Straight Pins & Multiplication

I learned how to multiply numbers one evening, when I was four or five years old, sitting on top of an avocado green Speed Queen Washing Machine.

I remember it very vividly. One of my older sisters was in third grade and learning her multiplication tables. I understood adding and subtracting but what was this “times” stuff?

I had asked my mother about it, and she explained it to me.

As I’ve thought through what must have been going on around me, I’ve made an assumption. My assumption is, my mother was probably busy that day.

We were in the “utility room” and with a, then, family of six it was a busy place. The room held the washer and dryer and all the dirty laundry sorted in baskets around the floor, her sewing machine and ironing board were there, and along one wall was a small kitchenette she used for canning and preserving. She didn’t hang out in that room for leisure or relaxation.

I remember asking, and I remember her lifting my tiny self up onto the washer so I was closer to eye level with her. She walked over to her sewing shelf and pulled out a box of straight pins. I remember the black box with clear lid and the multi-colored pin heads contrasted with the avocado paint on the top of the washing machine. She laid them out in groups and explained multiplication to me. I didn’t memorize the multiplication table until third grade just like my sisters did, but I understood the concept and could multiply if given a simple problem.

I LOVED knowing how.

I’ve thought of that little scene many, many times.

How small things can become a catalyst for confidence.

How straight pins can hold more than just fabric together, they hold memories fast too.

How sitting at eye level with an adult brought my ears to ear level too.

How one mom teaching me, becomes me teaching three and three teaching as many as God gives.

How multiplication isn’t just the way numbers work, it’s how love works too.

How interruptions make me feel frustrated for a little while, as a mom, but how changing them to opportunities can make my boys feel good for a long, long time.

I doubt, if my mom were alive today, that she would remember that little exchange. If she did, she would probably be fuzzy on which one of us kids she explained it to. I doubt that it was all that memorable to her, and that is what I most try to remind myself.

What is insignificant to me, may loom very large for my boys.

Lifting him over a spider and web I’ve told him is harmless, seems unnecessary to me, but Aron is dreadfully afraid of them right now and told me this morning how one time he dreamed that a poisonous spider bit him and he died. To him, I’m lifting him away from possible death.

A hug may seem irrelevant in the scheme of a days worth of words to me, but to Owen it can soothe so many misspent moments.

A bandage, on nothing more than a scratch, seems ridiculous to me, but Ivan would insist it hurts so much less with it there.

These days of small things, days of straight pins securing confidence on the platform of a washing machine, days of tiny moments that are growing even faster than they are, these are days when I am grateful for a God of small things. It was He, who first taught us to bring the children close.

He said that we are more important than so many little things, yet, He notices when the sparrow falls, and how the lily is dressed.

We can be sure, we can be confident and we can certainly multiply grace when it is presented from so high a place and we are lifted to eye (and ear) level with Christ.

“But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus,”
-Ephesians 2:4-6