A week ago, I had a birthday...and even though I spent it in paradise and with an individual that I deeply care for, I found myself heavy-hearted with the weight of my time here. All of the news programs that night were re-playing images of Princess Diana...and you know how sometimes a picture or a sound bite can take you back in time? Well, the Queen of Hearts died on my sixteenth birthday.

I remember myself quite well at that age. I wasn't your typical teenager, choosing to stay at home with a good book over going out and partying...choosing to bum around with my mother instead of friends. I never really went through that "I hate life" teenage angst, and I wasn't dedicated to finding a way out of my small town. I was centered on my family. I had grandiose plans of success and wealth.

Things have become fuzzier as life has taken some unexpected turns. Maybe I was too sure of everything, or everything had been too easy up until a certain point, but I've been tested. For someone who always wanted a career before a husband, I married young. For someone who always felt that marriage was a life contract, I divorced quickly. For someone who always took a certain amount of pride in their intelligence, I left college before getting a degree. For someone someone who only ever saw black and white, I've learned to differentiate between the hues of gray.

I was so singularly focussed on my goals that I was glass, unable to bend and likely to break. I broke alright. It took a good breaking to get my head on straight...but that is not how I remembered it that night...I only remembered the shattering. I felt the failures weigh upon me.

I ran myself a hot bath and turned on the jets while I soaked, putting on my dusty philosopher's hat and talking myself down. What is failure? I told Mom once, while trying work through the enormity of her dying, of my marriage ending, "I wouldn't want God's job...why should I tell him how to do it?" One of the hardest and most rewarding things I've accomplished is to stop questioning. I no longer wonder why.



The Serenity Prayer. Now, being that I'm all gray-sighted and everything now, I know that many of you do not have the same faith as myself. I have never been a strong disciple, one of the biggest reasons I did not continue on to Seminary. I do not set out to change your minds or to question your own beliefs. I am very strong in my faith, and all I can say is that I hope you are very strong in yours, whatever it may be. We all need something to believe in.

I embraced this plea more than any other. Over my desire to press rewind and go back to an easier time, I asked for the ability to accept my new reality. By grace, it was granted.

By grace, I am more okay with who I am than I have ever been. I acknowledge my strengths, and I can show my weaknesses. I am unafraid to test myself. I know that I have value. I have been untainted by heartbreak. I have grown independent in my mother's passing, but I no longer feel so alone. I realize now that the sanctity of a feeling trumps any rational thought and allow myself the "frailty" of wearing my heart on my sleeve. I am not a robot.

I no longer do things because I think somebody is watching. I no longer perform for others. I live for me. I live to love and to further myself, and I live to be unashamed. I fought the urge to go into hiding, I still fight. I still believe that my life is the fairy tale I grew up believing, but now I remember that every now and then we have a fire-breathing dragon to deal with. I forgive. I let go. I am happy with my life, even though I do not have a case of trophies to show for it.

Mom always said, "It is what it is."

And it is wonderful. I am moving forward.

"We are not human beings, but human becomings," I can still hear my eight grade English teacher reciting. The emotion has lodged in my throat the past several days, and today came my catharsis, when I released something, some sort of bitterness I've clung to for so long that I didn't know where it ended and I began. It didn't consume me, but it was there, a very unchristian hoarding that I had convinced myself that I didn't have.

My Dad. He really is a great man. His eyes are the blue of glaciers, and they glisten with tears when you least expect it, sending to to the same wonderful fate. My adult relationship with this man has been strained to say the least. I don't mean to say that it has been poor, only that I was spoiled by how easy it was for me to know my mother and to love the stuffing out of her. My father and I didn't really know one another by the time I graduated high school.

I remember the proud father who often came to be the parent-helper at my preschool over the two years I was there, I remember the man who kept every gaudy key chain that I ever made for him during craft time, and I remember the beefy sandpaper paws of his that held my little-girl-hands so gently. Then, my brother started having severe behavioral problems, and my memories of him grow fewer and farther in between. Mom and I were often left to live with the chemical imbalance that was dropped into our laps, and I believe that this alliance was the root to our incredible closeness. Dad had his own business. He could find places to be when he didn't want to be home. Mom and I had to hold the fort.

I guess I've always kind of held it against him without meaning to do so—I am the biggest proponent of forgive and forget, yet I held on to this hurt. I constructed it into a shield that I used to keep myself from being truly close to my father. It is unfair to blame someone for their frailty. I have been wrong.

I went to visit with him one night this week. I've taken to doing this on a somewhat regular basis...which started because it made him feel good...and has continued because it sort of makes me feel good too. While there, Charlie called, and upon hearing that I was at the house, wished Dad to send his love to me. I said something to the effect of how prideful I am of my brother, how fiercely devoted I am to the person he has become...and how I never imagined such a day would come while self-locked in my bedroom while he beat against the barrier. No good could come from him getting through, I knew this to be true. These days, I leave the figurative door open, and give him a key just in case it should close without my notice. People change.

Coming out of my reverie, I heard a sniffle and turned sharply toward my father who sat kitty-corner from me in the living room. "I'm sorry, Laura," he said and I was caught off guard. "I'm sorry that I wasn't there." That was all he said. I was never certain that he understood my distance. I had never voiced my reasons, had never alluded to them...as already stated, I barely understood my distance.

The statement has been reverberating in my mind for days, and I've had the most wonderful sensation of warmth, reward...peace. It has a name: forgiveness.

We went to Dad's church this morning, Burke Lutheran held their special outdoor service at 10:00, and I promised I would go. The gospel was from Luke 13, about the woman who had suffered with disease eighteen years before Jesus picked her from a crowd and made her well. The sermon instructed us to be patient for our cure. The prayer at the end of the children's sermon summed it best, "Lord, help us wait. Help us trust you."

I brought the message back to Dad, who had been unable to hear the sermon (having volunteered his services to the cookout to take place immediately following). He has been struggling with his empty house. Today he was limping quite badly, having injured his ankle the night before. Had he gone to the doctor? No, there was no one at home to force him there while he convinced himself he could walk it off. Then I understood his emptiness, and I was humbled by how little I have let him into my life.

And my phone rings. Hours later, after Nick and I have returned from a last bit of shopping before our vacation which begins at the end of this week. "Hello?" It is him, letting me know that he has his ankle elevated and iced as he promised he would do as soon as his duties with the cookout were satisfied. I smiled, happy he called to tell me so. "Good. Thank you. You'll get in to see the doctor tomorrow?"

"Yeah. Hey, listen, I wanted to thank you for coming today. It meant a lot to me. I..." he hesitated and I heard his voice grow thick, "...also wanted to let you know that I am really impressed with where you are in life. I am really proud of who you are. I thought maybe you should know that."

I am smiling right now, too busy thinking of him to figure out how to wrap up this rambling mess of a post. I have my daddy back again, the one who patiently baited my hook AND took off the fish time after time, and gave us rides on his back while he crawled around on all four limbs...the one to whom I no longer feel like a disappointment.

Dear Lord, it was worth the wait.

Emotionally spent, I took a call from my father the next morning after what would have been Mom's 50^th. I was weary with crying, weary with longing, and weary with doing it all behind closed doors because this is now her second birthday that I've celebrated without her, and I wouldn't want to be accused of being overly dramatic. I am okay with her death most of the time (well, as "okay" as a person can be with choices that weren't theirs to make), but Mother's day and her birthday just hit me...the two days a year that I dedicated always to her.

"Hi, Dad."

"Hello, doing better today?" He had called the day before and knew I was having a tough time. He had told me that, just like last year, he was going to buy a birthday balloon and tie it to the iron planter at her grave.

"I think so," I replied. "Did you ever make it out to Mom's grave yesterday? I don't think you had been there yet when I stopped by." I had left work early to to buy flowers and place them there.

"I was there first thing in the morning! The balloon wasn't there!? I did stop, Laura, I did!" He had started to cry. I felt like crap for saying anything.

"Well...who knows...maybe Charlie stopped by and wanted it..." I tried to give a soothing explanation.

"No, Charlie didn't think he could go. Said it was too hard."

And then I stopped feeling like a loser for my 20 minute cry at her final resting place, which was really more of a whispered mantra of, "I miss you—oh, God, do I miss you..." because with my father crying in my ear and my brother momentarily dropping off of the face of the planet, it was obvious that I wasn't the only one that finds August the 14^th incredibly painful.

Dad later went back to the cemetery and found the balloon ribbon still tied, but the balloon gone. He called again to say, "Maybe your Mom just liked the balloon and snatched it up." I do rather like that idea.

You would have been fifty years old today. I would have loved to share this day with you. I become so angry when I hear women at work gripe about their age...don't they realize what an accomplishment it is to make it as far as they have? No, they don't. They didn't know you. They didn't lose you.

Gosh, Charlie and I look so young in that picture from your 48^th. I think he and I did years of aging during that last week of your life. We were so torn between wanting to hold you to us forever, yet knowing we had to tell you to let go. You'd be so proud of him, Mom. He's everything you always knew he was capable of becoming and nothing that everyone else thought he was. From his patient eyes to his gentle hands, he is you. I love him to pieces. I wish you could see. Perhaps you do.

I am sad that you're not here.

The Queen Anne's Lace is embroidering the edges of modernity, and I can't help but remember the daintiness you spread around me and the imagination you inspired. You named me after Laura Ingalls Wilder and Louisa May Alcott's Beth, two of your favorite heroins of all time because they were quiet in their strength and deafening in their love—I always hoped that I would live up to such a tall name. I always hoped that I would make you proud.

I still do. You were a woman worthy of being impressed.

I love you.