Sanctuary

Posted on July 6, 2016 by Nicole Morgan under Iconic Place

The sunlight streams in through the massive stained glass window over the choir loft illuminating the blues and purples of the cross, the white and gray dove flying in the center. During the sunny days of the spring and summer months, a beam of sun comes through the skylight and finds me on my third pew from the back. The choir and people on the stage appear to have a “faded” filter until the sun moves further across the sky about ten minutes before the benediction.

There is a rhythm to the service. One of the youth walks forward and lights the altar candles, opens the Bible, and then the choir proceeds in. They split at the foot of the altar, half going left around the pulpit, the other half going right around the lectern.

We – the twenty to forty scattered in the pews, the half a dozen in the choir loft – sing mostly old hymns. We join together to say the Lord’s Prayer and after the ushers collect the offering we rise and sing the doxology. Another song and then someone reads a scripture from that week’s lectionary. We all call back, “Thanks be to God” as the reader closes the Bible with, “This is the word of the Lord.” After the sermon, the candles are snuffed and as we rise to sing the benediction response the smoke from the burnt out candles inevitably drifts towards me and I inhale a bit of it and cough out the last few bars of the song.

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When I was 17 I took my first plane ride to London, England with about a dozen other teens and a couple of adults from my church. We were going on a mission trip to work among refugees living in North London. That Sunday we went down to the magnificent St. Paul’s Cathedral. Built hundreds of years prior, the building was grand and impressive – filled with ornate stone and glass work. The missionary who was hosting our trip explaining to our Southern Baptist group that the service would likely be a bit different than we are used to, but to try and really pay attention to what was happening.

I was a very assured 17 year old, confident in my beliefs. We arrived early and our group occupied the front row of the cathedral. I turned around to watch the procession of men in robes walking down the aisle – holding a cross and swinging a ball of incense. They sang in a language I did not understand and I found their short homily uninspired.

I felt bad for them as they read through a call-and-response, certain that these often-repeated words could hold no meaning. When they called people forward for communion, I remained in my seat. I don’t remember if we were “allowed” to partake in this Anglican observance or not, but regardless I was not going because they used wine. And everyone knew Christians don’t drink.

And yet, as I sat there in that sanctuary, taking in the ornate art of the building, listening to the songs and scripture and words, and smelling the faintest incense in the air I heard an unmistakable voice inside my head saying, “I am here too.”

I squirmed in my seat; my assurances cracked ever so slightly that Sunday in London.

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I left my church about seven years later. It had slowly become a place that I didn’t fit. I left, slowly, and then definitively. For a few years – my life was fairly transient, so while I found churches to attend, I never settled too deeply into any church. Then I made a move that I knew was more permanent, or at least more long-term.

A firm believer of the importance of the local church, I landed in the second-closest church to my front door. A church with the massive stained glass and the beautiful woodwork. A church where we say and sing some of the same words over and over and over again every single week.

The one where the smells of candles literally take my breath away.

Each week I am astounded at the way that I need to say, “Thy kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven.” I need to say it out loud. I need to say it with community. I need to hear the excited voice of the children rising above the controlled tone of the adults. I need the moments of silence that come each week – moments that are sometimes punctuated by the rhythmic hiss of an oxygen tank, reminding me of the life in that room and the lineage of faith. I need to stand and sing, “Praise God from whom all blessings flow” each and every single week as I stare at rows of empty pews in front of me. I need to remember these truths as I strive to live into doubts and questions.

Almost 20 years after I rolled my eyes at the repetitive, smells and bells, of St. Paul’s Cathedral, I have learned that I need the smell of burnt-out-candle at the close of each service – an olfactory memory that triggers the acknowledgement that God is here, too.

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Open Windows

Posted on June 13, 2016 by Nicole Morgan under Sound & Place

“Do you want to go back to bed?!? DO YOU WANT TO GO BACK TO BED?!?”

“Yes!” I grumbly murmured as I rolled over in bed and turned my back to the open window letting in the cool 5 a.m. August-air.

I was a couple weeks into my new apartment near Philadelphia. By now I was used to the 6 a.m. physical training drills as platoons of teenagers from the military college across the street marched to their practice field about 100 yards from my window. Five a.m. was new though. Someone must have done something wrong.

I knew my body well enough to know my night was over. I slid out of bed, trying to be quiet in case my roommate had managed to sleep through the earlier-than-normal P.T. routine. She’d be up early enough when they marched back to campus singing their cadence song in an hour or so.

I wandered into the kitchen to start the coffee and curled into the soft cushions of our couch, staring out the window into the front yard of the apartment complex until I heard the young cadets marching home again.

Leased from a local military college, my graduate school housing was a 1930s era apartment. Its wood floors were charming, and the sweetest floral pattern was etched into the bathroom mirror. The 1930s was the era of the fuse box which meant no air-conditioning and no window unit. So, we left our windows open.

Aside from the hot-July months when I had to escape to wander the mall all day lest I roast, I didn’t really mind it so much. I’m a couple years removed from that apartment now, and I rather miss needing to have my windows open. The always-conditioned cool air of Georgia summers seem rather stuffy in comparison.

Much of my graduate school classes focused on peace and non-violence. The irony that I was living on a military campus where teenagers marched by and sang about war on a daily basis was not lost on me.

The apartment buildings was surrounded by the military college and their football field, the parking lot for a large church (that was also a school), and a golf course. The golf course was mostly quiet.

On Friday evenings in the fall, the football field filled up with high school sports. A marching band walked past my window, drumline in full performance. For every touchdown that the home team cadets made, a cannon blast pierced the air.

The cadets began the daily symphony early every morning and by 9:00 am there were sounds coming in from every direction. Children’s laughter from the church’s playground bounced across the mostly empty parking lot straight into our windows. On the other side of the road the bells of the college chapel began to ring on the hour at 9 a.m. and went until 5 p.m. Sometimes the bells counted the hour, sometimes they played a hymn.

On days when I had no classes these became familiar time-keepers, keeping me focused and paced as I read book after book after book after book. You don’t need any sort of advanced intelligence to attend grad school. You just need lots of time to read.

More often than not, I read past the end of the daily bells and was still working when one lone bugle broke through the dark night sky and played Taps. It’s the sound for lights out. I know it most from movies where it’s played at military funerals. And so my night often ended on a somber note. Not that I minded, I’ve always had an odd love for sad movies or songs or books.

Every once in awhile there was a special evening conclusion to my daily concert. On clear nights, after the sun had set, there would be the faintest sound of bagpipes. I’d close my book and sit and listen to the peaceful tune as the crickets outside joined the song. This final piece of the day’s symphony would often go on for hours.

Throughout all of this – we grew skilled in making our own noise. Loud family dinners of neighbors and friends were rich with full-bellied laughter. We hooked a projector and speaker up to a laptop and watched movies or the latest episode of Sherlock in a volume that was probably too loud for the neighbors who didn’t join us. One summer, we streamed the World Cup games from the laptop and loudly cheered on the home teams among our group: Cote D’Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria, and USA. Some nights we quietly listened to each other and shared our stories (to the soundtrack of bagpipes when we were lucky).

The golf course across the street had one noisy night a year – July 3rd – when they put on a fireworks show. The first year it surprised me and I ran to the window when my living room lit up bright red after a loud explosion. I had a perfect view from the second floor window. My last summer in that apartment the July 3rd show was rained out.

A few weeks later my roommate and I packed our cars and moving trucks full. All that was left in the apartment was the dorm-issued furniture and a small overnight bag. We were leaving bright and early the next morning.

As we prepared for bed, we heard a crack and boom and saw the flash of light outside. We moved one of the beds directly in front of the window, and sat next to each other as we leaned in towards the screen, listening and watching in delight as our neighborhood gave us a grand, thunderous, farewell.

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Comfort Food

Posted on May 23, 2016 by Nicole Morgan under Food & Place

“We thought maybe you ate too much and couldn’t fit through the door.”

My face blushed red and I turned away from my 5th grade classmates in shame. After being out sick for a couple of days, I had returned to school. A friend walking beside me turned around and yelled with fiery authority, “Shut up!” at the giggly boys who scampered away.

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I’d worked all day at a job that was a daily test in humility as I earned a paycheck far below my skill, experience, and Master’s Degree education level. Many of my coworkers at the big-box retailer were in the same situation. I was at the end of a seven day stretch of work days, three of them starting at 4 a.m. My sleep schedule was irregular, I was fighting off a scratchy throat that usually signals that I’m about to be knocked out for 24 hours, and my feet were killing me. The day had been typical – it was spent climbing tall ladders, lifting heavy boxes, and having people 10 years my junior instruct me on how to properly put products on a shelf.

I was physically exhausted. I was mentally exhausted.

Once home, I pulled a metal pan out from the cabinet, filled it with water, added quinoa, and set it to boil. From the fridge I pulled an assortment of leafy greens, strawberries, feta, lemon juice and the jar of minced garlic. I grabbed a grapefruit from the counter; walnuts, red wine vinegar, olive oil, and spices from the pantry. From the cabinets I grabbed mixing bowls and cutting boards. I did not really know what I was making, but I needed to chop and simmer and stir. I needed fresh flavors to mix together to enliven my senses.

The lemon juice and vinegar and oil were whisked together with honey and seasonings. I tossed kale and arugula with feta and walnuts and sliced strawberries. Small segments of juicy pink grapefruit plopped atop the mix of greens. When the quinoa was done, I spooned in the filling grain and then tossed it all in my home made dressing.

Here was my comfort food. I relaxed into the smooth wooden dining chair I had picked up at a yard sale a few months ago. It’s an old office or library chair – with an extra wide seat and a sturdy frame. The meal was delicious and full of just what I needed to feel calm and at rest after a crazy, exhausting week.

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I’ve always loved cooking and food. As a child I poured over the American Girl cookbook for Kirsten Larson and made a Swedish feast for my family. I remember many mornings with my elbows propped on the table in my grandmother’s farm kitchen watching her cook for hours. I have read cookbooks cover to cover as if they were a novel.

There were many years where I was ashamed to admit my love for those things. I was afraid that it would surely lead into a fat joke of the “of course she does!” variety.

Here’s the thing when you’re fat: you’re not sure if you’re supposed to love food, or hate it. There are the caricatures of fat people and food. One is the abundantly joyful fatty who drools over the mere description of food. The other is the sad fatty who forces herself to eat salad in public but must certainly binges in private. Most of us are given only these two pictures of what it looks like to be fat in relation to food.

For the longest time, I didn’t know I liked food. I just thought I needed it, the way an addict needs a fix.

I was in college when I realized that I really didn’t like chocolate that much. I wasn’t just pretending not to like it to try to somehow make myself appear thinner by declining sugar-heavy sweets, I really didn’t like chocolate that much. (Then later I discovered dark chocolate, and yes I like that chocolate!) But, if I am hungry and tired and want something that is going to give me energy and make me feel satiated – I will most likely crave something like my kale, quinoa, and grapefruit creation.

Yet, there are times when the sweet warmth of an apple crisp is what is desired. And sometimes the celebration of cake and ice cream with the smell of blown-out-candles wafting through the air is just what the occasion ordered. And those are things that fat people can enjoy without shame as well.

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One of my grad-school roommates peeked around the corner into my door and asked with a expectant smile, “I heard tomorrow is Lent. Is there anything that you are giving up that you’d like to pass on? Get out of your cabinet? Sweets? Are you fasting sweets?”

Another roommate called out with a laugh, “I don’t think you will get anything from Nicole. She doesn’t do sweets. Next time ask her for veggies.”

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Find more of Nicole’s thoughts about life in a fat body at Fat Faith

Ash and Light

Posted on April 19, 2016 by Nicole Morgan under Reclaiming Place

Sometime in between “we are through” and actually being through, I got a new job and moved to “his town,” the town where my (now ex-) boyfriend lived during part of the time we were dating. He lived in an apartment above a store that sold brightly colored men’s suits. One of a handful of stores and restaurants in the downtown main street square of a small Georgia town.

After I moved there, I drove downtown and parked in one of the nose-in angled spots on the street where he used to stand by my car and kiss me good-bye. I strolled past the storefronts, saw the entrance to the apartments above with the push button intercom where I would call up and he’d buzz me in. He was no longer there but that was his building. Up those stairs, we would laugh and talk and I would roll my eyes at his corny puns. On the nights we watched a movie, cuddled on the couch, he’d stand up as the credit music began to play and offer me his hand, pulling me into a slow dance under the skylight above our heads.

*******

A couple of months after he moved away from that town and our relationship gained geographical distance, he called me one weekend to say he was in town. He wasn’t there to see me, not specifically anyway. There had been a small fire at his old apartment. The landlord had called him. I was confused as to why he was notified, why any of his stuff was there.

“Oh. I just kept renting the apartment,” he said.

By this point in the relationship I was used to convincing myself to believe what he said. Used to ignoring questions in my gut and flipping down red flags. So, I accepted the explanation and jumped straight into planning when and where to meet up for an impromptu date, swept up in the romance of the unexpected.

*******

That day I moved to the town there was still a long aluminum chute that emptied into a dumpster hanging from one of the back windows of his building, evidence of the fire clean up.

I stared at it – wondering what blackened belongings of his had been thrown down it. Did the couch where we dreamed about the future survive or was it in ashes? What was left of the kitchen counter where I would sit and listen to him narrate his way through preparing dinner as if he had his very own Food Network show?

The last few months he lived in that apartment I was never inside of it. He called me one day and won my heart a little more by saying, “I think we should make sure that we don’t hang out alone in my apartment anymore. I want to be better at honoring you.” Reluctantly, but admiringly, I agreed. I treasured his leadership in our relationship. “Honoring,” in our shared vocabulary at the time, meant no more kissing (or more) in private.

I had been raised to believe that men lead and pursue and I wait and follow. I was told that a godly man would lead in godly ways. More than one youth group story had centered on a young man who went to pick up his date and then turned around and left when he saw her, because he was lusting so they needed to not spend time together in order to honor God. And here I was with my very own godly leader who put God above me.

Yet there was that aluminum chute and a dumpster full of ash and rubbish.

I wondered what belongings of hers were in the dumpster. The other girlfriend that had moved in a few months before he left. The one that stayed to finish out the year at her teaching job while he took his new job a few hours away. The one who called and told him about the fire. The woman he was living with while he was “honoring” me.

*******

After the fire but before I knew about the other woman, I called him and choked out, “I can’t do this anymore. I can’t feel like this anymore.”

“Are you breaking up with me?” he asked, surprised.

“Yes.” He didn’t fight, he just got mad and hung up.

I blamed myself. Over and over, the same message played in my mind: I wasn’t strong enough to make the distance work, to make him work. After trying for years, I was tired.

A couple weeks later, he called and renewed my hope by saying he wanted me back. I drove two hours to surprise him, my stomach in knots the entire way down because subconsciously I knew the one who was more likely to be surprised was me. I needed to not be able to lie to myself anymore. I needed to physically see and hear and know so that I could move on.

A woman yelled from inside for him to answer the door. With wide eyes he called inside to her, “It’s someone from work! I’ll be back!”

We sat near a river bank and I watched with the muddy water flow by as he told me that he chose her, that he wanted someone who was physically close, that the long distance was too much.

“Why didn’t you just break up with me?” I questioned.

“I didn’t want to hurt you,” he said.

I drove home in tears. Mad at him. Mad at God. Mad at myself because the signs littered the road for the past three years.

*******

I stayed in my new, his old, town for two and a half years. The aluminum chute was still there when I left.

He visited once. I visited once. He called often. I blocked and unblocked his number. He stayed with the other woman. He told me I was better than her. I begged him to let me be, to let me go. I told him I didn’t know how to walk away. I was addicted.

My brain didn’t know how to stop forgiving him, to stop believing that the good outweighed the bad, to stop my heart from trusting that things would improve and that my fantasy would come true.

I didn’t reclaim that town those years. I didn’t even reclaim my life.

*******

Ten years after the fire, I drove through that town again. The aluminum chute was gone. In the years between, I had learned to sort truth from lie from unknown in the jumbled web of memories from the years spent with him. I had quit my addiction and gained a clarity about myself that is perhaps only possible when forged in fire.

An Unmatched Life

Posted on March 30, 2016 by Nicole Morgan under Mess & Place

At 15, I read in a home décor magazine that you were only supposed to fill things two-thirds full in order for it to look neat and orderly. So when I got my new bedroom at 16, a room I helped build on to the house, I intentionally left some of the walls and closet shelf space empty to try and create that feel.

Once the room was finished, I picked a blue-floral bedspread and curtains from the J.C. Penney catalog and took a pillowcase to Home Depot to have the color matched. I sponged the gray-blue paint onto the baseboard and molding before we nailed it to the walls.

I was trying to keep it all together, I think. Trying to make it right. I am the child of a parent with chronic mental and physical illnesses. As a child, that meant taking on the responsibility of taking care. I wanted things stable and orderly and, above all, correct.

For a few years before I moved to college my junior year, those empty spaces and coordinating color scheme were a retreat. The aesthetics calmed and centered me.

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My first apartment

After landing a full-time job after college, I moved into my first all-my-own apartment. I dove into decorating it just the way I wanted. Things matched less, but they still coordinated. I bought sofas and curtains, lamps and end tables brand-new from the store. I wanted it decorated and soon. I bought fabric and made my own upholstered headboard and hunted down antique picture frames for the walls of my bedroom. I took a page from an interior design magazine and recreated a wall collage behind my dining room table.

When Christmas came, I bought new decorations that sparkled and shone in perfect complement to my décor.

It was common for me to lock myself in my apartment from the time I got home from work on Friday until I left for work on Monday. “Introvert re-charge,” I would say. And sometimes that is needed. But in truth, it was easier to just stay in, not interact with anyone, and piddle away on some new home décor project. I even started a short-lived blog full of recipes and decorating tips.

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When I was 29, I moved into graduate on-campus housing, complete with an R.A. and roommates. The apartments were built in the 1930s and, aside from the random rules that come with campus housing, I rather enjoyed the cozy wood floors and the old bathroom mirror with the flower scroll etched across the glass.

Perhaps the thing I was most nervous about as I prepared to move to grad school was that my home would feel like a dorm. That I would feel like a kid. I was afraid of ugly furniture and plastic storage bins and cramped spaces. I was afraid it was all going to feel like a mess.

And things didn’t match—except for the industrial, boxy, bedroom furniture. My bedspread was black and white, my roommate’s was bright neon colors. The bathroom linen closet was stocked with a haphazard collection of multi-colored towels in various states of wear. The empty wall of the small galley kitchen was a jigsaw puzzle of mismatched shelves holding extra dishes and cookbooks and pantry staples. Every third of the bedroom walls were lined with furniture. Desk, dresser, bed, repeat. Shelves were stuffed full of textbooks and binders and picture frames of family and friends in other states. There was no money to spend on new, matching furniture. There was too little space for all of my things.

Yet, that apartment was home to one of my most well-lived years. There was nothing more satisfying than to find the sink full of mismatched coffee mugs, evidence of another night of friends studying together or talking.

An Easter table

On Sunday evenings, friends and neighbors gathered and we made dinner. One person would cook, filling the small sink of the small kitchen with pans and cutting boards and wooden spoons.Then we’d eat—mismatched chairs crowded around a table with mismatched glasses in front of matching plates, the thin blue and white Corelle dishes I had inherited from my grandmother.

As the year went on, dining together just became a habit, no matter the meal. We had a French toast feast as the snow piled deep outside. On the days it never stopped raining, there was a crock pot of soup ready and warm. We decided JFK’s Birthday needed celebrating, so we researched and recreated his favorite meal. One warm night, we picked up a few “gourmet” ingredients from the grocery store, put on a record of classical music, opened all the windows, and laughed and talked and ate as the cross breeze drifted through our impromptu dinner party in that mismatched, unrefined, no-color-palette home.

That year, we managed to live life together instead of just being roommates or neighbors. It happened with overcrowded shelves and walls and it never once felt like a mess.

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Stumpy the Christmas Tree

Posted on February 24, 2016 by Nicole Morgan under Money & Place

“It’s going to be a small Christmas this year, kids.”

My mom. Almost every year. And yet, I never remember small Christmases.

Perhaps they were small in comparison to the expensive gifts or the multi-hundreds of dollars in cash and gift cards our classmates talked about receiving each year. But even then, I just found it odd that they received so much.

Some of the early Christmas photos of my family show our tree in the background – an 18” high green ceramic tree with colored pegs that glowed from a light bulb stuck inside. We put our gifts under and around the small table it sat on. We hung garland in a scallop from the ceiling and hung our ornaments from that. I remember being particularly enthralled by the ornaments and how certain I was that no one else decorated for Christmas in quite that spectacular way. Blame it on my steady diet of Little House on the Prairie and The Waltons, but I was just genuinely the kid who was (mostly) thankful for what I had. I thought of Laura Ingalls treasuring her tin cup and peppermint stick for Christmas and I knew our celebration was lavish.

One year, there was a knock on the door and I answered it to see Pastor Bill standing there. He asked for my parents and then gave them an envelope. “This is for Christmas” he said. Inside – money for gifts for us and food for Christmas dinner. Mom tells me that was the difference between having those things and not that year. But most years weren’t like that, at least not that my memory recalls.

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On a summer Saturday when I was about six or seven my mom and I woke up early to track down garage sales in our town as we often did. At one we found a treasure – an artificial Christmas tree selling for cheap. The top part that makes the point of the tree was missing, but we got it anyway. That next Christmas the tree earned the affectionate nickname “Stumpy.” We bent the branches of the top layer up and into a point and stuck the red Christmas angel on top. As a child, the tree seemed massive, but it didn’t even come to the top of the window.

Stumpy one year with presents piled around.

On the day after Thanksgiving we’d get out our ornaments and hang them on her branches one-by-one, telling the story of each ornament. Mom bought us a new ornament each year – something that represented our year. They were our travels, our dreams, our interests, our talents. There were curled papers covered in glitter that had resembled angels at some point. Hallmark collection figure skaters. Silly snowmen. Model cars.The ornaments were the stories of our lives and Stumpy held them well. As much as I had loved the ornaments hanging from the garland on the ceiling, I thoroughly embraced and enjoyed our upgrade to Stumpy.

We eventually got rid of Stumpy when I was around 11 years old and bought a brand-new artificial tree. This tree had full, fluffy branches, a top piece that scraped the ceiling in our short-walled living room, and no name. I suppose I would have done the same thing as an adult, but as a kid I missed Stumpy. She was part of my Christmas, part of the magic and wonder that we found such a treasure. She was short enough that I could reach the tip top and stick the angel in her place.

Stumpy was enough for my child-heart. And really, Stumpy was more than enough. The scalloped garland hanging from the ceiling and the ceramic tree on the end table were enough.

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I was better at it as a kid, but I still strive to maintain that seemingly unshakeable contentedness. I’m currently the poster child for the boomerang generation: 30-something. Grad degree. Back living with my parents. I’m working and my business is growing, but money is tight. As I’ve struggled the past 18 months with the fact that this is my reality, I’m constantly reminding myself that this is enough.I have parents gracious enough to accept my home-cooked meals and contributions towards the utilities as rent. I have a bed, a dresser filled with clothes, a car that runs, a cabinet full of food, and a computer on which to make an income.

My life is a little haphazard. If I compare my current reality to the dreams, my life seems to be missing that crowning piece that makes it look complete. But, I know, what I have is more than enough.

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Movie Nights

Posted on January 18, 2016 by Nicole Morgan under Laughter and Place

I sometimes joke that I grew up thirty years before I was born. I was born in the early 80s, but most of my frequently watched movies and television shows are from decades earlier. As a child, my family rarely had cable, but we did have a large video collection. Most of the videos were carefully recorded from TV onto VHS tapes. Small white stickers with black numbers were dutifully placed on each tape and then entered into a handwritten index. We had indexes listing our movies both by alphabetical order and by number order.

This was mostly my mother’s influence. She loved the old movies and the shows, many created even before her childhood. They made her laugh, and Mom has always clung to the things that bring her joy. I recently took a vacation with a friend to Niagara Falls and she honored my desire to re-visit these childhood memories by driving an hour out of the way to see a giant mural of one of Lucille Ball’s famous scenes on the side of a building in her hometown of Jamestown, NY.

Posing with a Lucy mural in Jamestown, NY. December 2015.

On Friday nights in my childhood, my two brothers and I would spread our sleeping bags on the patchwork-brown linoleum in the living room for family movie night. On the kitchen table Mom and Dad would put out Breyer’s vanilla ice cream, chocolate syrup, cool whip, and often some type of candy or sprinkles. We’d build our traditional Friday-Night-Sundae and sit on top of our sleeping bags — ready to laugh along as Jerry Lewis belts out a (rather catchy) song about beans in At War With The Army. Or, we would giggle for the hundredth time at Lucy and Ethel as they shoveled chocolates into their mouths. Sometimes we’d invite friends over; sometimes it was just us. There are dozens of movies (and television shows) in my head that I remember with smiles for the way they filled my childhood with laughter.

Other times, we’d watch the movies late into the night. My parents would delay bedtime and press play on an old favorite because the night was special. Once, I was laying on the couch, my head in my mother’s lap as she raked her fingers through my bangs. We were watching one of Martin and Lewis’ movies. I would glance up every time I heard her laugh to see the light in her eyes. There were days that it was hard for Mom to smile. Days where Depression did its best to keep her isolated and numb. But there were other days that stretched into the night where joy, and laughter, were present. Those were nights we celebrated and embraced the joy.

I used to wonder why we didn’t watch the movies on the sad days, so that they would bring the laughter. It took me into my young adult years to understand that the laughter came on the late nights because the clouds lifted, not because the movies penetrated them.

This Christmas my younger brother and I stood in our parents’ hallway and scanned the movie collection, laughing in recognition at some of our old favorites. Much of the family gathered around the television and put in Dean Jones’ Snowball Express (Dad’s favorite) and we all laughed along as Jones flew backwards down the mountain, on skis. A few days later we pulled out North Avenue Irregulars to keep us awake as we counted down to the New Year. Mom and my brother had tears in their eyes from their laughter as Cloris Leachman rammed her car into a mobster who had caused her to break her newly-manicured nails.

Those late night movie watching parties where Mom joined us in the laughter are treasured memories, but as an adult I think the work of joy is more evident in the every-Friday-night routine. Mom set up that routine and maintained it. Despite her own struggles, she made sure there was joy and laughter in the house for her kids. A joy that still pays off for us all these years later.

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Three Years as “Mom”

Posted on December 2, 2015 by Nicole Morgan under Finding Place

If you’ve never picked up your life and moved hundreds of miles away to a place where you know no one, I highly recommend it.

At 26, I was burnt-out on teaching after only three years, uncertain of what my future looked like, and my always-dreaming-of-new-places heart was ready to take a leap. I got on the computer. After a few hours on google, I applied for three jobs, got an interview for one, and within a few months had whittled the contents of my apartment down into what would fit into a small SUV– rented, one-way, from Atlanta to Chicago.

I moved into a 125 year old house that came with the job, a short walk from the shores of Lake Michigan. Already living in the house were three other adults and eight teenagers. The easiest way to explain my new job is that I worked for a nonprofit boarding school. I was one of four “house moms” to a group of smart, dedicated, and brave young women who made the choice as 7th, 8th, or 9th graders to live mostly away from their families in order to make their education a priority. In many ways, the people in that house lived as a family.

My favorite parts of the job were easily things like waking up a little earlier on cold mornings so the kids had cups of tea or hot chocolate to take with them to the school. I would often stand just inside the front door and say good-bye, shivering against the cold Chicago wind, as they walked out the door with smiles on their faces and gloved-hands clutching mugs. The highlight of the day was almost always dinner. At least four nights a week we gathered around the extra long dining room table and there was a chorus of “please pass the . . .” as dinner plates were filled and then stories from the day began.

Our dining room table, set for a Christmas Party.

One late spring day one of “my” kids came home to say that she needed to take fruit to a school function the next week. The morning of the event I pulled out a fruit platter with oranges and kiwi and grapes and strawberries arranged in an alternating, symmetrical color pattern. She looked at the tray and then back at me and said, “Did you buy this?”

“No. I made it last night.”

“Wow. It’s so pretty! Thank you!”

When I was a kid, the thing that I most wanted was to be a mom. There were a few years in college where my life seemed to moving towards my dream of “get married young and start a family.” While that didn’t happen, my desire to be a mom remained. But there, with fruit tray in hand, I realized something. It was a simple moment in the midst of a life that included dishes and laundry and “turn down that music” and checking on homework and a million things that were very mom-like, but it was that moment when I knew that I had found my place. Somehow, my always-wanted-to-be-a-mom heart was getting to live its dreams.

At the beginning of November I was back in Chicago for a few short days as part of a work trip. I drove past the old house and paused for just a few moments, giving thanks for what I learned those three years and have continued to live out since: I am a person who wants to make spaces safe and welcoming. That is a passion and a desire that can be lived out no matter if anyone calls me “mom” or not.

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True stories about roots, identity, and place.

Author Archives: Nicole Morgan

Sanctuary

Open Windows

Comfort Food

Ash and Light

An Unmatched Life

Stumpy the Christmas Tree

Movie Nights

Three Years as “Mom”