The Invisible Thread
What, if anything, is strong enough to hold a family together for a lifetime?
My oldest had been counting down the days until October for months, eagerly awaiting the day the neighbors would finally put up their Halloween decorations. Our neighbors are known to go big on Halloween decor: one family strings a giant spiderweb from their roof to their front door, another positions skeletons strategically all over their front lawn, and yet another hangs ghosts in the bare limbs of their massive maple. It’s a Halloween-loving kindergartner’s dream come true.
One afternoon, just a few days before the decorations would go up left and right, I call my daughter down from her room during rest time and ask her in a whisper-voice so as not to wake the napping toddler: “Do you want to go shopping for Halloween decorations with me?”1
Her eyes grow wide. “Wait…for real?! For our house?” she asks, her voice rising to a squeal.
I nod.
She jumps in the air: “Yes! Yes!! Yes!!!”
I had never thought much of Halloween decorations before. They always seemed like they were for people who were super into the holiday, or perhaps super into seasonal decorating in general, and neither of those things described me.
Fast forward to parenting a Halloween-obsessed kindergartner and suddenly all I can think about is what my beloved therapist Judy told me eight years ago: “Children can’t obtain a sense of who they truly are and what they love unless they have it mirrored back to them.”
So that is how I find myself in the aisles of Target with my five-year-old—me holding up bags of candy eyeballs, her shrieking at the smiling skeletons lining the shelves, both of us cracking up at the ridiculous pizza costume for grown-ups.
“Kid, I love how much you love Halloween.”
I say it because of Judy. I say it because I mean it. I say it because of what I hope to be for my children: a good mirror.
Most summer weekends growing up, I sat around a large table at the family cabin, shoulder-to-shoulder with cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and my own siblings and parents.
For all of my formative years, I listened to many voices around this table—my own included—paint the world in broad, black-and-white brushstrokes: Politics are like this. God is like that. The LGBTQ+ community is like this. People of Color are like that. We dress this way / wear our makeup like this / eat this kind of food / raise our children like this / partake in these traditions / do not bother with these worldly things.2
For almost two decades, whenever I pulled up a chair at this table, I felt some kind of belonging, some kind of relief knowing I was “in” and not “out”. But over time, a tiny seed of doubt sprouted in the back of my mind; a vague impression that the lines drawn were too permanent, the otherness of those different than us too severe. While there was a kind of security to be found in this the-world-is-simple, we-belong-because-we-are-all-the-same kind of family system, it was fragile and more breakable than I could understand.3
I used to believe I’d be sitting around that table for the rest of my life, bringing my husband to that table, squeezing our children in around that table—until the day I could no longer ignore how I would never be able to bring my whole self to that table.
How do you choose whether to continue becoming your own person—with your own convictions and passions and ways of living—or to remain a good ghost in order to belong? How long can you swallow all the things you want to say, but can’t? How long can you abandon your own self?
I will never forget the moment when I felt the puzzle pieces click into place inside myself, when I floated up to the ceiling and watched everything from outside of my body, when I finally realized how some of my deepest hurts were not specific to one person, but were generations in the making, when I realized that we were all a part of this broken family system.
And so, Memorial Day weekend, one week before our first anniversary, my husband threw our bags in the trunk of our beat-up Buick, and we left—him with a hand on my knee, pressing his lips together in a tight line, me punching the dashboard and screaming at the cornfields and the cows until I couldn’t scream anymore.
Feeling unheard and unseen by the people who are supposed to know you and love you the most is a specific kind of crazy-making hell. Being the first person to leave the family system that helped raise you is another.
Two days later, I drove from work to meet Judy for the first time. I don’t remember everything, but I remember the soft spaces between her words. I remember the bowl of Starbursts and the painting of the wild horses running so fast, their colors blurring together. I remember wanting to be one of those horses, and when she asked me what she could help with, I remember finally crumbling on her couch and asking her to please, please help me learn how to do things differently for my own someday-children.
Eight years later, I have never been more aware that I am not the hero of this story, and never will be. There are ways in which I will certainly pass on some of this generational trauma to my own girls. Even now, I feel the weight of carrying all that remains raw and unhealed.
Eight years later, I still have regrets about our last day at the cabin. I regret yelling. I regret neglecting to describe how this moment had been years in the making. I regret leaving without saying goodbye to my little cousins. I regret the loving relationships that I left behind in the mess. I regret trying to change the things that were unchangeable. Mostly, if I’m being honest, I regret not leaving sooner.
But eight years later, I am mostly—cautiously, tentatively—proud. I chose to be brave. I chose to go first. I chose to give myself, my husband, and our future children space to heal and work toward safety and belonging.
I chose to, God help me, work to lead my family to a different kind of table.
Sure, this table has plenty of its own imperfections, but it’s mine. No, it’s ours—mine, my husband’s, my children’s—and I don’t think I’ve ever been so grateful for anything in my life.
I stand under the pine tree, eyes closed tight behind my fingers, counting.
“…6, 7, 8, 9, 10! Ready or not, here I come!" I shout.
I scan our small backyard and notice one pink tennis shoe peeking out from behind the raised beds, glittering in the sun.
“I found you!” I say, running to scoop up my daughter as she dissolves into a fit of giggles, a pretzel of long limbs twisted in my arms.
Later, I will fall asleep thinking about how this, this is the God I have come to trust as an adult. A God who did not ask me to come out of hiding or to come looking for Him. A God who came to find me only because He delights in me. A God who still comes to find me every minute of every day.
This is what loving parents do, isn’t it? Seek out their child, no matter how far away they hide, no matter how many times they run away.
Even the youngest children carry this longing deep in their bones: the joy and the thrill of being found, known, held.
Mary Oliver begins one of her most famous poems with these lines: “You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.”
I think about these words when I wake up in the morning and when I go to church, when I am kneeling on the kitchen floor to speak with my children, when I look in the mirror before bed.
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to be good.
I say it to the girl inside me who believed that if she was good enough to ask, then Jesus would save her. And if she was good enough to ask to be saved, then she must also be good enough to live a life worthy of being saved, to give up her own will and sufficiently follow His, to be “walking closely with the Lord” as much as possible.
But who can actually accomplish this kind of “good, Christian living”? How do we ever know if we’re living a life worthy of being saved? What are we supposed to be measuring? And what about the many, many people who are measuring differently than we are? How do we know if we’ve done a good enough job giving up our own wills? How do we know if we’re walking closely enough with Him?
Listen, I get it. If we really do believe that Jesus is not asking us to be good…well, then we do lose some things. We lose any perceived certainty of who’s “in” and who’s “out”. We lose the privilege of thinking highly of our good, moral lives. We lose our propensity for using the Bible as a rulebook to lord over others and to prop ourselves up.
We lose a lot of what we thought we knew, but we gain everything. A softer soul. A more tender heart. An understanding of what it truly means to belong just because we’re loved. When we finally let go of the religion of being “good” and demanding the same from others, we’re finally, finally free to welcome others into a true belonging.
Isn’t this the invisible thread? Isn’t this the only thing that can truly knit a family together for a lifetime, through decades of change and growth and tragedy and celebration?
More than shared blood, more than shared experience, more than obligation, more than a litany of shared ideologies, more than sheer effort to remain open-minded and loving, it’s welcoming our children into this kind of tangible, real belonging. It’s loving our kids fiercely because we know what it is to be loved with that kind of ferocity. It’s showing them, with our own imperfect selves, the story of a God who says: “Nothing you do or don’t do can ever make me pull away from you.”
So I will say it to my children and I will say it to myself, too, as often as I can:
You do not have to be good.
My friend Ellen gets all the credit for this idea.
And by “these worldly things” I mostly mean spaghetti straps and Democrats.
The truth is complicated, like most true things, and the truth is: I do have many, many happy memories of growing up with my mom’s family as an extension of our own. In fact, most of my childhood memories include these people whom I loved so dearly and still have love for in my heart. It’s tempting to lean into dichotomous thinking, especially if that’s how you were raised (hi, it’s me). But in the end, two things can be true: the happy memories and the unraveling, the loving and the leaving.
Photo by Mel Poole on Unsplash
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Thank you for writing this. I don't have any tattoos, but I'm thinking "you do not have to be good" would be a good place to start.
Krista - this is so brave and vulnerable and real. Thank you for sharing!