Four Hundred Miles From the One You Carry

Twenty to ten at night, and the notebook is open on the kitchen table with the rubber band still looped around the back cover.

It is a cheap notebook. Lined, spiral, the kind you get in a supermarket. In it, in four different pens, is the whole running of a woman's life four hundred miles north of this table: the agency office number and the out of hours number that is different, the direct line at the surgery that a receptionist gave her once in a moment of mercy and that she wrote down like treasure, the pharmacy, the chiropodist, and Val at number nine who has the spare key and who is seventy eight herself and who apologizes every time she rings.

There is a cold cup of coffee at the edge of the table. Her phone is face up beside the notebook, because she has stopped putting it face down at night. That happened about eight months ago and she did not notice it happening.

Today's entry is short and she has underlined part of it. Carer came 11.20, not 8.00. Mum in the chair since six.

Since six. Sitting up in the chair by the window in her dressing gown from six in the morning until twenty past eleven, waiting for someone to come, because she gets up early and always has, and because she will not ring anyone to ask where they are in case she is being a nuisance.

And here is the part that is sitting in this daughter's chest at twenty to ten at night. She did not find out from the agency. She did not find out from her mother, who said on the phone, cheerfully, that she was absolutely fine and had watched a nice program about canals. She found out from Val, who mentioned it sideways, the way people do when they are not sure whether it is their place.

Last Sunday she filled the pill organiser by video call. Forty minutes of holding blister packs up to a phone camera, Monday to Sunday, morning and night, while her mother said, twice, I can do it myself, do not fuss.

She has typed a message to her brother three times tonight. She has deleted it three times, because there is no way to write it that does not sound like a bill.

She is at work at eight tomorrow. She cannot drive up until the twenty second. And there is nothing in her hands tonight except a supermarket notebook with a rubber band around it, holding the entire life of the woman who raised her.

You know that notebook.

Maybe yours is a folder, or an app, or a running list in the notes on your phone that you have never once shown anybody. Maybe it is a father, or an aunt who has nobody else, or a mother who is still sharp as a knife and simply cannot get up off the toilet on her own any more. You know the phone that stays face up. You know the specific cold that arrives when an unfamiliar number rings at an unusual hour.

And you know the sentence you have never said out loud, which is not that you cannot cope.

It is that you love her enormously and you cannot be there at eight o'clock in the morning, and you never can be, and no amount of organizing is ever going to change that.

Stay at the table. Do not close the notebook yet. Let me sit down opposite you.

The watch you cannot keep is being kept

Let me name what is actually heavy, because nobody around you has words for the way it gets carried.

You are not caring for your mother. That is the thing that gets missed. You are administering the care of your mother, which is a completely different job, and it has none of the parts that would feed you. Somebody else puts a hand on her arm. Somebody else sees her face in the morning. You get the phone calls, the rotas, the follow ups, the polite chasing, the two hours on hold, the sentence begins I am ringing about my mother, and then you go to work.

And you are doing it in the dark. You are making decisions about a woman four hundred miles away on the basis of what she is willing to tell you, which is almost nothing, because she was raised not to be a burden and she is not about to start now at eighty three. You are working blind and God is not, and that is not a soft thing to say, it is written into the oldest songs His people ever sang on a road. His Spirit has been in that front room since six in the morning, before Val, before the agency, before a single number in that notebook had been dialled.

Then underneath that there is the other thing, and I am going to say it because you will not. There is the guilt of the road. You went where the work was, or where the love was, or where you could breathe, and it was not wrong, and there is a version of this in which you were three streets away with the key in your own pocket, and you can see that version very clearly at about four in the morning.

I am not going to talk you out of any of that. I am going to put something underneath it.

Behold, he who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.Psalm 121:4

Notice where that song was sung. It is a song of ascents. It belongs to people on a road, away from home, looking up at hills they had to cross, and the whole psalm is a traveling person's psalm. It was written for exactly the distance you are living in. And the same Spirit who moved on the man who sang it is the One awake in your kitchen at twenty to ten, which is how a traveling song three thousand years old lands on a supermarket notebook.

And read what it actually claims, because this is the difference between comfort and a lie. It does not say nothing hard happens. It says the keeping never lapses. There is no hour of the night when the watch is unmanned. The carer was three hours late and God was not three hours late, and I am not going to tell you the lateness did not matter, because it did, and your mother sat in a chair for five hours and that is a real wrong.

But she was not unattended. Not for one of those minutes.

Now here is something I want to hand you carefully, because it is the thing that will actually let you sleep tonight.

You are one of her keepers. You are not the only one, and you were never meant to be the whole watch. Val at number nine is part of it. The good carer, the one who talks to her properly and stays the extra four minutes, is part of it. Your brother, whatever you think of him tonight, is part of it, and so is a God who was in that room at six in the morning before anybody had been rung about anything. Scripture puts the whole watch on One who does not sleep, and His Spirit is what turns that from a line in a hymn into the actual staffing of her front room while you are at work.

And one more thing, and I will say it plainly because it protects both of you.

Your mother is a grown woman with her own will and her own walk with God. She gets to decide about her own house. She gets to be stubborn about the pill organiser. I cannot promise you what happens to her health, and I would not insult you by trying, and neither of us has the authority to decide her mind for her. What you are permitted to do is stand for her. Not over her. That distinction will keep you honest and it will keep your relationship with her intact, and both of those matter more than winning any particular argument about the stair rail.

I stand for her. That is a real prayer and it holds real weight. It just does not come with a lever in it. And where my words run out, the Spirit takes over the praying; Scripture calls it groanings too deep for words, which is precisely the kind of praying a daughter does at twenty to ten with a cold cup of coffee and nothing left.