Author: CeceD

Cece DuBois is a modern day Polymath. She is a writer of prose, verse, and song. She paints portraits, builds furniture, sings, laughs, and prays. She's a designer -- of homes, and wardrobes, and ideas. She's known a life of being locked in a cage so small that her wings were stunted. But through the past few years she's broken free, traversed the shattered familial ties, and soared to the higher ground of a healing Spirit. In high school, Sister Edith told her to "choose one" of her many creative talents and discard the rest. Instead, Cece became determined to breathe life into every one, as long as she herself drew breath. Cece lives in Middle Tennessee, but has the heart of a gypsy, and loves the richness that adventures of the creative mind provide. She sees each day as a blessing, and all things as happening for good.

::Embracing Grace::

God has been tapping me on the shoulder for the past ten, maybe fifteen years. I knew it but, for the first few of those years, I tried to ignore Him (let me add: big mistake, that one).

As the years passed, and my grands were no longer spending weekends with me, my life became very … very quiet.

Finally, one evening, I attended an event put on by an organization called Portico Story. A dear friend from church, Tammy, had posted it on facebook, and God got in my face: “You need to go.”

So I went.

This event was about babies. And mamas. And forbearance, and grace. The speaker was a woman who shared her own pregnancy journey. She was passionate, funny, heartbreaking. Riveting.

At the end I hugged Tammy, thanked her, and told her I needed to meet with her about something God’s been pulling on me about.

We met. And, as they say, the rest is history. I’m being little vague here, mainly out of an abundance of caution. But the short of it is, I’m now a safe haven for Mamas and their babies.

I am delighted to say, the Portico organization, their people and I have become a loosely linked, spirit-directed team. My first Mama and her newborn arrived in April of this year, a referral from Portico.

Having someone live with you is a journey. Especially when your first introduction is at your front door. But it’s been five months, and now we’re halfway through September, her last month with me. We’ve gotten to know each other, and I’ve gotten to watch her baby grow. When I see this Mama lift her chin, find her feet, and begin to establish a life for her and her children, I know God put this here.

I’m present for her as supporter, and counselor, and prayerful watcher. I provide a cozy bedroom, nutritious food, and a peaceful place to call home. A sanctuary.

It’s not all clean and perfect. It’s real life: messy, disorganized, a little chaotic … dirty diapers and spit-up rags; communication breakdowns and slight misunderstandings. But we muddle through, as humans do.

And everyone in this house is human. I remind myself of this from time to time, and extend as much grace as I can.

In the end, this Mama and her baby will go off and live their lives. I pray that, in some small way, I’ve made a difference.

As she steps forward into this new chapter, I trust that God will continue to shine His light, His grace, and His mercy, down on us all.

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::Becoming Real::

I was a child of the sixties, and grew up in a household centered around the Holy Catholic Church and Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. My parents were children of the Great Depression; they learned that life means do without, stretch a dollar, work hard, and drink harder. I was their first child, born to them when they were still young, tragically beautiful, and very much in love. When I was a little girl I would shyly study my mother’s face … her wide eyes, long eyelashes, full red lips. She was clearly a movie star in hiding. I wondered what she was doing in this little life, in this house on North Marion Street, with its linoleum kitchen floor and one parched sapling in the front yard. Even at five, I knew she’d been miscast. Through the years, five more babies, and alcoholic chaos, it became an undeniable fact: my mother belonged in a different movie. 

As the oldest daughter, I took on the job of laugh inducing peacemaker. Lots of oldest daughters have that role. My brother, two years younger, was mother’s tenderhearted caretaker. We spent our childhood together in the family foxhole. Nothing will bond siblings like friendly fire. It’s a sort of hellish, heartbreaking love that no one else knows. No one. But at the time, it was our family’s brand of ‘normal,’ so imagine my surprise when, years later, I learned that some families have no foxhole at all.

I lurched through the decades, reinventing myself over and over, determined to be whoever those claiming to love me told me I was. It took over forty years, and one spectacular betrayal for me to stop, and turn my attention to the whisper of truth. It was there all along, but I hadn’t heard it before, because I wasn’t ready. Not only had I become ready, I threw up the white flag of surrender. I’d run out of things to try, people to be. And I was exhausted.. All I had left was me. When I finally gave into myself, it felt like declaring bankruptcy. 

I remember the date. May 12, 1991. My attorney’s call that morning woke me up. She was calling to let me know the divorce was final. She’d used the word, “Congratulations.” I got off the phone, and laid in bed, waiting. I didn’t know what to expect, but I thought surely I would feel … something. Relief? Excitement, maybe? All I got was silence. I threw off the covers, walked into the bathroom, and stared in the mirror. I looked into my own eyes, searching for … someone. Who will I be now? I whispered. I had no idea.

Ever since I was a tiny girl, there’s been … something … like a tiny thread … woven deep inside me. Piled over with years of Catholic school, alcoholic parents, sweet babies, abusive marriage, broken dreams … you’d think that thread would have broken, or suffocated, or disintegrated. It never did. 

Like a flower finding its way to the sun through a crack in the stone, that shimmering little strand found its way back to me. 

The very thing I feared would be most difficult has become easy, feels natural. Coming home to myself is simple, and honest. I am moving back toward the center of someone I’ve always known. It warms my heart, settles my belly, and brings perspective into sharp focus. I know where home is now. And I see that I was right here all the time. 

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::Big Brown Boots::

At Marquette School every day, Monday through Friday, started with Holy Mass.

Each class sat together with their Benedictine nun sitting proudly in charge of the group.

Once I received Holy Communion, I was able to partake every morning. This was back during the days when it was the rule to abstain from food after midnight in order to receive the Sacrament.

So I received it every morning. Recipients would file into the lunchroom to break their fast after Mass. My mother tied a dime and a nickel into the corner of a handkerchief. This bought me a cup of hot chocolate and one glazed donut. At that young age, this seemed the prize, and I confess to you now that – more often than not – it was that cocoa and that donut in my head when the priest placed the Host on my tongue.

At one point I needed rubber boots. I dreamt of getting a pair of white boots with a big tassel on the front. I’d seen the drum majorettes wear them and that was exactly what I wanted!

The next memory that comes to mind is me, late to Mass, shlepping down the aisle in big, brown rubber boots. Christ the King church was filled with every student in the school, and was dead silent except for me, age six, clod hopping my way down that center aisle to the front pews, where the first graders sat. I wished the marble floor would swallow me up.

When purchasing them my mother had pointed out, quite briskly, that my brother could wear them once I’d outgrown them which – give the size – would surely have taken several years.

I hated my mother, I hated my brother, I hated those big brown boots, and I hated myself for all that hatred. I knew, in my freshly ordained young heart, that hatred was a sin. So I hated, more than anything, the hatred that I had.

It seems like I wore those big brown boots for years. At first every time I pulled them on, I willed them to be white boots with a big tassel on the front.

They never were anything but brown rubber.

Such a big lesson in humility for a six year old.

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::The First Holy Place::

The first holy place was Christ the King Church. As a tiny baby I was baptized in that church on Easter Sunday.

With Holy water, oil, salt, prayers and ashes, Monsignor Fletcher declared me “marked as Christ’s own forever” that day. I have been His ever since.

Even as a little girl, the church’s architecture amazed me. It looms up out of the firmament, sandy gold bricks coursed in towers and spires, with sets of huge doors, matched on each side of the taller central spire.

It still makes my eyes wet when I see it.

I pull open those heavy doors and step inside, time seems to stop. Standing in the Nave, the faint aroma of Frankincense lingers and cools the air.

Move inside the to church proper, bless myself with holy water that’s held in copper lined vessels made by my daddy.

Breathe the stillness. Beeswax candles smell like holiness. There’s a bank of them on the left side, in front of the small altar to Saint Francis. Get close to this gathering of little flames flickering in ruby glass cups, the scent of burnt matches mingles with the candle wax.

The atmosphere is quiet, shady. But the altar is straight ahead, beckoning with light from the tabernacle. God is present.

The tall stained glass windows down each side are framed from beneath by stations of the cross in brass relief.

The long oak pew I slide into is weathered smooth, marked by decades of believers.
Tears come as I kneel there and remember, this is where I was declared as God’s own.

It’s been decades, but I am finally realizing the weight and the miracle and the blessing in this.

God’s own. God’s girl. I am His. And I am back. A lifetime of dreams, abuse, love, loss, brokenness … the winding, rocky road has brought me home.

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::I Want to Write::

I want to write.

I want to write something so clear, and so true, that even as you are reading it, they are your words, and not mine, melting into your heart.

I want to write about joy, and faith, and tender mercies.

Let me write you into your sweetest sanctuary, where love and safety abide.

I want to show you my heart, so shattered and abandoned but now whole, so that you can see, and can know, that your own fragile heart will have its own healing, its own wholeness.

I want to talk about the God of recompense, of His grace overflowing, of His arms outstretched and waiting for you to claim Him as your own.

I want to remind you that every breath you take – from that very first – is the inhalation of the Holy Spirit.

I want to tell you that you are marked from the inside out with the fingerprints of the Almighty.

I want to write about the goodness that rises from the ashes of abuse, and of the lessons that, when you give birth to them, change everything – past present, and future.

I want to write a sonnet that you will never lose, about how much this weary world needs your authentic self, loveable and present.

I want to reach across the great divide, from here to eternity, and write to you that yes, it all matters, it’s all good, and every little piece, when laid side by side and end to end, makes a dazzling, beautiful mosaic that is the truest picture there could possibly be of everything.

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::Nanny’s Back Porch::

I remember the glider. The arms and frame were painted chartreuse green. The cushions were upholstered in oil cloth with wide red and white stripes.

Nanny sat on it every morning with her cup of coffee and the morning newspaper. She drank her coffee in a china cup that sat on its own saucer. There were delicate flowers hand painted on them both. She added half and half to the coffee until it looked like caramel.

I remember the treadle machine. It sat against the back wall next to the door on the the concrete patio. The patio was large, and had a lofty roof. The area was cooled with a large ceiling fan that hung from the rafters.

I remember the gentle, rhythmic sound of that fan, and the air that it created.

Nanny’s patio was a place where I knew I could do anything. It was almost sacred in that way, though I didn’t know it at the time. But every weekday morning during my ninth summer, I did my chores, then called my Nanny.

“Nanny? Can I come over?”

“Come on, baby.”

I packed my little cardboard suitcase with my doll and fabric scraps, then walked the two and a half blocks to Nanny’s house.

I remember climbing the steps leading to her house. The front porch had steps of its own. Wrought iron columns painted chartreuse on each corner. Two pink flamingos stood amongst the flowers in front.

The house wall of the porch was knotty pine. A mailbox hung on the left side of that wall. It looked like a covered wagon.

Exactly like a covered wagon.

Nanny made it.

I followed the sidewalk around the left of the house to the back. When I reached the back, I lifted the latch on the large black iron gate. It slowly rolled open, I walked into the back and pushed it shut behind me.
Nanny was there on the glider, her back to me, holding the newspaper akimbo in front of her.


When I think about it now, it makes me tear up. I didn’t know then, didn’t understand, how hungry I was for a space where I could be my unbridled creative self.
At home the message was clear: do your chores, stay out of the way, be quiet. In other words, try not to suck too bad.

But here at Nanny’s, my nine year old shoulders dropped. The knot in my stomach let go. I could sew on the treadle all day long, and nobody would stop me. If I got to a place where I needed help, Nanny was there to lend it. No criticism, no shame, just safety.

I don’t recall her ever really championing my pursuits, but she never cut me down either. I was present and a participant in many of her own creative projects and, by that, I learned that anybody could do anything they dreamt up, all they needed to do was start.

I remember Nanny’s projects where she taught me to “sand with the grain,” to “paint in long, firm but gentle strokes on furniture,” and “never buy a sewing pattern, always make your own.”

Nanny would be horrified if she could see the pile of sewing patterns in my work room today, but all she taught me … about how to do things, and about trusting myself and my creative process – are literally what have inspired me and saved me.

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::Breaks My Heart::

I was so young when I had my babies. I knew only enough to keep them diapered and fed and loved. I sensed there was something deeper still in the act of loving them, but I didn’t know how to get there. I thought about that often, and it broke my heart.

As my babies were growing up, I took them to Sunday school, and to church. They learned to ride bikes, they played dominoes and Uno. They jumped off the pier in Perdido Bay. I was there as mother, but also as observer. I tried to give them all of me. But I often thought that just fell short. And it broke my heart.

They grew into teenagers. Music blared, the house filled with their friends, and sometimes we laughed till our sides ached. Good, rowdy kids who pulled on the reins. It felt like I was always scrambling to keep up but I fell behind so often, and it broke my heart.

Now as I look back on those years. I swear, it feels like a different lifetime. My babies are grown, married, and my grandbabies are almost grown. My goal, my intention, is to always be there for them. But even now, it feels like I fall short, and it breaks my heart.

She had no idea how good a job she was doing. She always felt she never measured up to what she should be. I guess love is like that … you have so much to give, you give all you have, and yet there’s a longing to give more, to be more.

Now, when I tell them how sorry I am for any wrongs I might have done them during their childhood they laugh, feign outrage, and tell me to stop.

If I could, I would live long enough to spill love on all my kids till they day they die. 

But I can’t and it breaks my heart.

So I’ll just keep doing my brokenhearted best, as long as I’m here, and hope it’s enough.

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