Year One

#WrenSylvie

By Bri Vos

March 2^nd, 2017

2016

I usually do an end of the year wrap up post but I found that difficult to do for 2016. It was a year different from any other I've experienced in the world at large, my work, my relationships, my marriage and in my own life. Then I came across an article written by Rachel Held Evans (you can read the full article here) and it said so much of what I had been grasping to describe about 2016.

It inspired me to move away from trying to do a 2016 wrap up and instead as my beautiful daughter celebrates her first birthday, I'm reflecting on and celebrating a year of Wren.

From "2016 and the Risk of birth"

Written by Rachel Held Evans

"We like to refer to the “dumpster fire” of 2016. Memes abound (my favorite: “have you tried turning 2016 off and on again?”). From what seemed like a surge in celebrity deaths, to an especially divisive, racist and misogynistic election, to what is beginning to look like a global shift toward authoritarianism and xenophobia, we have good reasons to be sad, good reasons to be deeply concerned.

"And yet, rolling around on the floor with my baby yesterday, his nose pressed against mine as he squealed with laughter, I was reminded once again that 2016 was, by far, the best year of my life.

Oh, it was the hardest year on my marriage, for sure, and on my body, my faith, and my ongoing battle against cynicism, but there is no doubt in my mind that 2016 will always be remembered as his year, the one that brought the world his first yawn, his first giggle, his first fall, his first Christmas, his first word."

"We find ourselves in these strange juxtapositions from time to time, between the stories of our lives and the stories of the world around us. Sometimes they align with a sort of poetic symmetry—the gentle rain at the funeral on September 11, the divorce papers arriving the day you get the cancer diagnosis. Other times, the contrast is jolting—the baby cooing in your arms as news of another mass shooting scrolls across the TV, the wedding on Inauguration Day, 2017.

For me, the dissonance of this strange year is compounded by the fact that motherhood turned my bleeding heart into a hemorrhage. It’s as though I’ve become porous, my skin absorbing the pain of others, particularly other mamas and babies."

"Every night, as I nurse my boy in that cozy armchair in his nursery, I think of the Syrian mama nursing her baby in a raft adrift in the Mediterranean Sea. I think of the shell-shocked boy from Aleppo. I think of how every Latino kid taunted by classmates, every soldier sent to war, every autistic kid who will lose his therapy when ACA is repealed, every black man shot by police is somebody else’s baby boy, somebody else’s most important person in the world. I still, almost every day, think of Sandy Hook.

“Compassion is the sometimes fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else's skin,” writes Frederick Buechner. “It's the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy finally for you too.”

Motherhood invited me into other people’s skin in a way I’ve never experienced before. So my joy is big and real and consuming, but also incomplete. I am overwhelmed by the conviction that every mother should be able to feed her baby like this, in safety and contentedness, and I am haunted by the reality that this is still far from the case."