When our weights become wings
what I've learned from my mother
This was first published with (in)courage. Read the original here.
“You have hands that have done the work.”
My mother told me this recently after I told her that my hands remind me of hers.
We rocked in my new turquoise farmhouse chairs, discovered (and nearly tackled by another woman over) at a local thrift store. Our hands were in the same position, holding the rockers as we looked towards my Eastern Tennessee yard, surrounded by lush foothills.
Our hands had the same short nails and gentle grip.
Looking down, I noticed how our veins are like tributaries or small rivers that etch in and out of mountainsides. How my skin, almost overnight, reveals cells like stars as it stretches over the bone. Just like her. I hear my children’s shrieks of joy and a little bit of silly madness from the house inside.
When did I become the mother?
How has time morphed so that looking at our hands side-by-side, I see myself in hers?
Like my mother, my hands have wrung themselves, held themselves, and reached out for the hands of others. They’ve lifted themselves up into the air with hesitation and then abandon. They’ve prayed. Pleaded. Bled. Outstretched—they’ve praised.
Photo by Matthew Henry on Unsplash
For years, I struggled with addiction and untreated, undiagnosed trauma symptoms. My life was centered on how I could escape pain: Through drugs, men, food, screens, the list goes on. God felt far away—I, far away from him. Lonely and deserted.
We’ve both been through similar traumas—my mother and I. We’ve both lived with unhealthy patterns, sometimes the result of and symptom of that trauma. We’ve both been unsure that we’d ever escape the fear, the stuckness, the prison of the mind, that living in years of undiagnosed trauma symptoms can create.
Yet, today we are here.
With the same hands, we build. We love. We write. We nurture.
Photo by Alex wong on Unsplash
In the classic devotional, Streams In The Desert, the author recounts an old fable about how birds first got their wings.1
The story goes something like this:
At first, birds were made without wings.
“Then God made the wings, set them down before the wingless birds and said to them, ‘Take up these burdens and carry them. […].
For a short time the load seemed heavy and difficult to bear, but soon, as they continued to carry the burden and to fold the wings over their hearts, the wings grew attached to their little bodies. They quickly discovered how to use them and were lifted by the wings high into the air.
The weights had become wings.”
Our burdens can become wings. The things that threaten to keep us tethered to the ground will turn our souls and our sights heavenwards if we let them.
Our traumas can help us to fix our eyes, not on the seen tragedies of our experience, but on the unseen hope of God.
If we trust that God is the God of the weights and our wings, he can do something amazing with the work of our hands, the fruit of our lives.
We have the hands of women who have done the work to heal.
Me and my mom
How have you discovered a connection with your family—in a new way, perhaps?
Have you experienced God in a new way through your experience of shared trauma with a loved one?
And this…
Join my mom and I tomorrow live on Zoom for the first Circle of Chairs Monthly Gathering for Subscribers. This month is for anyone (soon these meet-ups will only be for paid subscribers). 8:00pm EST.
Here is the info to join:
Caroline Beidler, MSW is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84471215598
Meeting ID: 844 7121 5598
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Cowman, L.B. Streams in the Desert. Zondervan, 1997.