In My Skin

This is the dress I wore home from the hospital. I believe my sister chose it. It hangs on my bedroom mirror, and there were once little shoes that matched it, pale yellow and covered with lace.

Looking at it, there is a lump in my throat. It is so dainty and delicate, as was the pink baby who was dressed in it and carried home. And she was loved, I know that. But she was also delivered into a heritage of estrangement, resentment, simmering unspoken anger and pain and verbalized rage and disappointment. She learned that normal was a mental list of topics and people of which you never spoke, that emotional violence ran in families like eye color and wavy hair, that there were unwritten rules to dodge direct suffering, but no way to escape collateral damage. To escape being the collateral damage.

Many of us survive these childhoods, and arrive on the cusp of the world, fired with a deep-running vein of promise: everything will be different. It is actually a touch of grace when we realize that we have survived, but there is only One who knows all our broken places, Who speaks the language of our faulty "how life works" rule book, because He was there as it was written. Only He can rewrite it, trade a thousand lies for truths, truths that always begin, "My beloved. . . "

His loving course correction has even been with me, giving me a sister who can say, "You're not crazy, I was there too." Giving me my husband, who helps me to sing a new song, who tells me I AM different, not a recording of my parents' litany. Giving me friends who have their own war stories and continued peace talks. Books and art and music that remind me that becoming a new creation is not the work of a day, but a divine dance to the day of Christ Jesus.

Every day as I grapple with my short temper and impatience, my tendency to melancholy, as I fall and ask forgiveness and get back up, when I do, by grace, speak to my kids in gentleness and relate to them with integrity and peace, that little girl is being healed by her Father. As I raise my children, He is bringing me up. He is teaching me to forgive and be forgiven, to give grace as I drink deeply of it, to know that the hurt of my home of origin was born out of a deep need for Him.

That little dress is a reminder to me that I was always surrounded by loving hands, though sometimes they were invisible.



I am back in this space, counting on my day to day sensitivity to our family's needs to monitor my computer time and energy. Blessings to you as you read these words.