An Unexpected Journey

Tiny pairs of sparkling flip flops.   In and out they walk on tiny feet.   I am so glad I work with adolescents most of the time, but this week we are screening elementary children.   I have sparkly flip flops at my house, too.   Sealed up in a box in the attic.   They cannot find the little feet that should be in them.   They didn’t get to go to kindergarten this year.   Didn’t get to hear the little blond girl learn to write her last name.   Learn to read.   Feel   her toes start to hang off the edge as she outgrew them.   Get dusty on the playground or have chocolate milk spilled on them at lunch.   No, they didn’t get to go to kindergarten. I fight off the feelings of anxiety.   The impulse to run away.   Too many little blonde ponytails with faces that are not hers.   Then I see them.   The rainbow painted toenails.   Exactly the way she wanted them the last Sunday when we were painting our nail...

I have not let myself think about it.  Really.   I heard someone say once that we don't have the grace for something in advance... just that day.  So I figure the grace to face the hearing and the boy-man and the evidence will be there in the morning and not before.  I wish someone would tell my subconscious, though. I dreamed someone was babysitting her.  When I went to pick her up, they had let some of their family take her off with a few of her friends.  And I knew.  I knew she was gone.   When their van pulled into the driveway, all the friends got out, but she was not there.  I screamed at the adults hysterically the whole dream- yelling at them that they had lost her. Then the next night I was at the top of a grassy hill.  I could see her down at the bottom sitting in a lounge chair  just at the edge of the woods.  She was playing with a baby doll.  Suddenly I could hear the sound of something terrible and mighty...

It happened by accident.    I was driving to my friend’s new house, and one of the road signs grabbed me.   While we visited, I was turning the name over in my mind.   Could it be?   I thought the accident had happened much further down the highway.    My memory is muddled.    I said I would never drive that way again.   Never again see the place.   I had been with a group to tour my friend’s house a few weeks before she moved in, and I had been nauseous.   But I didn’t pay attention on the drive, and figured it was because I was close to the place.   As I packed my girls in the car to leave,   I took a deep breath to still the trembling inside.   Now I would be on the same side of the divided highway as that day...   Was this it?   I didn’t know another way home.   I would have to find out.   I drove slowly as if in a dream.   And then, suddenly, there they were just before the susp...

So many things have been swirling through my mind I hardly know what to write about.  My time alone is so limited that I think of more things to blog than I am able to get down.  Then I seem to forget them.  They slip away in the fog of mommy brain!  One of my girls was screaming her head off in a public restroom yesterday while I tried to change her out of her poopy (I mean covered in poop!) clothes, and a lady walked by and said "All I can say is thank God!"  Meaning she was glad she didn't have a squirmy, screaming, covered in poop child.  I just looked at her, smiled, and said, "That's what I say, too.  Thank God!  I say that every time I look at her."  And I laid a big kiss on my stinky, precious, red faced one! Squeeze them tighter.  Kiss them more.  Laugh when they spill it all over your clean floor.  Yes, you should.  You absolutely should.  Don't waste another second with them.  If this tragedy has don...