;

A semicolon is a small bit of punctuation that separates two related ideas.  

It’s a clause. 

A pause.  

A semicolon says,  “Wait!  This is not the end;  there is more to come.”

The news today tells us that some people are tattooing semicolons on their wrists to symbolize that there is more to their life story.  They are people who have fought with death or trauma or attempts at suicide, but they have won the battle.  Even though they walked through a very dark valley, and their world and situation seemed hopeless, they made it through.  People with semicolon tattoos are survivors with a backstory.

They paused. 

And they chose hope. 


So, I'd like to introduce my friend.   I like to call him Semicolon Cat.  He has a backstory.

Someone didn’t want him when he was a baby.  He was thrown away.  Abandoned in the darkness of a Minnesota winter.  He was unloved and left to die.

Semicolon Cat appeared on the edge of a woods where my friend lives.  He was tiny, hungry, and matted.  Just a kitten, he had battle scars from facing a mean world on his own.  One ear was wounded; probably frozen in the winter winds.  It bent over, cartilage broken, and just stayed that way, folded in half.  His tail was bent, too.  It dangled and dragged along as he walked, hanging by a thread.  His abdomen was caked in matted blood.

He stayed on the periphery of the woods, watching my friend’s cat daintily lap up her cream on the sunny porch in the mornings.  She slept in an igloo dog house with a heated floor pad, dining twice a day.  She was petted and fluffy and beloved.  He stayed on the edge of the yard, watching.  Suffering.  Afraid.  Wounded.

The family asked around, but no one admitted to losing a little ragged calico cat.  Not a cat whose half a tail just fell off.  The family put out a little extra cat food at night, and left a warm quilt out on the porch.  

The kitten stayed.

The female cat wouldn’t let him in her house.   “It’s too cold for him!” the children said.  “The little kitty needs a place to sleep!”  They left him treats, and my friends cut a hole in their garage door, just the size for a stray feral cat.  He curled up in the warm garage, and began to heal.  Days and weeks and months passed.  Spring came, and Semicolon Cat fattened up on the love of the children, on the pets and caresses and the joy of strings tied to sticks that he chased around the yard.    

He chose this family, and they all love him, just the way he is.  He came out of the woods and right into their hearts, to stay.  He likes to keep close by, following them around, purring and marking their legs with his scent of ownership.  He is a good hunter, and leaves his people special gifts of dead frogs and moles.  He lounges around, right at their front door, rolling over to expose his belly for pets, because he trusts them so implicitly.  He is the most affectionate and loving cat I have ever met.   He is beloved.

Someday if you find yourself in a dark place, feeling unloved and alone, please remember Semicolon Cat.   

Pause.  

Hope. 

Make it through for the Love and Joy that is waiting for you, on the other side of the woods.  

Because someday, today will only be your backstory…  and you can fill the rest of your story with love.

I haven't posted any flowers in a long while.  Here is one of my favorites.
This was my dad's Crown of Thorns plant.  It covered his desk, sprawling over his workspace,  soaking up the sunlight on the south side of his office, where the sun shone most brightly.  

Under this plant's ferocious gaze, Dad chatted on the phone, buying used hospital equipment like X-ray machines, Geiger meters and pancake probes and ultrasound machines.   He would load the heavy machinery up from metro hospitals, clean, repair, refurbish, and resell.   He loved that job.   It somehow gave him so much joy to take what someone considered "junk" machinery, and to work with it and recondition it and make it something valuable.   He frequently sold to hospitals in impoverished areas, or to countries that otherwise would never be able to afford something as expensive as an ultrasound machine.  He followed up with service plans, because he knew each machine so well, and kept them in good working order.  He took "junk" and helped save lives with it. 

When Dad passed away, I took his thorny plant home.  
It's in my studio now, and still sprawling, covering the desktop, producing thousands of thorns and occasional tiny red drops of flowers.

I like this plant's daily reminder that somehow, God does the same kind of job that my dad did so well.  God takes the thorns and the garbage and "junk" of my life, and with his tender care, he makes it into something worthwhile.  He knows my faults, he can correct them.  He knows my brokenness, and somehow, he can find a place for me anyway.  He knows that someone, somewhere needs me...
And so he turns me into something valuable.  
Thorns and all. 

  

What do you see when you look out at the world?  Do you see a big mess of darkness? Tangles of trouble, insurmountable pain and fear? Hatred and despair?  

All those things are there, I know.  
The world can be a tough place.   

Just reading the news headlines is enough to scare me.  Add my own personal troubles, and I could be overwhelmed, buried in negativity.

I could be jaded.
I was jaded.

But I have found a secret weapon that melts away all my fears.  
I have discovered that even in the forest of fear and doom, beautiful things grow.  

Little things.

You have to search for them.  

Once you learn how to find the little things, you will find hope and joy everywhere.
Because hope and joy are everywhere. 

Here is what I found in the middle of that dismal looking forest this morning…
I hope you can find some wonderful small things today, too.  
The small things make all the difference.

Spring Break!

Woop! Woop!  Excitement is high this week.

“Where are you going for Spring Break?”  Another Mom asked me.  I knew she was going to Florida, taking her kiddos to Disneyworld.  And I am sure, knowing this mom, that her vacation was planned to the detail, and the whole week would be thoroughly enjoyed by the polite and happy Someone Else’s Kids.  

And I was not jealous.  Really.  Of course I would love to take kids to Florida for Spring Break, but it would have to be Someone Else’s Kids. 

Not mine.  

Definitely not mine.  

“So what are you doing for Spring Break?” she asked again, jolting me from my reverie.

“I am staying home and breathing!”  I smile.  This is the truth.  And I will enjoy this.

Because staying at home with nine people and pets and friends and drop ins is going to take a lot of calculated deep breathing.  I may hide in a closet, too.  That will be the only quiet place, I am certain. 

On Monday of Spring Break, I bought six pairs of tall rubber boots and six sets of watercolor paints. The kids and their pals are going to have a magnificent week of stomping in puddles and watercolor painting.  I am sure it will be a great week.  I scrub all floors, and am certain that the white tile will remain clean for many days, with those wonderful boots keeping the mud outside.  I am so pleased.  I will probably get to think and write and paint, while they are so busy and happy.

On Tuesday of Spring Break, I admired the copious spread of landscape paintings in the quiet of my kitchen.  They seem to have gone through half a ream of paper.  It was still early when I discovered that the “quiet” kids had created a huge mudslide in the back yard, which they were sailing down, standing up, like barefoot water skiers.  There was still no mud in my home, but the backyard looks like Southern Californian mudslides.  They are banished from the backyard.  After lunch, Little Guy had set up a winter sled in the widest puddle, a small lake, really.  

“Watch me, Mom!”  

He took a running leap, soared in the air, landed with a thump on the sled.  The sled galumphed and sloshed, propelled forward, while Little Guy flopped backward, sitting down right into aforementioned mud lake.  While he was inside, getting clean, dry clothes, two little girls came squishing in.  It seems the depth of their puddle exceeded the height of their boots, and their little toes were swimming in muddy ice water.  And one had fallen in, and scraped her hand on an icy stick.  There was blood in the mud.  

My gosh.  I have flashbacks back to my first son, who made mud pies in the rain with a cut on his foot.  It was a teeny tiny cut, but he chose to make mud pies in a corner where the dog had gone to the, um, baño.  Yes, indeed.  That ended with a few days’ stay in Children’s Hospital with a staph infection.  With visions, no, nightmares of the blue line of infection that ran up that child’s leg, I gasped and hauled today’s kid right into the sink, and slathered her with soapy water.  Antibacterial ointment and bandages followed.  Before I even wiped up the mud from their socks and feet, Another Boy came slumping in the bathroom, pale faced and ghostly.  White lips.  Bloody knuckles.  His freckles stood out on his nose and cheeks like dark sentinels of approaching doom.  What happened?!

“I - I - I slammed my fingers in the dooooooor!”  He sat down on the white tile floor in his very muddy jeans and very muddy socks and held up his very muddy and bleeding knuckles.  I think he was going into shock.  

“Into the sink!”  I shouted.  “Hey, You in the Sink, move over!”  I saw another vision of blue lines of infection slinking up this kid’s veins, and pull out the antibacterial soap and antibacterial ointment and bandages again.  

There are now four muddy kids on the white tile.  They are adorned with muddy socks, muddy jeans, muddy shirts, muddy lips and muddy hair.  Even though some of them are bandaged up, they are all magnificently happy.  I am shown the muddy sinkhole of their creation.  The five foot wide hole of what they call “Sopa di Baño” that is now in the ground where there used to be grass.  They are proud as punch of all the mud pies lined up on the front porch.  

I make them change clothes, and start the laundry.  And they are all banished to the kitchen table to paint.  

By Wednesday of Spring Break,  the mud is disappearing, mostly dried up in the yard.  But I am noticing a trend in the paintings.  One kid has taken blue painter’s tape, and their creations now decorate his bedroom wall.  

“Look, Mom!  A cyclops!  And Medusa! and this guy’s a troll.  Every time someone hits him with an axe, smaller trolls break off him and see?  They’re everywhere.” 

Indeed.  Even the Kraken’s tentacles are climbing on his wall, right next to the Hydra with the four heads.  

Pinterest would be appalled.  I am reminded of the cute boys’ bedrooms posted on Pinterest, a website that brings together decorating ideas and moms with free time.  Pinterest shows me bedrooms for boys:  happy tree houses painted on walls, red, white and blue ships and boats and plaid and dolphins…  On Pinterest, everyone has clean tile floors, and there is no mud.  

On Pinterest, there is no Kraken slithering up a child’s wall. 

By Wednesday of Spring Break, I told them it was video game day.  

I am hiding in the closet.

And I am eating chocolate while sitting on the very clean closet floor.  I think that I realize, for the first time, that a mud puddle to a quiet, thoughtful artist mom is a very different thing that a mud puddle to a group of loud, adventuresome, energetic kids. 

I also think the closet is really nice this time of year. 
Let me know when Spring Break is over. 

I should have been doing the laundry.

I should have been making breakfast.

God knows I should have been cleaning the floors, or scrubbing the bathroom, or wiping the 3,000 fingerprints off the windows.

But something magical happened in the forest this week.

Usually, the forest is dark, dormant and barren in winter.  Cruelly abandoned, really.  The leaves are gone, the butterflies and flowers are gone.  The songbirds bailed a long time ago.  They’re somewhere South, sipping margaritas on a sandy beach, posting colorful selfies on instagram to those of us who are jealous and cold and left behind.

Left behind, we feverishly clean our cabins and long for spring.  Because it gets claustrophobic and messy, living in a box in the snow for six months out of the year.  I miss the sunshine.  It’s dark in the box.  

But, for one glorious morning hour this week, all that darkness was transformed.  

Who knows what all was involved…humidity, temperature, the angle of the lights, the alignment of the planets…  Whatever it was, it was perfect.  Every stick, every twig and every branch in the woods was covered in ice.  Illuminated with icy, heavenly light, the forest sparkled.  It glowed.  It refracted rainbow spectrums and ignited the woods with joy. 

I left the housecleaning in a heartbeat, and coaxed Small One out the door.

This was one of those moments.  One of those experiences that stay with you forever, able to  warm your heart on the coldest of future days.

Small One and I walked through the diamond forest together. 

An hour later, the sun had weakly risen in the sky, the ice had melted, and not one glittering crystal remained on any branch.   It was back to darkness again.  Normal.  As if nothing remarkable had ever happened.

We returned home, back to the laundry pile of doom and the drudgery of cleaning…

Later that afternoon, as I burned dinner yet another time,  Small One smiled at me.

“Remember the diamonds, Mom?”  

“Yes, Small One.”

“We walked right in the middle, didn’t we?”

Yes, Small One.  

I smiled back at her, and felt the joy return.

Ok.  I’ll admit it.  I’ve got a secret agenda.  For twenty years now, I have been trying to grow a cardiologist.  I buy doctor kits, plastic stethoscopes, bandages, biology books…I promise to help with tuition.

It’s not working.  

No matter how many textbooks I buy, no matter how many educational “field trips” to the doctor we have made, I got nowhere.  I can’t tell you how many hours we have spent playing cardiologist.  When I only had daughters, I deliberately chose only female doctors and dentists, hoping the girls could see role models around them.  That didn’t work, either.  Once, on an urgent care visit, a male doctor entered the room and my daughter thought he was a fake.  In her experience, only girls were doctors.   I did try hard. 

For all my efforts, the closest I got was a child interested in the Boy Scout First Aid Manual.  Then she got mad because she couldn’t be a Boy Scout.  But that is another story.

The first Barbie my daughter had was a doctor.  I finally caved on the whole Barbie thing, because she came with a lab coat and stethoscope.  But you know what?  Within a short amount of time, she was wearing strapless ball gowns and high heels.  What a sham.

“Don’t worry, she’s still a doctor, Mom!”  my then-three-year-old assured me.  “She’s just a pretty doctor!”

My plans have failed.  

Until this week.

Somehow, after twenty years of playing doctor and performing play surgery with spoons and dolls, the tide seems to have turned.  Someone is interested.  

For the last week, this child has awoken early, donned a white sweater that is her “lab coat”, and proceeded to give shots to the whole family.  Dog included.  I have had my “blood drawn” with her yellow Crayola crayon fifteen times.  The box of Band-aids contents are dwindling, and the bathroom wastebasket is overflowing with plastic exam gloves.  Really.  She found my box of gloves for oil painting (I don’t like solvents on my hands, thank you) and I discovered she is using a new pair for every band-aid application.   A roll of toilet tissue makes a very fine cast, did you know that?  

It’s been an intense week.  

Last night, I sat melting into the couch, exhausted from the busy day.  
“Will you brush my hair like you used to, Dear?” I asked Small One. 

“No, Mom.  It’s time for a blood draw.” She responded.

I am losing.  Twenty years of efforts, and all I really want right now is a little attention.  Maybe a Mommy Makeover so I can sit on the couch in a coma and feel petted and loved.  

But she wraps my upper arm in an elastic hairband, and tells me to make a fist instead.  

“Gotta get a good one this time, Mom” she says as she feels my veins.

Gosh. 

This makes me question all I have ever stood for.  Who wants to play cardiologist, anyway?  Isn’t it more fun to have your hair done and your eyebrows waxed than to have thoracic surgery?  How did I fail to show them the importance of a good haircut or an occasional foot massage?  I failed.

Ah, well.  Perhaps this won’t last, either.  No matter how we as parents promote and groom our kids for their futures, the bottom line is that the future is theirs.

It belongs to them.  

When it comes right down to it, the choice to wear high heels or toilet tissue on their feet is theirs alone.  My job is to keep on being Mom, because that is what I chose for myself so long ago…  And to love my kids and support them no matter what they choose to become.  

I have to go now.  The doctor just called my name.

This winter, life has been a bit rough.  
We’ve had one continuous Germ Fest after another.  
After Thanksgiving, we all had the flu.  After Christmas, the infections began:  double ear infections, bronchitis, strep throat…Jolly good fun.  January was topped off by a case of Mononucleosis, like a cherry on top a very large bacterial parfait.  

I knew we had all had ENOUGH when the Mono was diagnosed. Everyone was sick of being sick.  That week, Little Guy came into the living room wearing a home made Plague Mask.  

A Plague mask!  

You know, those beak-like masks, dark robes, covered in oily wax from the dark ages?  They wore them when they came to collect people that died from the Plague.  Does Little Guy really think it’s that serious? 

“I’m not getting HER germs!”  he snorted.

How does he even know what a Plague mask is, you ask?  Oh, I don’t know.  History books lie around here in bulk… We could probably construct furniture from surplus hardcover books.  Can’t get enough history and art and literature, right?  But I digress.  Back to the Plague.

He was wearing two pairs of Spiderman boxer shorts on his head, a long, dark Obi Wan Kenobi robe from Halloween, and he was wrapped up in a scarf.  With mittens.

Way to be proactive, Little Guy.  
But isn’t he taking this a little too far?  He had his share of antibiotics.  Can I blame him for being wary?  There has been a lot of talk about the measles at Disneyland…whooping cough, chicken pox, Ebola…   How much disease talk can one little kid take? 

How does a kid decide what is fine, what is trouble, and what is DOOM?

Little kids just don’t know.  How serious is serious?  I mean, we go to the doctor a lot.  They don’t forget those shots easily.  

“Okay, Mom.  I trust you.  You say I gotta be shot up with diseases today, then I trust you.  I may scream and try to run away, but I’m still counting on you to take care of me.  …Are you kidding, Mom?  THREE shots at once?  I’m gonna run.  Will I die?  Will I still know who I am tomorrow?  Can I have a sucker AND a sticker?”

I know that’s what they’re thinking as I sign on the dotted line, saying I accept all possibilities and it’s my own fault if they die because of vaccinations.  I know it.

They don’t have much control over their lives.  So they take what they can into their own hands, and craft a nice little Plague mask for protection.  How effective is that underwear hat  going to be, Kiddo?  I had to laugh.
But after I laughed, I realized that I do the exact same thing.  No, I don’t wear boxers on my head for disease protection.  But I do ridiculous things to try to make things better.  

Safer.  

In control.

I could insert a list here:  I avoid doorknobs.  I (still!) buy antibacterial soap.  I wash my hands compulsively. I call out “drive safely!” to everyone, even adults.  Will this really make a difference?  They do know how to drive safely already.  But I still worry.  I teach them to be careful with scissors (“Blades down!”)  careful with pencils (“Oh, my goodness turn that around, you’ll poke your eye out!”).  One of my older kids prefaces requests with “I know you won’t like this because you say I’ll poke my eye out, Mom.  But can I please have a ________?”  Fill in the blank with anything that any normal American kid might have.  And mine do not.  Like real darts or real bows and arrows or bb guns or sharpened blades and axes from the middle ages…  

The truth is, I can’t control life, and I worry.  Even though I make them eat vitamins and probiotics and gluten free bread, we could still get hit by a truck tomorrow.  I can’t control life.  It happens. 

It does happen.   

Eating organic isn’t going to save us from life any more than Spiderman underwear on our head is.  We can’t save ourselves.  Vaccinations, disabilities, illness, even the Plague…  We can’t stop it.  We just have to roll with it and love those kids as much as we can.

We need to hug them and love them and tell them they are worth it.  They are worth all the sleepless nights and doctor bills and drawings on the walls and the yogurt in the carpeting and the headaches and the overtime.  And no matter what happens, whether they get a shot or need surgery or are fighting cancer someday, I am here.  I am here because I love them, and nothing can change that.  Not Autism.  Not Down Syndrome.  Not a poor report card.  Not two months of being sick.  Not even the Plague. 

I’m here because I love them.  All of them.  No matter what.
I’m a mom.

Yes, you still have to have the shot.  
You still have to eat oatmeal.
But you are loved.  So everything is gonna be okay.

Later on, after the Plague Mask Kid went back to play, the One With Mono had something to say:

“This is the life.  I hope Mono sticks around for a long time.  The doctor actually told me I have to lay around and sleep as much as I want to!  No medicine, no shots.  Just my bathrobe and the couch.  Jolly.”

Jolly indeed. 

Life is good.  So put that Plague mask away and hug someone.