My childhood was marked by long car rides. We moved around quite a bit there for a while, all the brick houses a long highway's journey to my grandparents in Mississippi. Both of my parents were born and raised there; neither desired to stay. So I grew up comfortable with road trips; back in the good old days, of course, my father would remove the back seat of our minivan completely and my mother would sit on the floor with my sister and me playing Barbies until we fell asleep, curled in a pile like the litter of kittens that would inevitably be waiting for us at Maw Maw and Paw Paw's. No one spays a barn cat.

We'd visit one set of grandparents for a few days then get back in the car for a four-hour drive to the home of the other set. It was a seamless setup until the day my little brother accidentally kicked the gear shift and flipped the car and my un-seat-belted sister broke her leg and we all said thank God it wasn't worse and my uncle put a hot pink cast on her that itched and pricked and nearly thirty years later I'm still using that story to threaten my boys into their seat belts.

Childhood memories are like turtles, like hermit crabs: touch them too abrasively and they'll disappear into their shells. You don't get to control when they come out again.

//

When my dad's parents died in my twenties I mourned the loss of people I loved but not the place. When you're young you don't need to be rooted, you think. You've got a wide world before you and who needs home? I was tied to nowhere, a product of parents who followed passion and opportunity to tread across several states. We made fun of mom for how giddy she would get on those trips back home to Mississippi. She wasn't a silly woman, but the nearer we sped the more she would giggle at things that weren't funny. My dad's sarcasm pounced on it, affectionate in his own way. It was a ritual, and we teased her every time. Four hours to go and we cheer, gas station candy bars in hand. Two hours to go and mom can't sit still. Half an hour to go and she puts on more lipstick and fluffs her hair around.

What, I wonder, will be the rituals my own children remember?

//

We laid my Paw Paw in the delta soil on Sunday. We knew it was coming: 6-8 weeks, the doctor had said, 6-8 weeks until the cancer takes him. He made it eight weeks and one day, because he's a stubborn Southern farmer and he'll last an extra day just to prove you wrong.

You think you're ready for death but you are never ready for death. Even still, even knowing that, I am surprised by the depth of my emotions. I loved him so. As a kid I would sit in his lap and listen for as long as he'd talk, hearing about cow shows and cotton and how much I looked like my mama. "She's Kay made over," he'd tell anyone who'd listen, pride dripping from his voice. I grew under the shade of his delight.

I am nearly thirty-five years old and to this day I adore the smell of cow manure. It smells like my childhood, it smells like freedom and breath and feeling deeply rooted. My grandparents' farm is home. It is the only place I can go to physically return to childhood memories. It was the only place in my life that had never changed.

Last week it changed. When he passed, the farm changed, the house changed, Sunflower County changed, the delta changed, Mississippi changed. I've never lived in the state and didn't realize that it was the only real home I had until this weekend when I was there and he wasn't. Part of the grief I feel is losing a man (a truly great, kind, generous man) I loved, and part of it is knowing that everything is changing and I can't stop it. But Maw Maw remains in their home; strong as a baby bull, that woman-- she'll probably outlive us all. Some years ago my uncle built a cabin 200 yards away, in the very spot where Paw Paw was born. I have a home there, I know; a changed home but a home still.

I could buy a plot of the family land, I could build a house there, we could make a life there. But outside of the haven of that farm is a state with a sordid history that it's still scraping the scabs off of, and I don't want to bring my multicolored family into that long fight for healing. We are charged with making a home elsewhere.

//

The world is the oyster of this generation; we follow jobs, we follow education, we follow appetites for adventure and sensuality. Home is wherever I'm with you, we say, we sing, and I want it to be true but I'm not sure I believe it anymore. I'm not sure I believe it at all.

We walk to Good Friday the only way we know how: one foot in front of the other, unsure of what we are meant to be feeling, uncomfortable with sadness and grief, untaught in the ways of lament. We are both creators and products of this culture we live out our days in; one that silences the suffering, not out of malice but discomfort. Scripture says that God "sustains the weary with a word," but the imago Dei in me can't seem to remember how.

Ancient societies had elaborate traditions for mourning, but my grandfather is dying and all I know to do is text him pictures of my kids. I want the world to stop; I want my family to walk away from our jobs and our schools and our lives and set up vigil around that old farmhouse for weeks until he drifts into eternal rest. But we haven't set our world up for that. We expect the bereaved to stay on the treadmill. You told him goodbye two weeks ago, after all. What more could you hope for than that? No one says it. No one except society and my own heart.

I peer into the tomorrow of Good Friday tentatively, sure that when the hour of our Lord strikes at 3:00 I will miss it; too busy slathering peanut butter onto apple slices or pulling a bedraggled toddler from his crib. I have only ever observed the day as a mother of young children, and I find myself fantasizing about how holy it will be when they're grown and gone and I have the whole day for silence and fasting and prayer. And then I berate myself because this right here is holy, and when that day comes in the future I know I will cry tears of memory, thinking on how loud and messy and hard and precious Good Friday used to be.

I feebly offer my children what I know of the Triduum; I piece together a liturgy of life that I only hope will anchor them to something eternal as they grow and change. Tonight we will wash each other's feet in mass, and I will cry freely in front of God and men the whole time. We won't receive communion at mass on Friday- we'll kiss the feet of Jesus on the crucifix instead- and maybe the awe-full/awful truth of this holy day will seep into their bones, ready to be unearthed and dusted off in twenty years when their faith feels rootless. Saturday will be still (but they are small boys so it won't be still at all) until the Easter Vigil, when the fire will reflect in their eyes and their tiny hands will grip candles determinedly as the litany of saints dead but alive rolls over their ears.

Good Friday will not feel powerful and sacred; I've been a mother long enough to feel sure about that. But I will walk my children down the road to Golgotha anyway, praying that the liturgy of death and resurrection will be locked somewhere deep within that I can't see, there for the taking when they need it; there for the taking when they are 87 years old and dying, receiving texted photographs of their great-grandchildren to make them smile.

I cried the day I took the pregnancy test.

I had ignored my suspicions for weeks because I didn’t want it to be true. My husband finally made me pee on the damn stick and I collapsed into tears as the positive line burst on the scene like it had been behind a velvet curtain just waiting for it’s time to shine.

We were short on money and even shorter on energy. The youngest of our three boys was not even a year old and had only just begun sleeping through the night- could the universe not throw me a bone here? My work had started to pick up and I’d finally gotten back down to my pre-baby size. It wasn’t that I wanted to be done having babies; I just wanted a break from it for a while. This was not the plan.

When I was younger I fancied the idea of having loads of kids. The mental picture of a dozen half dressed love-children climbing trees and having pillow fights wooed my hippie heart. It wasn’t until I actually started having my own kids that I realized how exhausting they are. Turns out, children spend less time scaling foliage and more time begging for snacks than I originally estimated. And the half dressed thing is only cute until we actually have to go somewhere and all defiant hell breaks loose.

It can be monotonously excruciating, but I do adore motherhood. It doesn’t define, validate, or complete me, but I love my kids passionately and spending my life with them is a gift I am both receiving and giving to the world. Yet my initial reaction was that I did not want this pregnancy. Not now. The guilt of that truth weighed on me, and I alternated between imagining myself the victim and the villain of the story I was living out.

You have nine months to get excited about this child, a wise friend who’d been around the block told me. You don’t have to feel it right now. This was news to me, and it gave me no small degree of relief. As the days and weeks went by, I found myself involuntarily daydreaming about this unplanned baby: it would be a boy, of course (it was), maybe the first to sleep through the night right from the get-go (it wasn’t). I started remembering that new baby smell and the lightest of heaviness against my chest. There’s nothing so cozy as watching Netflix on the couch at night with the man you love while a newborn baby dozes dreamily against you.

We continued to worry about how it would work- how we could possibly do it all- but gratitude was sneaking in too, along with that inexplicable phenomenon called hope. There was no overnight transition from negative feelings to positive ones, and in fact right up until the last weeks I continued to feel the tension of holding wildly contradictory emotions at once. But what I had learned by then was that this is normal.

Our culture is wound so tightly around planning and control that we’re duped into thinking the only way to be a good parent is to make a five-year plan before conception. But statistics say that half of all pregnancies are unplanned, and while many are surely joyful surprises, I have to believe that the majority of those women feel as conflicted as I. After all, neither our freedom nor our love of control go down without a fight. This is a road that women walk- a very normal road. It can be scary, it can be emotional, but it is certainly not odd or even rare. And maybe if more women talked about it we could all better find the support we need.

The day this son was born was every bit as joyful as the days the other three joined our family; all trace of uncertainty disappeared as I beheld and held this incredible gift. Since we’ve been home life is more hectic than before, yes, but oh how love has expanded too. I have four boys- four!- to raise and delight in, and the way they dote on one another moves me to my core. Imagining them in twenty years all home for the holidays, giving each other noogies and getting coffee together, is almost more than my heart can take. I am luckier than I deserve.

For every part of my freedom that I’ve surrendered for this baby, I’ve received equal parts wonder in return. What I feared has now begun. And it turns out, the beginning of it was the only thing that could drive out the fear. Only love remains.