Sevier Park

I LOOKED DOWN at my new tattoo as I drove home from dropping Helen off with Matt. “Savor this.” I had really done it to myself this time, tattoo-wise, because I didn’t want to savor this AT ALL. I didn’t want to feel this anymore and I didn’t want to think about what all this means and I was just sad and had just about no time to actually grieve what I lost.

I preached at church the Sunday after Helen left. It was strange. It was like she was never here but was also just a thought away. She was quickly adopted by another family and given a different name in a different state, which is probably better for me.

Pastor Drew, the creative pastor at our church, brought his two youngest kids with him to church that day: AJ and Bentley. His wife, Jamie, and their two oldest, Grace and Emory, were out of town that week. All four of the kids call me Aunt Annie, and I love it so much. I have a few nicknames with a few different families. Aunt Annie is a good one. Two families call me AnnieDowns, like one name, since there are already a few Annies in our kids’ lives. But I think my favorite nickname is Crazy Annie. It’s the best nonfamily “aunt” kind of name that anyone could think of for me. The kids yell it across the street, across the playground, across the kitchen. It’s the only thing they know me as. (Because yes, I am for sure the silliest, craziest adult they know. And I’m glad for it.)

But Pastor Drew’s kids stick with Aunt Annie. After I finished preaching the sermon in the first service of the day, AJ said I needed a haircut and that I coughed too much. (That’s real family talk and that cough was definitely Helen’s fault. Allergies, man!) The kids and I sat together between services that day. Me with my new inhaler (also thanks to Helen) and Bentley—Drew’s five-year-old daughter—with her sequined cat-ear headband. We laughed as she sat in my lap and ate a Rice Krispie Treat. She hates taking selfies. I absolutely love them and love to beg her and snap pictures until she says no or says “PLEASE DON’T POST THAT.” (And I don’t.)

I got home Sunday night and was scrolling through pictures from the day, and I saw a hilarious one of Bentley and me. She’s wrapped in my arms, her head laid right into the nook of my elbow. She’s half smiling at the camera, her little sequined cat ears glimmering under the fluorescent lights of the church. I texted it to her parents, and I was typing before I was thinking and I said, “Who needs a dog when I already have a cat?” It was a joke (obviously), but it also spoke to something deeper in me—something I didn’t quite know how to put words around until that moment with Bentley.

I DIDN’T KNOW what it would be like for my best friends to have kids. They are little joys who I like to call my MiniBFFs. I didn’t know what it would be like to love the kids of my friends. But it is the most fun.

It started with Jarrett. He was born while I was still teaching elementary school, and I called in for a substitute teacher to cover my class so I could be at the hospital when he was born. And it’s been me and him (and his parents, of course) for the last thirteen years. He was two when I moved to Nashville, and I think he was the hardest person for me to leave behind. I came home for Christmas that first year after I had moved away, and as soon as I walked in the door, he screamed my name and stood up from the chair in the dining room, ran across the living room, jumped on the couch on the way, ran the length of the couch to the front door, and bounded into my arms. It still makes me tear up to tell you about it. It was such a significant moment for me. And after Jarrett, my friends just. kept. having. kids. It has been the absolute most fun.

We get this choice as single people surrounded by peers who have become parents. We can either make new friends with new adults or make friends with the children of our old friends. Those are the options. And for my married friends, you can either let your single friends be friends with your kids or, honestly, you will probably lose them. Sometimes that is fine. I totally get it.

But it feels like maybe we are doing family wrong here in Western society anyway. Shouldn’t everyone feel like they fit somewhere? It doesn’t have to be your nuclear family—none of mine live in this town where I live—because any family system can welcome you and include you.

In one of my all-time favorite romantic comedies, While You Were Sleeping, the main character, Lucy, is talking with her boss about family systems. He says, “Lucy, you are born into families, you do not join them like you do the Marines.”1 But I’m just not sure that’s true. I think family is so much more than the definition we give it. I’m not talking about framily, some weird word people have made up for friends who are like family. I’m talking about actual family.

ONE NIGHT I was over at Dave and Annie Barnes’s house, a stop I make on a lot of evenings after work. The three kids were running around like crazy: Sam looking for a snack, Zanna taking dolls and puzzles in and out of the playroom, and Ben kicking and dribbling the soccer ball up and down the hallway. Annie and I sat around the table as I filled out paperwork for Onsite. I needed to put an emergency contact on the form, and I looked up at her and thought for a minute. “Annie, will you be my emergency contact?” She smiled and said of course. And it led us to a conversation about what it looks like to really be committed like that, to choose family, even if you aren’t related. We talked about the actual word and the actual commitment and it changed things for us.

I’ve spent a lot of evenings at the Barnes’s house, but that one was super special. To be loved like that, invited in like that, spoken to about commitment like that. It warmed my heart. And the kids kept running around and Ben kept asking me to play and Zanna started crying and life went on right around the moment I joined their family.

I WAS RECENTLY transporting a whole bunch of boxes full of books from the office down to my car. I loaded them onto a rolling chair, stacked three boxes too high, and rolled onto the elevator. As I went to exit the elevator at the ground floor, one of the wheels caught on the slit where the door opens. The top two boxes immediately made moves like they were the Red Sea parting and I knew I couldn’t save the one on the right, but I thought I might be able to save the one on the left. So as it tumbled I stuck my arm out to catch the box. Instead of landing in my arms, the edge of the box of books slammed into my forearm and then fell to the ground. But it hit RIGHT on my “savor this” tattoo.

The pain of that moment felt so profoundly true. I have chosen to love deep and wide in this time of my life, and while I’m trying to stay in it and feel it, it is bruising me too. It is hurting me right in the place where I’m trying to savor it all. Where I’m trying to really be in the moment and live what is right in front of me.

And guess what? This is what happens when you love. This is what happens when I love. There is no protecting your savor this from bruises if you’re going to love and live your life.

I’m scared to be brave today, too, if that helps you at all. I’m scared to love today, scared to hope. I’m worried that I’m going to look like a fool or end up more bruised. And if I’m being totally honest with you, every time I get a bruise, I want to become the girl in the plastic bubble and not let anyone near my heart. But I think that’s what my MiniBFFs do for me. They keep me soft. They bump into the bruises but don’t hurt them.

I PARKED MY car across the street and walked down to Sevier Park. It’s the park in the middle of our neighborhood, and all the kids ride bikes there and play on the playground. On Tuesdays in particular, when the 12th South Farmers Market is going, we tend to find ourselves heading there at the end of the work and school day, my friends and their kids and me. One day I watched as my MiniBFF Theo biked toward me. As he got closer, I worried he was going too fast and would fall and get hurt. I wanted to yell out, but then I saw that his parents were super calm and trusting. If they weren’t worried, I wasn’t going to worry. Theo’s face was pure excitement as he careened toward me. That kid was having the best time. I feel like I learned a lesson that day at Sevier Park. I learned that fun is worth the risk. Honestly, it’s all worth the risk.

I HAD A MASSIVE friendship misunderstanding recently and I don’t know how to fix it. I want to, I think, but I don’t even know the first move when I only heard about this problem secondhand. As soon as I heard about the issue, I drove to the Barnes’s house. Annie and our friend from across the street, Amy, were both sitting on the front porch, ready to go on a walk. I got out of the car and walked up and burst into tears. That’s love, isn’t it? Having a place where you can melt down and break down and laugh and play soccer and just show up when you need a hug.

There’s something Eden-like about that, even in the sadness. I don’t think it was ever sad there before Adam and Eve sinned, but there is something about having a place to come home to that feels like the thing we can’t find.

I work so hard in my life to feel at home on my own. And it comes so, so close to being enough, but it just isn’t. I don’t want to admit that. I want you to think I’m fine alone and I don’t need people. This is where we’ve broken Western culture—by hearing and repeating the lie that alone is strong and together is weak. That we should all be capable of living absolutely independent of each other. To need others is to be weak or unable to do life well. If you do it alone, SUCCESS. Look at you. You don’t need anyone. Congrats.

But it’s just not true. It lacks the center thing—it lacks love. Isolation doesn’t lead to flourishing; isolation leads to death. What we need is love.

I OPENED MY PHONE the other day to see that my friend had sent a video from her family with two of my MiniBFFs. In the video, the little girl says, “AnnieDowns, AnnieDowns?” and her older brother says, “AnnieDowns, I love you. Look at this” before throwing something across the room that the mom doesn’t get on video. I so love being loved by these kids. It changes me for the better every day.

I have always dreamed of being a mom. I wasn’t one of those little girls who played house and said I wanted to be a mommy when I grew up, but deep in me, I knew I always really, really loved children and wanted to have my own. And yet here I am, decades down the road, and I don’t. I do not know what it looks like to have small people with some of my features. I don’t know what it’s like to look at baby pictures of my parents and see the same eyes in a new baby I am holding. I don’t know anything about being an actual person’s parent. And I’m grieved by it at times.

But I know the feeling of love. And I trust my gut enough to know it when I feel it. Ephesians 3:20 is so deeply true. This love for, and from, my MiniBFFs is a love that is more than I could have asked for or imagined. It’s not a parent love, but it’s not a friend love either. And it’s not a nanny or babysitter love because I don’t do that anymore—it takes a tougher and more rested person than me to nanny, that is for sure. It’s this other thing, this Eden thing, this powerful exchange between a trusting child and a trustworthy adult and trusting parents. It lights me up because it feels like God saw a gaping hole in my heart and filled it to overflowing with a collection of children that I couldn’t have birthed, even on my best day. It’s this other kind of love that says God sees me and hears me. It says that my prayers have been answered, even if the kids don’t have my parents’ eyes. It is the kind of love that tells me to keep choosing hope, because there is a gift in the choosing, a gift that exceeds all expectations.

As I’m typing on a Wednesday night, a sad Wednesday that didn’t quite go as planned, where having family would have been helpful for me, I got this text from Amber.

Tonight when Matt asked the kids who they wanted to pray for, Aury’s first response was “AnnieDowns” and then they all prayed for you. That was the majority of the prayer.

It makes me cry just sitting here typing about it. It’s a kind of love I didn’t know to ask for, a love that is so profound and deep and other, it just must be a gift.