Merry Christmas from Me to You!

I cannot possibly reach each one of you with a Christmas card (an American tradition), but I will happily share with you my greatest joy and the thing I am most proud of; my family.  Here is a small peek into our lives and our year in the form of pictures.

Merry Christmas and Happiest of New Years!!

Sincerely,

Vonda

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdYLG2-4ooc&feature=share

The Tear Jar

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I find myself tonight in the median of two unrelated, cataclysmic events.  The sort that grabs your face, stares you in the eyes, and forces you to think differently than you had before. 

The first happened a week ago Tuesday.

I have a nephew.  He is that rare sort of man that is born with integrity, a strong sense of duty, and an inner core of courage.  He is the stuff of heroes.  This sounds like the crowing of a proud auntie.  I am not embellishing here.  Adam is one of the nicest kids I have ever had the privilege to know.  He is all I say he is and then some.  If you meet him someday you will be the better for it.

Adam followed in his grandfather’s steps and enlisted with the National Guard shortly before his high school graduation last May.  Five days after graduation, he was activated and in August was on a plane headed to Afghanistan to detonate explosives. 

I was honored to attend his send-off.  The civic center was filled with family members trying to be brave and succeeding mostly, with a few failing miserably.  The governor milled about the expansive room before the ceremony began, shaking hands and expressing his gratitude. 

A great sense of patriotism filled my chest as I felt the genuine gratitude for the service of these men and women who, like Adam, were heading into the unknown.  There were last minute hugs and promises for prayers and then we were separated.  Eleven men rounded out Adam’s squad and joined him in a hostile land on a dangerous mission.  Three of them came home this week.  One badly burned, but alive, and two who paid the ultimate price.  Sergeant 1st Class Darren Linde, a father of four, and Specialist Tyler Orgaard.  The younger soldier, Tyler, was Adam’s bunk mate. 

The details of that terrible day are not germane here.  The end result is the same with or without them.  Some died and some were spared.  Those alive are trying to grieve and keep moving forward.  But it is so very difficult.  I have spoken with Adam’s mother, my sister-in-law, a couple of times since then.  She and I try to make sense of it.  It is impossible.  I am sure so much the harder for those who are there still trying to carry out their orders and wrap their brains around the fact that of eleven men, three are no longer with them.

The second event happened Friday.  You already know what I am about to share.  Twenty precious children were gunned down in their classrooms.  Twenty babies rushed out the door first thing that morning – just like all the other mornings of their short academic careers -- and got onto buses or into cars with one mitten missing and no time to brush their teeth or eat a decent breakfast.  Snarled hair and half-zipped Dora backpacks left in a rush of flurried lateness… an ordinary morning that would end with all of heaven and earth weeping. 

The second grade teacher in my school stepped into my room moments after my students left for music in the afternoon.  She delivered the news that I had been insulated from all day.  I get no Facebook at school, no cell service, and no time to surf the web.  My fellow Americans had been grieving all day and I had no idea.  Her words left me chilled and shocked.  I was imagining the scenario from two vantage points; as a mother and as a teacher. 

My very skin reacted to the news.  Reeling and sickened I finished the day.  My semi-annual evaluation with the elementary principal was scheduled while my students were in music.  I sat down in his office in shock, my mind in disarray as I tried vainly to focus on his words.  I had to ask him several times to repeat himself.  Suddenly things like a good evaluation seemed pathetically unimportant.  My mind was in Connecticut, picturing babies in their last moments of life.  I could not comprehend any of it. I could not seem to stop myself from imagining the sheer terror that their last moments of life held for them.

Adam’s mother called me that night.  She knew it had to have been a hard day for me.  She also wanted to share details of the two very difficult funerals she had attended for the men in Adam’s squad.  We talked of school babies and the empty arms of mothers and fathers.  Our voices were choked and our emotions raw.  Her own arms ache for the son that is serving his country in a barren land far away, who is trying to process his own grief, who carries ninety pounds of gear on his back, and who vainly tries to sleep on the cold ground with no blanket for warmth.  She will not get to wrap him in her arms for several months yet.  That day will come for her.  I fully believe that and cling to that hope.  It will not for twenty sets of parents from Sandy Hook Elementary.

I saw an image on Facebook after that conversation.  It haunts me yet.  The parents of Specialist Orgaard are seated in folding chairs at the graveside.  They are bundled against the cold, but the frozen prairie surrounding them is desolate and snow covered.  In the photo, their shoulders are stooped and their heads bowed as they reach out to receive the folded flag offered them that had moments before covered the casket of their twenty-year-old son.  It is a stark image of parents who will never hold their son again; the flag an unacceptable substitute for living, breathing flesh and blood.

As that image worked its way into my heart and soul, I lost my composure.  The tears that I had held in check all afternoon and evening now refused to stay bottled up any longer.  The grief of a parent must surely be the most painful of all emotional suffering.  My children all live.  They are home now for the holidays.  Their bedrooms are filled again with grown up bodies and luggage and I am filled with gratitude that we are all together.  I am unable to identify with the loss of a child.  But the waves of torment and grief that surely washed over those parents on Friday as day turned to night and the world prepared for sleep, had to have felt like a torturous nightmare from which there is no awakening.  Empty beds and empty arms.  The missing mitten now found and held against faces and sobbed into with cries from places so deep that even sound hides.  The primal scream of a parent whose child has been ripped from their protective arms.

I hope they had people around them to hold them and scream with them.

The question from mankind now directed toward its Creator is one word in length… “Why?!    God, how could you let this happen?  Where WERE you?  Why innocent life?  Are you really that far removed from your creation?” 

A DJ on my favorite Christian radio station helped put this into perspective for me as I drove home from school on Friday in a fog of mental exhaustion and sadness.  He reminded me of a scripture I had completely forgotten. It is poignant and deeply moving.  The Psalmist David wrote this in his book, “You have collected all my tears in your bottle.  You have recorded each one in your book.” Psalms 56:8, (NLT).  Did you know that God is so broken by our heartache that he actually keeps record of every tear of sorrow that falls from our eyes?  I am staggered by that kind of empathetic love. 

Where was God, you ask? 

God was crying with us, from places so deep that even sound hides.  It is the devastating side effect of sin entering God’s perfect world.  Illness, both of the body and mind, were never a part of God’s original blueprint. 

Someday He will set everything right.  Until then…

We hold our babies just a little bit closer and bless the days that are mundane and riddled with frustration and we cannot find both mittens.   

Above all, we remember that Christmas is coming!  I do not mean merely the date of December 25^th.  I refer instead to the event that triggered a world celebration.  No other person born has the entire world celebrating in unison. 

Christmas is really a story of the Birth of Hope.  God became a helpless baby and grew up to defeat Evil and Death through his death and resurrection. 

So do not despair. 

Cry, yes.  Mourn and weep and ask the hard questions.  Be angry if you must.  God is not intimidated by our pain.  But allow the light of Hope, dim now but still flickering, to warm and strengthen you.

God’s Jar of Tears is much fuller than it was before Friday. 

I think a few of his are in there too...

Of Muddy Footprints and Letting Go

It is messy business, this teaching path.  Mothers ought not become teachers.  Really they shouldn’t.  The two worlds are destined to collide and create Black Holes now and then.  I suffer from Mother Syndrome. It is quite painful, and I am told there is no cure.  I am doomed.

He came to me several weeks into the school year, a foster child with big eyes and a bruised heart.  The first week or so he tried so hard to be the defiant toughie.  Always angling for the laugh from classmates, always trying just a little too hard to fit in. 

I waited.

…Waited for his need to feel my love and acceptance outweigh his need to not stand out glaringly as the new kid.  It took about three weeks.  His little heart was so tired of feeling emotional pain and loneliness, and eventually… slowly and ever so gradually… he needed the assurances of his teacher to help ease his grief. 

I was ready.

The little homemade, construction paper cards began to show up on my desk at odd moments.  Eventually he began to walk over, hesitantly at first, to tell some inconsequential little first grade bit of trivia just so he could have my attention for a brief moment.  Then it became a frequent ritual.  He was basking in the unconditional acceptance of a female mother figure; a poor substitute at best, but enough salve to help heal his trampled soul.

Those big eyes would bore into my being.  So serious his little face was at all times.

I was shoving corrected papers into cubbies twenty minutes before the morning bell when the second grade teacher, a darling little dark-headed thing, walked over with coffee cup in hand.  “Did you hear?” she asked without preamble.  I have perfected the deer-in-the-headlights over my fifty years.  It came unbidden now.  “Hear what?”  I asked without stopping my chore.  “This is your student’s last day.”  My hands dropped to my side.  “Whaaaaaat??!”  I am so eloquent at times.  “Yeah, I just heard.  He and his brother are going to a new foster home tomorrow.  Today is their last day.” 

My stomach dropped to my toes like a bad carnival ride.  Ok, foster kids change foster homes for a variety of reasons.  I get that.  But I would have made today special somehow had I known.  I would have planned.  I would have tried to bring some sort of pathetic closure to his short stay at our school and my classroom. 

I wanted to drop my head and shed a few tears, but bus kids were waddling in in their winter gear like the Michelin Man and the clock was steaming towards the twenty after mark.  I didn’t have the luxury of self-pity or reflection. 

Stay professional, Mrs. Dahl.

Miss Cutie Patootie was still standing in front of me and she or I, I do not remember which, suggested we try to throw some sort of party together for the end of the day.  Next thing I know, I am literally running up the stairs and down the hall, dodging high school boys the size of small refrigerators, on my way to the cafeteria and our sweet cook.  I screeched to a halt in front of her, nearly running into the school maintenance man, and breathlessly told her of my dilemma.  Did she possibly have anything on hand, anything at all, we could use for a small going-away bash for our youngster?  She never hesitated.  In the blink of an eye, she invited me into the storage room and loaded me down with candy bars and bags of chips (what would Michelle Obama think of THAT?) and asked what else we might need.  This is why I love teaching in a small school.  We are family.

I spent the day trying to be reassuring without creating unnecessary drama.  I asked him now and then, how he was doing, and if he was excited?  Nervous?  He was incredibly stoic but I caught him willing himself to not cry a time or two.  It was nearly imperceptible, but I am a mother.  I know the signs.

I gave him warm hugs whenever he came near me and he brought me homemade, construction paper cards.  He appeared to be doing incredibly well.  He kept asking me if he should clean out his tub of belongings and get ready to go.  I said no.  Better to wait for the end of the day.

It was a difficult day for me.  I cannot bear to see children suffer.  In spite of his stoicism, he was suffering.  Change is hard for anyone; especially so when you are only in the first grade and have very few years of living under your belt.

Finally I had just one hour left with him and I told him he could get his things together and prepare to leave.  I watched him pull things out of his tub and carefully look them over, one by one.  I think in some odd way, that small plastic tub had been a symbol of permanence to him.  As long as his things were gathered alongside the markers and extra pencils of his classmates, he felt he had a place to call his own.  He was one of us and he could prove it.  Just look, he had a spot on the shelf like everyone else.

As he tossed markers and crayons into a plastic bag, he kept finding little scraps of paper that he had started to draw on or had never bothered to take home.  One by one he brought these over to me.  “I think you should have this,” he would say and would hold it out to me with that stone face and those big brown eyes.  “I would be honored to keep it,” I said each time.

We had his party after PE and sang, “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.”  The children were enthralled with their treats and thought our boy was a superstar for the act of leaving that had caused such a grand celebration.

Five minutes before the bell rang and his things were packed and sitting by the door.  His coat was on. He was ready.  His face never crumbled, even though my heart was in splinters on the floor of my soul.  I wanted to say so much.  Somehow I knew I would never see this precious child again on the face of this Earth.  Barring death, this is goodbye in its most cruel finality. 

It was now time to let him go, both literally and figuratively.  I pulled him into my embrace, but his little body did not melt into my arms.  He was stiff and unemotional.  I whispered goodbye into his black hair and assured him that I would never forget him.  I had given him my picture.  I hoped he would not forget me either. 

No tears and no drama, but I noticed that as he reached into his cubby one last time to check for any forgotten papers, his hand trembled.  Then he walked out the door for the last time, and never once looked back.

It is nasty business, this caring too much.  I do not know how to tamp it down or feel less than I do.  This precious, priceless child walked into the garden of my heart, his bare feet making footprints in the soft, loose soil.  For the briefest of moments, we shared a sunny day and heard birds singing and watched butterflies alight on the flowers that bloom there. 

And then he left.  Not by choice, but by mandate and I watched with helpless sorrow as his retreating muddy footprints grew distant on my horizon.

He was not the first to go and he will not be the last.  Did he take a bit of my sunny garden with him to remember me by?  I cannot know. 

I visited a friend recently in Georgia and minutes before I had to leave for the airport, she dug up a bit of rosemary from her garden and wrapped it in a wet paper towel and shoved it into a plastic bag for me.  That fragrant, delicious herb sits in an indigo pot on my windowsill.  I snip a bit of it here and there to add to my cooking.  I love that plant and I love the story that goes with it.  It is a part of a precious person and a sweet reminder of her sunny generosity.

I hope and pray that wherever my boy’s path takes him in this rough and tumble world, he will take a transplanted bit of Mrs. Dahl’s garden with him.

Be safe, Dear One.  Be happy.  And above all, let Sunshine fill your life and your own garden.  Do not let bitterness and self-pity cast shadows on your path.  Rise above and be all you are destined to be.  I am rooting from afar.

And the footprints left behind? 

I will rake around them for they will always be a sweet reminder of you…