When Mama Can't Fix It

I raise a Hallelujah....

In the presence of my enemies.

I sit here now with tears coming to the crooks of my eyes and that song crawls into my heart.

I raise a Hallelujah...

I don't feel like raising a Hallelujah. I want to fix my boy, my joy. I want to scoop away all of the pain and scary and mire. But I can't. And instead I will raise a hallelujah because I have to.

Because my soul was sent to praise.

And I praise. Like gasping for breath after a hard sprint, there's an innate need in my soul to reach out to the one who holds me.

I praise in the midst of pain. Of sorrow. Of shattered dreams and bottles of hope that couldn't even remotely be called partially full.

I stand with my face to the wind so the air can dry my tears and I feel alone and scared. I feel this just before the familiar feeling of dispair is swept away by a God who sends the wind and heals my heart and fills my growler of hope. He sends me in again. Back to my home. Back to my family. Back to be the heart of a seemingly never ending black-hole of bleakness for a little boy becoming a man in an experience that I will never be able to understand.

And time will only tell. Will we be able to beat the anxiety that ensnares my son's heart, that uses it's black tendrils to confuse knots of uncertainty into the every day, and tentacles of fear to snuff out his breath? Will I have what it takes to weather this storm with him? Am I made of enough to even act brave for him anymore?

I sit and sob in the bathroom, on the tub I've cried on for the past 13 trips around the sun. This porcelain lip has served as my edge between solidarity and relinquishment: a place where only God has heard my guttural soul cries from. A place where only cold beneath my fingers can bring me back to the reality of this place.

I exist as a mother. A holy-being to be reckoned with when my family is terrorized. And yet, sitting here with my son's newest diagnosis of anxiety, extreme anxiety, I sit here as the epitome of oblivion. I am a vacuum, a cavern of air unable to create momentum that could manufacture any change.

I have no choice but to simply succumb. I have to raise my head to the Lord. I have to beg God to fix this and know that I can change nothing. I must raise a hallelujah.

I dry my eyes and feel the grit of the cheap up and up toilet paper on my crepey eye skin. The roughness of the world sometimes must be used to toughen us for its wherewithal. As I stand, shaky but erect, I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror. Is it really myself though? This person, with blood-shot eyes and tear stained cheeks...is this the real me? And while I feel that somehow I have lost myself, my soul feels so close to heaven when I have to hold the hand of God like I'm white-knuckling the vanity counter in order to find the strength to walk out of the bathroom once again.

I hold God's hand. I hold my pain in for my babies. I hold back my sobs. I hold a wad of cheap one-ply toilet paper in my sleeve just in case.

I raise my head high. And I raise a hallelujah. And I know heaven comes to fight for me.

For us.

For him.

I raise a hallelujah.