Captain Reverend Mother

I just finished the most important thing I did today. No, it was not drafting a policy memo or fielding a call from a flag officer about the constitutional rights of Sailors (though those were important). It was sewing the tail back onto a cow costume. A fuzzy little black-and-white get-up my youngest wears with pride, at an age when he still believes in magic, the goodness of popcorn, and that his mother can fix anything.

Tomorrow is pajama day. A blessed and weird tradition where kids tumble into school in their bathrobes and fleece onesies, all sugared up and cracked out on summer anticipation. They get to watch The Wizard of Oz with their friends. The lights dim, the popcorn crunches, and the 3rd grade teacher claims she chokes up when Dorothy says “there’s no place like home.” It is the second-to-last day of school. My son has been talking about it for weeks.

And then the tail fell off. The tail.

I had just come off a long stretch of work that blurred into itself—triaging competing demands on my team’s time, working with a command on enhancing their spiritual readiness efforts, and sorting through some big-picture national guard mobilization concerns that made my head (and heart) hurt. I was bone-tired, my inbox was feral, and I had a long list of “urgent” items.

My son came to me with the costume in one hand and his small, quiet hope in the other. “Mom, the tail came off,” he said. And just like that, the to-do list fell apart. There are moments we know, even as they are happening, that will go down in the unwritten ledger of our soul. This was one of them.

I keep thinking about how many times I try to do something grand, visible, useful with a capital U. I am a Navy Captain, a chaplain, a theologian, a mother. I move in high-stakes rooms with acronyms and official fonts. Yet tonight, nothing felt truer than threading a needle and anchoring that tail like it mattered. Because it did.

I have spent my life in spaces where people are trained to show strength. We armor up, perform competence, and survive things that should have broken us. Yet what I have learned, often by accident, is that love—actual, fleshy, inconvenient love—shows up in the just before bedtime with a spool of thread. It says yes to the cow tail, and “I see your heartbreak. I have ten minutes, two hands, and some thread.”

Sometimes I imagine God as a divine tailor, patching up the frayed and torn edges of our lives. Just sitting beside us quietly, reattaching something small that came loose. A cow tail, maybe. A threadbare belief. The part of us that used to know how to rest.

The tail is back on. Back in middle school, I opted for woodshop versus home-ec, so needless to say, the tail is a little crooked. My son put on the costume and did a slow spin in the living room, watching the tail swish behind him. “Thanks, Mom,” he squealed. Then he looked at me the way only a child can, with a radiant, unguarded trust I pray will survive into his adulthood.

I keep thinking about what our world measures and what God might measure. We reward productivity, forward motion, efficiency, and optimism that sells. God probably is counting stitches.

That is the real work: catching the thread when it slips loose and mending what matters before the lights go out.