps, call my sister.

You do not get to live your life without losing hope altogether now and then. If you haven’t ever rocked back on your heels and wondered why you even bothered, then I have to wonder if you even tried? If you haven’t cried over the world, have you even engaged with its realities? If you haven’t been haunted at night by the knowledge other people’s children are crying (there is no such thing as other people’s children) then are you paying attention?

Of course you are, of course you are.

So here you are. Despairing while punching the clock and sending emails. Wondering if it matters, rather convinced it doesn’t. Sweeping up the crumbs and praying. Perhaps you are wondering if you believe in the doctrine of total depravity now (just me?) because the six o’clock news is becoming a theological treatise.

Love wins, sure, but right now she has a split lip and a black eye, she’s gotten like the bad end of a street brawl and it doesn’t look good out there.

I wish I could set the world to rights the way that I put my house to rights. I wish I could move from room to room, soothing souls and picking up socks and making beds and stocking pantries. I wish every room had a fair, kind, sensible mother present. I wish I could offer bread and light candles and keep the porch lights on for the ones far from my door.

I even wish I was as hopeful and naive as I was twenty years ago, ten years ago, five years ago - those were good days. I wonder if anyone has ever held a wake for their naive big world-changing hopes? Just lit the candles, set out the food, and gathered with the folks to tell a few stories about the time when precious you believed that the world could change or even just get a bit better under your watch.

I think I’ve accepted my limitations now, I’m better acquainted with realities and yet, I am stubbornly hopeful about small things now. About soup kitchens and newspaper delivery guys and food banks and school fundraisers and knowing your neighbours and writing out Bible verses to stick on the mirrors. About shelter drop-offs of coats and meals for mothers you don’t know and donations to maternity centres in Haiti for Christmas and text messages to hold vigil during scary doctor appointments. Go figure. I think we have to be this foolish because I will not become what I despise. I won’t give up on who I am or what I believe God loves in us, hopes for us, longs for us now.

So when the youngest shouts for help rinsing her hair out in the shower, I turn up the furnace a degree or two and pull back the shower curtain, rolling up my sleeves. I plunge my hands into her soapy wet hair and tip her chin up to the ceiling so that it runs down her back to the tub drain. I sing Anne Murray’s Danny’s Song into the cavern of the bathroom, like I always did at bathtime, back when they were tinies, back when I could fit all four of them in my lap. I wash all the soap from her hair gently, untangling as I go, and she tells me that nothing feels as good as getting your hair washed. When we’re done, she steps out of the bathtub and into my waiting towel, I wrap her up and dry her off, hugging her tight, and she says, “I wish I everyone had a mother, I wish everyone felt looked after.”

On Sunday last, we stood in church and I listened to my row of tall children sing the old songs I’ve loved my whole life long. We’re still here, I guess I just love being part of a congregation. I don’t know what I’m doing most of the time and I’m a bit overwhelmed by the trying, so we just show up to church and we sing. We pray together for the world. My middles adore their youth leader and never miss a Wednesday. I think I’m trying to help my children see that another world is still possible, that there is hope even when it feels like so many are choosing fear and despair and distrust and scapegoats. I’m trying to keep singing when the darkness is gathering, I hope they remember what my voice sounds like at night.

We usually take the long way home just because I love to see the Rockies every day. I still write letters to politicians like it will make a difference. We volunteer for the Christmas food programs again. I talk about mental health with teenagers and pray for Palestine again. Maybe you think I’m quaint, I’m precious, I’m naive, I probably am: but I have considered all the facts¹ and I have decided it is no small thing to love my life with small action verbs right now.

There comes a time when you decide that being earnest and sincere is better than being defeated.

Because when I love this small patch, when I love it by putting my back into it, then I want to love the whole world again. This is how I keep loving the world. When I comb the tangles out of wet hair and hug the teenagers tight until they sigh and exhale and relax, when I pull a rather humble cake from an oven, when I put a baby sweater in the mail for a new arrival, when I donate and make phone calls and keep caring even when the very nature of the powers and principalities of our current apocalypse right now is designed to force me to stop caring. Loving is the last thing they can take from us, I won’t I won’t I won’t stop.

It’s no small thing to decide that you will keep caring. It is no small thing to keep showing up for the ones who need you to show up. It’s no small thing to do the work that is yours to do today. It’s not everything, it couldn’t be, but it is something. I won’t give up on my something. Collectively I keep praying, hoping, that we won’t give up on this, on the possibility of making it all beautiful again for one soul.

Love S.

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1. h/t to Wendell Berry’s The Mad Farmer Liberation Front for that phrase, “considered all the facts.”