Guest Post: Praying With My Daughter

Guest post by Bryn Neenos. Bryn is a teaching lecturer in composition, partner to an excellent spouse, and parent to three whole human beings who spurred her continuing journey to know Heavenly Mother. She should be writing right now, but is most likely distracted by counting down the days to the next season of Ted Lasso, a good book, or a walk in the woods.

It’s a unique feature of two-year-old toddlers that anything worth doing is worth doing twice, or three times, or unlimited times. So, somewhere between twelve months and two years, the nightly rituals of bedtime, the bath, the book, the finality of the shutting door, began to include first one prayer, then two. We shifted from my ritual whisper, “you are brave, you are strong, and it is time for you to go to sleep,” to one prayer, to “one more, mama.”

She invited. In that liminal space, I found opportunity. I prayed first for all the ordinary things (please Lord, help everyone to sleep through the night tonight), while the other prayer, the second prayer, became something else entirely. Something I hadn’t necessarily intended. It became a search for the Mother. My Mother. Our Mother.

Standing in the darkened room, next to the white wooden crib, with my tousled, damp, and footy-jammied baby in my arms, her soft arms flung loosely around my neck or folded into themselves, I voiced a prayer for my impossibly perfect daughter. Dear Heavenly Father, I am searching for my Mother in Heaven. Will you help me to find her? Where is She? Who is She? How can we become like Her? Please, can I find Her?

At odd intervals, when it was my turn to put the baby to bed, against the racket going on next door with the twins who would rather play with Legos than read and pray, I shut out the noise and held my littlest one close. The shadows from the streetlight shone through the blinds and striped the purple polka dot wall. These were the walls I had painted while she lay heavy in my belly, only a promise then. The quote I painstakingly copied, traced, and framed hung above our heads: Well Behaved Women Seldom Make History. My feet stood steady on a hard laminate floor, always strewn over with the detritus of the daylight, but I knew my way in the dark and never tripped between the lamp and the crib. And then the words came.

These were not the prayers I said over the heads of my older children, but somehow, with her, the need became urgent. It was for her, and it was for me. My heart was singing a song only my daughter and I could sing together, yearning for the future and lamenting the invisibility of the past. What I did not know I had in my youth, my daughter might know. She will know.

With the whispered words came answers, little wisps. I held my breath so as not to blow them away. A text from a friend with a link to art that brought tears to my eyes. A website here, a little gift there. A scholarly work. A book of poetry. The phrases that came to my lips–my heavenly parents–without realizing that wasn’t what I would have said before. When did the change begin? When did I begin to know? When did that knowing flower into doing and being? It wasn’t the first prayer. It hasn’t been the last prayer yet. It’s just me and my daughter, praying.

This post is part of a series, Contemplating Heavenly Mother. Find more from this series here.