There’s no longer give-and-take in the relationship.
Only give and give some more.
Bonnie watched her daughter Ella lift five-week-old Zoe to her shoulder for the important post-meal burp. Three generations cozied in the family room, with a fourth napping down the hall.
“Is Zoe sleeping any better?”
Ella’s sigh paused in the middle before it released in a slow, telling exhale. “Zach spoiled me. He slept through the night before we left the hospital.”
“I remember. And I also remember telling you not to rely on it with all your babies.”
“I doubted you then. Paying for it now.” Ella yawned.
“Want me to watch her for a few hours so you can get a nap?”
“Mom, who’s going to do that for you? From the dark circles under your eyes, I’d guess Grandma is still getting you up a lot at night.”
Bonnie leaned over her knees, stretching tense muscles. She stayed bent and said, “I’d sell a kidney for a solid night’s sleep.”
“I hear you.” Ella adjusted Zoe, who had mastered the secret of daytime sleeping and proved it. “Intellectually, I know I’ll live through this temporary sleep deprivation.”
“Me too.” Bonnie righted herself. “But there are days when I wonder if my breaking point isn’t nearer than I thought.”
Ella closed her eyes and leaned her head against the sofa’s backrest. “We’re orbiting in parallel universes. We’re both changing diapers, losing sleep, responding when someone we love cries out for no good reason, exhausting ourselves caring for the helpless. . . .”
“Your charge,” Bonnie said, “will grow more independent. Mine will grow more dependent until the day when she’ll abruptly not need me anymore.”
“Mom. . . .”
“I told you once to view those middle-of-the-night feedings as a tender opportunity for alone time with your baby. Just the two of you, whispering your love in your own ways as you snuggle and rock in the dark.”
“I’m trying to take that to heart.”
“I think God’s telling me I’m supposed to do the same. When your grandmother calls for me in the middle of the night and I groan my way out of bed to see what she needs, I should apply my own advice and treasure that time between the two of us. But that gets harder and harder the more exhausted I get. Ella? Ella?”
Bonnie rose from her chair and tucked a chenille throw around her daughter and granddaughter, who were lost in their dreams, locked in love.
I was a young mom with a sleep-resistant infant when someone pointed me to the verse in Psalms that tells us, “God wants his loved ones to get their proper rest” (Psalm 127:2 TLB).
I was a middle-aged woman lying on a loveseat inches away from my dying mother when the verse circled around again. “Go home and rest,” the hospice caregivers told me.
How could I consider sleep when my mom was fighting so hard to draw her next breath?
And how do we survive one more day when we feel as if we’ve reached the end of our energies and tolerance?
How does the mother of a newborn survive weeks or months on a fraction of the sleep she needs?
How do we keep giving to aging parents who need us when we are sure we have nothing left to give?
A hymn writer answered this way:
When we have exhausted our store of endurance,
When our strength has failed ere the day is half done,
When we reach the end of our hoarded resources
Our Father’s full giving is only begun.
His love has no limits, His grace has no measure,
His power no boundary known unto men;
For out of His infinite riches in Jesus
He giveth, and giveth, and giveth again.
—Annie Johnson Flint
The author who penned those words—holding a pen, not a computer keyboard—spent much of her adult life in a wheelchair, unable to walk, her hands distorted by pain and crippling arthritis.
Annie Johnson Flint slept at night surrounded by nine pillows, placed just so, to help alleviate distress to her joints. The foreword of her biography notes that the arrangement was an attempt at “protecting the exquisitely sensitive, pain-smitten body from the normal contact of the bed clothing, so distressing it was for her to recline in the hope of rest at night” (Philip E. Howard, president of The Sunday School Times Company, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania).
The poetry from which this hymn was written is one of the treasures my grandmother kept in a thin leather journal she’d started when she taught in a one-room schoolhouse, the kind of classroom Annie J. Flint would have served if arthritis hadn’t interrupted her plans to teach and exhausted her life. Her spirit was not exhausted, however.
As I reread those pain-penned words today, I knew the answer to the question of how we keep going when we think we can’t be the caregiver any longer.
We lean on friends who offer respite care.
We lean on the support of our church family, even for an hour or two.
We lean on family members who need caregiving practice.
And we lean on the One who gives more grace.
“He will shelter me in his own dwelling during troubling times; he will hide me in a secret place in his own tent; he will set me up high, safe on a rock” Psalm 27:5 (CEB).
“Lean on Me”
Has never meant
So much
As it does now, Lord,
When You whisper it
Over my tired soul.