The warm promise of "what if" and my cold apprehension collided in a tiny brown house near Prospect last week. The day started bleak and cold, bare twigs frozen outside my windows frozen in the gray. It was 12:21 and we were ready to go out the door. Then I saw the text: playdate cancelled.
The kids went back to their game. I went to the kitchen counter and scrolled facebook. I came to the message marking my mistake of the week, the one I couldn't get out of my head. The mistake which turned our day into an adventure I hadn't even known I wanted.
Three hours later we found ourselves in Kansas City, Missouri, our minivan laden with a Buzz Lightyear toddler bed (with detachable neon green wings). We parked the car in front of a humble house in a neighborhood I've historically bypassed by driving over it on the interstate. "Why do all the houses look broken and it says 'danger' on them?" Abby asked.
As I stepped over the front step's foot-long wooden crevice and past the shredded lawn chair cushions, I prayed this was the right house. They all had bars on the windows. In my head, I rehearsed how I would throw myself to the ground if I heard gunfire. I looked back at my kids sitting expectantly in the car. Should I have told them to hit the ground just in case? I rang the doorbell. Two tiny fingers parted the blinds. The door opened.
A week earlier I had posted my son's wooden toddler bed for sale online. A moment later I saw a post from a lady named Andrea. She needed household furniture and items for a family moving here from India. I offered the bed. Here's my real classy move: I sold the bed to a buyer before Andrea responded. In the name of good manners, first comes first, or whatever, I thought I was doing right. Turns out, it felt all wrong.
So our playdate cancelled, I stood staring at the response to Andrea on my screen: "Sorry, I sold the bed." I wondered what if I just dialed the children's consignment store and what if they just had a bed. Because in that moment, if I didn't move, nothing was ever going to change.
From behind the wrought iron door, a dignified woman with a wide smile named Kavita greeted the kids, Buzz Light Year, and me. Her two children and my two children helped us unload bed pieces and a basket of winter clothing items and toys.
Her son Nathan and I hunched down in the bedroom corner together to ensure the green neon wings got screwed in properly for night flight. His eyes were brighter than any full moon I'd ever seen. Kavita offered us bags of doritos and cheetohs. I noticed the blue flipflops with her socks. I asked her what she thought of the cold and America so far. She said people here are nice but would we come again so the kids could play. Her husband was getting his master's degree at a local seminary. They have no car. They cannot work on their visa. What if this moment was both bigger and smaller than either of us imagined?
My kids and I had just entered into their world and now there was responsibility and dignity and opportunity where I had only seen my uncharitable mistake of selling a bed I should have given away. This was God using broken words for His redemptive thoroughfares of nonsensical love.
We drove away in the dry afternoon wintry air. "Mom, where did the sun go?" Abby asked. I scanned the sky above 435. Then we both saw it off to the southwest, pink and yellow clouds reflected somehow on the bottom of all the gray. The sun was on its way to set, but it felt more like the beautiful sunrise between sleep and waking up.
- Christina M.
