Trying Anyway
My third grader has decided she wants to be a fox for Halloween this year. After some rummaging through closets, I find a few crumpled pieces of orange fabric, brew more coffee, say a prayer to whatever saint keeps an eye on overly ambitious craft projects, and dust off my arch nemesis: the sewing machine.
Six hours later, I’ve got a pair of fox ears that look less like ears and more like miniature orange oven mitts, and a tail that’s both lumpy and slightly crooked.
The vest I’m working on now is veering dangerously toward construction-season chic. There are bits of orange thread on the table, the floor, the cat, and somehow in my coffee cup.
But I’m trying.
And in that trying, something gentle is unfolding.
It would be easy to say that bravery is always disruptive, that it’s showy and public and comes hand in hand with a megaphone. And sometimes it does. But more often it looks like this: the quiet refusal to let imperfection keep you from showing up. Choosing to try anyway, even when you know the result will never be seamless.
Maybe the point isn’t making a perfect fox costume with straight seams and whatever the heck ‘bias tape’ is. Maybe it’s showing that we try anyway. Maybe it’s keeping the belief that love doesn’t need to be perfect to be worth showing. What we create, however lopsided, still carries the imprint of our love and our hope. There’s bravery in every stitch, and that bravery says we’re still here, we’re still trying. There’s compassion in every crooked seam that holds the shape of effort, of care, of showing up again.
When she looks back at this Halloween costume in ten years, when it’s her turn to start being brave, she’ll see the frayed edges. But she’ll also remember sitting next to me, plucking neon bits of thread out of my coffee cup with one hand and mapping out her ideal trick-or-treating route with the other. She’ll remember helping her seventeen-year-old brother make waffles for dinner so I could keep sewing. She’ll remember the soft chaos of these autumn evenings, the kind that only happens when love is busy learning.
By the time Halloween comes, my daughter will twirl in her crooked fox costume, and I’ll see the uneven seams and the way the tail tilts just slightly to the left. But she’ll see something else entirely. She’ll see that her mom tried.
And that’s what I want her to remember: that we can keep trying anyway, that love is the courage to begin again, even when the stitches don’t line up.
