Peace in the Making

It happened in the kitchen.

Around a skillet of cheesy eggs and another one full of turkey bacon. Breakfast for dinner only happens when Daddy is home late from work.

Everything else in my life has been calling so loudly. The children’s homework. The house that does not clean itself. The laundry baskets and Christmas planning, the holiday parties that need wrapped hostess gifts and the school programs. The other for-pay jobs I do each day even when I don’t have time.

The details. Oh, the details that keep us crawling to the finish line of Christmas.

It all screams so big and loud so that even my own brain cannot fix itself on anything for more than a moment.

And I must write. I must. Not for my blog or my {unwritten} book or for anyone else. But for my own sanity.

But there hasn’t been a stitch of time. Each stolen minute is filled with the loud calls from everything else in my life and one needs quiet to create, right?

I sat for an hour with a blinking cursor while I answered everyone else’s calls except the ones that would calm the urgency inside.

So tonight I lost all sense of adulthood and advent and crumpled once again into a folded mess of a cardigan, jeans and boots in the dining room.

It was then I decided that breakfast for dinner was just as good as anything.

I asked the eleven-year-old to make the eggs and the seven-year-old to empty the dishwasher. And they sensed I was needy. I’d already apologized forty-five thousand times in the last hour.

So they obeyed with wide, empathetic eyes.

I pulled the bacon out of the refrigerator and retrieved the skillets from where I’d hidden them inside the oven.

“Maybe you need a few minutes by yourself, Mama.” The oldest said as she swept crumbs from the counter. “I can make dinner.” My heart. My grief at my own brokenness. My whole spirit begging not to be a failure as a mother.

It was all that it took to break my sense of urgency and mania.

“No. Let’s do it together.” Burners on. Skillets hot. Bacon dropped onto the heat. And we moved in the kitchen together. All three of us, two generations of sensitivity and womanhood and youth as we worked together to create a simple meal.

She beat the eggs. “Like this, Mama?”

She used a fork instead of a whisk.

“Yes, now add a bit of milk.”

The seven-year-old found a step stool to reach the high cabinet. She put the glasses away while her little voice sang a happy song she’d heard on the way to school this morning.

“The princess and the frog…” she sang while her sister poured eggs into the skillet.

There was peace in the making, in the creating and even in the working tonight, beauty in the simplicity of a meal made and a meal eaten together. There was redemption in the whisking of yolk and white and in the sizzling of meat on a stovetop. There was grace in the teaching and in the praise and in the song.

And these girls teach me over and over again what it means to be a woman. They teach me over and over again what grace with hands and feet look like. And they teach me the quiet in the heart of a Sabbath Savior that loves to meet us when we are weak.

{adapted from my original post here}