Today’s my What She Said day over at Patheos, so join me there where I discuss poo and how to cope when it’s dumped on you.

Today’s another What She Said day over at Patheos, so find me there today.

Today is my What She Said day, so check out a little Christmas silliness over there.

Eight weeks ago, my bike was just a spider web holder in our crowded garage.  I bought it years ago, but had ridden it only once since then.  The seat wobbled.  The tires were flat.  My brakes bipolar.

Thanks to the efforts of a kind friend, my bike is now working gloriously and I have been slowly getting into biking shape, gradually increasing my mileage, learning that my quads can burn for two hours and, even though I want to, I won’t die.

There’s a rhythm to these rides, I’m discovering.  To get out of my neighborhood I have to climb two hills right off the bat, while my muscles are cold and still waking up.  The first five miles take me east, the early sun in my face, hill, valley, hill, valley, usually into a head wind.  It’s a rough way to start.  My legs are screaming.  My mind is fuzzy from sleep.  Although it’s early, this is Kansas, meaning it’s already hot and sticky, my stick straight hair miraculously curling around my sweaty neck.

Once I reach the five mile mark, I turn south for the bulk of the ride.  I’ve already conquered the altitude needed to get to the edge of town, now it’s about putting some miles in.  I put my head down and press into a six mile stretch.  By now my legs are warmed up, all that breathing hard is pumping rich oxygen into every cell, washing out any brain fog.  The sun is up–barely–painting tips of wheat a golden honey.  Fields are almost ready to cut;  huge green combines sit nearby.  A farmer in blue overalls and a white hat waves at me as I zip past.

I love this part of the ride.  My legs pump in a steady rhythm, my music works its way predictably through my biking play list.  I neigh at the horses, moo at the cows, covet cute farmhouses.  Sometimes I sing.   Sometimes I yell.

Most of the time, though, I just think.  There’s something about the repetitiveness of pedaling that lulls my brain into deep thought.  For an hour or two, I can’t let my ADD have any leash.  I must, must stay the course, stay in the groove, not breaking my focus by hopping over to check my Facebook or running downstairs to grab a cup of ice. Lulled by the rhythm of pedaling, my restless mind at last settles, unleashing a stream of cool and flowing thoughts.  Thinking long streams of thought isn’t something mamas get to do very often and I am rusty from eighteen years of not being able to finish even the most abbreviated line of thought/reason/argumentation.  But these rides are gradually reawakening in me the ability to think in something other than sound bytes.  To say I am more than ready for it is a wild understatement.

It’s not until the last two or three miles of the ride that I come out of this nearly hypnotic state.  Once I get back into town, the spell is broken.  I have to dodge cars in the McDonald’s parking lot, navigate my way through a few traffic lights, try to avoid riding into sprinkler paths or being hit by construction workers.

Suddenly I notice how hot it is.  I wonder if the kids are doing their school or their jobs at home.  I remember I have to go to the store because we have no peanut butter.  Dinner is unplanned, my bed unmade.  Time to get back to it.  Blogs to figure out.  Books to write.  Miles to go before I sleep, miles to go before I sleep…

Back home, I’m peppered with questions:  How far did I go?  What’s for breakfast? What should I wear today?  Will you do my hair?   Can we go to the water park?

Hello reality.

I’m glad to be home.  My legs are really glad to be home.  But as I go about today’s duties, chores (just the words sound drudgerous, don’t they?), I hope I can keep with me the peace I found today, pedaling away, wind in my hair, thinking thoughts while chewing on a Sports Bean.

Little did I know how prescient that statement would be.

Emily, my first ‘book’ is definitely going to be done July 30th.

The other book, the one with words and pages and lots of mistakes?  Not so much.

When I set the deadline, I had no idea Emily would be getting married on that date.  I just pulled a arbitrary date out of thin air, choosing the 30th instead of the 31st because I like even numbers.  I figured it gave me enough time after the end of the school year  to complete the writing, and enough time before the new school year got started to get it edited.

July 30th.  Sounded so random at the time.

In my last post, I wrote about ‘finishing.’  As you may or may not recall, I mentioned that finishing isn’t my strong suit.  I told you that this whole ‘graduating’ and ‘being done’ thing kind of snuck up on me, how I wasn’t ready for it, how it had taken me by surprise.

In this post, I will tell you:  I think I’m ready.

For the past few weeks I’ve watched as Emily has planned the wedding from top to bottom.  She found a venue.  She designed her invitations.  She sent out Facebook invites.  She found a dress on sale.  She found a photographer.  She planned her flowers.  She found an decorative arch on Craig’s List.  She bought table decor at Dollar Tree.  She bought ribbon at Hobby Lobby.  She bought a dress for her sister (the flower girl), shoes for all the girls, rented the tuxes for the boys.  She’s met with the pastor, picked up the marriage license, made sure my dad (who is officiating) brings his ordination papers. She’s moved most of her things over to Paul’s apartment.

Except for notarizing the consent form giving her permission to marry, she has not ‘needed’ me for any part of this.  It seems I’ve worked myself out of a job.

Which, I keep reminding myself, has been my goal since October, 1993.

I probably have that written on a calendar somewhere, too.  ‘Work self out of job.’

Wonder what the date on that one is.

Anyway, folks, this Saturday, at approximately 7 in the pm, I am finishing my book.  That’s right.  Like all books, it took a lot of work to get her ready for publication.  For one thing, she took YEARS to write.  I’m a slow learner, you see, and had several false starts.  Somewhere around year nine, I developed a terrible case of writer’s block.  I petered out more than once, cried on a regular basis, tore up whole PAGES and threw them in the trash.  Started over once or twice, sought the counsel of writer’s who’d gone before me…some who set me straight, some who made me crazy.  I had to learn from trial and error how to tool a sentence, had to figure out which rhythms worked and which didn’t, and had to get really good at cut and pasting.

I’ve heard writers say that, at some point in the writing process, you have to quit with the i-dotting and the t-crossing.  There has to be an end to the polishing.  Eventually you have to quit doubting your word choices and stop wondering if you should have started the book with that particular hook and slam the manuscript shut and be done with it.  You have to wrap it in brown paper and tie it with a piece of string, box it up and send it to your editor.  You have to close your eyes and open the mailbox, and shove it in.

It’s harder than it sounds.

That baby’s been attached to you at the hip for a long time.

Letting go feels a bit like the first time you walked your dog without a leash.  On a busy Friday night.  Next to the highway.

It’s an exercise in faith some might say.  Maybe it is faith.  Who knows.

What I do know is that Saturday, my book is done.  For better or for worse, she’s on her way to the editor.

It remains to be seen if the publishing house will bite or not.  These negotiations get complicated and take time.  Who knows how long it will be before I hear back from them?

Ah well, in the final analysis, it doesn’t really matter.

To me, she’ll always be a best seller.

I love their enthusiasm, their love for their children, their determination to do what is best, no matter how hard it is, for the little ones under their maternal wings.

And how I remember those days.  When I woke up at the crack, made homemade oatmeal, mowed the grass before 7.  Ha!

They were busy, busy ones filled with diapers, training the beasts to come when I said come, force feeding peas, all that bathing.

But then one day I woke up and they weren’t so babyish and it was time to train them.  Here’s how we put away the silverware.  Here’s how we hang up a towel.  Here’s how we sort the clothes.

Then there was one brief moment I thought the hard work was done.  Everyone could hit the toilet.  Everyone brushed their own teeth.  Everyone could dress him or herself.

It was a brief, but beautiful moment:)

Because the next thing I knew, I realized that all that coming to Mommy, all that potty training, all that teaching to work didn’t mean a darn thing unless it was done in love.

As my friend, Kim, would say, if it was grounded in love.

Cuz everything’s worthless unless grounded in love.

Everything.

All the training and coming to Mommy and putting away the knives sharp side away from you.

All the getting up early, the oatmeal making, the lawn mowing.

All the bed making on Saturdays and the keeping them away from honey until the age of one and the natural shampoos and all the fresh veggies and all the vacuumed edges of the room and all the books and all the Bach and all the flossing.

Worthless.

Unless grounded in love.

Clanging cymbals.

Unless grounded in love.

Sounding gongs.

Unless grounded in love.

All that training, all that drill instructoring…did I work so hard on these I missed the whole point?

Possibly.

Probably.

Ground them in love.

I hope it’s not too late.

ps.  This pic is of me and my sweet niece, Brooke, summer 2009.  She’s probably twice this size now.

The problem is with the finishing.  Songs get harder.  The workout is too painful.  The curriculum is boring.  I have so many books started I can’t focus on finishing any one of them.  I can’t think of a great nail-it-shut ending to a blog post.

So everything sits.

And sits.

For the most part, I get along fine like this.  I know perfectionism is the culprit and have learned to cope with it, meaning that I delegate or hire out the finishing part and no one is the worse for wear.

But there comes a time when one simply must finish something, something that cannot be delegated or put off.  With Emily graduating from high school, that time is here.

It seems easy enough, doesn’t it, when the baby is fresh out of the womb and you are looking ahead to eighteen long years with her, to assume it will go tick tockingly slow and that when the day of separation finally arrives, as it surely will, that day you must say goodbye to your child, you will be more than ready for it.  Maybe you have tussled with her and can’t wait until she flies the coop.

A magical thing happens when you’re a parent, and this is the thing you are warned of from the beginning by well-intentioned people, that time will go so fast…that your baby will grow up in the cliched blink of an eye.  You don’t believe it, of course, because you’re young and carry about yourself the assurance of the truly informed, and, really, maybe other people’s kids grow up fast, but you’re going to make each moment count!  You’re going to take time to stop and smell the roses!  Not just wish it away or spend it in frivolity like parents who say such things must be.

But one day you wake up and your precious baby is graduating from high school and although you should have expected this for ever so long, the suddenness of it is a blade to the heart.  You wonder why you haven’t prepared yourself for this severing…not of your love or of your friendship, for those things will never end, but of the normal, the everyday, the camaraderie, the ability to snag her for a grocery run or lunch out at your favorite girl hang.  Your workout routine has her firmly at its center and you consider how you will fill all those lonely road-pounding hours that the two of you filled with nonstop words to distract yourselves from the pain.  Even a day away from her leaves a hole in your heart because it is a reminder of how things will be when most of your days are spent apart.  And you can only guess how much your life will change without being able to call down the stairs and summon her whenever you need an Emily fix.

As with any shove out of my comfort zone, this finishing business is tough.  I can get away with knowing only one page of a piano or a violin song and no one will care (they’ll probably be thrilled, actually), but I can’t escape the emotions that surround her graduation.  My perfectionism is rearing its head big time.  Is she ‘done?’  Does she know everything she needs to know?  Can she roast a chicken?  What oh what if I’ve forgotten something?

Laugh at me, if you must, but that’s how perfectionists think.  Perched on the cusp of ‘finishing’ up my girl, the ludicrousness of it isn’t missed because, let’s be honest:  I really haven’t had that much to do with it.  At heart, she’s the same girl today as she was at ten months and at ten years, but with a little more polish.  I’ve only made sure she was fed, rested, and moderately civilized.  That’s the rub for we perfectionistic controlling types:  We think we’re holding the world in our hands and that if we relax our vigilance for a single moment, it will stop spinning on its axis.  But then you wake up and a whole childhood has gone by and all you’ve gripped so tightly, trying to manipulate and manage and redesign, keeps right on spinning without you.

Maybe, then, it isn’t about her at all.  This Tigger girl with the Rabbit mother is doing just grand.  Maybe the person who needs finishing school is me.

One of my dearest friends was dead.

Younger than me, with my brother’s birthday, with a husband who she’d loved since she was 18, with five precious children.

Dead, and I don’t even know why. Or how.

Welcome to 21st century grief, I guess.

This friend, Kim, wrote me a note on one of the hardest days of my life. I was new to a huge 4-year high school when I received a note, a simple note, torn out of a notebook, on college-lined paper. In short: I want to be your friend. God bless, Kim.

I have it, somewhere in my mementos. It was the kind of note you keep.

Kim was the opposite of me.

Affectionate where I was rarely touched, so uncomfortable with it.

I cringed when we were together because I knew she would hug me at the beginning and at the end of every visit.

Warm, where I was cold.

I didn’t do “I love you,” but she said it all the time.

Her mom embraced me like Kim’s twin. She fried us eggs and bologna and read us a devotion while we scarfed it all down before school.

Love.

The years meant nothing. We disagreed about the finer points of theology, but that never caused a rift between us. Our children fell in love with each other, much like she and I did, two decades ago. Her in-laws lived (ironically) just a couple of miles from where we landed after our lives fell apart, visits ensued, and our friendship never dulled for a moment. Eleven kids between us and still, we were two girls, hanging on for dear life, making dinner out of nothing and praying for our tomorrows.

Tonight I am stunned. At the wake she leaves behind her. Five precious children whose lives will never be the same again. A man who was her first and last love. A mother who never loved a daughter better. I’m without answers for the many who loved her. Who wouldn’t be? She was, really!, just that kind of person.

Unpretentious.

Unaffected.

True.

My eyes have not had a dry moment since 3 pm. But I don’t cry for myself, as much as I loved her.

I cry for her family, her church, her children–one who bears my name. I cry for her husband, whom she loved so much. I cry for her mother, who loved me when I was unloveable, who taught me by example how to love, who loved her only daughter infinitely more. I cry for all that should, could, have been.

I cry for the sin and misery that pollutes this world and that has hurt so many that I love so very, very dearly.

God help them.

God help all of us.

After the initial denial, I realized she was right.

Mamas are supposed to hold the standard high, aren’t we? If I do, maybe they won’t fail in life. Maybe they won’t suffer through the school of hard knocks like I did. Instill some discipline, establish healthy eating habits, set them on the straight and narrow and they’ll turn out okay.

Or so goes the thought.

But tucked somewhere in all the ‘shoulds’ and the ‘going against the grain’ and the ‘doing hard things’ needs to be something else:  A fat measure of ‘knowing their frames.’ Without that, our best intentions are tyrannical and will only produce heartless, judgmental automatons.

I think of this especially as I watch them sitting next to me in church, a huge line of children, my children, all so beautiful, all needing love, each with his or her own struggles. Maybe it’s because sitting in church is one of the only times they sit still enough to observe them. Maybe it’s because in church we’re all a bit more vulnerable, a bit more impressionable, a bit more aware of our weaknesses. It’s also a place we should be, despite all these things, more aware of the grace lavished on our parched and broken souls than any other time in the week.

The foundation has been laid. My kids know how to sweep the corners of the kitchen and how to properly put the refried beans away in the refrigerator. They try hard and they work hard. They know what is expected. But do they know grace? Do I? Sure, there are times to push and force and make the point stick. But there are also times to do a boy’s dishes for him when he’s been gone on a Boy Scout project all day. For pulling little bodies into tickle sessions when exhaustion-induced bickering breaks out. For stroking the soft cheeks of a boy while he tells me the contents of his not-even-close-to-perfect heart. Lectures can wait. Other opportunities to rebuke and remind will come.

But, for tonight…grace.