Dear Hallie,

Last August, when you hugged me goodbye in a Target parking lot surrounded by your new roommates and a trunk full of last-minute dorm necessities, you were full of both anticipation and fear. You had no strong expectations and only a handful of concrete plans: be yourself, find a church, make some friends, study nursing, and find some intramural or recreational soccer team that needed a goalie.

I heard from you many times during those first days. I loved the play-by-play accounts of welcome week, navigating the nightmare that is parking at Texas State, your classes and professors, and all the many ways you were filling your social calendar.  Just as I’d hoped, I heard from you less and less as time went on. Not that I did not miserably miss you every single day, but I knew it was good and healthy for you to need me less and less as you dove headfirst into college life.

My favorite phone call was the level ten emergency upon realizing your goalie gloves were missing- likely left back at home. And the reason this was such a huge emergency is because you were already about to risk complete and utter embarrassment by attending tryouts for the TX State Women’s Club Soccer Team. Of course, you are no stranger to taking social risks. In fact, that previous Saturday, you went to your first college football game completely by yourself, only to quickly befriend the stranger sitting next to you in the stands. When you mentioned you’d played soccer in high school, she emphatically insisted you join her at tryouts for the club soccer team. You tried to explain that you did not start playing soccer until two years prior, when your tiny high school needed one more body just to fill a roster. You tried to explain that you only played one season as goalie after the “real” goalie moved away- and the majority of that season you played with a broken thumb. You tried to explain that while you had a knack for keeping the ball out of the net, your general soccer knowledge, endurance, and field skills were not exactly up to club soccer standards. Turns out your new friend Ellie can be as persuasive as you, and you reluctantly agreed to show up to tryouts. But suddenly, as you planned to run out the door with just enough time not to be late, you realized your darn goalie gloves were missing. You called me to ask if I remembered seeing them when we were setting up your dorm, or if I had seen them at home since you left. Once it was clear you did not have them, you dashed out in search of the waiting Uber, who would drive you to your car parked in your assigned off-campus lot, a full 45-minute walk from your dorm. Then you would drive your car to a different part of campus where tryouts were being held. I stayed on the phone with you, unsure if I should be encouraging you to show up to goalie tryouts without goalie gloves, or if I should be telling you it might be time to just give up the whole thing. Just before we got off the phone, we were discussing how best to explain not having your gloves to the coaches. I was anxious and eager about the post tryout update I would get a couple hours later.

But you called me back almost immediately, informing me that your Uber driver, after hearing our frantic phone call, got out of the car with you. He then popped his trunk revealing a lone pair of professional goalie gloves. He insisted you take them and quickly drove off before you even had time to realize what was happening.

Turns out you made the team as a reserve goalie. While you only played in one game all season, the three days a week of practice, weekends traveling for games (including the national championships in Kansas), and the friendships you made with the other girls on the team were significant parts of last fall being the very best semester of your life! So much so that you were questioning giving up nursing in lieu of being part of the soccer team, given that your school’s nursing program means you’ll spend the last two years studying an hour away from the main campus.

Just as you were beginning to realize how much your body craved intense physical activity, you were also realizing how much your brain genuinely loved learning. You truly enjoyed your classes, studied more than you ever had in your life, and despite your intense academic and athletic schedules, you still managed to keep a busy social calendar. Other than being the poorest you have ever been, you were truly living your best life!

You came home for winter break, high on college, and single-mindedly ready to hit the slopes.  Other than skiing and babysitting, I kinda think the holidays at home felt a little anti-climatic to you. Not that you were not happy to see your family, but you were also ready to get back to living your best life. Spring semester promised more rigorous academic challenges, another club soccer season, more skiing over spring break, and then you were planning to spend your summer serving as a camp counselor at Camp Eagle. Nothing was going to stop you from making your freshman year of college the very best year of your life.

That is until you tore your ACL and likely fractured your sternum in a bad skiing accident over that break. You managed to get back on the slopes a few more times despite your missing ACL, but limped and coughed with tons of pain through the rest of holiday. You are one tough, determined girl, and you only got the MRI after Dad made you. Since your pain and mobility were not getting any better, he insisted there would be no soccer tryouts without it. The results of the scan felt like a death sentence to you. We suggested you get through the semester and schedule your surgery for early summer. But your determination to get back on the slopes, the soccer field, and still being a camp counselor by summer meant that you took the first surgery date available. You were confident you would figure out your classes despite surgery mid-semester, and the long road of recovery that would follow.

Surgery was in February. A million complications later, including complications with the actual surgery (resulting in an unexpected hospital stay), pain management (CRPS) difficulties, an highly inconsistent recovery, tons of make-up work, dorm changes, transportation and mobility issues (much worse than the fall semester parking situation), and a severe case of strep throat, you just barely managed to finish the second semester of your freshman year. Not only did you have to drop a class and cancel your spring break trip to Beaver Creek, but you have also had to give up summer camp and accept that you are not going to make it back to the soccer field anytime soon, if ever. You went from living your best life in the fall to barely getting through the spring.

And just when it felt like things could not get any worse. The hardest semester of your life was followed by one of the hardest weeks of your life. June 16, you learned that one of your dear childhood buddies took his own life. The shock and sadness that has settled over our home as we process this incomprehensible loss has been like nothing we’ve ever experienced. Your broken heart no doubt causing you even more pain than your broken body ever could, while you try to make sense of Ethan’s senseless death.

Being a mom is hard. So is being a daughter. Becoming an adult is hard. Watching from the sidelines as a daughter becomes an adult is also hard.  Suffering is hard. Watching my daughter suffer over this last semester might be one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. What I want more than anything right now is to comfort you, make everything make sense, to answer all your questions, chase all your pain away, ease your uncertainty, and reassure you that everything is going to be ok. But the reality is that sometimes things are not ok. Sometimes we get tempted or injured or rejected or betrayed in ways that feel impossible to come back from. Sometimes pain and suffering is profound and prolonged. Sometimes we don’t get what we want. Sometimes dreams get shattered. Sometimes lives get cut short. Life is really hard, Hallie. And some seasons of life are a lot harder than others.

I am painfully aware that my attempts at being a comfort to you recently have all fallen flat. Partly because the older you get, the more you realize how hopelessly flawed I am and how easily my well-intentioned words quickly become babbling lectures. But also, because we are in that totally awkward mother-daughter stage when you, at 19, are definitely not a child anymore, but not exactly a full-blown adult either. Neither of us have quite mastered the art of relating to one another as friends. Still, there are things I am desperate to say as you walk through this dark night that seems to have no end in sight. I don’t mean to be preachy here, other than the fact that I am even now learning and preaching these truths about the nature of time to my own weary heart. And I am more aware than ever before, that we don’t always get a chance to say the things we want to say.

 

1. Time moves in both loops and lines. Time is both linear and it is cyclical. Our modern western world views time as purely linear. Everything today is measured in terms of goals, success, flourishing, and progress. Culture has taught us to define progress by how much discomfort, failure, rejection, pain, and inconvenience we can avoid. And also, by how much pleasure we can attain and desire we can fulfill. But this obsession with progress and pleasure has increasingly separated us from the story that natural time tells. Yes, time is linear. There was a beginning of time, and there will be an end. Scripture is clear that we are currently living in the last days, towards the end of time. But, time is also cyclical. From the very first day of creation, there has been both darkness and light. There has been day, and there has been night. There has been morning and evening. Sunrises and sunsets, high tides and low tides, new moons and full moons. And there has been seasons- springs, summers, falls, and winters. Trees blossom and flowers fade. Hungers get fed, thirsts get quenched, pain is comforted, conflict is resolved, wounds are healed, needs get met, the lost get found. The rhythms of the water cycle, the food chain, the phases of the moon, and the circle of life are in constant motion. Days, months, seasons, years, and generations come and go. The earth itself twirls on its axis even as it annually dances around the sun. Our obsession with progress and linear time means that rhythms of life, and the ebb and flow of grief and joy that belong to us this side of eternity, all too often feels like regression. Human undulation feels like failure. True growth is sometimes mistaken for death. And rhythms of rest and renewal get mistaken as brokenness, deterioration, failure, or rejection.
2. Time’s loops are reminders: What is, will not always be. It is easy to forget that every night knows exactly how long it is supposed to last. And while some winters are longer and colder than others, the snow always melts and the flowers always bloom. Without a cyclical understanding of time, it is always hard to believe joy will return once it is lost. It’s hard for anyone to imagine summer in the dead of winter, but the symmetry between the past and the future is supposed to help remind us that no matter how long or dark the night has been, morning still comes. We miss so much of the journey by focusing on a fixed destination. We rush past seasonal “wave-like” joy in search of ultimate happiness. We likewise avoid seasonal discomfort which always diminishes the intensity of the joy that comes in the morning.  We no longer understand the pleasures of harvesting anything when plump, juicy, genetically engineered fruit is available year-round just by walking into a neighborhood grocery store. And our homes full of sound machines and artificial light and heat have greatly diminished the joy of sunsets, bonfires, falling stars, fireflies, bird sounds, weather, and changing seasons. Efforts to prolong comfort and pleasure makes the intensity of joy muted since our joy is often in proportion to the grief that came before. Our joy is also in proportion to the loss and pain we feel once that joy is lost. Understanding time as both linear and cyclical helps us to learn to hold our happinesses and sadnesses together at the same time. And it helps us to treasure moments of fleeting joy to the full even as we learn to grieve with anticipation of the joy that will come with a new day or a new season or on the other side of eternity. Your freshman year has been both very good and very hard. It has been very happy and very sad at the same time. If you had not felt the tension of losing your gloves, you would have never felt the joy of provision when a stranger gave you his. But it is also true that if you had never felt the joys of your first semester, perhaps the losses that followed would not sting so badly either. Certainly, if you had never spent several of your elementary school years joyfully romping around the neighborhood with your buddy Ethan, you would not be suffering the sting of his death as intensely as you are today.
3. Time’s lines remind us: you are still at the beginning of your story. We may be living in the last days, closer to the restoration of all things than we are to their creation, but your story (in a linear sense) has only just begun. Mom’s have the tendency to forget that their own stories are deeply impacted by their children, but their children’s stories are separate from their own. We hold ourselves responsible for our children’s pain and poor choices, even as we endlessly regret and worry and try to control. The reality is that while your childhood is officially over, your story is just getting started. You have so many days and nights, and so many joy-filled summers and grieving winters, yet to live. Believe it or not, many of the most important things in your life right now will someday seem so distant and trivial. You have struggled to understand the intensity of your grief over Ethan’s death for this very reason. The childhood joys of roaming the neighborhood with your friend Ethan feel trivial and distant. You asked me why you are so heartbroken about losing your friend after not having talked to him in a few years. It is because time is linear, and once upon a time your paths crossed and your stories intersected in a deeply meaningful way. Together, the two of you (both 3^rd children in big families) explored the boundaries of the woods behind your neighborhood- far beyond what either of you had permission to explore. You were the only girl at his birthday party in second grade, and you were both welcomed into one another’s homes without prior notice or even having to ring the doorbell. He taught you all the bad words and you taught him the secret passage to Javi’s house revealed only by moving the lose board on your side yard fence. Of course, once Ethan started using the secret passage regularly, the board broke off and the neighbors promptly sealed the gap. You are grieving like you have never grieved before, because you have never had a friend die before. Ethan was an important part of your story for a season, and no amount of time passing will ever change that.

Three years ago, we moved to a new neighborhood just on the other side of the bayou. The same bayou Ethan convinced you to swim in a few times back in the day. I’m thankful I did not know about those disgusting and dangerous expeditions until now, but I am also thankful that they are a part of your story. There’s a lot we don’t know about one another and usually the things we are sure we know, we have gotten wrong. But every one of your memories, just like every one of your joys, griefs, mistakes, rejections, wounds, and scars are being perfectly stitched into the story of your life. This includes childhood friends as much as your college roommates. And it includes all the children you babysit for who adore you and their parents who consider you a part of their families. It includes your first and unexpectedly final competitive soccer season, all the Uber drivers you’ll ever have, surgeries and scary diagnoses, dropped classes, changed plans, and canceled trips.

Through it all, the most important thing I want you to remember is that every part of your story matters. I imagine that had Ethan realized how many stories had been impacted through the course of his short life, and how many hearts would break when he left this earth, he’d have chosen to stay. Likewise, there are so many people who have been changed because your story has briefly intersected with theirs. But since this is still the beginning of your story, know that there are lots more people who you’ve yet to meet that will love you. And people who you will love in ways you do not even know are possible- especially if you have the privilege of being a mom.

One final reminder about our stories… they’re not really about us at all. Ultimately, our stories are part of a bigger story. A love story that began, not once upon a time, but at the very beginning of time. A story that will assuredly end, happily ever after, with the redemption and restoration of all things both visible and invisible. And with a great big reunion with all of those who have gone before us.  Until then…

I love you,

Mom