What You Can't Not Write

Foreword
I’m about to tell you something that I’ve only said out loud one other time. It’s very deeply personal, maybe more than I should share with anybody, really, but especially with people who may not even know me. Also, though, I’ve not shared this because (I believe) my greatest fear in life is that I will cause harm or hurt for another person ~ and sharing this could hurt some folks on a very deeply personal level. Holding it, though, is also causing pain and if I’m really weighing it out . . . (I believe) sharing this will do more good than harm.

I.

I’ve never really understood children. Even when I was one of them, I didn’t exactly know how to be one. I was never the girl who daydreamed about a future life filled with children of my own. My sister was the one who had the names for her seven lovely (eventual) children by the time she was 11 or 12 years old ~ which I did not understand. As it turned out, my sister was only able to have one little girl ~ and my experience has been not at all what I planned or expected.

(I believe) it goes without saying that a person who doesn’t understand or necessarily plan to spend time with children may have a very difficult time playing with them.

"If I've had any nameable ambition, it's been to not hang out with kids. 

It's really not that I don't love them.  The Lord knows that I do love them ~ particularly my own.  I just don't understand them.  Don't know how to play with them, for sure." Ambition, 2015

II.

(Eventually) I had six grandbabies, all quite lovely surprises, but still, I had not planned for them. To say I was intimidated by the prospect of playing with them would be an understatement. Once, I tried to duplicate a game with one of them that I’d seen the parents playing ~ and I accidentally bit the kid. Hard enough that we both cried. It would have been a great excuse to quit trying so hard, but instead, with some minor adjustments, I learned how to play in a way that worked for both kid and me. Mostly, it was just about spending time together marveling at the world around us. Eventually, I was at a certain kind of ease when I was with my g’babes.

In other words, I gave up my ideal, overcame my extreme reluctance to hang with children.

My Little Box of Cupcakes

III.

And then we lost one of them. 
It was as if someone took a corner of the universe and ripped it from heart to hilt.
It’s a pain that’s deep and lasting and spirit-changing.
Because I either don’t want to or can’t say any more about that,

"I lost a nearly four-year-old grandson this year in a tragic accident.

God bless his momma and his daddy and his cousins and all his other grandmas and grandpas, all his other family, all those who knew him and know the void he's left behind." Antithesis, 2017

Suffice it to say that I retreated entirely ~ from most everyone I loved, but especially from my grandbabies. It was neither intentional nor obvious (to me) until years had passed. I did not fully realize I'd done it before I could look back with some measure of clarity on the years I'd left barren of any real and lasting memory.

IV.
Imagine now that this is a paragraph all about the comeback. It's not complete. It's not graceful. It's not without fear and trepidation. But it's here. It's come this far.

I have come this far.

V.

Recently, I answered a plea (or a conviction) to assist with the little kids at church on Sunday mornings. I'm starting as a floater and only once per month. Baby steps. On my first day, I began in a room full of nearly-four-year-olds, and specifically with a little girl who was having trouble separating from her dad. It took a minute (for me) but I finally sat on the floor and took his place in playtime. Next, we went to the tiny table to glue eyes, etc., to a paper face.

It was odd the way that she kept looking at me, and especially the way she noticed my hair. [I'd left in a hurry (slight dread) with wet hair and it was expanding as it dried.] "Your hair is crazy!" she said, and later I remembered a story I've told about my mom's second cousin who visited us once when I was six or seven years old. She was a hitchhiking hippie, and had a little bag full of tiny treasures she'd collected along the road, and she let my sister and me each pick something to keep. I remember all of that pretty keenly, but the height of that memory is of her hair. We were sitting together on the floor, and she was asking questions about our daily lives and seemed genuinely interested in our answers ~ and she had this wild, unruly hair that framed her face and from which I will always swear a light was shining. In that moment, she was the most like a real, live angel that I've ever met.

Back to baby girl ~ within minutes of her exclamation, I was called to assist in another class (of actual-four-year-olds.) I told her that I'd thoroughly enjoyed our time together and regretted having to leave and that I hoped I'd see her again.

"Are you dying?" she asked.

Three times I asked her to repeat because I could see no context for her question and I was sure I wasn't hearing her correctly until she said, "When you die, you go to Jesus."

Conclusion

This isn't the ending I thought it would be. In fact, it's only as I was writing that last part out that it fully dawned on me: this isn't about me. This is about what and who we are to the children we encounter.

The real conclusion is yours to write.