A Lesson From Tolling Bells

A Lesson From Tolling Bells

I was in the park with my daughters this week when the courthouse bells chimed, announcing that it was twelve o’ clock. My heart constricted with a strange longing, and though I at first had no idea why, I soon understood.

In college, my ears were always tuned for the sound of the recorded chapel bells, heralding the fact that I had ten minutes to get to class, as I hustled across the viaduct connecting the residential to the academic portion of campus.

The morning sun would slant through the autumnal foliage clinging to the few old trees, which hadn’t been uprooted for the perennial construction, and cast a treasury of gold-toned coins across the sidewalk. The roots from those same trees slightly buckled the cement, so that you had to pay attention to your steps or else you—and your books—would go flying.

Those four years I lived in the mountains of Kentucky, absorbing and dissecting words and concepts taught to me by wonderful professors (who were all the more wondrous for their eccentricities), were some of the best of my life.

Therefore, seven years later, the sound of those recorded bells, tolling from a Wisconsin courthouse’s belfry, made me long to revisit a season already past rather than embrace the season I was in.

Before that moment, my spirit was effervescent with gratitude. My daughters—three-and-a-half and one—were both healthy and happy, laughing and kicking their feet as their fine hair fluttered and their starfish fingers grasped to clutch each other as their bodies passed in their separate swings.

Before that moment, I did not want to be anywhere else but there–in the park–and then that moment was stolen from me by the tolling bells. I fought to get it back, and I did, but for the next few days I paid attention to those metaphorical “tolling bells” that whisked me away from my present joy.

A picture posted on Facebook made me long to be in Dallas at a book event hosted by my publisher: an event which I turned down mostly because I didn’t feel released to leave my little family after our journey this past year. And then another picture (can you see a pattern?) made me long to be in Raleigh for another book event with my sisters from Southern Belle View.

(Um, Jolina? You cannot be in two places at once.)

The past year and a half, I have felt led to a quiet season. This could be out of fear that something will happen to my family if I leave them, or because God is simply teaching me to be content with being still in order to show me that dissatisfaction is at the crux of every human fault–exemplified from Adam and Eve to a Wisconsin stay-at-home mom.

Maybe it’s a mixture of both. But one thing I know for sure: I am not very good at quiet.

Quiet–in my mind, the equivalent of missing out–takes me back to the days when I was the only girl in a neighborhood full of rough-and-tumble boys, pedaling, pedaling—my hands braced on the shiny bike handles, my Velcro sneakers a whir of blue and pink—as I struggled to keep up with the cyclone of dust marking their path down those summer-scorched dirt roads.

As always (because, again, I’m not good at quiet), I told my husband about my struggle this week: at being torn between past and present, present and future, when I know one day I’m going to look back on these days—yes, even the ones when my girls are both crying because the couch supposedly “bit” the eldest and the youngest tripped on her skirt while crawling, and and they are patting each other with pasta-sauce hands and crying some more out of dramatic sympathy—and I will look back on these wild, simple days and see them as golden.

“I don’t want to know that these days are some of the best of my life only once they’re gone.”

My husband smiled. “You won’t,” he promised. “You already do.”

I looked down and wiped the countertop. “I do,” I murmured, eyes stinging. “I do.”

The next day–the day of the book event in Dallas and the book event in Raleigh–I helped my eldest daughter lead out a calf at the county fair.

She held onto my hand, refusing to let go, and watched my eyes as I helped her introduce herself and tell the MC her favorite thing about the event (ice-cream). Watching those brown eyes locked on mine–searching for strength and encouragement–my whirring heart stilled, and I found myself fully embracing this season that is a celebration of everyday motherhood . . . of quiet journeys . . . of the unassuming beauty of us.

Have you ever felt led to a “quiet” season? Did you embrace it willingly or struggle with it as I do?