all saints and superheroes

Yesterday morning was a special All Saints Service at our church. Every year the church invites a dixieland jazz band to play, and the music is perfect - painfully, joyfully so. There were baptisms, there was a tuba, there was Lazarus emerging from the tomb, and there was a beautiful sermon about, in large part, the holiness of tears. I suppose that's a good thing, because good gracious, despite my best efforts I think I cried through the whole thing.

It was a big day for Frances, who served as an acolyte for the first time. That means she wore a red robe with one of those white angelic blousy get ups on top and carried a candle on a long pole in the procession leading into the church, during various parts of the service, and in the recession at the end - not far from the jazz musicians walking us all out to the raucous strains of "When the Saints Go Marching In."

She looked so small and solemn in that red robe! She was a good foot shorter than any other children participating in the service that day, and even though most of the time - she is my first, after all - she strikes me as impossibly old, long, lanky, and sophisticated, while we were in church I was reminded (thank you!) that she is just seven. She's a little girl.

Saturday was hard. I brought Frances to a superhero-themed birthday party for one of Gabriel's classmates and though I offered to take her elsewhere with me for awhile, she couldn't resist the balloons and cupcakes and opted to stay. But that is a hard spot to be in--bigger sister in a room full of wild and wooly smaller boys--so she eventually felt left out and pouty. And I was short-tempered with her persistent negativity, and then, and then...the day seemed to unravel from there. We arrived late everywhere, there was way too much backseat bickering, my messy, chaotic house resisted all efforts to tame it...basically, push back everywhere I turned, from animate and inanimate objects alike. And so late in the day, when a shelf of books in Gabriel's room dislodged after I bumped it with the vacuum and all the books went sliding to the floor, I sat down and cried.

It was fatigue, frustration, the stuff of everyday life weighing a little too heavily, but mostly it was my inability to get through to Frances, to circumvent all the junk cluttered between us. It was the grief I feel after the initial smokescreen of anger has worn away and I am left empty-handed, bewildered and sad.

Reading together at bedtime helped (it always does) and I do believe she felt good about herself after carrying that candle without setting anything on fire the next morning. After church she and her brother donned their fabulous party favors and played in the backyard, Gabriel deep in a fantasy superhero world and Frances somewhere else entirely, humming and talking quietly to herself on the swings while her cape fluttered behind her.

Tonight she was put on the spot in a group of people, and when I tried to quietly help her out after a short moment of awkward silence, she looked up at me with flaming red cheeks. Angry tears instantly formed and filled her eyes, and I knew I had made a mistake. I felt desperate to do something, to distract and somehow save her from those hot tears that would only make things worse if they managed to overflow. After she had a chance to settle herself I apologized for trying to help when I knew she could speak for herself just fine. She listened, then told me I had embarrassed her terribly, and that she was mad. Later still she ran up to me and silently hugged me around the waist (or where my waist used to be) as hard as she could. I stroked her hair for awhile, then she ran off.

Push, pull! Much later, she patiently explained to me that even though I think of her as an outgoing, talkative person, sometimes she is actually really shy. And that when a person is three or four or five years old, they can be more extroverted without feeling embarrassed, but now that she is older she feels embarrassed all the time.

Why?

Because now I know how you're supposed to act. I know when I do things the wrong way.

Oh, my thoughtful girl. When I see her twisted up inside herself it is hard to step back and let her find her own way. I think of Jesus calling to Lazarus in the cave: Come out! Lazarus had to do the work and get up and walk, but it was in response to a loving voice. How might we be a pathway for that voice that beckons to Frances, calling her forth when she is scared and uncertain, keeping her inner superhero hiding in the shadows for fear of doing things the wrong way? How to give her the courage to be her own extraordinary, idiosyncratic, perfectly lovable self?

To put it more plainly, how to endure the pain of loving our children so very much? How to find the strength to stay close and stand apart?