Untamed

My wife and ex-husband play on the same adult league soccer team on Wednesday nights. After dinner, we pack up the car with chairs and snacks, and the kids and I sit on the sidelines and watch their dad and their bonus mom work together to score goals.

A few weeks ago, the kids and I were sitting on the sidelines and an older couple sat down next to us. The woman pointed toward my girls and asked, “Are those your daughters?”

“They are,” I said.

“Is their dad out there playing?”

“Yes, he is. That’s him.” I pointed to Craig.

“Where do you all live?”

“We live right here in Naples, but separately. He and I are divorced now.”

“Wow, it’s wonderful that you still come watch him play!”

“Yes, we love watching him play. Also, the girls’ mom is playing. We come to watch her, too.”

The woman looked confused. She said, “Oh! I thought you were their mom.”

I said, “I am! That’s their other mom.”

I pointed to Abby. The woman looked closely. “Good Lord,” she said. “That woman looks exactly like Abby Wambach.”

“That woman is Abby Wambach,” I said.

She said, “Wow! Your ex-husband is remarried to Abby Wambach?”

“Close! I’m married to Abby Wambach.”

It took her a minute. A full minute of quiet. Selah. Old structural ideas burning, a new order of things being born inside her.

Then she smiled.

“Oh! Wow,” she said.

Tish’s first word was “Wow.” On an early-December morning in Virginia, I pulled her out of her crib and walked her over to the nursery window. I lifted the shade, and we both saw that the backyard was covered in white. It was her first snow. Tish’s eyes got big, she reached out her hand to touch the cold window, and she said, “Wow.”

When people encounter our family, their eyes get big and they say “Wow”—in one tone or another—because they haven’t seen a family exactly like ours before. Our family is specific, because we are specific people. We did not use a blueprint created by someone else and then struggle to fit each of us inside. We create and re-create our family again and again—from the inside of each one of us—out. We will continue to do that forever, so each of us will always have room to grow and grow and still belong. That is what family is to me: where we are both held and free.