Elizabeth Lyvers's Blog

Reflections Watching Caitlin Clark Lose

Like so many others I know, I got caught up in the magic of watching Iowa play basketball this season. It was extra special watching with my in-laws. My father-in-law is a proud native Iowan and U of I alum who loves to quote Field of Dreams, “Is this heaven? No, it’s Iowa.”  Caitlin Clark is a joy to watch, the sort of player who can repeatedly hit a perfect three off a screen from 30 feet out. I imagine there are times even the opposing team has to just laugh and say, “Unbelievable.”  Last Sunday afternoon, I felt genuine sadness watching the final minute of the final quarter dissolve, and it wasn’t because I had our life savings down on the championship game winner.  It was a good story and I love good stories. Caitlin Clark with her record-breaking shots and uncanny ability to see the floor became our protagonist, and her teammates the astounding supporting characters. Kate Martin’s spin jump shots are amazing. Gabbie Marshall’s defense. Hannah Stuelke’s inside plays. They’re all amazing.  The camaraderie that this team has brought to the game, drawing record crowds, has been unparalleled. Sunday’s title game was the most watched basketball game […]

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No Ordinary Life

By all standards of the American dream and my restless, internal drive: I’m not doing enough.

But am I supposed to do more?

That tension between ambition and reality has led me to questions I didn’t bother pondering in college.

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The End of the Story

Someone took a photo of me the other day, a headshot for author purposes, and looking at it, I was struck by the fine lines around my eyes. I know thirty-one isn’t “old” and in a few years I will want to pat myself on the head and say, “You silly, young thing,” BUT the truth remains—those lines were not there ten years ago. The passage of time is slipping into my face, like ink blotting through a page, and I’m both mesmerized and conflicted. Time, that essential measurement of life, is a finite space into which I must fit maturity and understanding. Lessons learned. Battles won. In the time it took for these lines to appear, nearly everything that I’ve learned has come experientially. There’s no way to become an expert simply by being told. I can read instructions in a book on being a “loving wife,” or “relating empathetically, “or enduring adversity”—but the reality of them only comes through the doing. No one could tell me how to grow up. I simply had to do it.  The same photographer of my headshot also took a family photo—me, my husband, a little boy of nearly three, and a tiny […]

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Musical Memories

We don’t choose the music we love any more than we choose the color of our eyes.  We don’t find it. It finds us.  My husband has a soft spot for ‘90s country because that’s what played in the car when he was just a pair of short legs in a carseat. But then he grew into a teenager and heard Breaking Benjamin and it was like knowing a language without ever having been taught. Freedom, power, the angst of adolescence—all gathered into the furious sound of The Diary of Jane. Then he became a man and heard Hans Zimmer’s score in the movie Inception. Later, he found the folk band Arcadian Wild and then the composer Kerry Muzzey. Other languages he could quote line by line. Tommy never had music lessons and wouldn’t recognize middle C if it was the last note on earth, but he understands music fluently.  Conversely, I grew up with some technical music training and a mom who required that I practice every day. Piano became the ambience of my childhood whether it was Rachmaninoff on the record player, my Tuesday morning lesson with Sally, an older sister at the upright, or an Emile Pandolfi […]

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Dear Daughter

Dear Daughter, I’ve started and stopped this letter a half dozen times. Sleep deprivation is like a leaf blower blasting my words into chaotic circles, ruining any attempt at a neat pile of thoughts. But this afternoon I made a lovely cup of Columbian coffee and cradled you in the crook of my arm and the leaf blower calmed to a distant hum.  I started to read but mostly I couldn’t stop looking at you. You’re beautiful to me—your tiny lips and full cheeks. The fist closed around my finger. Dreams occasionally tug on your mouth and it’s like you’re smiling at me. And although I’m too tired to spell the word sleep, I cling to this moment because I know it will pass all too soon.  Just two weeks ago you were a thumping foot against my stomach and already you’re a snuggly body that smells of milk and this marvelous, indefinable quality that all the newly born seem to possess. Two years from now you’ll be a version of your older brother—spooning granola into your mouth and asking for another Clifford book. And ten years from now … twenty … I don’t know exactly how to picture it, […]

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In a World with Spring

Imagine that the leaves have fallen. The trees are dead, stripped to spindly, ghostly tentacles. The sun rarely shines, but even the light is cold on your face. When you emerge from your house, the wind lashes you like fleas biting skin. The days are long but the nights longer. And it’s in those nights, in the darkness, the ever-pressing, all-encompassing lack of sight, that you first feel despair.  Over time, winter steals the memory of warmth. You forget the sight of golden light glistening across living branches. Forget the smell of thunderstorms and the sounds of living creatures. The taste of sweet lemonade.  Wrapped in the dark, the cold, and the silence, you believe, This is all that ever was and all that ever will be.  And then one pre-dawn morning, your eyes still closed, you hear the song of returning birds. You step outside your door, and the air smells different—like rain and cut grass and your grandmother’s garden shed. That smell of rich soil is ironically the smell of bacteria eating away the dead things of winter. But these trees, they were never dead, merely sleeping. And as their branches unfurl into green leaves and pink blossoms, […]

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Stories for You to Muse Over in 2023

I have been in love with story my entire life: a child reading Nancy Drew in the woods, then a teenager dreaming up plot lines for a new novel during a basketball game timeout. Later, as a college student sucked into The Hunger Games mania, and now as a mom picking up Edith Wharton in those quiet minutes before bed. Throughout the years, story has been a tethering line that connects my present self to all those older versions, reminding me that the little girl who sobbed through Where the Red Fern Grows is still alive and well.  Jack was two months old when my best friend Bek Robinson came to visit us and brought with her a stack of baby books. “Have you read to him yet?” she asked. Embarrassed, I didn’t know what to say. It hadn’t occurred to me to read to him yet! He seemed so … out of it. I mean, the kid was still learning the basic elements of head control. Nevertheless, Bek persisted. I can remember the spot on the couch where she first read him Big Red Barn and Jamberry.  After that, I started reading to him before naps and bedtimes, and […]

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Have you forgotten that you’re loved?

Her words brought me to tears. Tommy and I had been watching the latest season of The Chosen, a free streaming show about the life of Jesus and his closest followers. Afterwards there’s an opportunity for viewers to record and post their responses to the show. One woman described being homeless for the last decade and connecting with the way Jesus and his followers slept outside without roof, societal normalcy, or comforts. She identified with Peter’s anger, Andrew’s anxiety. She said, “I forgot that I was loved.” And it struck me, In the hustle and bustle and break-neck urgency to get 2-day shipping.  In the ending of one school semester and in the great breath before the next one begins.  In the depression and loneliness. In the changes of tradition. Or the missing faces at your table. Or the children that should be in your arms but aren’t. For all the joys and woes bound up in that word—Christmas Have you forgotten that you’re loved? During the holidays, the senses stir our remembrance. For me it’s the smell of snow and burning wood, sounds of a fire crackling, carols on the piano. The taste of Mom’s sausage balls and homemade […]

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Secrets of a Contented Heart

I finished a new novel in May and the book spent the summer with an editor getting spruced. Since September I’ve been in the dreaded query process where I pitch the premise and some sample pages to dozens of literary agents in hopes of being “discovered” and getting a big publisher. It’s soul-wearying. Painstaking. A lot like sitting at a slot machine in a casino, watching your money dwindle with every game, telling yourself to give up, but unable to stop on this off-chance that the next one will hit the jackpot. I don’t enjoy limbo or uncertainty or waiting. I don’t think most of us particularly like having our feet suspended above the floor, unable to move forward or undo the past. But that’s where I live today: waiting for an email. You might be waiting, too. A new job, a house of your own, a better relationship, a child to love. I try to focus on the positive, on those things I’m not waiting for, but finding true contentment feels more elusive than a game of mind tricks. I’ve always been captivated by Paul’s words in Philippians: “I have learned the secret of being content in any and […]

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When Certain Meets Unsure: Thoughts on Turning Thirty

Ten years ago, I was walking across my college campus on a humid, golden-lit evening. My good friend, still stuck at age 19, asked how I felt about my birthday. I pulled in a deep breath and smiled. “I love it! I’m so excited not to be a teenager anymore.”  Twenty was the age of promise, the next decade hinting at monumental moments like degrees and engagement rings, careers and new friendships, international travel. Experiences that happen for the first time only one time.  During a childhood spent straining for independence, I imagined life on my own. As an adult, before the inevitable “settling down,” I would get a historic but appropriately renovated apartment in a big city’s downtown. I’d cook gourmet dinners with friends and afterwards sit on my balcony alone to watch city lights and read good literature. I’d have a real writing career, definitely a dog, and maybe a roommate depending on current inflation.  I would be self-sufficient, confident, breezy but rooted, always learning, always growing. I would stop wearing basketball shorts and my sisters’ hand-me-down clothes and develop an actual sense of style. I might attempt heels and a matching purse. Ten years later, this morning […]

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