I so get it. I have become that mother stranded or trapped, feet burning and no where to go. The seconds tick by and perhaps I will catch fire, unable to extract myself from the inescapable heat. I am the figurative cat on a hot tin roof. At least I feel that way in my own mind, the thoughts and fears are closing in on me and I don’t dare speak one word of this vulnerability or I will surely be incinerated. Of course, it is my most delectable elephant that pulls these feelings to the surface, Amos.

In that I can not trust myself to speak, I shall write the words and offer them up as a sacrifice, a token of thanks and perhaps a plea for prayer, for the mother that is coming unglued as she relinquishes her greatest mindful struggles surrounding the little boy who can not speak. Help us, I would beg you, but alas, it is not your battle to fight, not your war to wage, not your territory to win. It is not mine either and that is surely to be the only way I may escape from what feels like strangling paralyzing fear.

I can stand here, shifting and angsting, simmering with the deepest terror I have ever known and yet, none of that allows me an out. Just a very meek response and as useful as an old unsticky bandaid, not the kind for the pulsing wound that my heart is inflicting on my mind or perhaps, vice versa. I am left no choice but to jump. Not just jump but run and fly off the roof, leap into the unknown space that I try to imagine as open space of blue and the thick white of clouds. It is exactly that, I know, but I just so often forget. I want to remember but to acknowledge the beautiful of the great wide land of the future feels not a sustainable solution for the trepidation that creeps in, virtually everywhere I turn these days.

Tomorrow, we will fly far away to another land, this time Connecticut. We will travel and smile and hope and pray that there are answers there but my heart says there are not. The lump I try to swallow as I write those words is not enough to stifle the pool of tears filling my eyes. We have not found the road that leads back to Rome and at what point, do we travel back to our wonderful small town of Edenton and our great state of North Carolina and say, our journey of seeking has ended. It is not tomorrow but I feel the time is drawing near and so, I will race off the roof, risking the plummet of a free fall and I will go to the ends of the earth but some day I will come home and say, “It is well with my soul.”

I will not live trapped by the fears that aim to paralyze me and yet, I can’t figure out how to speak without voracious weeping and unstoppable sobs when I consider my precious son. This is the son whose joy has made millions of people smile and holds his family hostage in love. Yet, he can only offer a primitive sign for thank you. That’s enough though, isn’t it? He walks the journey bravely and he smiles and says thank you. There is always thanksgiving, perhaps that shall be my cape and I shall not fall but fly shrouded in his joy, with the relinquishment of fear.