So I Won't Forget...May 2024
3 things I want to remember from the past month
It’s quiet at my house and I just set up my office to work and write. There’s a diffuser going, I rearranged some books, and I made myself a cup of tea before sitting down. Basically this morning is my oyster.
For the entirety of my life, I’ve been someone who must tidy things up to be productive. A blessing and curse depending on the situation. Even as a teenager I really wasn’t that messy. I liked my room clean before I did homework. I was constantly nagging my sister about the condition of our shared bathroom. For a while my aunt would pay me to clean her house…and I thought it was fun. Hindsight into my personality shining through right now.
May is a hard month for self-professed “tidiers” to feel good about what they produce, but as its nearing the end and I’m reflecting on what to remember, I’ll start with the most obvious: I simply did too much this month and I didn’t even realize it until I washed up on the shore of the end of the school year and found myself dehydrated and cranky—trying to drag all our crap back to the car covered in sand with sweaty kids asking what we’re doing next. This is a metaphor, of course, we didn’t actually go to the beach, but I think any parent whose either taken kids to the ocean or survived the month of May knows what I mean.
I spent last week detoxing from it all—somewhat unintentionally at first. I had talked up the rhythm of an afternoon quiet time to the kids and insisted that we’d be doing it. Two out of my three love quiet time, the other is built more like me which translates to her being almost unable to relax until her room is picked up and then she spends another few minutes bemoaning how she’d rather leave the door open or be with people until she finally surrenders to quiet play and ends up enjoying herself. In my own grown-up way, I behaved very similarly at first—picking up laundry and making my bed before I let myself sit down, wondering if I ought to call someone or respond to some missed text messages until finally the earned wisdom of motherhood told me to sit down and do something I enjoyed before this blessed twenty minutes was up.
So I read a book and drank a spindrift.
And basked in the joy of a bored, simple moment, one that wasn’t a pathway to the next to-do and one that didn’t accomplish anything outwardly measurable. But one that was slow enough for me to remember I am not a robot. God wants me to enjoy good things and my kids look to me to set the pace of their lives. One of my favorite Substack reads is by
and she recently shared this quote from John Lubbock:“Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer's day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.”
And so before we take on the wide open summer that lies ahead, I want to remember what it felt like to be detoxing this week from over-producing, over-extending, and over-planning. May our summer be filled with purposeful cloud-watching, unhurried bedtime routines, read-alouds in the middle of the afternoon, and less tidying (not no tidying though because I’m still me).
So I Won’t Forget #1…Glimmers of a slow summer
I wish I could remember more of the context of this conversation, but recently I was chatting with our six year old son about some boundary that his Dad had set. Our son is the most compliant of our kids and this was a rare moment where he questioned the justice of whatever limit had been set. Like most parents who are trying to present a united front, I responded in agreement with my husband and said something like “If Dad said no, then so do I…” Satisfying if you’re the one who gets to say it, infuriating if you’re the one on the receiving end. But simply curious if you’re the sweetest kid in the universe and don’t like to rock the boat. Avett just asked why. Why do you agree with Dad? Why is your answer the same as his? A earnest question from an inquiring mind to which I responded “because Dad and I are a team.” I watched his expression light up as he processed my cliche response and with the great delight that comes only from a surprise realization, he declared:
“ooooooooh, so is that the sport you guys play?”
Yes. Yes it is, son. I got such a chuckle out of his question that I wrote it in a note on my phone so I’d remember to tell Dustin about it that evening. Such insight from such a simple conversation. Parenting is the sport we play. Sometimes we’re great at it, sometimes we lose miserably, and honestly most of the time it feels like a draw. But at the end of the day/game, we’re just trying to leave it all on the field and head back to the locker room together. Maybe this analogy is why we love Ted Lasso so much: “I do love a locker room, it smells like potential.”
Anyway, I’m documenting it here because sometimes the wit and wisdom of our kids blows me away. It makes me laugh, but it also often reminds me of the beauty found in a simple connection made. I spent the rest of the week puffed up with team pride—the kind that had me believing we might be able to retire with more W’s than not—let’s gooooooooooo!
So I Won’t Forget #2…the wit and wisdom of kids & a solid metaphor
Hopefully you enjoyed the long weekend recently with Monday being Memorial Day and the unofficial kickoff to summer. There’s nothing better than remembering halfway through your Sunday afternoon that the weekend isn’t really over yet. I hope that was true for you and I say that with the pang of privilege on my mind for two reasons. The first is because a sweet Starbucks barista asked me in the most upbeat way whether I had to work this weekend or if I was headed somewhere fun. The truth was the latter and I drove away reflecting on the sincerity and kindness of her question while she was, in fact, working rather than headed to the pool. The second reason is that for the first year of my adult life I did a bit of research on the history of Memorial Day—because kids ask good questions and I just flat out didn’t know.
Here’s your very brief history lesson: Memorial Day was originally know as Decoration Day. This started shortly after the Civil War—which to date is still the war that caused the most deaths in US History—and people would decorate the graves of those who died in battle. This gave way to the establishment of national cemeteries. The tradition of Decoration Day started out locally and did not officially become the federal holiday we know as Memorial Day until 1971. Local cemeteries still participate in the long-standing tradition of grave-decoration including one just a few miles from where we live (Floral Haven if you’re local and wondering). My husband grew up scouting and every Memorial Day they would done their polyester uniforms in the fresh summer heat and head to Floral Haven to pick up all the American flags. I’m told this was no small task—picture thousands of flags because this cemetery is home to quite a lot of veterans and that’s frankly a lot of folding. They do a lovely job of honoring the tradition of Memorial Day.
This year our oldest daughter went with her great-grandmother to visit the cemetery and decorate the grave of her great-grandfather who served in the Korean War. She came home processing the experience in the way most little girls process their feelings: drawing. She found a large piece of cardboard in the garage, drew a picture of her Gramps and wrote out a placard: In loving memory of James Curzon: 1930-2014.
It was a curious thing to display on our mantel as friends and family came over to eat dinner that evening, but the beauty in it really struck me. She had witnessed very poignantly the practice of remembering on full display and she came home on a mission to emulate that practice in the best way her nine year old self could. Her art gave way to remembering—to thinking about death and to honoring those who have gone before us—and she reminded me that Memorial Day is much more than the starting line to summer. It is a day of remembrance. Perhaps I am the only one who has missed that memo in recent years, but I can’t help but wonder if our current generation has forgotten the art of remembering a bit. Perhaps we could stand to visit cemeteries more. To take our kids with us. To talk about what it means to give your life away or what it means to live a long, full life and die with a rich history worth sharing.
I’d like to imagine that anyone still reading this is thinking about their person—the veteran from their family, maybe a grandparent or great grandparent whose history you know very little about, or perhaps just someone who is buried in the ground somewhere and you’ve not found a good way to memorialize them each year. What would it look like for you to practice remembering them with your kids? To visit the spot or do the ancestry research? In this very simple way we make remembering a part of our lives not so that we can dwell in the past, but so we can more fully understand what it means to be a person with history. Sometimes a little bit of research unlocks a rabbit hole worth going down.
So I Won’t Forget #3…the origins of Memorial Day and a cardboard drawing.
Well friend, once again you’ve made it to the end and I’m grateful. If you’re enjoying these essays then I have good news for you: more is coming! We Have This Hope will continue to produce podcast episodes, although at a slower pace over the summer, but I’ll also be doing a bit more writing with an emphasis on remembering. If you’ve been around here much, you know this is a topic that I can’t shake so why not spend the summer months seeing what shakes out.
And as always I love your feedback so if you have enjoyed this, if it sparked something worth remembering in your own mind or if you simply want to respond, please leave me a comment.
See you next week,
Emily
What lovely thoughts! Thank you for writing and sharing them; they're giving me some of my own thoughts to mull over today.