“Sorry. I can’t come tomorrow morning,” was all the text said. It was from the college student slash babysitter who was due to be at my apartment at 7:30 am on Monday morning. I had a feeling she wasn’t going to come.
Last week the same sitter had helped me out with task of making sure that my kids were dressed for school, ate breakfast, brushed their teeth and had their backpacks ready to go. This morning routine can be relatively pain-free and dare I say even enjoyable, taking only 15 minutes on some days. But on other days accomplishing the same handful of tasks involves a fair bit of cajoling, several shouts of “Why does this take so long?!” and even bribery. Plus 45 minutes of time. The amount of time depends on a formula that is directly proportionate to the amount of patience and cups of coffee that I have stored up that morning as reserves, divided by the collective amount of additional hours we all wished we had slept.
This was the third Monday in a row that I needed to be ‘at work’ at 8:00 a.m. “At work” might sound like I needed to be in shiny shoes in a midtown high-rise with my comfortable pair tucked discretely into my laptop bag. But I just needed to be connected to a phone line and have a quiet desk to lead a virtual training session for a team spread throughout Europe and North America. I took this series of three 8:00 a.m. training sessions knowing that I would need some support to get Sammy and Oliver off to school since we usually leave the house at 8:00, but having spent a year in New York City I felt confident that I could work something out three Mondays in a row.
On the first Monday I was wading in grace and good fortune. My ex happened to be in town and he took Samuel to school. And since Oliver was home sick that day, a friend who lives just a block away on the Upper West Side offered me space at her dining room “desk” in her studio apartment so that I could be ‘at work’ without an ill 3rd grader and Minecraft survival mode as background noise.
On the second Monday the sitter who had just cancelled on me helped the boys get ‘school ready’ and shepherded them on the half-mile walk to their elementary school. And even though the babysitter doesn’t live far from us, I guess $20 for the hour of work for a busy student was probably not incentive enough to come the next Monday at such an early hour. $20 is basically one drink out at a NYC bar. But heck, I wish someone would pay me 20 bucks for my valiant efforts to get three tired and cranky human beings over the finish line which is our front door and a half mile beyond it each morning.
Basically for two out of three Mondays when I needed to be at work early everything had worked out, well, with grace and ease.
But maybe what I refer to as ‘grace’ had run out that Sunday night? Maybe I had only earned a certain amount and it was all used up? After all, I’d spent the weekend at a monastery in upstate New York with a group of new friends from the neighborhood church that we recently joined. One of our pastors had invited me to join a small group for a weekend of worship, meditation, prayer, time in nature and divine conversation with my new friends, our pastor and the monks… without my kids! That meant I didn’t have anyone to feed or keep alive but myself for two days! And the weekend away was only possible by another act of grace: my upstairs neighbor and friend had volunteered to check-in at my place and stay with my boys for the weekend. Considering how not-so-religious I am, the whole weekend was nothing short of amazing grace for a single parent in the City.
The kids got spoiled by their upstairs aunt, and I got some much needed time away. By Sunday evening all three of us felt like we had been carried down a river of grace bopping along on a buoyant inner tube. The sweet river ride came to a halt when I got the text message from the sitter. Then I was suddenly up that creek without a life jacket.
“The sitter can’t walk you to school tomorrow morning,” I announced to the boys while they squeezed bubble gum toothpaste on their bristles.
“Well then who is going to take us, Mommy?” Samuel asked, mouth agape.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “Maybe I can just drop you off around 7:45 and you can wait in the playground until the school opens at 8:00.”
“I don’t want to wait outside!” said Oliver with both arms up and his thin red toothbrush hanging from one side of his mouth. “What if it’s raining?!”
“Well when I was little,” I began to relay the true story of my own father dropping me and my younger brother off at our elementary school in rural Ohio an hour before the school doors opened on his way to work. “I remember that one winter we got inside the big tires on the playground just to stay warm while we waited for the school to open their front doors so we could go in.” I was clearly taking the ‘telling your kids about how much worse off you had it as a kid to make them feel better about the sucky situation they are about to be in’ approach.
“Why did he drop you off so early, Mommy?”
“I guess because we were not in the school bus district that year. And my Dad had to get to work early,” I replied, not satisfying any of us with the answer. What I do recall is that the early drop offs must have happened for months or even a year until my Dad eventually left us at my friend Tracy’s house, which was a short walking distance from our school. Tracy’s parents must have taken pity on our frostbite.
In any case, that was small town Ohio about four decades ago when kids didn’t regularly wear seat belts, frost bite wasn’t front page news, the Citizen app didn’t showcase how many pedestrian deaths there were in a 1 mile range of my NYC apartment at any given moment of the day, and the slack of freedom on the leash of children was much longer than what most parents give today. I’m pretty sure my big city boys could walk on their own to school, even crossing busy Broadway and Amsterdam Avenues. They both know their way around and after a year in NYC, they are seasoned street crossers. But neither of them have a phone, and all I could imagine was them quarreling over who has exploded more Minecraft creepers smack dab in the middle of Broadway and subsequently getting run over by a school bus—such an ironic and tragic ending to a Monday morning that would make.
I thought of some options…
-I could write the sitter back and say, “Please, please, please don’t cancel on me with such short notice! I will pay you more! Your next happy hour is on me!”
-I could ask our ‘regular’ babysitter who is a trusted family friend to help out. Or even one of my cousins. But they both live over a half hour away from us.
-Or I could ask the neighbor who had taken care of my boys all weekend. But as of this evening we were still friends and I wanted to keep it that way.
-I could email the entire parent group at the boys’ elementary school and see if anyone who lived near us would be willing to walk with them.
-There’s also a family from New Zealand who lives around the corner from the school. The mother and I run together on occasion and she must be one of the kindest people I’ve met in NYC. I could ask her.
So I texted the New Zealander mom, asking if I could drop the boys off at her house at 7:45 with, “I can imagine that might be a bit crazy with three other kids at home so feel free to say ‘no’!” And as soon as I pushed the green arrow to send the text I half-regretted asking an already busy parent for help at that time of day.
I alerted my colleague in Denmark about what was happening and went to brush my teeth too. Looking at my reflection in the mirror I said to myself, “I don’t know what is going to happen tomorrow morning, but I know it is going to be ok. There’s no need to call the neighbor, email the full parent group or panic.” Maybe I was just too tired to summon up more action. Or maybe I was ready to lean into grace.
At the monastery over the weekend I had spent time with one of the monks named Brother John. He, along with all of the monks I met at the Monastery, was so down-to-earth and easy to talk with. On Friday evening he had shared his journey from librarian in Pennsylvania to monastic life and his decision to take the Benedictine vows of Obedience, which includes chastity, Stability, and Conversion to Monasticism. Brother John compared his life and devotion to God to someone being in a committed marriage with a spouse. He was the first monk that I’ve had the chance to get to know personally and his piety intrigued me. Part of this might have been due to the fact that my only lifelong devotions to date have been to pop music and anything made from potatoes. But I am also relatively new to most things church-related. I consider myself a spiritual person but was never particularly religious and never felt a strong sense of a ‘spiritual home’ until I found this church on the Upper West Side. Last Spring I went to one of the weekly candlelit Taizé meditations held at the church down the road from me. After that I went to their Easter Sunday service. Then I started to bring my boys. And the rest, well, that is grace too.
At lunch overlooking the gently flowing Hudson River I asked Brother John, “Considering how much time you spend in prayer, can you tell me how do you pray?”
At lunch overlooking the gently flowing Hudson River I asked Brother John, “Considering how much time you spend in prayer, can you tell me how do you pray?”
I mean, I pray. I meditate. I light candles, send wishes, white light and blessings. But maybe I’m not doing it right? Maybe he knows the right way to pray, I thought.
His eyes smiled. He paused, put down his fork and replied, “Well, yeah, we do pray a lot here.” The monastery, true to its Benedictine roots of being a welcoming host and refuge for many visitors, is steeped in the tradition of prayer and worship, with a typical schedule of five services full of prayer, meditative psalms and hymns. Guests and locals come from all over to listen to the monks sing from opposing pews in a entrancing harmonized melody. Brother John looked me directly in the eyes and said, “It doesn’t matter how you pray or where you pray. The most important thing is praying regularly. If you pray regularly before you know it, your life becomes a prayer.”
Amen to that.
~~~
It had been a couple of hours and I had not heard back from my Kiwi running pal. As we turned off our bedside reading lamps we said our regular evening prayer, the one I learned from my grandparents:
Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep, if I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take, Amen.
Although the nighttime prayer might sound like it sleeps on the foreboding side of the bed, it has always reassured me. And my little guys rattle it off at their own pace too before we share what we are grateful for from the day and other special prayer requests.
If this same situation would have occurred a year ago, I would have likely called the regular babysitter and both of my cousins and when they didn’t answer I would have sent an SOS to the full parent group asking if anyone could help, and then without waiting for any replies I’d email my colleague and apologize profusely for having to cancel my participation as lead trainer in a just-another-manic-Monday panic. And then I would have spent a restless night in bed wondering what the opposite-of-heaven have I done?! When it came down to leaning into faith and grace in moments of uncertainty like this one, I would have clawed my way against the river’s current by sheer muscly force, only to drown.
But not tonight. Tonight at the end of our bedtime prayer ritual I thought about Brother John, and all of the regularity of grace that has been flowing slow and steady in my life since we moved from Amman, Jordan to New York City one year ago. I thought about the possibility of living a life of prayer, even if wasn’t totally sure what Brother John meant by that. Something inside me signaled that all would be ok, and that it always is. So I clicked off the bedside lamp and added, “I pray that tomorrow Samuel and Oliver get to school safely and easily and that I’m on time for work” and went to sleep.
The next morning I woke up, turned my phone on, and received a text message that had come while we were sleeping. It was from my New Zealander running friend, the super-fit mom who always has a kind word for you on hand and brightly colored running shoe laces on her feet. True to form she wrote, “Happy for you to drop off the kids in the morning or I can check on them in the playground if you take them early!”
There it was again. “Grace,” I joyfully muttered to myself right before tripping over Oliver’s aircraft carrier made of Legos. Then came a word a bit less holy.
~~~
At 8:00 am on this Monday morning I was ‘at work’, running shoes still laced up, and re-connected to my training group and to grace. My colleague in Denmark welcomed all of the participants who logged in early. And meanwhile the kids were enjoying the early morning sunrise view of Manhattan from their friend’s 23rd floor apartment.
Life regularly offers up surprises — illness, transportation issues, inconvenient working hours, and missing sock pairs — all the time. Grace asks me to let down my resistance to whatever I believe may be happening to me, and consider how it might be happening for me.
The origin of the word Grace comes from Latin and means thankful. Considering all that had happened for me in the last 12 hours, I was so thankful that I didn’t panic the night before and get my pajama shorts all in a bunch trying to control a certain uncertainty. I was grateful that my boys were so cooperative, good-humored and fast moving from “Why do we have to get up so early, Mom?” to the “Do I have to wear shoes today?” end of the routine. And I felt deeply thankful for the busy New Zealander mom, newly anointed as one of my ‘single mom saints,’ who helped me out at the last minute. Most of all I was thankful that I leaned into my inner knowing and the grace that lives inside me, as well as the grace of the universe that always surrounds me, trusting that no matter what the kids would get to school fine.
I used to think that Grace was just something I could experience on a mountaintop, in stillness or at a sacred place. It was some elusive, fleeting touch of the divine that I grasped for but could never hold onto. Now I believe grace is absolutely extraordinary because it is extra ordinary – it is everywhere in and in everything and in everyone. It’s not earned or taken away. It’s in the temple, synagogue, church, mosque, ashram and monastery. And it is also on Broadway and on the bus. It’s the magic that’s inside of us and all around us, always. It’s heaven and earth. Grace is where our humanity meets our divinity.
Sometimes the most ordinary moments– like getting to work on a Monday morning — provide us with just the right opportunity to dance with grace. This week I showed up on the dance floor ready to tango in my super sized Nikes. Grace encouraged me to, “Kindly let go of the tight grip you’ve got on me, sister.”
“Sorry, so sorry; I’m kind of new to this still,” I replied, easing up on her hands.
Then Grace whispered, “No need to step on my toes either, dear one. Just lean into me; let me guide you. You know, it takes two…”
… To dance with grace.
