Speaking Grace With Wordless Fluency

In 2007, it felt like life had hit me like a tidal wave (or two) as I sat in the tsunami’s wreckage in a tiny upstairs apartment in Oostburg, Wisconsin. We’d been through a job loss –my husband was laid off his teaching job, the one we thought would be for years to come as we grew our family (this happened Feb. 10, 2005, two days before my 33rd birthday), the birth of my son (March 2005), a cross-country move to Phoenix, Arizona and back (July 2005 to August 2006), endured a year of stress and adjustment and isolation (the ensuing time in Phoenix), and finally, another cross-country move back to Wisconsin in fall of 2006, after my husband’s teaching job in Arizona turned out to be the worst job he’s ever had.

I survived that year by going on long walks when I had the chance, by spending time online with other mothers, by long naps, and a lot of the time, by just going numb. I was depressed. Overwhelmed. Disappointed.

When I am depressed, I get frozen in place. Where some might become angry or irritated, I become unable to move. I go numb. And that’s where I was, sitting in the wreckage on my couch, computer in my lap and kids playing in the next room in 2006. It was all I could do some days to just make dinner, to get the laundry done, to keep the kitchen clean. The girls’ room was a study in chaos. Where two years previously, we’d devised a system for them to learn to pick up their toys before bed, I just couldn’t maintain it in the current situation.

I hadn’t realized how badly my mental and emotional health had affected my family’s physical situation until my in-laws came for a visit. I’d picked up the living room. The kitchen was usually fairly ordered, as it usually took first priority in terms of living space. But the girls’ room was still mostly a disaster, despite our half-hearted attempt to shovel the toys into a pile at the end of the day every few days when we could no longer walk through the small room.

My wake-up call, my “rock bottom moment,” happened when my husband and father-in-law decided to move the girls’ bunk beds to another arrangement in their room. They moved the mattress, and under the bed frame were about a month worth of Sunday school papers, broken crayons, books, fruit snack wrappers, cereal pieces, crumbs, and miscellaneous small toys and stuffed animals. It looked like an episode of “Hoarders: Lite, Closet Edition.” I was horrified. Embarrassed. And in despair, because in that moment, I realized how badly I really was doing but had no idea how to remedy the situation. I felt like I was drowning, but I wouldn’t have been able to even give the sinking feeling in my soul that word back then, staring emptily into that pile we’d quickly swept into the corner of the room and a into a garbage bag.

And now, many years later, I see the same despair in my son. He’s going through a rough season himself now at age almost-sixteen, and he’s reflecting my own type of depression. He shuts down and “just can’t.” I’ve gone down to check on him for the last month or two, mildly horrified at the condition of his room. Laundry (clean or dirty? Who knows?) in mounds on the floor, bed sheets that hadn’t been washed in weeks, dishes piled on the corner of his desk, wrappers and papers and garbage piled well above the trashcan in the space between his desk and the wall. If you have teenage sons, I’m sure you can imagine the smell.

Some time yesterday, I started to see it differently, though. I remembered that pile of detritus under my daughter’s bed and decided the situation in my son’s room wasn’t calling for shame or condemnation –several weeks of trying that had failed, anyway– but grace. I know now that what I needed back in the middle of all my own wreckage was grace. I found it in the long-suffering of my husband and in a daily dose of prayer and Wellbutrin, but it didn’t come easily.

So I stopped looking at the condition of my son’s room as a judgement on my poor mothering skills (“how could you let it get that bad?!”), but an opportunity to show my son the grace I needed years ago, but had to fight for. Here, I could fight for him when he couldn’t fight on his own. What might have started with laziness or complacency probably became overwhelming, and that I can understand.

So, yesterday afternoon while he was at school, I went down to his room and took out the garbage, stripped the bed, changed the sheets, washed all the clothes on mounds on his floor, swept under the bed. I’d offered to do this work before, but he’d refused my offer. Whether that was due to my disappointed tone or due to his refusal to be shamed into action, I don’t know, but when I picked him up yesterday after having cleaned his room all afternoon, I told him my own story and what I’d learned from that experience: that sometimes you just need a fresh start, to be rescued when you can’t do it yourself. I reassured him that I’d left his notebooks alone, I hadn’t thrown out anything but what was clearly trash (empty cans, wrappers, plastic cups, packages and boxes), and that I cleaned up the room for him out of love, not out of judgement. I did it because I wish I’d have had someone back then to do that for me.

He seemed relieved.

And when I think of how ashamed I was back then as a depressed and overwhelmed mom of littles, looking into the piles of junk under my daughter’s bed unearthed for everyone to see; when I think of how I still am ashamed at the condition of our yard, of the laundry that piles up next to the dryer, and I have to fight that sense of inner condemnation as I buckle down and just get the work done, I realize that maybe that’s what grace is for: to let ourselves receive it and pass it on to someone else who needs to experience it rather than have it explained to them.

Sometimes that looks like six loads of laundry, three garbage bags full of trash in the dumpster, and a fresh refill in the plug-in air freshener. Sometimes it looks like remembering to take my meds every morning and making a plan to take care of myself. Sometimes it means listening to a compliment and letting yourself believe it. Sometimes it means remembering that God does not operate by human-made formulas, but by love and grace and justice that we may never understand. Justice that gives itself up for those who can’t give of themselves. Especially on the days when we “just can’t.”