Story - Ashleigh Baker

on nurturing

One would think, I told myself, choosing nurture as one’s word for the year would necessitate a kind of gentle life, a quiet realm, a soft and soothing environment in which to nurture whatever it is one wishes to nurture.

Last year my word was release.

It wasn’t a word I chose, but rather, a word which found me late in January, several weeks after I’d given up with possible words and had p’shawed the idea of choosing a “word of the year” as faddish and unnecessary.

But a friend, beloved, spoke release over me and, unbidden, it followed me all year, showing up in every major event of 2012. Release of ideals, of expectations, of old bitternesses, hangups and grudges. It called for the heartrending release of unhealthy relationships and even release in the form of long-suspected-but-finally-diagnosed-and-treated health issues.

Twenty-thirteen.

This year, I remained ambivalent to the idea of a word. If I was supposed to have a word for the year, it would happen. If not, I wouldn’t fret.

But a few days after Christmas, everything I’d felt swirling in my breast on the cusp of 2013 settled into one thought and, eyes flashing, I turned to John and exclaimed, “Nurture! My word!”

He nodded, yes, yes. That does seem to fit, doesn’t it?

Yesterday I made plans to spend the day in my favorite coffee shop, at my favorite laminate table in the far back corner, sipping my favorite extra large latte while turning phrases and weaving words on my little white laptop. Other than a few quick tidbits to do for work (did I tell you I started a new job last fall?) I anticipated seven whole glorious hours without any responsibilities.

As life goes, the “hour or so” of work turned into six hours of work-related busyness and the sun was down and the baristas were washing out the coffee pots for the night before I had typed one quality sentence.

So I wrote for the final quarter hour of coffee shop time. Then I drove across the highway to an open bookstore and pounded the keys for another sixty minutes. Then I rolled the twenty miles home, said some lofty words to my husband and brother about the process of combining art and work and play, and then went to sleep at midnight fantasizing about a pre-dawn wake up for quiet thought-gathering and a bit of stolen writing time. The baby woke an hour later for a three-hour party and I stayed in bed until seven o’clock, time to get the big boys ready for school, to plan supper, to prepare for today’s conference call.

sleepy boys, working mama

I joked to a friend a few days ago that I should change my word from nurture to survive, because 2013 is already shaping up to hold more than its fair share of crazy. How could I nurture anything – writing, my children, my marriage, relationships, my husband’s aspirations, my own dreams or our family goals – if I’m living on adrenaline and I crash by 10pm each night?

Isn’t that the point? she asked. Doesn’t nurture mean it’ll take some extra effort?

2013 is my year to cultivate those hidden plans and dreams, to grow the way I love my dear ones and cheer for them in their own pursuits, to work toward our big family goals.

Nurture doesn’t equate fulfillment; it speaks of plugging along, stealing moments here and there, viewing life through the lens of priorities and aspirations. It’s a yearning and focused passion through of the hum of full and hectic family life, in all of its imperfect, blissfully busy glory.

So here’s to cultivating and not simply surviving. Nurturing… even still.

January 23, 2013 12 Comments Filed Under: Create, Mothering, Story

rising up, calling them blessed

Arianne, Ash and Sarah - Lake House 2012

Spiritual mothers, my friend Sarah Bessey wrote, are a congregation of saints, the holy midwives witnessing and caring through the work of God birthed in a life.

I read her words and nod, because, yes, I know these women, the ones in my own life.

There I sit, on the edge of a blue striped sofa, still small in body and spirit, listening to my mother and her friends, my aunt, these women with children all around, at the breast, clamoring over each other. They’re speaking of raising the little ones, of course, striving hard for what is good, searching and seeking and sacrificing everything they can for us. They’re reading voraciously, passing books between hands, opening Bibles often, disagreeing through their smiles and hungering for commonality. Ever present, always listening, the oldest child in the entire bunch, I soak it in. My soul is a sponge, drowning in the earnestness of these women and their thirst for the best parts of God.

There I stand, now fully grown, waist deep in the warm September ocean, a coast away from my home. I’m covered by an oversized navy t-shirt but it clings to my body as I push the water away with my hands, moving deeper, deeper. Someone begins to pray and then everyone is praying at once and I’m leaning back into the water, hearing the words, “I baptize you in the name…” and I break the surface again and the water trails my shoulders as I breathe free and new. A moment, a stepping stone, an altar there on the beach. We women, we sit in the shallows and the sand until the sun sets, talking deep and reveling in the Jesus of it all.

There I am, in a cramped booth with an infant beside me, third child sleeping soundly in the middle of the afternoon. My most beloved friend, the one who knows my dark secrets and my most sacrilegious thoughts, the one who digs for the truth everyone else is afraid to unearth, she sits across the table and we both analyze the messy heart I’ve spread between us. We laugh too loud and I cry too much, but she doesn’t give up, she isn’t afraid of the mess. She isn’t afraid of the mess. We sit there for four hours, in that burger place, drinking Coke when we had planned to get fancy tea and peruse the shops, and she convinces me to give God and people and church and life a second chance.

There I sit, legs crossed on the floor, sitting at her feet. We’re there in a circle, the whole lot of us, and we’ve spent the weekend trading hearts. We cradle each other, we do, with the way we love hard. Their questions wrap themselves into my gut, asking about the breach of trust I claim between me and my God, the way it has all come about, the way life twisted and the fact that my well of words has run dry. They pull out the diseased truths and pour healing on the broken. We have talked and they have affirmed and I’m realizing deep within that suddenly I’m whole and I think I’m hearing God whisper. Then she opens scripture and stretches her hand to my head and speaks great truth directly from the page, her voice powerful, pouring strong words over me, another baptism there on the carpet covered floor of a lake house. The room is a holy hush and my eyes spill over and I can breathe and I am healed. I am healed.

My spiritual mothers, my midwives are these, the women who have waited with me through the groaning years of labor pain, so close they feel it themselves. They’ve been here, waiting and watching and believing for me when I couldn’t believe for myself. They are the ones who have wiped my brow, who have held me up when I couldn’t stand. They have themselves aided in this birth of my soul.

I rise up here and call them blessed, these strong and valiant women. They are a holy generation.

I rise up and I call them blessed.

November 8, 2012 21 Comments Filed Under: My Jesus, Story

when she burned all of her money

My grandmother’s bedroom smelled of Chanel No. 5 and peach lotion.

I slept there when we visited, curled on my side and tucked under her quilt. She saw the world in flowery hues of mauve and burgundy and hints of green, and the traffic light outside her window highlighted their presence in this, her personal space.

Everyone lived at Grandma’s house. Well, not everyone, and certainly not always, but her children were attached to her (wasn’t everybody?) with her chuckle and her caramel eyes and the way she seemed to live with a magical secret tucked near her heart. She pressed her lips tight when she was angry.

So we lived in her house when I was an infant, and again when I was three, and my cousins and aunt lived with her off and on throughout their entire lives. My uncle and his family lived close and saw her at church and I was always jealous, because when I was four we moved two hideous hours away from that house in Cypress and two hours might as well be two days when you’re four years old.

Even with those two hours, we were there often. My daddy had firefighter’s training quite frequently, so we’d load up boxes of schoolwork and stay for a week. Grandma woke early, dabbing makeup on porcelain skin by the din of a light-up mirror, and went to work at the school district. She came home in the evenings to make creamy stroganoff or fried pork chops and she served them with boiled corn.

The adults told the story in hushed tones when Grandma wasn’t around, of that time she burned her money. I wasn’t there, I was years and years from being born, but they say she had been saving it for ages. Cash for school or for starting over – the details are fuzzy now – but it was years upon years of stored-up hope.

We asked her once, when she was in the hospital those last few months, when was it she knew her marriage was doomed? She said it was the morning after their wedding night when he told her to get up and get his breakfast made – he wanted a feast – and she looked at him and thought, What have I done?

They had both only just graduated high school and it was 1953, so she did it.

Grandpa was never true to her.

She raised her three children and worked long hours in the school district and began an adult education department and won awards throughout the state.

But there was that day her teenager had drugs in the house and what was the point of it all?

So she yelled and she raged and her eyes became flowing rivers as she stuffed handful after handful of green printed paper into the kitchen sink and set a match to all of it.

Disappointed dreams in licks of orange and blue.

One night I sat in the car with Grandma, that winter before she died, waiting while my mother grabbed a gallon of milk and a dozen eggs. I asked her about her favorite color.

“Oh, pink, green? I like all shades of pink,” she said. “But you know what color I hate? I hate burnt orange. There isn’t any color in the world worse than burnt orange, like the color of those dull street lights over there, or of a fire about to go out.”

I slept in Grandma’s bed when we visited. When it was time for me to go to sleep, she walked up the stairs with me and said she was tired too. She washed her face, climbed into her high bed and pulled up the sheet, arms folded carefully over the top of it. She slept in embroidered nightgowns.

I curled myself under the quilt and snuggled in close as she stared at the ceiling and I stared at her. The green glow of the traffic light rested on her face and she began to sing.

Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do and Bill Grogan’s goat who was doomed to die. That old bum William Fitzpatrick Fitzgibbons McKoy from old Broadway and Annie the toothpick girl who slipped down the bath drain.

And Grandma grinned in the darkness and kissed my hand and sang me to sleep.

August 28, 2012 14 Comments Filed Under: 300 words, Story

overheard conversations about God

Wednesday nights I go to the coffee shop to listen to people talk.

I say I’m going to write, when I leave those three boys with their daddy, but I step in the door and am lulled by the scent of burnt beans and the hum of conversation. I pay three dollars for a cup of sweet coffee, open my computer, reply to a few emails, tap notes to friends, bite my fingernail and stare at the screen.

And I listen to people talk.

***

Three tables down that man, a boy really, is tapping his heel against the floor, flipping a capless pen against the edge of his seat. His eye, staring, trained on the door until a man walks through it and bee-lines the tiny two top.

Bald, this new arrival, blue striped polo and jeans, brown suede loafers. Notebooks and a laptop screen open, they’re discussing a church offering campaign. The older one exudes leadership, the boy clever ideas and tech know-how. They plan. I catch tidbits of two humorous videos and a few catch phrases and a couple Bible verses written on paper.

“The problem is people need to be gently led to open their wallets,” the pastor sighs.

The kid grins. “But they give more if they think it’s funny.”

A girl is breezing in, now, tall and lithe, straight brown hair tied up in a bandana. She hunches her shoulders and leans expectantly toward the pepper-haired man across the table. “Mr. Bradford,” she calls him and he has kind eyes. Philosophy spins from their lips, wisdom and youth, winding ideas about our country and politics, the way people live in Russia, the way they live in Africa.

She moves quickly, clasping her hands and hugging them to her chest. Leaning forward again and she asks him, “But… but what about God? Does he… or she… have anything to do with it? The world, I mean?”

He sits back and nods slowly. “I do think God is running things here, spinning this world on his finger like a basketball, watching the way we live and giving us pointers on how to do it.”

“I think maybe I do, too,” she breathes, tilts her head. “But I don’t really know.”

***

I write a paragraph and then delete the whole thing. I chew the nail on my tiny finger, chin on my wrist. Shift on my corner bench and prop my feet on the chair opposite me.

A group of three sets their stack of books on the table beside me. A ringed notebook, a bound Bible with gold-edged pages, and a red-covered book I recognize as Francis Chan’s Crazy Love.

The dark haired girl sits tall. “So, for Elevate? Should we keep doing our fellowship night at Joe and Kate’s, and what do y’all think of that new Bible study?”

The boy blows air between his lips. “I think Elevate is a good ministry, but it’s getting a little stale, you know? I mean, the new study should be riveting, and this, just… isn’t.”

Another girl, one with curls, shakes her head a bit. “I don’t think that’s the point. Isn’t God’s Word enough anymore? Why do we need gimmicks? We’re Christians, you guys, and we should just want to read the Bible together.”

“Whul… I guess that’s true.” The boys shrugs, standing. “But sometimes being a Christian is just a little boring. Maybe we should do something cool, like visit a prison. Hey, I’m going to get some coffee.”

The girls turn to each quickly as he leaves and the first one’s eyes get wide. “So, you and Jack? You think he wants to marry you? Have you slept together yet?”

The other one blushes hard and laughs.

***

The coffee house closes at 10:00, so I pick up my laptop and move to the wooden chairs outside, where it’s warmer and louder with the hipsters packed around tables, flicking cigarettes. But the two men at the next table don’t have sideburns or skinny jeans, and I can taste their cigarette smoke as I open my notebook and search for an idea among the jotted words.

The one with a Marine haircut takes a drag. “You know Christy? That girl from AA? She keeps telling me I just need to get to church or some sh*t like that.”

His friend laughs too loudly and slaps his thigh. “Church? What the hell is that supposed to mean? These stupid *ss Christian people think they can just take a guy to church and he’ll fix right up.”

“But you know, man,” the Marine shakes his head. “Sometimes I think she’s right. I mean, after I got arrested last year, I prayed and I think someone was listening. I don’t know, man.”

“Naw, dude. Don’t tell me you actually believe that sh*t.”

***

The college kids are getting louder and the bar across the street rowdier.

I pack my laptop and my spiral notebook.

It always comes back to this, doesn’t it?

August 16, 2012 15 Comments Filed Under: 300 words, My Jesus, Story

blackbird fly

After lunches of peanut butter and strawberry jam, I take the little one to his bed. He’s already four, and yet, without that hour of rest he falls asleep on couches or in cars or flat on a rug, surrounded by tiny race cars. The quiet of a darkened room staves off the over-exhaustion and meltdown of later.

Today we are all home. Coughs and runny noses abound. We drizzle elderberry into oats and drink it by the spoonful and manage to stay ahead of most traveling germs, but sometimes they catch us anyway and we resort to Rebecca’s herbal vapor rub. I dropped a meatloaf into our old black crockpot and we’re going tonight to gather an old table for my craft room. It is big enough for cutting sheets of fabric and making a perfectly royal mess.

Have you ever stepped off a merry-go-round because you felt sick and then watched it spin for a while? It is thrilling, the whirl, but sometimes your equilibrium must settle for a moment before you grab a bar and swing yourself back into the fun. I’m watching it spin for just a while, standing in my small and quiet space, here.

My boy brings me his children’s Bible, a tattered relic now, the one his grandma read to his daddy. And instead of sighing, due to the book and the need, I say yes. Then he asks to hear Blackbird on the record player and says he wants a sip of my coffee.

We watched home videos all weekend and I only cried twice.

***

Also, there’s this:

***

In this time of breathing life, I write more words at Deeper Story than I do here. I said some things about God, again, last week, on the question of God’s gender.

Will you be at BlissDom next month? I’ll be there, hanging with the lifestyle bloggers as a Community Leader and hugging people. Come find me if you’re there – I want to see you! I’ll be the one taking my ginormous baby bump out onto the dance floor.