What We Were Actually Building

On Valentine's Day, families sat across from their sons and built bird feeders. That is what it looked like from the outside.

From the inside it looked like something else entirely.

A few weeks earlier I had written about birds, about what it means to tend something and wait, and somewhere in that conversation the idea took shape: we would build bird feeders together. Families and residents, side by side, at the same table. We set out supplies and offered three templates. Easy designs, a place to start. And then we stepped back and watched what happened.

There was a dad who was an engineer. He studied the template the way you study a problem you intend to solve. He was quiet and focused and completely present. You could feel that this was how he showed love, by bringing his whole self to something and not leaving until it was right. He measured. He thought it through. He built something sturdy and considered and entirely his.

There was a boy who did not look at the templates at all. He sorted through the materials, took what he wanted, and built something nobody else in that room would have thought of. He did not ask for permission or check if he was doing it correctly. He just built the thing that was in him to build. Watching him, I thought: that is exactly the posture we are trying to help these boys find. Not recklessness. Trust. Trust in what he knew about himself.

There was a mother who started building, hit a wall, and stopped. Not because she gave up. Because what she was building was not working and she knew it. She sat with that for a moment and then made a significant change to her design. The goal was still the same, a place for birds to land and be fed. She achieved it, just not the way she originally planned. What she finished was completely her own and it was exactly right.

Not one person in that room did it the same way. Not one.

I stood there watching and I kept thinking about a phrase families hear constantly in this process. Trust the process. It gets handed out like it is a comfort, like it explains something. But I have never thought it was a simple thing to ask. You have to trust a process you did not design, that does not run on your timeline, whose outcome nobody can guarantee. You have to trust it when the first version is not working and you do not yet know if what you are making instead is going to hold.

That mother trusted the process. Not the template. Not the original plan. The process of staying at the table and finding another way. That is what trusting the process actually looks like from the inside. It is not passive. It is the decision to keep going when the first version falls apart.

The engineer trusted his own way of loving. The boy trusted what was in him. Neither one followed the instructions. All of them got it right.

When they were finished, each person handed what they made to someone across the table. A mother placed hers in her son's hands. He placed his in hers. The boys who had spent months doing the hardest work of their lives sat across from the people who loved them most and passed something over. I do not have adequate words for what those exchanges looked like. There are moments in this work that you just hold.

Some of those parents had already watched things fall that they had put everything into. Programs that promised and did not deliver. Hope they had carefully built, piece by piece, that came apart anyway. They had not come to that table because recovery had gotten easy or because the fear was gone. They had come because they were the kind of people who keep building. Who refused to stop.

When I returned to Woodhaven after Family Day I found the feeders lying in the grass and snow. I stood there and felt something I did not expect to feel. We had built those with real hope. We had hung them with the idea that they would stay, that they would become something, a symbol of what happened in that room on Valentine's Day and what our families were building. And February had just taken them.

I have picked up broken pieces before. More times than I can count and in harder circumstances than a handful of sticks in the snow. I know how to do it. I know how to bend down and gather what fell and carry it away and keep going. That is a skill you develop whether you want to or not.

I am usually the person who bends down first. The person who gathers what fell before anyone else has to.

One of the boys found me.

"Jill," he said quietly. "The bird feeders all fell."

He saw it in my face before I said a word. He knew it was not about the bird feeders and he did not need me to explain that. He just knew.

He offered to go pick them up. I told him no. It was cold and it was not his mess to deal with and I meant it. He insisted. Not in a way that made it complicated or heavy, just quietly and with certainty, the way you say a thing when you have already decided. He wanted to help. He was going to help.

So I let him.

He went out in the cold without a fuss and gathered up the broken pieces and threw them out and came back in. That was it. No drama. No ceremony. He did not make it a thing.

I want to tell you something about that boy. He is in the middle of his own hard work. He has his own things to carry, his own process to trust, his own version of the first and second design that did not hold. He is doing the work every single day and it is not easy and it is not finished. He had every reason that afternoon to be focused entirely on himself.

And he looked up. He saw me. He said my name. And then he went out in the cold and did something for someone else without being asked and without making anything of it.

I know that when I go back this weekend there will likely be more on the ground. February is not done. This will probably not be the last time he does this. What stays with me is not what fell. It is who noticed. Who went out anyway. Who came back in without making it a thing.

That is not a small thing. That is the whole thing.

That is what we are all working toward, the moment when a boy who came to us turned inward by necessity starts to turn outward by choice. When he begins to notice other people, to extend himself, to offer without being asked and without making it about himself. When the work he has been doing quietly inside himself starts to show up in the world in ways that have nothing to do with him and everything to do with who he is becoming.

I am not someone who accepts help easily. I handle things. I always have. Accepting help when you are capable of doing something yourself does not come naturally to me. I know it is not weakness. I know it is its own kind of trust. I just do not always practice what I know.

That afternoon I did. I stood in the cold and I let him, and somewhere in that moment I understood something I had been saying to families for months without fully feeling it myself.

Trusting the process is not an abstract thing. It is not a phrase you hold onto until the hard part is over. It is what that mother did when she sat with what was not working and found another way. It is what that boy did when he trusted what was in him and built something nobody else would have thought of. It is what that father did when he brought everything he had to a table and loved his son the only way he knew how.

And it is what I did when I said yes to a kid who was in the middle of his own hard thing and still looked up and offered.

Sometimes what we build looks like it is falling apart. The feeders are down. February took them the way February takes things, without warning and without apology. And yet something beautiful was happening that I did not fully understand until a boy walked up to me in the cold, said my name, and went out without being asked to pick up the pieces.

That is the process. Not a program or a timeline or a predicted outcome. Sometimes it looks like it is falling apart and something is growing anyway, something you could not have designed or planned or seen coming until it is standing right in front of you saying your name.