Overflow

It can happen at any time

“Just once, I don’t want someone to compliment me on my art, or my behavior, or being put together. Just once I want someone who isn’t my mom to tell me that I’m pretty!”

Her words rang back to me as I scooped buckets of water out of the toilet, the defeated plunger tossed on its side next to my feet. I knew exactly what she meant. Replace “art” with “strength,” “behavior” with “resilience,” “put together” with “brave.” Where was the allowance for softness and appreciation for just existing?

It was just after 11:00pm when we all three walked down the hallway to retreat to our rooms for the evening. Make sure one child takes their medicine, give one of the cats her nightly treat, make sure there are no dirty dishes left in the sink and check the faucet for dripping. My frustration wasn’t that the toilet was clogged. These things happen. No one would confess to knowing who did it or when it happened. The thing is, we live in the middle of a cornfield where no store within a reasonable drive is open 24 hours, or even until midnight. Where was Meijer when you needed it? Not in Iowa! Had I known even 20 minutes earlier, I could have rushed down to Walmart to get a snake. I tried to calm my children, both of whom felt awful, and reminded them to stay solution focused; that was the only thing that mattered in this moment.

I scoured the internet for ideas. We didn’t have any wire hangers. There was a lot we didn’t have that someone who had lived in the same home for a few years might have lying around. We were in our fourth home in as many years, with another move coming up as soon as the school year ended. Our trio embraces the idea that “Life is an adventure!” It’s the happiest way to view the circumstances.

While I stood in a half-inch of water, my mind overflowed with the events of the last week. More colleges and universities announced cuts to the arts and humanities. I hold the unpopular opinion that the institutions making these cuts should have made them a decade earlier. If the arts are near a chopping block, chances are high that the quality of the degree that was offered was not adequate, and the students were not graduating with the skillset needed to be competitive in their fields. The debt taken out for these degrees is astronomical. At what point do we stop handing certificates over in the name of keeping business?

A beloved religious world-leader, Pope Francis, died on Easter Monday. People are being deported from the United States in alarming ways, and our economy seems to be operating on Monopoly money. I think briefly of my eye appointment earlier that day. Nearly $200 for less than twenty minutes, when last year I had paid only about $110. While I was waiting, Newsweek reached out to me about a TikTok I had made a few days earlier regarding a substitute teaching assignment I had talked about. I declined to be interviewed or give them rights to the video. A faded rainbow peeped out through the thinning of a heavy rain cloud on the way home from grocery shopping.

And then there was the situation at the college I was let go from a week before Christmas. The president of that institution, a vibrant man of 54, unexpectedly passed away in the residence provided on campus. It is alluded to in his public obituary that he took his own life. So much is going on in this sleepy cornfield. To be aware and live in today’s world is to know that any one of us is capable of overflowing at any time. The solution is kindness, and yet I find at many turns people are lashing out and using cruelty as a coping mechanism. Or maybe they were always cruel and lost the ability to mask it.

The sky this morning, before the sun came up, was a smile. Venus and Saturn lined up just so above the sliver of moon. If a rainbow is God’s promise, maybe this smile is sent as a comfort from heaven. I see you. You’re beautiful.

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