Warm

 We knew of people who had a heater. These fairy tales were always some people somewhere who owned a house, and they had always lived in it. They lived there before, they continued to live there, it was always theirs, there was a permanence that rooted them to the community, to the places around them, to their ways and to their family traditions. And those kinds of people, they; not us, they would have a heater. 

This heater would be stored in some area of their home, or maybe it was a part of their living room and bedrooms, or it was even installed under their luxury tile that was polished and shone in the summertime, its shiny coolness not giving away its duality and perfect function for the cold months ahead. 

Those people had warm beds, piles of blankets, more than one pillow. They also wore huge oversized coats, to go over their school blazers in the car for early in the mornings, or they had hidden soft vests under their school shirts, a secret defiance to the cold, that only they knew about or that we saw when they changed in the locker rooms before P.E. 

We had a polar vortex in the US two weeks ago, it even affected Texas. We were suddenly plunged into these arctic temperatures, the wind moved sideways laden with frosty particles, you could physically see the depth of the cold when you opened up the door: looked like sideways moving fronds of frozen fog close to the ground. 

Inside this house we had a heater. It is a central heater, attached to a thermostat, a subconscious useful tool that automates the comfort of your home, lest you feel suddenly chilled after your shower, that level of appropriate warmth is already preselected and purchased. The point is to ward off any recollection to when the cold made you feel less than. 

Despite all the movement away from where we began, and those people that we were, and the people that we vowed to now become; all it took was a dip in the atmospheric temperatures for the recollection of how things actually were when we were children to sashay into my consciousness, so that I may be partially having a conversation with my husband now before me, but viscerally, internally, my throat is clenched by this suffocating feeling of despair and desperation that we felt as children in our household in the winter. 

When I was younger, I would say about 7 or 8, before my brother was born, we had bunk beds. I remember my mom allowed me to make a sandwich with a large fluffy blanket folded and then I would have a layer beneath me and a layer on top, and then my duvet. This was when things were not as desperate. We had full terry cloth (not fleece, we didn't really have fleece anything in South Africa) long sleeved and long legged pajamas when we were little. Mom was into sewing and she made our curtains and duvets and she depicted a girl with a bonnet on her head in brown with tiny flowers. I later on identified her on Facebook as Holly Hobby. We had no idea who she was, but our mom expertly appliqued her to our belongings in our bedroom. 

There were hints of being threadbare, for example one memory is how mom had to start her brown Toyota Corolla. She had a piece of metal inside of a cloth and she opened the bonnet of the car and pressed something to start the car. I have no idea what she was doing. She would often cry and say she wished she had her parents because life was so hard all on her own. 

Later on is when the desperation really sank in. Maybe it had always been there, but my awareness of it kicked in. My brother was born when I was 9 and by the time I was 11, mom worked nights and we had this giant toddler baby who wouldn't sleep without being rocked and sang to and shushed. He fought sleep and we fought to get him to sleep. I would wake first to make sure that I could get to school on time. But we were often late, mom barely coming back from her shift at the hospital, and dad having to drive us far to get to school in the slow morning traffic. 

If you were late you had to walk through the front office and I knew that dad hadn't paid the school fees. I just wanted to crawl under a rock and hide there. I felt like everyone knew that we hadn't the money and didn't deserve to be there. 

There are now what I realize are normal purchases that a family needs to make to ensure cleanliness and comfort of the family. Those purchases include sheets, pillows, blankets. As a mom of two teens, I am bereft if I see their rooms in a mess or if I see a pillow without a pillow case on it, or if I see my child is cold. I can 100% ensure you, that there were no $8 fleece blankets from Walmart given to us a gifts when we were children. There were no new pillows being bought. A pillow was almost something you had to scrounge up as we all had one, at the most two, flat, old and definitely dirty pillows. That was it. The linens were washed and ironed so many times that our feet went through the bottom of the sheets. 

And then one day, my dad and I want to say my brother, when he was younger, (because we all hopped into my parents' bed to keep warm or for a snuggle after we hadn't seen my mom for 14+ hours consistently as she worked so frequently, put their feet through the bottom of a bright orange and threadbare thermal blanket that had been the mainstay of our families existence. 

This blanket in tatters just tore my heart into a thousand shreds. It was butternut yellow, and in many ways the frayed fronds of blanket were like the fibers of a gourd as you scrape out its seeds and pith. I felt scraped and shredded, and useless, and beyond repair, the same state as the blanket. Mom said the blanket was from her Harare days, that is how old it was, but it was the only additional source of warmth tucked into their tiny full sized marriage bed, underneath their empty down duvet (it used to be full in 1977 when they got married, but fast forward 20+ years and it too was on its' last legs). 

So given our climate, of not being able to afford basic things that bring us warmth, we did not have a heater. I knew of people who had a heater, but my dad had always told us stories of how dangerous they are. One entire family had been killed in Northwold when their gas heater exploded and because of the burglar bars on their windows, they could not escape. 

I think because of these stories, and these feelings, I can not stand to walk into a house where the heat is just on because it is 65 degrees outside. I can not stand to be a part of artificial heating without the severe cognitive onslaught that should be considered before you put your heat on. Prior to wanting to feel warm, I have to question myself "am I really cold?", "could a blanket suffice?", "are you just being a sissy?", "did you check the weather in Fahrenheit and in Celsius just to make sure that it truly is a cold temperature and you're not just trying to willy-nilly waste the energy that you will have to pay for because nothing is free and you can not waste money because it is a cardinal sin and your mother lived without heat, so should you?". 

The electric automated furnace clicks on and I am bereft, I am panic stricken by feelings that I am doing something wrong, just by having heat. I have similar issues with running a lot of water in a bath or hearing the shower running for an extended period, I get a lump in my throat and my pulse races. I also do not know how to dress, or what to buy because I am ill prepared for the cold, so then over compensate in ways that I don't quite understand. For instance, I have beautiful cotton vests in my drawer that I will never wear, because I do not like the feeling of them against my skin. But I own them. They are there and they are mine. As if somehow by owning them I will be absolved of being one of those worthless cold children whose story doesn't even really matter because Johannesburg doesn't really get that cold. 

By the time that you do know, it will be irrelevant.

 I am finally at that peace in my life where I can reflect on time that has passed, things that no longer matter, and all the parts that have got away. 

My girls are now 15 and 11. We're living in a new space, desert landscapes, painted skies, warm breezes that carry bats chirping as they locate their next meals suspended in a forever sky. We lay our heads back in our Adirondack chairs on the back porch and lament on how it came to be that we live in this space. My youngest bounces on the trampolines, springs squawking on each rebound, her giant lady feet putting the webbing through its paces. 

I booked us a getaway with our Bear, hes a mountain man, loves to fish and build fires, solo camp in a hammock in the mountains in January. We're going to Big Bend National Park for Christmas, which I get is a little unorthodox. But we're hardly traditional, so I don't get what all the fuss is about. We will get to camp at the base of the Chisos mountain range and try to keep our food away from the black bear and mountain lion that naturally occur in the area. 

My girls both do not want to go. I am hurt by this. I know it is natural in their state of being that they become this way, that their friends are way more important than we are, that they need to push us away to make space in their lives for the women that they are to become. But I hang on the threads of memories when my own mother was so energetic, so alive, and so passionate. I want them to remember me too at this time in my life, when everything feels right. 

I feel awakened by so many hard lessons, a life of hard living, a finishing school of hard knocks. That I want to live today, with my girls and our Bear, and be free on top of a mountain in the Chihuahuan desert, to be severed from humanity by lack of wifi and cell signal, so that we're forced to look into each others' eyes and see each other for exactly what we are. 

We're family. And we made it this far. 

My daughters' folly is that they think of nothing but themselves. They are Freud's Id personified, they seek only their own pleasure, they think of themselves first, then of others. And I think about myself at that age, I was exactly the same. I honestly feel like I was 24 and a mother myself before I had any empathy or true compassion for what my mom sacrificed to make my life what it was. I think they will get there in time. I just pray that they get to have us and we get to be with them longer than I had with my mom. I was not ready to see her go. 

Mommy, I am going to live with you forever.

My sweet pea. All of eight years old. The girl who watches so many YouTube tutorials she is full of a fantastical amount of information, some useful, some not so much. She told me how she is going to live with me forever. I think she first started telling me this when she was five and I honestly paid no attention to it, just thinking it was the desperate pleas of childhood to prove some type of rank over the loyalty of her sister. Her sister (12) claims she is going to live in Japan. So then that leaves a lot of time and space for the little one to imagine how easy and cushy her life would be if her big sister were gone.

Firstly the little always wants sleep overs in my bed. Always not an easy thing to accomplish because I am a very light sleeper, I have sleep anxiety related to going to school, studying finance and quantitative management and the like, being able to still go to work and to not sleep through my alarm clock, and the like. Then my boyfriend sleeps over. No room in the bed for three. And thirdly, even though she is the cutest cuddle monster around, she sleeps dead in the foetal position, barely moving, she is a chatterbox and will keep me up all night until she sleeps.

So her plans involving staying with me forever include:
1) changing her sisters' bedroom into a bathroom
2) installing a slide to the basement
3) installing a swimming pool in the basement
4) installing a switch in the slide so we could go downstairs or to the pool, you can choose.
5) not letting her sister use the slide.

It literally only occurred to me how she has been saying she is going to live with me forever since we got divorced in 2015. We separated in 2014. I wonder if she thinks I am going to pack her things up and send her away.

Or I wonder if this is just normal kid behavior. I too wanted to live with my mom forever. I had zero plans to move out :)

Divorced Easter

My neighbours asked me what my plans were for Easter. I wasn't exactly able to respond to them. I just brushed it off, vaguely stating "meh, divorced holidays" and then we were distracted and the topic was quickly forgotten. Like most parents with young kids, things are forgotten, only to come steal your thoughts when you should be doing something else, like sleeping or doing work.

A divorced Easter. What is the big deal about Easter? I mean its just chocolate bunnies and plastic eggs that I must not forget to send in to school. correct? Or is it the whole redemption thing, Jesus giving the greatest gift he could give, laying down His perfectly clean life, to save us dirty sinners from an eternity of gnashing teeth.

Divorced Easter is a time when you're furiously driving down the highway to send one kid here, one kid there, to meet ex in laws for this, to spend five minutes here with another family member, to go and pick everyone up again. It is where you let bygones be bygones. Where new traditions are formed.

On the front steps of my horizon are new beginnings, new forays, a new family, a new life. I will be someone else's wife. On the back steps of my memories are my most precious moments, moving to America,  having my girls, buying this house that I inherited in the divorce (also symbolically this is our 10th year in the house this month, my twelve year old was just a tot when we moved in), all soured by the presence of a broken marriage, a family torn apart, visitors seeing family members instead of the organic innate family we once had, lives forever changed.

Some have said, my whole life, that I live too much in the past. My whole head is a jumble of things that are and things that were. I seek symbolism in things that have passed, things that can be, things that are. My life, a whirl of opportunities and memories.

Divorced Easter. I buy my ex husband a bag of goodies from his girls. They will pen their names in a card and deliver it to a man who once lived here.

Divorced parents, vying for influence, vying for their five minutes worth. Children growing up quicker than weeds. The time we have with them is the only thing that matters.

I drive to gym and my head is just a jumble. I cant think much anymore. I walk in and there is my friend, Mr. Zebra Print Leggings. He greets me, we meet before his workout. We speak briefly about the amputee guy at the gym and how incredible he is in his work outs. Then he says to me out of the blue (we hadn't even been talking about this) "I have been divorced you know. " (I didn't know that). He said "I wont tell you it gets any easier, but I wont tell you it gets any worse". He has kind eyes.

Later on we sit on our Keisers, he is three bikes down. I see him on the treadmill as I leave.

Chocolate milk and orange juice.

We're at a theme park in Atlanta on Saturday, riding the rollercoasters. My seven year old is thoroughly done with the big ones, and so am I. My eldest is off with her friends. My seven year old sees a face painter and before you know it, she is getting turned into a "pink kitty" for a mere $20. My boyfriends' face says he does and he doesn't understand why I would pay $20 for some park employee to smear communal makeup all over my daughters' face, when I could more than likely buy some decent quality face paint to take home for $5 at Walmart. But he doesn't say anything. He just watches. His hands go in his pocket. He adjust his sight to something further away in the distance. And I hand over the $20 to the makeup artist and then marvel at how much my youngest does indeed look like a pink kitten. I tell her she is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. Not a word is ever said about him thinking it is a waste of money, because he doesn't operate like that. Firstly it is my money, it is my daughter, and then when it comes to childhood, he is aware and supportive of the fact that memories are made up of silly actions like that day at the park. The $20 is inconsequential.

My seven year old was sick this week and the school nurse phoned, she said she hadn't seen her in a long time, possibly since the time she was in Kindergarten. She is now in second grade. I was thinking about why she would have to go and see the nurse so many times when she was in kindergarten. I wanted to know the significance of that time. My girls have both been really healthy. We don't get the flu and we've had strep a handful of times.  But they have both lived through some pretty hairy and scary times, times you would never intentionally push on your kids: In kindergarten her dad and I were divorced. I remember I would get blue slips of paper in her backpack during that time saying she had been to the nurse for a cough drop. I remember feeling appreciative of all of the ancillary people during that time who had helped her, been kind to her and her sister, during the time when her home had become a war zone.

Realizing this yesterday about the fact that the nurse hadn't seen her since kindergarten, I said to my seven year old, "do you know that you used to visit the nurse a lot when you were in Kindergarten because that is when mommy and daddy got divorced". And she said to me "no mommy, you got divorced in pre-K". So I didn't argue the time line then because I was driving and I wasn't sure. She then went on to tell me "but that is okay, because mommy, you and daddy were like chocolate milk and orange juice. You can love chocolate milk on itself and you can love orange juice on itself but its not so good if you mix it together.".

verbatim.

verbatim the words that the counseling session for divorced parents taught us to explain to our children that it is okay for the children to love each parent and to not be ashamed or to feel bad for choosing to love one parent or another.

verbatim the words that I came home and filled their heads with when I told them their daddy was going away.

verbatim the phrases that I told them, that they must have repeated to themselves, when they couldn't sleep or their worries kept them up at night.

So she said to me "I cant remember before I was three. That was too long ago. But I remember you and daddy used to fight all the time." (that I didn't remember, I thought our household was peaceful?)... And then she said "But that was a long time ago.". So I asked her, how about now, how is your house now? And she said "its fine now".

Sitting here this morning, I figure out the time line, back in 2014, when I filed for divorce, she was indeed in pre-k.

As a divorced parent you live with knowing you caused your children the greatest hurt. But you cannot parent from guilt. You have to somehow still be the authority that they need, the tough guy, the one who insists on certain standards, the one who sets the tone for the household to thrive.

But you still have to be the softy, the one who is the maker of dreams come true... The person who overpays for face painting. Some days I am more one thing than another. But they're watching everything that I do. Every action and every phrase becomes a part of who they are, how they interpret the world. Verbatim.

That girl. I loved her. I love her still.

That girl. That girl over there. Too big for her age. Body not conforming to your standards or your ideals. That girl. She is perfect. She is everything that she needs. She is everything that anyone could ever wish to be.

That girl is me. I am fiercely protective of that girl. I was there with her every time she felt less than or undeserving of being alive. I was there every time her flesh crawled with their judgment, where she felt like she could never meet their harsh standards of perfection, where she wished she could have been anyone, except the person that she was trapped in her flesh.

I love that girl. I always have. I always saw more for her. I knew she was so capable. I believed in her. I believed in me. I saw her breaking through the stereotype you formed for her. I see her being her own self.

I scroll through pages where people change their lives and they write and reflect on how they hated who they were, and they are so nasty to themselves. I never felt that way. I never felt like I was undeserving. I just struggled with finding a way to be in this world, in a world full of razor blades and harshness, its hard to be a person like me, who is hurt so easily.

Thoughts

July was an awful month. In so many ways it kept reminding me how I was inadequate: ill prepared for this life, incapable of plotting my own course in seeing it through, ridiculous in my pursuits and even that I was a terrible parent, because my daughters came home from camp with lice.

I am kind of an experiential learner, sometimes my best lessons are learnt with tears running down my face. I am that child who never understood "hot" until I had burnt my hand. Even then I would still want to poke at the fire, questioning but "why, why, why"? I say no to everything, so if I say "yes" you have to bet that I have spent a lot of time psyching myself up for the event. And when the "yes" doesnt work out the way that I want, I am dumbfounded, reeling and I begin the process of disambiguation/ rumination till the senseless/ pointless and useless makes some form of sense.

I interpret life in a way that makes zero sense to those governed purely by logic. My logical side, who comes in a close second, reminds me always why something is not a good idea, is like my sidekick holding out a helmet or knee pads saying "you might want to put these on, that could hurt". But my emotional side says I have to try it, I have to feel it, I have to be it, I have to experience it.

So I am stuck half way on a continuum of belief and disbelief, in confidence and in self doubt, in safety and in reckless abandon.

7-21-16

Send your words he said. They’re meaningful. To someone, somewhere. The strings of conflicting experiences, the non-stop chatter, they had some value. There were people who would read them and feel something. I don’t know what they would feel, but they would feel more alive than they do, in this world where everything numbs your ability to feel; your wine, your coffee, the lull of the train, it numbs you until you are senseless, defeated, and you have forgotten how to simply exist.

Send your words, he said. They are the things we wish to say, that we cannot summons up in our weariness. In the way that our bodies ache, in the way that we are forced to be so close to each other, head to armpit, I accidentally bump into you, a look in my direction is not even granted, it would be too much effort.  We are crammed into this place, the putrid stench of too many bodies, together in our bustle, yet we have nothing and no one. We’re alone and we all just can’t stand it.

I send my words, I write them for him, in the hopes that he is the one person who can understand.  I live this life of occasional agony, brief glimpses of togetherness, then huge walls of separation where I linger, mulling over everything I did wrong, trying somehow to prove my worthiness.  My pain is nothing and it is everything, it is universal and it is individual, it is everything and it is nothing. It is human.

Around me there are marriages, and dissolutions of marriage, new babies, happy families, engagements, people in my group of friends who have long term relationships, like 30 years, and I am incredulous. When did I get to the age where I had grey hair on my temples and people have known each other for 30 years? I mourn the loss of where I thought I was going, periodically throughout the week. I am jealous of people whose husbands come home from work, who eat dinner with them, who tickle the children and tousle their hair.

My own children stand before me like I am this vast source of knowledge. I want to scream that I don’t know anything, and I should barely be allowed to make choices as an adult, because obviously I choose the wrong thing. I try to smile at them, but my elder child cannot be so easily placated.  She bears worry on her face too. I try not to project unnecessary distress onto her. I remind her I am an adult therefore I have it all under control. Then I worry how I am going to keep my words to her, true.

I lie awake long nights, my head a tally of the choices I made, the reactions to those choices, and whether those choices were the correct ones based off of the outcomes. I ruminate on what I could have done better, how someone else would have used the opportunities before them for something more beneficial.  Have I wasted this opportunity?

I will send my words, I write them for him, I write them for you, I write them for me. I write these words of universal distress. In a world of endless possibilities, and free choice, how do you know that you have used every ounce of your life for the best? How do you know you are not wasting these few days between your first breath and your last?

The river

We floated down the river in inner tubes. I became separated from the group, singular in my float in the meandering current. At times my bum scraped over jagged rocks, but for the meantime I was stuck in a circular swirl, I put my head back and looked up to the heavens.

A lady from the bus on the way up to the tubing drop off point was very talkative. She kept involving herself in our conversation. Stacey said something, and the lady retorted with her own anecdote. I decided then that I liked her, possibly because she reminded me of myself, just a person who could relate to anyone, who had a good natured comment about most things, who wasn't afraid to speak up.

Stuck in the swirl the trees began to twist, from pale lime green leaves bordering a royal blue sky. The more that I swirled, the more dizzy that I became. I was already a bit dizzy. Stacey had let me drink an entire 16oz German pilsner at lunch... And I had thoroughly enjoyed it, before heading off on our tubing experience.

A voice carried across the rocky water, it was that lady from the bus. She said to her friend "You know Jeff? Well he is married. Why do I always fall in love with the married ones?". And her friend said "I do not know".

My current took me ahead of them, the lady from the bus and her friend were tethered together in their tubes, I was solitary, the current carried me ahead at times because of my singular weight, and then sometimes it held me back. I guess there was no continuity in this river, because of that it grew rather irritating.

About twenty minutes later, I found myself behind the bus lady and her friend. We were slowed by an outcropping of slippery boulders.  This time the bus lady remarked excitedly "So I found the perfect dog for me!". Her friend said "Oh where did you find it?" and the bus lady said "We'll technically the dog already has a home, it's my neighbours dog, its a Great Dane and she is beautiful".

At this point I started laughing. I said "I heard your conversation earlier about Jeff, who already has a wife. And now you're talking about your neighbours dog, who already has a home". I said to her "I think you just fall in love with things that you can not have".  Her eyes popped out of her head a bit.

I asked her if she grew bored very easily. With her mouth agape, she nodded her head.

So I lay back in my tube and I watched the sky. I was stuck in a swirl again. I went round and round again. Then, I adjusted my hat.

As we got off at the exit point, they walked past me. They bade me farewell with the forced friendliness of cautious eyes.  You know how people just don't like to be seen. It's not of course like I presume to even know her. Just like I already said, I saw myself in her.

When you pray for a tomato.

The couch is cool supple leather beneath the length of my spine and I am able to fully stretch out and point my toes. I point one toe, then the next, feeling the stretch radiate through my hamstrings and into my hips. The room is dark, only escaping light from a scant centimeter around a paper shade that covers a small window in the basement. If only summer could be permanently escaped in a subterranean lair where you needn't come out except after dark to meet your friends.

I begin to imagine how to tell the story:

My day began yesterday when I failed my statistics exam. I studied exactly the same way that I did when I got 90%. I devoted exactly the same amount of hours to the craft that is "plugging and chugging" your way through formulas that only bored Greeks or uber geeks could fathom. I have foregone most of the summer festivities, I turn down birthday party invitations, pool party invitations, BBQ invitations, facetime requests, I don't return whatsapp messages or emails. All I do is take care of the most immediate need in front of me (normally the kids), the necessity for provision for their keep (my job) and peripheral jobs that aid their quality of life (cooking, vacuuming, cleaning, laundry, dishes, brushing and washing their hair). So when I got a whopping 35% for the exam I was more than heartbroken. I felt like the wind was knocked out of me. I had all the things that people have said about the American education system floating around in my head "oh you know in America they just give you a degree" (yes the education system is a lot different, and very forgiving, but you actually do more homework and participate more here), "American college is so easy anyone can do it" (actually yes anyone can get a liberal arts degree, the degrees that you can actually use that are worth their parchment that they are printed on are harder to get), "my cousin is so dumb and he got his engineering degree, just like that, anyone can do it". And there I was staring at my 35% when I began to get tunnel vision and feel panicky. I didn't have the words to speak. I was so flat, but in my spirit I was just praying.

The professor has four exams, comprising of 25% per exam towards the total mark. So I would have to get 78% in each subsequent exam in order to get a minimum grade of 70% (which is a C) to pass the class. We all know my big sob story, I didn't do maths in high school, I taught myself high school maths at home over a period of a year, before I did university level algebra and trig. I have gone on to do accounting, economics, computer science. So I just saw this stats class as another hurdle I would just have to face and overcome. Just more than anything, the words that kept racing through my mind were "you are so stupid", and "look how smart you are now, turns out you cant do everything that you think" or "maybe you should just give up, you have your associate of science degree, why try so hard, this is too difficult".

I phoned my dad. He said don't worry, it happens, worst case scenario, you do the class again. I felt a teensy bit better. He was correct, I could just do the class again, it would mess up my GPA, but that is the definition of learning, correct, where you take something you couldn't previously do, and learn how to do it. So what if I graduate a semester later. Its not going to hurt that much. I spoke to my brother, he said this had happened to him before, and not to worry, it shouldn't mess up my GPA, I could still correct it. He suggested I email my professor. I spoke to the IT guy, who is also my friend, as he sat there at work with me upgrading our computers, and he said to me, why not email your professor. Which I ultimately did. The IT guy also read to me the psalm where He says His love never fails, it never gives up, it never runs out. The Psalm spoke about being on a ship and experiencing the highest of high peaks as the ship was catapulted through the sea, and the spirit of God calming the water, and rescuing His people because they cried out to him and because He loves them.

So I just felt flat yesterday. I felt overwhelmed. I felt like I had gone 10 rounds with the world, and my arms were tired. My mind flittered over to tomorrow's lunch, what I would eat at work, feeling like I needed to prepare my food for the next day, and I took stock of what was left in my fridge at work and my fridge at home. I realized if I had a single tomato I could make a pimento cheese and baby spinach salad and I would be satisfied and satiated and enjoy my lunch. Eating is one of my most perfect pleasures. But I was so weary I couldn't leave the comfort of my car, step out of the AC into the heat, to face the stores, plus I had the girls with me, they too were exhausted from all the shenanigans of youth.

I know I didn't pray for a tomato. But it was a request in my spirit, it was something so private, my request never formed on my lips. My heart had been openly crying to the God of the heavens, who painted the sky, who suspended the clouds on a breeze, who knew how our skins would welcome the sun.

I turned onto my street at about 6pm last night. A blonde boy walked ahead with two grocery bags of something. I knew him as my friends' son. He said "My mom sent veggies from my Nan's garden. We have squash, cucumbers....And there is even a single tomato".

In the busyness of getting the kids in the house it didn't immediately strike me of what had exactly happened. As I poured over the contents of the bags, huge yellow squash, almost plastic and unreal looking in their perfection, it suddenly dawned on me, that I was staring at the physical manifestation of a silent request to my Abba Father. It sat there like a big fat red round reminder of everything that He has said. He hears everything. He is with you. He walks with you. He loves you. You are His beloved.

And He gave me my tomato.