Butterfly Chronicles Volume 18: The Messes

***I've stopped counting the weeks since September 13 - dead day. It won't change the time and distance, and I just need to stop counting.

And the butterflies have not ever stopped – since September 15, two days after the end.

Lately, the days have been a volcano of emotion erupting, subsiding, spewing again. Hard. Really hard. And I had nothing to write about. Nothing to say even praying to say something, to let some of the hard out.

We are leaving a life we lived for 13 years. Zach’s death has changed me and every person who knows him, and God is dragging kicking and screaming me through a butterfly metamorphosis. Before his death, I plodded along a caterpillar. At his death, I died, cocooned in shock and denial, lost in time, in a dark hateful hurt. Now, the struggle to survive, open wings, and flutter, and maybe even fly.

Julie Andrews has her Maria “a few of my favorite things” list. The caterpillar me lists a few of my un-favorite things.

Un-favorite - Regularly used dental floss – white, green, mint flavored, dangles, tentacles draped over wastebaskets, coiling on floors, left unnoticed by users. Mommy-like, gloved with toilet paper, there’s then my resentful retrieval and stuffing those floss snakes deeper into wastebasket caverns.

Un-favorite - Dirty socks. Sweat plastered cemented into modern art sculptures strewn across floors like Gretel’s crumbs weaving a path hither and yon. My angry fingertip stomach turning tiny fingertip grip to travel them washing machine-ward.

Un-favorite - Sunrise sunshine alights, glints off scum drenched, half scraped, dried on mystery meal soaked dishes stacked like Jenga blocks teetering in morning sinks. Me clanging and banging just short of shattering to symbolically voice my disapproval and frustration of this ever ongoing morning ritual.

Un-favorite - Grasping and pulling and pulling and grasping long flowing hair balled up stopping drains. Me, wondering and steaming over why no one else notices the water in the tub isn’t draining.

Un-favorite - The crap monster living, alive, reproducing, delivering twins, triplets, quadruplets of baby crap monsters into every crack and crevice of my car. Empty water bottles, empty Star Bucks cups, shoes caked in mud and grass, backpacks flowing out like blood dripping to floorboards, car seats disguised as library shelves. Me finally dumping the refuse on the driveway demanding the toxic waste clean-up in irritated intonations.

All these unfavorites…and so many more…The caterpillar, ungrateful, complaining, sour. Me the one with the real problem.

And I finally finish that One Thousand Gifts book. It took almost 4 months. Ripped me apart and mirrored me against God’s word, and me so coming up short. Craving, aching, searing with desire to own that thankfulness, gratefulness, Eucharisteo that she pours on the page while I continue the pronounced dissatisfaction over the messes.

Like a thunderclap lightening strike from heaven yesterday, I finally understood what God wanted me to understand from that book. Obvious. Being thankful.

For all my life I’ve been distracted, distressed, disgusted by the dropped dental floss, dirty dishes, sock trails, stuff vomit in my car, and the world’s problems, and people problems and I could keep going and going an Energizer Bunny complainer. Messes. For all my life. Complaining, begging, threatening, teaching, asking, pleading, manipulating, bargaining, motivating, demanding, for the droppers, dirty-ers, stuff leavers, sweat sock sculptors, and evil doers TO FIX THE MESSES. Yelling, whispering, cajoling, my voice echoing pick up your stuff, pick up your stuff, the maid doesn’t live here, and life has so many messes, and it’s so easy just to put things away, change. Fix it and I’m really the one needing the fixing. And the voice to no avail…the floss still drapes, the socks still trail, the dishes still dirtied rest, the car still a refuse dump, messes – everywhere home and abroad and cultural. And my voice, so ungrateful, so dissatisfied.

Then God’s delivery of the epiphany:

All of those messes mean something ultimately, infinitely important. They mean life. Grace. God’s gifts. Only a life can make a mess, or trail dirty socks, or create a dirty dish tower in a sink, or clog a drain or a freeway or a world. Only a life.

From yesterday on, from the anvil slammed into my mind, I will flutter wings to see those messes that I hated before with love and laughter and hope and thankfulness. They are life. And Zach is dead, and I’d give anything to pick up his dirty socks, clean his mud-soaked cleats, wash his dirty dishes, gather his empty water bottles from the car. And I can’t, and I realize the change God is wrenching out of me, and I am glad, thankful, fulfilled by the lives and messes and God’s love that I can share in the messes.

Perspective is everything.

I won’t stop teaching or asking or pleading for all that junk to be cleaned, cleared, put away, fixed. But my voice will resonate differently. That voice, thankful that I can ask with thanks, talk with thanks, teach with thanks, thankful to watch the undoing of messes happen, and thankful always that the messes are there to confirm and reaffirm the lives that left those messes there. They are alive. They are the gifts. The mess is just affirmation of their presence, here, now. Dear God, how did I miss this, and please don’t let me miss it anymore. And thank you for showing me now. Messes come from the living. And life means there’s still grace time for John 3:16 in whatever mess there is.

A while ago, I got a massage gift. It was before the epiphany that “mess means life” manifested itself in my brain. The masseuse prodded and poked and asked me why my neck and back and body were so full of knots. “Stressful job?”

“No.” Silence as I consider and craft the words to explain. Finally, “Stressful life.”

“Lots of computer time?” she tries to unravel my meaning.

My lips tremble. “No.” Can I say it out loud without sobbing, without drowning in snot and tears? Eek it out in sucking breaths, “My son decided to take his own life in September.”

Heavy, hanging stillness, then her quiet soothing, “I’m sorry.”

Slowly, voice shaky, low, “The knots are from packing and trying to fix a house, and sell a house, and find a house, and buy a house, and move forward from the place where my son is dead.” A pause fills the air. I think about knots from too much computer time. Again, with quivering lips, tear puddles pushing and pushing relentless against eyelashes clamped closed, I whisper, “I wish they were, the knots, from the computer.” And I think and wish, if only they were from the computer…

I am so ungrateful. Forgetting to live in the moment, in the messes, in the lives, in the now. But I am and will learn to give thanks for those messes which are only born from the living. Lives can be messy, but God is in those lives he has graced with another day and another, and still another. And even, He is there, in the mess of a life ended. Life means there’s hope - for God, for salvation, for fixing messes. And He is also in the mess He allowed Zach to make. No "Jonah" fish to rescue our man-child. Zach dead, a mess, then flying to heaven on butterfly wings landing in golden nectar, the arms of God, and me thankful for that.

And grace is that God will give me the chance to unfurl my butterfly wings, give me the chance to take flight, and give me the choice to soar right in the middle of all these messes. And maybe make a difference in some of them?

It’s all about perspective.

My new normal favorite things: sweaty socks, dirty dishes, a car full of refuse and the littering of lives being lived, but my most favorite thing, my best favorite thing - the lives of those who make the messes. Messes come from the living. And I am learning to be thankful. Even in the midst of the hardest messes. God is a fixer of messes. Be used in His fixing.