Stephanie Rische

Blogger and Writer: Capturing Stories of God's Grace

When the Queen Anne’s Lace Blooms

It happens every year. The Queen Anne’s lace blooms—delicate yet sturdy, dainty yet wild—and I feel the pang of August. Summer is sunsetting. The heat index may still be one-hundred-and-sweaty degrees, but make no mistake: The days are getting shorter. The cicadas are humming their annual dirge. It’s time to dig out the backpacks from the back of the closet.

I’ve always been of the “do your homework before you play” mindset. This generally worked for me . . . when I had a finite to-do list.

But as a mom? It turns out, your homework is never finished.

***

We made a “Summer Adventures” list this year, as is our tradition. The goals were small but grand, especially if you’re four and seven:

Run through the sprinkler.
Make root beer floats.
Go hiking in the woods.
Have a water balloon fight.
Get a shaved ice.
Try out that new playground.
Have a breakfast picnic.
Go on a road trip.
Make s’mores.

We played and ate our way through the summer, delighting as we checked each item off our list. The days extended before us like a limitless shoreline.

Until we spotted the first heads of Queen Anne’s lace, bobbing obliviously in the field. Suddenly the air was full of back-to-school flurry: making lists and gathering supplies, reconfiguring schedules and resetting bedtimes. Summer was sprinting to a close, and when we looked at our list, we saw we had more adventures left than weekends.

And that’s how I found myself leaving work outrageously early on the last Monday of summer to check our last adventure off the list. We ate a picnic and let the watermelon juice run down our chins. We ran and climbed and scraped our knees. I made them pose for pictures (even though they insisted on silly ones) because by next summer, they won’t fit in those shoes/shirts/car seats anymore, to say nothing of the crook of my arm.

The Queen Anne’s lace disappears at first frost, after all.

I don’t know how to savor every minute. I do know that it’s unrealistic to successfully juggle every plate. Sometimes the best we can do is choose which ones to drop. And every once in while, the right thing to do on a Monday afternoon is play…even though you haven’t finished your homework yet.

A Letter to Our Son on His 8th Birthday

My dear son,

When the grown-ups in your life see you lately, they regularly say some variation of, “Wow, you’ve grown so much!” And they’re right—but in more ways than just inches.

How do we measure your growth? How do we chart it?

Do we capture it by how many teeth you’ve lost, how many numbers you can add in your head? Is it how short your pants have gotten, how tight your shoes suddenly are (even though we got them at the start of summer)?

Do we measure it by the way you make up your own jokes, the way you say, “How has your week been?” to our elderly friend at church, the way you make your own lunch and fix a sandwich for your brother while you’re at it?

Years and inches are easier to chart than your ability to follow assembly instructions on my new desk chair or explain the difference between a leopard and a jaguar, or your intuition that our neighbor needs a note to cheer him up.

This independence is exactly what we’ve been working toward—it’s the goal, the endgame. But it still pierces us sometimes, this growing-up version of you.

Madeleine L’Engle once said, “I am still every age that I have been,” and I think that’s true of parenthood too: When your dad and I see you, you are still every age you have ever been.

We look into your big brown eyes, and we’re transported to the hospital room where we locked eyes with our “Baby Spark” for the first time. When we see the freckles that dot the tip of your nose every summer, we can’t help but recall the toddler who spent endless hours investigating bugs on the sidewalk. When we see you run with those increasingly grasshopper-like legs, we are taken back to the moment you took those first wobbly steps, more dance than forward motion. When you ask for a sixth pancake, we’re imagining feeding you sweet potatoes in your highchair, with a success rate hovering around 30 percent. We tuck you in at bedtime, your pillow surrounded by piles of library books, and suddenly we’re time-traveling to your toddler requests for Blue Hat, Green Hat and that little truck book with the handle. We watch you march into school without looking over your shoulder and recall you on that first day of preschool, so proud with your tiny blue backpack, holding my hand with a grip that defied your three years.

So maybe that’s why we can welcome these new stages, even as we miss the old ones: We never truly have to give away those other iterations of you. We hold them in our hearts now, and we will continue to hold them as you grow up. We love every version of you: baby-you, toddler-you, preschooler-you, and eight-year-old you. And the person God is making you to be that we haven’t met yet.

Happy birthday, our beloved son.
Love,

Mom and Dad

1.8 Million Minutes of Summer

It’s one of those memeable sayings you can’t avoid this time of year: You only have 18 summers with them! Make sure this one counts!

I appreciate this sentiment, but it can feel like inspiration with a millstone around its neck. The reality is, every second of summer isn’t magical. Every second of summer can’t be magical.

Some moments of summer look less like fairy dust and twinkle lights and more like lists and laundry, dirty dishes and deadlines, bills and band-aids. Sometimes people are hot or cranky or bored or tired or hormonal or otherwise off their A-game. Even smack dab in the middle of those very moments we’ve worked so hard to make magical.

So for all the magic-makers out there, I’d like to propose a new equation. What if, instead of putting the pressure of an entire summer on our backs, we thought about it in terms of seizing golden moments within those summers?

We have 100,000 minutes this summer, and some 1.8 million minutes over the course of 18 summers. Every one of those minutes won’t be magical . . . but some will be.

Yes, we can be intentional about making plans and carving out space and putting down our devices and looking our loved ones in the eyes. But maybe we don’t need to sweat so much to make it all count or beat ourselves up when, despite our best efforts, everything goes off the rails.

Maybe the moments that will become magical in our memories won’t be the epic trips we take or the carefully orchestrated itineraries we create. Maybe it will be the popsicles we eat on the porch, the deep conversation that comes out of nowhere while we’re running an errand, the book from the library that strikes our mutual funny bone, the time we make a flour-dusted disaster in the kitchen.

Maybe we don’t have to work so hard to be the makers of magic; maybe we can become noticers of the magic that’s already right here. We don’t need to fear that the time we’re given won’t be enough. We can take the moments the same way we live them: one at a time—one of 1.8 million at a time.

And who knows, maybe this summer can feel less like scarcity and more like serendipity.

A Letter to My Son on His 6th Birthday

Dear Graham,

This summer we went on a family vacation to the Sleeping Bear Dunes—that veritable mountain range of sand. We squinted our eyes against the electric-blue sky, taking in the towering hills above us. Can we make it to the top? I wondered. It would be a steep enough climb even if we weren’t schlepping water bottles, snacks, and diapers, not to mention two small humans.

Your dad and I listened studiously as the park ranger went over safety guidelines with our group. He told us how sometimes people start the climb but aren’t able to finish, and what to do if you get tired or hot or stuck somewhere between the base and the summit.

We were nodding along, taking in all the tips, when in a surge of panic, I realized you were gone. We scanned the parking lot for your trademark green ball cap. Where could you be? Then I spotted you climbing—no, sprinting—up the dune. Somehow, in the span of minutes, you’d made it two-thirds of the way up, all by your barefooted self.

I tried to call out to you, but the lump in my throat silenced me—a lump that was one part pride, one part fear, and one part I’m not ready yet.

***

You started kindergarten last week. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise—five comes after four, six comes after five, kindergarten comes after preschool. These are linear steps, predictable chronologies. And yet I find myself standing at the bottom of this sand dune, looking up at you with a mixture of pride and fear and I’m-not-ready-yet.

When you were a baby, I heard so many times that the days are long and the years are short. I tried to soak in this advice, but I don’t know if it’s possible to be prepared for the inevitable time-slip of watching you grow up. I am no likelier to freeze-frame you at this stage than I am to preserve a dandelion puff or capture a sunset in my pocket.

You are adamant that I am Mom now, not Mama or Mommy. It’s strange how quickly you are changing while I stay the same. I look at pictures of us together, how you once fit in my arms and how your arms now wrap all the way around me. I remain the same height while you keep inching higher.

As soon as your dad and I think we’ve found a rhythm in a new season with you and your brother, things change. Your brain is growing, your heart is growing, and your soul is growing. Your questions are getting bigger along with your shoe size, and the problems you’re up against are increasing in complexity along with your math problems. And I find myself ever a step behind, racing to catch up.

But maybe I’m growing too, just less obviously than you. At the very least, my rib cage must be expanding, because how else could my heart contain all this without bursting?

And so, as you turn six and climb the mountains God has put before you, know that your dad and I love you. And when you face mountains that you have to climb all on your own, know that Jesus is with you, running to the top beside you.

We’ll be cheering you on, whether we’re ready or not.

Love,
Mom and Dad

Tulip Season

“The tulip field,” he said,
Eyes puppy-wide,
Though I almost missed them on account of my screen.
Not today, I thought,
The inbox as full as the sink as the laundry basket as my List of Very Important Things.

It was the pants that caught my eye.
An inch higher than last week, I swear. His brother’s too.
Everyone warned me this would happen, of course.
The way they shoot up, faster than a field of dandelions, without my assent.

By the time spring comes again, I wonder,
Will you be driving a car, getting a job, calling to check in on a Sunday evening?

So I trade deadlines for hastily slathered peanut butter sandwiches
And we picnic with the tulips.

For tulips bloom bright and brilliant,
But the season is short—
Like morning fog.
Like blinking.
Like last year’s pants.

To My Son on His 2nd Birthday

Dear Milo,

When I went downstairs to dig out the Christmas bins this year, I looked around and realized that ever so slowly, without my being aware of it, our basement has become a graveyard for baby things.

First you outgrew your swing, your legs kicking so energetically that you were becoming a topple risk. When you learned to walk, you no longer needed that exersaucer (the one you did hundreds of laps with while I made dinner). Then came the day when you began protesting your highchair, refusing to settle for anything less than a booster seat like your big brother. It wasn’t long before you started boycotting your crib too, threatening to throw yourself over the side until we finally released you.

As I look at the baby detritus around me, it’s not that I’d wish you back to babyhood. After all, we love the person you’re becoming, and it’s a delight to see your personality emerge with each passing week.

The two-year-old version of you is made of grins and grit, delight and determination, impishness and independence. You live large and love big. You adore dogs and social gatherings and cheese and somersaults and leaping off high places—and, if you have your preference, doing it all without pants on.

You have two speeds: full throttle and asleep. After a day filled with jumping on things and then hurling yourself off, and trying to keep pace with a five-year-old, you snuggle into your bed (not a crib) with a rotating cast of stuffed animals tucked under your knees. Before bed, you inevitably request the car book, pointing out who in our family drives each one (I’ve never envisioned myself as a dump truck driver, but who am I to argue?). You don’t say much, but you certainly know how to get your point across, taking us by the hand to show us precisely what you want or acting out elaborate charades.

Looking around me, I wonder if it’s the rocking chair that hurts most. There’s nothing fancy about the chair—it was handed down by a friend who got it from a friend, and it’s been recovered multiple times. You haven’t sat still long enough to be rocked for some time now, and there’s no reason to keep unused furniture in your room—it would only serve as an unnecessary obstacle to your games of chase and hide-and-seek. Besides, I don’t know how much longer my arms will even be able to hold you.

But doing this the second time around, I know how fast the sands of childhood slip through a parent’s fingers. Now I know how birthday candles accumulate faster than I’ve given them permission to. Now I know how the calendar pages keep turning, even if I’d like to stay in a particular season a while longer.

You won’t remember all the nights your dad and I rocked you in the middle of the night, singing “I Bid You Good Night.” But even after you’ve outgrown lullabies, I think those words and melodies (and the love undergirding them) weave their way into your DNA somehow. Maybe they become part of you, grounding you not only in our love but in your belovedness as God’s child.

So, happy birthday, my little boy who is literally racing your way into your third year of life. Your dad and brother and I love you so much. And please excuse me if I tuck you in more than once every night, while I still can.

I love you, but Jesus loves you the best.
And I bid you good night, good night, good night.

Photo copyright Julie Chen

Split in Two

To be a woman, I would contend, is to feel split in two. Maybe you’re juggling home and career, or marriage and friends, or kids and calling. Whatever the scenario, we all know what it’s like to try to keep the plates spinning without breaking the ones we care about most.

There’s a famous story about a wise king who settled a dispute by offering to split a baby in two split a baby in two. As the story goes, there was one baby and two women, each claiming the child was hers. Solomon called for a sword and said, “Cut the living child in two and give half to one and half to the other.”

At this point in the story, every person with a beating heart cries, “Stop!”There are no circumstances that justify a split-in-two baby. No one wins if Baby is dead.

But what about when it’s the mom who’s split in two?

I recently returned to work after maternity leave, and it seems that wherever I am, I have to leave a piece of myself behind. When I’m at work, my heart is still tethered to the 15-pound cheeky boy who is currently doing tummy time without me and the 3-year-old I promised to build an excavator with when I get back. When I’m at home, I can’t help but wonder what emails are piling up and if my brain will ever recover from its current porridge-like state.

And it’s not just working moms who find themselves tugged in different directions. There are women who are at home full-time while trying to pursue something they feel called to. There are women sandwiched between two generations, caring for kids as well as aging parents. There are single women who are trying to figure out how to follow their passion while also covering the bills.

Some days it feels like there just isn’t enough of us to go around. Not enough energy, not enough time, not enough emotional bandwidth. We need the wisdom for Solomon for this. Is the answer to split ourselves into two (or three or four or five)? If we do, will there be enough of us to go around?

The reality is, it will never work to cut ourselves in half—no matter how sharp the sword or how accurate the slice. We’ll keep giving pieces away until there’s nothing left . . . and it still won’t be enough.

So what’s the answer?

I don’t think there’s an easy solution to this—we may have to reconcile ourselves to living in some amount of tension. But I am learning, by baby steps, that there’s peace in bringing our whole selves wherever we are. Instead of becoming fragmented—separating our work selves from our home selves, our mom selves from our professional selves, our daughter selves from our adult selves—what if we stitched our roles together so we could be all there, wherever we are?

I used to think of integrity strictly in terms of moral uprightness. But what if integrity is about being fully integrated—being the same person, no matter where we are?

I’m still figuring out what this looks like. But maybe it means bringing my editor-self to my parenting and using multi-syllabic words with my toddler. Or bringing my mother-self to my work and letting my baby crash my Zoom calls on occasion.

I wonder what this looks like for you, beautiful woman being tugged in different directions. How are you wrestling with the split-ness of being a woman? What might it look like for you to bring your whole, integrated self to each role you’ve been called to?

However we’re feeling split, may we stitch each part of ourselves together so we can fully love, fully live . . . and be fully ourselves.

The glory of God is a human fully alive.

Saint Irenaeus

For Those Who Keep Vigil at Night

This is a word for those who find themselves awake when the rest of the world sleeps.

  • For the one plagued by worry
  • For the one caring for someone who is ill
  • For the one haunted by insomnia
  • For the one begging for their prodigal to return home
  • For the one toiling on the night shift

And, yes, for the one trying to comfort an inconsolable infant in the wee hours.

As anyone who has stood sentry at night knows, everything seems bleaker under the blanket of darkness. Shadows grow menacing. Minutes feel like hours. Anxiety morphs into full-blown fear.

I’m not sure why this is, exactly. We have artificial light, after all, and we’ve long outgrown our fear of the dark. But something about those middle-of-the-night hours releases our monsters from their hiding.

I have a hunch that one of the reasons nighttime is so hard is because it has a way of isolating us. It makes us think we’re the only ones marking this bleak and desolate hour. In the absence of our usual defenses, we feel alone, and rather small.

If you find yourself doing battle by night, I want you to know that you do not keep this vigil alone. There is someone who sits by your bedside, someone who waits with you, someone who toils alongside you. There is someone whose love is not bound by time, someone who sticks by you even when it’s inconvenient, someone who doesn’t clock out when the sun goes down.

The psalmist puts it this way:

The one who watches over you will not slumber.
Indeed, he who watches over Israel
    never slumbers or sleeps.

Psalm 121:3-4

Even when the rest of the world is asleep, God is awake. And because of that, you can rest . . . even if you can’t sleep.

Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace. God is awake.

Victor Hugo

God as a Nursing Mother

It may be the season of epiphanies, but in this season of sleepless nights, as Daniel and I wake to feed a hungry or otherwise disconsolate newborn, I can barely string two coherent thoughts together. (Case in point: I recently found the peanut butter in the cabinet with the frying pans and lost in a game of a memory to a three-year-old.)

But the other night, as I thought about this verse from Isaiah, it made some kind of three-in-the-morning sense:

Can a mother forget her nursing child?
    Can she feel no love for the child she has borne?
But even if that were possible,
    I would not forget you!

Isaiah 49:15

I’ve long loved this tender image of the mother-like love of God. But I thought of the love it describes only in terms of volitional love—the love a mother chooses for her child, the love God chooses for his people.

But now, as I find myself overflowing with milk in the wee hours of the morning, it occurs to me: a nursing mother’s love is more than an act of sentimentality. In fact, it’s hardly a choice at all. She has milk to give, milk that must come forth. It’s part of her very nature, and it will pain her not to give what she has.

And so it is with God. Love pours out of him; it is part of his very nature. He must give love.

According to scholars, the Hebrew word for love used in this chapter of Isaiah also means “womb.” God is not distant or aloof; he pulses with love—the kind of mysterious, unbreakable bond that forms between a mother and her child as the child rests beneath her own pulsing heart.

God is committed to you with an irrepressible love—a love that flows out like a life-giving force. He loves you with a womb-love that defies explanation. He is tethered to you, by choice and by nature.

He could no more stop loving you than he could stop being God.

We are never more restricted nor more liberated than when we are in love.

C. S. Lewis

Number Our Days

Dear Graham,

You are one year old now. Only a year . . . and already a year.

Time has become a slippery eel of a thing ever since you were born. On the one hand, I can’t believe you’ve only been with us for one revolution around the sun. I can hardly remember life before you. What filled the Graham-shaped spot in my heart for all those years?

On the other hand, how is it possible that an entire year has flown by? If I close my eyes, I can believe you are still the size of a loaf of bread, with tiny fists closed above your head as you slept. But when I go into your room in the morning, I marvel at this jabbering, smiling, squawking person you have become, the boy who toddles single-mindedly toward the potted plants.

After we brought you home from the hospital, all manner of seasoned parents echoed the same advice to us: “Enjoy this—it goes so fast!” I tried to soak in the wisdom, but it didn’t make sense to me at the time. The days stretched on, a blur of feeding and changing and wiping spit-up, eclipsed only by the even longer nights. Time didn’t seem fast—it seemed like it was standing still.

But now it’s starting to make sense. It turns out the best part of parenting is also the hardest: no season lasts forever. When one stage ends, it’s replaced by something else, something equally worthy of being cherished. Case in point: you don’t fall asleep on our chests anymore, and there’s a tote full of tiny onesies you’ll never fit into again. But now you pat us on the back of your own volition, and if we catch you at the right moment, you’ll give us the most delightful slobbery kisses.

By no choice of our own, we have traded rubies for emeralds. They are equally lovely, but we do not have the luxury of holding both at once.

Psalm 90 says, “Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” What would it look like, I wonder, for your dad and me to number our days with you? Here are some of the numbers from the first year of your life:

  • 1 ER visit
  • 14 pounds gained
  • 365 times we’ve tucked you into bed at night
  • 522 books we’ve read together
  • 2,000-plus meals we’ve fed you

That’s the past year by the numbers (I’ve lost track of the number of diapers). But I’m not sure that’s what it really means to number our days. Numbers have their place, but they don’t tell the whole story. They can’t capture things like wonder and joy and delight and love.

You have taught me so much already, little one. You have taught me to slow down, to notice, to pay attention. Before you, I never realized how interesting a dandelion puff is or how delightful bubbles in the sunshine can be. Before you, I never appreciated watching a squirrel scurry across the backyard or watching the garbage truck pick up its weekly haul.

You have taught me the joy of inefficiency, of putting aside my to-do list and just being present in the moment. You don’t agonize over regrets from the past or fret about the unknown future; you are all in for the right-now—for the sweet tang of a ripe blueberry or the hilarity of your dad’s funny noises.

And so even as time is speeding by faster than I get my mind around, I want to take a lesson from you as we celebrate your first year. I want to enjoy this moment and be fully present in it, not pining for past-you or looking ahead to future-you, just savoring the boy you are right now and thanking God for the gift of curious, observant, silly, joyful, active, bananas-in-the-hair you.

Happy birthday, my boy.

Love,
Mom and Dad