More on: parent

A family lives here, here things are a bit wild, yes, I’m trying to maintain, give me grace, please, look, there’s beauty in the attempt—and all of this is not only the subject matter of the yard, but the aesthetic, let’s call it, an aesthetic of too-muchness, or, as in a line from a poem I jotted down in my commonplace book, “the is-ful ah!-nesses of things.”

Twenty years ago, we brought the first child home. We held him, and the silence before us then was the deep, vast thrum of all we didn’t know. We were here, suddenly parents. The silence weighed down the air like boulders on silk. And then, of course, he cried.

I had wagered more than I could afford to lose on the probability that God was a friend to the orphan and a protector of the vulnerable.