The Grandmother Who Got A Second Round

She is sixty two and she is doing the school run, and the other women at that gate think she is his mother's mother helping out, which is one of those things that is true and is not the truth.

She is the whole arrangement. She has been for four years. The uniform, the packed lunch, the parents evening, the appointment with the school about his reading, the boy in her spare room who is not in a spare room any more because it is his room and has been since he was five.

His mother is not well. That is the sentence she uses, and she uses it kindly, because she is that woman's mother too and she loves them both and she is not going to say a harder sentence about her own daughter to anybody.

She is tired in a way that people her age are allowed to be and mothers of small children are not, and she is both.

And here is the thing she does not say. It is not the tiredness. It is a specific fear that arrives at about half past three in the morning and has a shape: if her body goes, what happens to him. There is no second arrangement. There is her.

And a woman at church, who loves her and who has been faithful to her for years, said: sister, have you fasted about your daughter?

She said she would. And what came up in her was not hope. It was the calculation of a woman who is already fully spent, being handed another thing to spend.

If you have a fear that arrives at half past three, come and sit down here. The tea is on.

Name the fear properly

Let us do that first, because it has been circling for four years without ever being said in a sentence.

The fear is not about being tired. Tired is an old acquaintance and it holds no surprises. The fear is that one woman is the whole of a child's arrangement, and that arrangements made of one person are fragile, and that at half past three in the morning that fact is unanswerable.

And nobody has said it back to you, because nobody knows, because saying it out loud would sound like complaining about a boy you would lie down in traffic for.

You are not complaining, and you were never once required to pretend the arithmetic away. That is not a soft word said to a woman at a school gate. It is written that the Lord looketh on the heart (1 Samuel 16:7), and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been awake with you at half past three, every time, and has never once told you to stop worrying.

Who Scripture says is actually carrying him

There is a verse about how God handles the young and the ones responsible for them, and both halves of it are for you.

He shall feed his flock like a shepherd: he shall gather the lambs with his arm, and carry them in his bosom, and shall gently lead those that are with young.Isaiah 40:11

Look at the two groups in that sentence, because there are two.

The lambs are gathered and carried. That is him. And then, separately and specifically, there are those that are with young, and what He does with them is lead gently. Not drive. Not expect more of. Lead gently, at the pace of somebody who has a small one alongside.

Both of those are in one verse, and God put them there together, because whoever wrote it understood that you cannot separate the care of a child from the state of the person doing the carrying.

You are the one being led gently, and he is the one being carried, and neither of those depends on your strength. I am not saying it to make a school run easier: it is what the verse describes and how it is arranged (Isaiah 40:11), and it is His Spirit, not this page, who makes it something you can hold at half past three rather than a picture on a card.

And a fast held for somebody does not keep them

Here is a thing that needs saying plainly, because the suggestion at church landed in a specific place.

Going without food does not build a wall around a child. It is not a covering and it is not protection and it does not keep anybody safe, and it never did, and the moment it is thought of that way it has become a thing you must keep doing or something bad happens, which is a load nobody should carry and God has never once handed out.

You are not the fence around that boy, and you were never appointed to be. Scripture says the Lord is thy keeper, the Lord is thy shade upon thy right hand (Psalm 121:5), and it is His Spirit who makes that an actual arrangement rather than a comfort, and the keeping in that verse is not shared.

Now the sentence this site says everywhere and means. Some people must not go without food at all, and being one of them takes nothing away from you. Diabetes, medication, any hard relationship with eating, being underweight, unwell, older or simply unsure: speak to your doctor and let their answer be the answer. And a woman of sixty two raising a child needs feeding, not one more thing taken off her. You are not one step further from God because of what your body needs. Scripture says the Lord is good to all, and his tender mercies are over all his works (Psalm 145:9), and the Holy Spirit has never once come in a smaller measure to anybody on account of a body.

And if this week has more in it than a page can carry, if you are frightened for yourself or for either of them, put this down and ring somebody real: your doctor, your daughter's team, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if anybody is in danger tonight. That is not a road around God. That is help He put in the world on purpose.