Summer
In the summer of 2021, my husband and I wrote a list that looked like this—(more or less.)
How to Blow up your Life in Five Easy Steps:
Get pregnant with twins. (You already had three kids, so now you have five.)
Tell your husband you want him to quit his six figure engineering job so you can start a small family farm in the middle of nowhere—plan for the following summer.
Once your twins are two weeks old, throw out the idea of the following summer, and put an offer on a house you’ve never seen in a tiny no-stoplight town two hours away.
Leave your comfortable life in the Choice City and move to the middle-of-freaking-nowhere with an eight year old, a six year old, a three year old and two six week old infants.
Wait for spring.
What else were we to do? Grief and rage had turned the city where we thought we’d spend our entire adult lives into little more than a graveyard of memories. It’s funny the way all the joy of a place can be sucked out like the oxygen from a room once you’ve knocked the scales just a smidge too far in the wrong direction. For example, something as neutral as a sign for a healthcare facility can go from filling you with anxious joy, to becoming a source of nauseous dread.
“I’m so freaking ready for a new season!” I told my husband as we drove our two newborn infants home from the hospital after being trapped behind those walls for four excruciating days.
“I am too,” he said, gripping the wheel tightly. We hadn’t slept the entire time we were there, and we had a thirty minute drive home, so i’d promised Willy I’d talk with him the whole way home to help him stay awake.
“What if the farm is our new season?” I said, trying to remember how to blink without shutting my eyes for longer than a split second.
I was two weeks postpartum when a house appeared in our inbox, and at first I thought nothing of it. My mom had been forwarding us houses for years at this point. Zillow, Redfin, ColoProperties— anytime she found a house within a “reasonable” distance of their home, she’d send us a link with a peppy little note.
“This one is perfect! A horse property!” Or “just picture it without the wallpaper!”
But as one does when trying to learn how to hold and feed two newborns simultaneously, we opened the email.
“This one is only 10 minutes away from us!,” the message chirped.
I probably would have ignored it if it weren’t for the front porch. It was a thick slab of stamped concrete with a small step and a wooden railing. Above the porch, a peaked roof paneled in pine offered relief from the afternoon sun—and I could immediately picture the two wooden rocking chairs that I’d install in place of the blue plastic Adirondack ones currently sheltering in its shade.
I scrolled down the listing, reading the description of the house. While I nursed my tiny babies for hours at a time, I clicked through the artfully arranged pictures and stalked the neighbors via google satellite. Inside I felt like a shell of myself. I’d spent much of the past two weeks crying, and I was pretty sure my incision was getting infected. Yet, in the middle of a future that didn’t look anything like I’d hoped or pictured—there was this spark of hope. I could see myself sitting beneath the shade of this wide front porch. I could see myself watching my children ride bikes with the neighbors in the dirt road, and the twins learning to walk in the tractor ruts that led down to the meadow where we planned to put our market garden field. And I could see us starting this farm of our dreams, a year sooner than we’d originally planned. Like a Deus Ex Machina, this escape hatch cracked open to a different sort of life altogether.
“Maybe this is it. Maybe this is the invitation we’ve been waiting for,” I told Willy. My confidence shocked me as I held my tiny babies on my lap and rocked them back and forth, my swinging knees like the pendulum of our thoughts. But no matter how many times we tried to decide rationally; ‘No we are not buying a house right now, we just had twins two weeks ago and we are clearly not in our right minds’—the possibility of it kept nagging at me. What if?
What if we didn’t wait until the following summer? What if we sold our small, beautiful house in the city and moved to this larger, in need of love, house in the country? What if we cut the losses of these tiny threads holding us to our old life here and just…left?
The fact that my husband agreed to even consider the idea with me is probably the most inexplicable part of the whole story. An engineer by trade, Willy is known for making decisions only after looking at every conceivable angle, weighing each consideration, and consulting his decision matrix spreadsheet for the final result. But I think he was longing to escape just as much as I was, and a wild hope was whispering to him just as loudly.
A couple days later, we hung up the phone in shock. We couldn’t believe the lender approved us; didn’t they know we are were traumatized out of our minds and exhausted beyond belief? We couldn’t believe the sellers took our offer; there were three other competing offers, two of which were higher than ours. When they handed me the keys a month later, I still couldn’t believe it. I took a photo and posted it on Instagram, and as I did, I realized that I’d been waiting for the whole thing to fall apart. The entire month between when our offer was accepted and the closing, I’d been holding my breath. I went home to our old place that afternoon, and between feeding the twins, breaking up sibling fights, and making lunch and snacks for everyone, I shoved down my disbelief and began packing in earnest.
Autumn
“We just have to get there,” I told my husband. Between the packing and the recovery from major surgery—this was not the restful postpartum period I had been planning for. But the hope of this new house, this new place, was like a refrain: We just have to get there. We just have to go. We can make it, if we can just get there.
The day our friends and family came in force to help us finish packing up our house was the hardest. Nothing disrupts a postpartum mother like watching her entire nest be torn apart. Even though I knew it was what I had chosen, watching my house be tromped through by dozens of people, all my comfortable furniture unceremoniously removed, was difficult. I nursed the twins one last time on the floor of my old bedroom, and I trundled all the children into the minivan without so much as a goodbye to this place that had held me after the worst experience of my entire life. I just have to get there. I just have to go. We can make it, if we just get there.
The following day, I carried my wind chime on my lap in the car on the way to my new house. Before the moving truck had even arrived, I’d shoved my key in the back door lock, walked through the laundry room, the kitchen, past the empty living room, and back out the front door to hang my chimes from the hook on the front porch that I’d noticed the day of our inspection. It was my September child’s sixth birthday the day we moved in, and my mother in law brought birthday popsicles, which my son shared with our new neighbors after they’d exhausted themselves rolling down the hill in old tires.
“They fit right in!” Our neighbor Candice said, and I had to agree. Another neighbor, Jean, told us two things we needed to know.
“One—we get way more snow here than any other part of the front range, so you might want to consider getting a snowblower for your new driveway. And two—the stars here are amazing. If you’re ever trying to look at the stars and my back porch light is on, just come pound on my door and tell me to shut it off. I promise I will.”
That first month was the hardest. I spent my days taking care of two newborns in less than ideal circumstances. Their room didn’t have a stitch of furniture in it yet, and they were still rooming in with us at night, so I was carrying the portable crib back and forth across the house every morning as my husband started work in the ensuite office off our bedroom. Every weekend, Willy drove back to Fort Collins to finish fixing little things that needed doing at our old place so we could get it on the market. He slept in a sleeping bag on our old bedroom floor, and I did a night with two newborns alone. I tried to look at the stars when I could, but mostly I was rocking babies. One, then the other, then the first one again. Over and over, until the moon set outside our the westward windows.
It was six months before our newly acquired basement became more than just a home for the broken down cardboard boxes I’d throw down the stairs as I finished unpacking them. My twins were not the best sleepers in the world, (read: the worst), and it was eight months before they ever once napped at the same time. Yet somehow I managed to do a little along. Somehow I managed to begin to assemble our home.
“I could tell it was your house immediately,” my friend Sarah said as we sat and sipped hot tea in the wooden rocking chairs on my newly outfitted front porch that autumn, the warmth of the morning sun chasing away the chill of the breeze.
“Really? How?”
“I don’t know exactly…It just looked like you,” she said.
Somehow, that felt like a confirmation that I’d needed; my new life, though in many ways completely opposed to my old, though still achingly lonely and haunted by trauma, somehow fit me.
Winter
Autumn turned to winter, and the seed catalogues came en masse in the mail, as we’d signed up for nearly every one. Seed Saver’s Exchange, Johnny’s Select Seeds, Territorial Seed Company, and Harris’—catalogues full of the hope we’d blown up our lives for, floating around the house, tucking themselves into drawers, and generally forcing their possibility upon us in a way that almost ached. Additionally, it turned out that Jean was right about the snow. The kids wore their snow clothes to school most days so they could slide down the hill below the water tower at recess, shrieking with raucous joy. Meanwhile, I was drowning in grief and a loneliness so deep it almost looked like despair some days.
“Where are your big smiles, Mama?” My six year old asked me one day.
“What buddy?”
“You used to smile so big…before the twins. You used to smile so big, and I was just wondering where your big smiles are…I miss them.” My chest ached, and tears rose in my eyes at his vulnerable words.
“It’s been hard buddy,” I said hugging him, “but I’m working on it. I’m working on getting my big smiles back for you.” I just wasn’t sure how.
Spring felt so far away, and how was I supposed to believe that plants as pretty as the pictures in the catalogues could ever come from such tiny seeds, when I couldn’t even recognize the seed of my old self in the eyes of the woman in the mirror?
I’d blown up my life; but the truth was that the woman I was before the twin’s birth, had died on that operating table. She’d died with the zip of the scalpel across her belly, with the blue drape thrown haphazardly over her face, with the fear that they had forgotten that she was a person with feelings and not just a body. She died when she felt much too much as they pulled her apart to save the life they’d endangered in the first place, and she died when they didn’t believe her that it hurt.
But I was still waiting for spring. Even though sometimes, I thought the winter might last forever.
A few weeks before Christmas, I had my first phone conversation with a new therapist, and that January I started going once a week while my Mom watched the twins for an hour. From that very first session, the dissociation I’d been living under since my traumatic c-section, finally began to clear. In February I made an unlikely friendship with another Mom from the school, and the loneliness slowly began to ebb. And in March—in March we took our hopes to the earth and began planting seeds.
Spring
There’s nothing like greenhouse therapy for a soul in torment. The very fact that you can put these tiny, dead looking things in a grave of earth, then watch as they explode out of their skins and burst forth into something that looks completely different, and yet so much more alive, will never cease to be miraculous. Therapy was helping. Having a friend helped. But the best comfort of all came in remembering that the dark nights eventually give way to the light. The snow does give way to the green of spring, eventually. I needed the rhythm of the world to remind me, that life is inextricably tied to seasons—and seasons always change.
I breastfed babies while thinning beets that first summer. We canned more pickles than we could possibly consume. The weeds were a runaway train we had no hope of catching, especially since we all had other full time occupations. But in our market garden field, where the cell signal was spotty, and the wind kissed your sun burned skin like a lover’s caress—I began to find my center again. Next year, the farm would be for others—but this year, it was just for us. This year, it was just for me.
A seed bursting from her skins to sprout. A meteor exploding in the middle of a dark sky. What looked like destruction, just the chrysalis for a beauty that could not be contained.
Dear Reader,
Thank you for reading this essay. This story is so personal and tender, and yet I know that those kinds of stories are often the ones that find the deepest resonance—my prayer is that my vulnerability can meet your vulnerability and let you know that you are not alone.
One of the seeds that I planted during my new season was the seed of my first book as the Sparrow flies. It released on February 20th, 2024, on the 10 year anniversary of my Gamama going to heaven, and it is a book that seeks to name the various aches that come with loving broken beings in a broken world—because in the naming of what aches, we can begin to find healing, wholeness, and freedom. Love hurts, but it’s worth it. For those of us who have been burned by love so often that we sometimes wonder if it’s worth it, the hope of the Sparrows can give us wings.
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Including five original pieces of emotionally evocative artwork by Bethanie Pack—as the Sparrow flies is a beautiful book that I’m very proud to have made. So many wonderful readers have reached out to me, or left kind reviews letting me know what this book meant to them, and it means the world to know that some of the words that came from my own darkest place, have met you in yours. (And if you’ve read it but haven’t left a review yet, please do! It really helps other readers find the book.)
You can purchase it on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Bookshop.org, or of course at my Poetry Shop for a signed copy with a personalized note from me. (This is your friendly reminder that buying a book, subscribing to this newsletter, sharing the posts that resonate with you, commenting—etc. are all AMAZING ways to support an author so that they can keep doing their good work!)
Thank you for being here dear readers—for making a little space in your heart and in your inbox for these words from me. I hope they bless you to read as much as they blessed me to write.
Warmly,
Grace E. Kelley
We have very different circumstances, but I related to this so deeply. I am going through the second time of “blowing up my life” and the trauma has been perpetual since 2021. I had these same thoughts— “We just have to get there. We just have to go. We can make it, if we can just get there.” I remember the intense anxiety and overwhelming feelings infused into those thoughts.
This is a hard walk. At first it didn’t seem like blessing and grace as I clawed my way towards the light, but I can see now… it is.
I look forward to reading more. Great post 🤍
Amazing essay! I could see, feel and hear every word you wrote. Thank you for writing your path through the pain. Your words will encourage those still finding their way through trauma. You are a courageous woman to make such a drastic change, but breaking from the old life gave you great freedom to start fresh, rewriting your new story. Your essay moved m so much!