275/365 Ordinary Time is Waning

I have something planned every weekend from here until mid-December (and those will fill up, I know). When I focused long enough to rattle it off to a neighbor today, I got this doomed feeling. Ordinary time is slipping away from me.

In the atrium, we call it "Growing Season", and it is. It's the time to grow in God's word and love, but also in the rest of our lives, all our mundane tasks and gardens and houses and families. This is the time for vacations when you reconnect with your kids, and the time to finally get cucumbers to grow in your garden. We spend our summers lazing about, but really we don't. We work at being and becoming the people we are. Early fall greets us with harvest and back to school, back to encouraging routines and new beginnings. It's a beautiful time of year.

And before I know it, it will be gone. So far gone. The little green plants on either side of the ambo will be gone and an Advent wreath will hang in the back, at the entrance to church. It'll be cold and negotiating last minute present wrapping with school and church and family obligations and traditions. Traditions. I think that's why I like the easy breath of Ordinary Time: there aren't so many traditions. Just good Gospel stories and a plain church and no big worries. Sure, some local traditions, but there's room to move around in Ordinary Time.

Until now.

317/365 Twenty Two Months

She made it 22 months. Twenty two borrowed months. Leo's whole lifetime, just about.

I lay her down on the bed, on the polka-dotted sheet, and she drools, all the saliva she was choking on. She jerks a bit more, but not long. Her eyes are closed and I know she's not there.

My heart doesn't even skip. Suddenly I have ice water in my veins and I don't know how that happened. 22 months ago I couldn't even make the words come out of my mouth on the phone with 911.

She calms down. The fire engine is outside and the younger in-laws are letting the EMT in the front door. I smooth her hair, her perfect golden brown hair. She breathes. The man in navy with all the gear comes to the top of the stairs and starts talking to me. I respond to him, but I keep looking at her face. My God, she's gorgeous. Her nose is so perfect, her eyebrows look like she has them done. The shape of her mouth. My six year old has just had a seizure and all I can think about is how angelic she looks. Like I've caught a glimpse of something I don't notice every day when she's healthy. How do I miss this? How do I not see it?

And my heart is at peace more than it should be, I keep telling myself. I shouldn't be ok with this. I should be worried and sad and upset and all verklempt. But I'm not. I put on a bit of a show, I drink some coffee, I hope for but do not expect a fever spike to come. It doesn't, and while my brain has to wrap itself around this new wrinkle, while I do start the mental games and the bargaining, I don't do so bad.

Knowledge helps, I know, but other than that, it was sort of out of my hands in a very comforting way. This has nothing to do with me. It has nothing to do with Maeve. I can't get her into rehab or clean my house better or move to a dryer climate. This is who she is and where she is and for the first time in her life, I saw her as Maeve. Not just my daughter Maeve or Sophia's sister Maeve or Baby Maeve or any of that. She had arrived. It took a seizure but now I see her.