Shedding Our Papier-mâché Skins

Shedding Our Papier-mâché Skins

I scooted over, to make room for my daughters on the bench, and my sandals brushed black, orthopedic shoes. I glanced to the right and saw the disabled man, slumped in the chair, with a pair of dark sunglasses and his grizzled mouth hanging slack. My heart swelled with this strange, maternal tenderness as I watched him sleeping there. He was as much someone’s child as my own children, sitting on my left with their matching pink and purple sneakers swinging to the storyteller’s beat.

Inside that man’s broken body lodged a soul, as perfect as anyone’s. Behind the storyteller, her beading earrings swaying with her movements, stood a papier-mâché tree, and its brown branches appeared to disappear into the white drop-down ceiling. I looked at that synthetic tree and saw an image, but I wasn’t sure what. Eyes unfocused, I continued staring, and then I looked back over at the man.

I then understood that our bodies are as synthetic as that papier-mâché tree. The true tree—the true life everlasting—is what’s lodged in our souls. A root system, branches with leaves, all of these things, which will never die, be struck down, balled up, or maimed.

I was still contemplating this viewpoint as I sat on the bench in the park next to the library, divvying out my daughters’ picnic lunch. I noticed a woman in a baseball cap playing with her daughter. I loved watching them—the mom’s zeal as she made her daughter laugh, and her daughter’s overjoyed response; the chlorinated foam spilling from the fountain’s giant copper bowl catching them both off-guard, and the sun on water dappling everything in iridescent light.

My four-year-old, Miss A, too eager to play to eat, got up from the bench and walked barefoot toward the fountain. The woman noticed my daughter and came over to say hello.

I recognized her once I saw a close-up of her face beneath the cap. Two weeks earlier, her two daughters had taken a gymnastics class with mine, but while this woman’s daughters twirled and balanced in their leotards, Miss A ended up with her sweaty hands pressed against the glass separating the lobby from the gym. Crocodile tears rolled down her cheeks as she begged me to come inside.

The mom of the two daughters told me Miss A would be okay. That I just needed to push her. So I sat, like the second-born, people-pleaser I am, but then Miss A didn’t stop crying. I jumped up and went into the gym. That night, Miss A sobbed from leg pains so severe, my husband and I had to rub her knees until nearly 1 a.m.

The woman and I spoke of this experience. She offered solutions for the leg pains and my daughter’s shyness, but in my pride, my hackles rose. I did not want to accept advice from someone whose maternal journey appeared so different from mine.

I understand now that this mother was simply trying to help, but once she left—with her happy, towel-wrapped three-year-old—I put an arm around each of my wet daughters and felt like a failure.

And then I remembered the lesson God taught me less than an hour ago. As a wife and mother, I too often focus on papier-mâché trees. I nag at my husband to stay hydrated, because I don’t want him to have heat stroke, but also because it makes me think I can keep him with me forever; my two-year-old lifted up her shirt the other day, and I shuddered to see the blue veins beneath her belly’s fragile globe; my four-year-old sometimes struggles in ways I do not understand, and I don’t know how to help.

But not one person on this planet is going to last forever. Our souls will. I am not sure what they look like now, or what they will look like once they are separated from our broken bodies’ papier-mâché casings. And yet, these past few years have revealed enough about life and death that I truly believe life beyond exists, and that sometimes our society is so focused on maintaining our papier-mâché bodies, and getting the most out of our papier-mâché minds, that we lose sight of the greater, internal picture.

That disabled man, asleep during story time, will one day be whole. The chiropractor, with the fear of his aneurysm awakening, will one day be whole. One day, I won’t have to overcome the fear about losing those closest to me. One day, I won’t have to sit on the bathroom floor at 11 p.m., trying to use Google as a poor medium to fix everything.

But then, last night, I had a moment when the soul inhabiting my broken body met my daughter’s perfect soul. After two days of her not being herself, after two days of me and my husband about to pull our hair out, I sat on the lip of the tub as the water poured and held my daughter against my chest. I held her and prayed into her ear.

She stayed still in my arms, listening to every word, and I could feel my soul touching hers. I knew—without a shadow of doubt—that one day we will shed our papier-mâché skins and become real.

Have you ever thought about life beyond our temporal bodies?