Stephanie Rische

Blogger and Writer: Capturing Stories of God's Grace

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

Toddler-Style Lament

I’m no expert in child development, but I have had a front-row seat to my share of toddler tantrums lately. Based on my unscientific analysis, I would venture to say there are two categories of tantrums: the clinging kind and the flinging kind. (Of course, in the middle of said tantrum, it feels like the categories are loud or louder; public or more public).

After the tsunami-force winds die down, I try to catch my breath and take stock of what just happened. It seems like my son goes one of two directions in the midst of his big feelings: he either launches himself away from me or glues himself to me. If it’s a flinging tantrum, he squirms out of my reach and throws himself onto the floor. If it’s a clinging tantrum, he wraps his little arms around my neck or leg—all the while sobbing as if to fill a small bathtub.

I’ve been reading the Psalms recently, and I’ve been struck anew by the chord of lament that runs through so many of them. I’ve had my own seasons of lament . . . times of waiting, times when God seemed silent, times when I had to reckon with a “no” to a deeply longed-for prayer.

In my seasons of lament, I confess that at times I’ve responded with a flinging tantrum. I have launched myself out of God’s arms. For reasons that defy logic, I choose a dirty floor over his loving arms. I refuse to bring him my tears, my confusion, my weariness.

I’m so grateful for the Psalms, because there are no verses that say “Thou shalt suck it up” or “Thou shalt get a grip.” Instead, these ancient songs encourage lament . . . when we do so in the context of holding on to our Father. 

Faithful lament, I would maintain, is akin to a clinging tantrum. It’s beating our Father’s chest with our fists and letting our tears soak his shirt. It’s grabbing him and holding on for dear life.

The other day I was comforting Graham in the midst of a clinging tantrum. I can’t remember what sparked the meltdown—perhaps all the green bowls were dirty or I insisted he wear pants or I parked the car in his imaginary friend’s spot. At any rate, as I held him, I wiped a tear from his cheek. This resulted in a fresh waterfall. “Put my tear back!” he wailed. “I wanted it there!”

So we sat on the floor of the kitchen, the two of us, as the afternoon sun streamed through the window. At last he let out a ragged sigh and rested his head on my shoulder. I silently wondered what it would be like to do the same with my heavenly Father. No more throwing myself out of his reach. No more demanding that he take away the pain. Just allowing myself to be held by him.

If I’m going to pitch a fit, it might as well be the clinging kind. I want to hold on to him until my prayer is answered . . . or until my tantrum subsides.

Whenever you find tears in your eyes, especially unexpected tears, it is well to pay the closest attention. They are not only telling you something about the secret of who you are, but more often than not God is speaking to you through them of the mystery of where you have come from and is summoning you to where, if your soul is to be saved, you should go next.

Frederick Buechner

Love Like a Toddler

Children, it turns out, are not programmable. Neither do they bear any semblance to a vending machine: Press button A21 and voila! Out comes a Snickers!

I have to admit there’s something compelling about a vending-machine model for children. Think of the possibilities—you could input helpful phrases like “Yes, Mama!” “Of course, Mama!” “You’re brilliant, Mama!”

At two-going-on-twelve, my little man decidedly does not operate according to preprogrammed instructions. In fact, he relishes the taste of “No!” on his lips. At various times, he has attempted to boycott any combination of the following: diapers, meat, car seats, toothbrushes, and hygiene in general. He has been known to emphasize his point by lying prone on the grocery store floor. He has, on more than one occasion, been observed streaking across the room pantless.

In short, he has a will. And he knows how to assert it.

But I’d be remiss if I didn’t tell you the other side of toddlerhood. In recent months, he has also been known to pipe up from the backseat, “Hold mine hand, Mama.” And we hold hands until the light turns green. In the middle of playing with his cars, he will run over to his dad and say, “Kiss right here!” before dashing off to play again. On occasion, in the highest form of love language, he extends a sweaty palm with a goldfish cracker in it. “Here go, Mama!”  

Sometimes I look around our world and wonder why God would give us human beings free will. Maybe it’s always been this way, or maybe parenthood has made me squeamish, or maybe social media is the worst kind of magnifying glass, but it seems like we are drowning in selfishness and violence and bad choices and greed and all manner of mayhem. When I pray, I sometimes find myself asking, “Is this really your Plan A, God? Wouldn’t it have been smarter to program us to be a little nicer than we are?”

But then I hear my son’s little voice saying, “Hold mine hand,” and I can see where he’s coming from. Forced love—that’s no kind of love. Forced goodness—that’s no goodness at all. The Father doesn’t just want obedience; he wants our hearts. Even at the expense of our own willfulness.

The psalmist says, “I have calmed and quieted myself, like a weaned child who no longer cries for its mother’s milk. Yes, like a weaned child is my soul within me” (Psalm 131:2). There comes a point when we go to God not just because we’re utterly dependent on him for our next meal, for our very survival. He delights when we finally quiet down from our tantrum long enough to come to him by choice. Not only because we have to, but because we want to.

Just like a toddler.

***

It is not a slight thing when they, who are so fresh from God, love us.
Charles Dickens

Here’s hoping his word for the year isn’t NO…

Planting Hope

As I think back on this year, it seems like joy and grief have been holding hands.

On the one hand, I’ve received far more grace and love than I deserve, not to mention my share of sticky kisses and toddler snuggles.

On the other hand, there has been altogether too much death for one year. The deaths weren’t entirely a surprise, and I know many people have experienced much greater loss. But by my reckoning, any number of deaths feels like one too many.

This year we lost our little Mo, the baby we never got to meet. We lost my funny, kind, smart grandpa—the one we’d lost for the first time over a decade ago to dementia. And last week we lost my beloved friend and mentor, Ruth.

I don’t know about you, but sometimes it helps if I can put a label on what I’m feeling. Maybe it’s an illusion, but I feel like I can start to untangle an emotion when I can call it by name.

Bereft. I looked it up, and it sounds about right to describe the hollow place that has carved itself out just below my esophagus. “Bereft (adjective): lacking something needed, wanted, or expected.”

I still needed you, Ruth.
I wanted you, Mo.
I expected to have you for just a little longer, Grandpa.
And now I find myself lacking.

One of the problems with grief is that you can’t schedule it. It rears its messy head at awkward, inconvenient times, precisely when you don’t expect it or when you’re not wearing waterproof mascara. You go to the funeral, you attend the burial, you walk through the good-bye ceremony, and you think grief will fit in the box you’ve made for it. But it turns out you can’t plan out when you’re going to feel sad. You can’t put it on the calendar and then be done with it.

***

On a brisk November morning, just after Ruth’s funeral, I told Graham, “Okay, let’s put on our coats. We’re going outside to plant hope.” I had work to do and emails to answer and laundry to fold. But those things would have to wait.

So I grabbed a shovel and started chipping away at the stubborn November ground.

“Do you know what this is?” I asked Graham after we’d dug forty holes and unearthed approximately a dozen worms.

“Onion,” he said proudly.

A fair enough guess. The brown bulb looked much more like a shriveled-up onion than a daffodil. I’ve seen plenty of spring blooms in my lifetime, but even I found it hard to believe this little lump would burst out of the ground in golden glory four months from now.

Isn’t that the way hope is? It seems irrational—impossible, even. It doesn’t take root right away. It’s something we plant today with the wild idea that it will bloom after a long winter.

Hope, it turns out, isn’t one of those splashy flowers that gets planted in May and then disappears with the first frost. No, hope is a perennial. You plant it now, when the ground is hard and cold. And you trust that by some miracle, you will reap an eternal spring.

I don’t know what you need hope for today. But I urge you to dig in, even though there are no blooms yet. Dig in, believing that winter won’t last forever. Dig in, and bask in a little bit of tomorrow’s sunshine today.

The snow, like all other deaths, had to melt and run, leaving room for hope.

George MacDonald

A Letter to Our Son on His 2nd Birthday

Dear Graham,

You have been with us for two years now. Only two years . . . and already two years. In the span of this year, you morphed before our eyes from a baby into a little boy.

Your dad and I sometimes check on you in your crib before we go to bed. We don’t need to anymore, but it’s habit now. Besides, we secretly love those quiet moments, watching your normally active little self in freeze-frame, like a hurricane on pause.

We close the door behind us and marvel at how big you are. “Didn’t those pants just fit him two days ago?” we ask. It’s not just your legs that have grown. But they’re the easiest to measure.

Last year at this time, you were taking your first tentative steps. Your babble was mostly incoherent. You needed help to eat, use a sippy cup, and go down the slide at the park.

Now you are full of opinions and words and dramatic gestures and joy and occasional food strikes. You’ve learned how to string words together and whisper in our ears and rake leaves and mix cookie dough. You’ve learned how to run on your tiptoes and kick a soccer ball and throw rocks in the creek. You’ve learned to beg for Band-Aids and sing silly songs and share your goldfish crackers (when you want to). You’ve learned that a cow says “moo” and a lion says “rawrrr” and a puppy sticks out its tongue and pants. And when I asked you recently, on a whim, what Graham says, you flashed me a sparkly smile and replied, “Happy.”

“Do you think there’s ever another year in a person’s life when they learn so much?” I asked your dad one day. Probably not, we decided. But the more I think about it, the more I realize how much we’ve learned this year, thanks to your tutelage.

This year we’ve learned . . .

  • How to extract a pea from a tiny nostril with a Q-tip
  • That locks aren’t always baby-proof, especially the ones that guard the snack cabinet
  • How to keep a straight face when you say, “No, no, puppy” just before doing something willfully defiant
  • How to find creative protein alternatives during that two-month meat boycott 
  • How to notice every rock, stick, and bug on the way to the park
  • How to read the truck book seven times in a row

Here’s what I’m learning about being a parent: in my eyes, you will forever be every age at once. In your two-year-old face I see who you are right now, with your sticky oatmeal fingers and cheeky grin and affinity for all things with wheels.

But I also see the swaddled bundle we took home from the hospital in an enormous car seat. I see the baby so tiny we were afraid we would break you but who somehow had ninja-like strength whenever it was bath time.

I see the six-month-old who belly-laughed at Daddy’s silly noises and learned to dance before you could walk. I see the one-year-old who adored garbage trucks and flowers and blueberries. I see the 18-month-old who decided one inauspicious day that he was too big for a high chair and insisted on sitting at the table instead.

And at times I see glimpses of the person you may become. In certain moments, you do something beyond your two years, like tell your own joke or give us a pat on the back or insist on wearing a romper with Hawaiian shorts and snow boots, and suddenly the future flashes before my eyes. I see you getting on the bus, going to overnight camp, sitting in the driver’s seat of the car, getting your first job, becoming a dad yourself.

These moments when time folds over on itself are at once beautiful and terrifying. My heart isn’t big enough to hold so many versions of you at once. And so when you blow out your candles, I will try to just count to two and embrace who you are right now, in this moment. And I will tuck the memory in my pocket so I can pull it out again someday.

Happy birthday, my boy. We love who you are and who you were and who you will be one day.

Mom and Dad

Sometimes you will never know the value of a moment until it becomes a memory.

Dr. Seuss