My Sunshine

why I haven't been blogging much

Guys, I feel like I'm starting to come out of the brain fog. Really! At least in this moment, I am feeling as though there might be more to me than momhood (though momhood is pretty amazing and totally consuming most of the time). I've been inspired by a number of shockingly wonderful things recently, and I just want to live fully, spending it all. Maybe it's just because I'm on my second cup of coffee and the sun is shining today, but I'm remembering that I need to be more than a dishcloth.

Gifts for Dust

My mom gives gifts as smoke rises upwards. Some days I would come home from school to find a new shirt lying out on my bed or a stack of 'new' 50-cent thrift store pants for me to sort through. I remember when she handed me the first clue in a treasure hunt that lead to me to my very first set of eye shadow. Mom prepares for Christmas and birthdays months (and months and months) in advance. When I went away to university, I received far more care packages than anyone else I knew, and those bits of home meant the world to me, a prairie girl transplanted to the mountains and studying my bleary eyes out as I was testing my wings. And now that I am living in Seattle with her grandkids, her momentum has not waned. I mean, we even received a package to commemorate Canada Day, complete with Coffee Crisp bars (yes!) and pencils brandished with Canadian flags.

One card I received while in university contained a note pointing me towards Psalm 103, and it has been a favourite passage of mine ever since. I find immense comfort in the psalmist's painting of God's expansive power and grace, and in the shocking magnitude of my forgiveness.

I was reading this Psalm a few years ago, pregnant, weary and stretched beyond all reason, and my eyes fell on verse 14: "For he knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust."

HAL.LE.LU.JAH. This has been such a consolation to me ever since, particularly in the smallness of these mothering-of-little-people years.

I am trying to be very intentional about being with my kids. I like them, and I just want to really walk with them, not simply point them towards a destination and tell them to go. But when I'm overtired, my physical body lacking some of the stabilizing abilities that my heart and mind depend on, being with the kids is emotionally exhausting. I ride all of their feelings right along side of them, vibrating in perfectly discordant harmony with their highs and lows. When all is peaceful and quiet, I am calm and grounded. When two or more are screaming, I easily become ... ahem ... slightly agitated.

'Tis bittersweet. I wouldn't trade it, and I won't regret it, but it's depleting. Hence the comfort of knowing that He knows I'm dust. When I can't connect two coherent thoughts, He knows. When I can't muster the energy to form even the simplest of prayers, I can just be. As a friend reminded me, we are more than minds; we are spirits too, and intimate friends can be together without words. What a friend we have in Jesus.

A stranger, a woman who is a generation ahead of me in the journey, wrote this to a woman who is very much in the same stage as me in the journey:

He can cope with your less than adequate communion with Him because He's the One who sees the heart, not the performance. Trust me, I battled the same thing years (and years and years) ago when I was at your stage of mummage... and now at grandma stage, I've found that He and I are still together and I love Him even more now... and I get more time to read my Bible... hang in there... this too will pass.

What a gift.

Theodore

Theodore: divine gift
Alvin (my dad's name): friend

You are here, and you are perfect. Two weeks, and our worlds are completely upside down while being completely right and overflowing. You did not emerge to breathe the free air when expected, or as expected, and your labour was not what I expected (silly me, to think I knew what labour would look like, or to think that by the fourth time around I could have some control over it). You were born at home, and we know that the Lord was good to us.

Your dad has been taking incredible care of all of us, of me, so I can take care of you. And you are thriving. These are days of bleary eyes and unfinished sentences, of tears and quiet. There are moments when I am rubbed raw and figuring out how to meet 17 simultaneous needs (melt downs), and there are moments of deep peace and fierce gratitude.

I love you, little man. I am so glad to be your mommy.

Pea soup, a double-edged sword, and reflection

The double-edged sword of pregnancy, particularly when full term, is this: brain fog + increased hormones.

On the spectrum that places thinkers and feelers on opposite ends, I naturally lean towards the thinkers side. But pregnancy has robbed me of my ally. My brain is drowning in a pea soup fog; clear, coherent thought is a distant memory. I don't have my reliable filter to help me sift through my normal emotions, let alone the increased emotions that are raging through me. I wish they were pleasant emotions of elation and gratitude, but the thing I feel the most is agitation. I have constant agitation bubbling right below the surface, and I have three children whom, I swear, are thriving on pushing my buttons right now. I would be such a nice person if no one would test my character.

And that's the thing: my character is being constantly tested, and I don't like what I see. Enter: Guilt.

But I also know that failures bring humility. My failures are throwing me to my knees, and I can not deny my need for grace. I am not a nice enough person to be a parent. I do not have enough patience or creative energy. When I yell at my kids before breakfast (because they're fighting, screaming, and attempting to rip a chunk of flesh from a brother's shoulder with ferocious teeth as the only tool of torture), I can not deny our fallen nature. It is a fact, and it is ugly.

So as brain fog combines with the constant confronting of my inner junk and the constant testing of my character, I have not been drawn to blog. But I gained a little courage when I read this:

Writing is not about creating tidy paragraphs that sound lovely or choosing the 'right' words. It's just about noticing who you are and noticing life and sharing what you notice. - Glennon Melton

And I gained a little more courage when I read this:

...trust in the slow work of God. We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay. We would like to skip the intermediate stages. We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new. And yet, it is the law of all progress that it is made by passing through some stages of instability - and that it may take a very long time. Above all, trust in the slow work of God... - Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

I am so impatient for God's refining work in me to be done, but it is, in fact, a slow work. I am not an easy subject for Him to work upon, yet the failures and instabilities along the way enlarge me, just as the (unavoidable) practice of waiting for this child to emerge enlarges me. The waiting, the process, enlarge us, making us more than we were before.

And while my own frailty is a very real and constant presence, so is beauty.

There is still much laughter filling our days, and there are nature walks in the evening when golden hair is backlit by the setting sun and we delight in finding a caterpillar and a perfect reflection in a pond.

So this is what my life looks like right now. I am noticing it; I am showing up; I am owning it and begging Jesus for mercy. I am eager to hold this little one in my arms, and I am enlarged by the slow work of God.

***

A rare shot of the five (six!) of us

Stretching

It had been two weeks since many had seen me, so this morning in church I was on the receiving end of a lot of wide grins and "So when are you due again? How much longer?" queries. I guess Baby and I grew.

This is my fourth pregnancy, and I've outgrown some of the pre-natal wide-eyed wonders and novelty. I'm not in the posting-baby-bump-profile-pictures-every-month stage (I don't think I even did that with my first). I'm excited to meet this new little person, to find out who s/he is and wonder at how we ever felt complete without this new life in our lives. I anticipate the person who is coming; I'm not gaga over the pregnancy.

Don't get me wrong: it has been a healthy pregnancy, and I think I've been the most energetic and least uncomfortable this time around (nothing short of miraculous). I love feeling the kicks and stretches, and I rejoice and grin at each one. And really, as far as pregnant women go, I'm pretty cute. But I also feel the real, physical strain, the toll of being a vessel of another's life. It's just not glamourous. I won't go into details, but believe me when I say that it's just.not.glamourous.

I don't know her, but I read some breathtaking words by Jordyn Osburn the other day that I knew I wanted to steal share.

Maybe some of our scars won’t follow us into resurrection, I don’t know. But Jesus had scars on his resurrected body. On his hands, on his feet, on his sides. Scars that proved that he lived, and that he loved. Scars that remind me of who he is and how he loves. He let Thomas touch them. Maybe someday he’ll let me touch them.  

Is it possible that the beautiful, spotless bride of Christ looks like a body that has lived? A body with wrinkles and scars and calluses? A body that has loved beyond herself in a way that stopped caring about what she thought was perfection and fixed her gaze on the one and only Perfect One? A body even willing to groan and bleed for love the way her Maker and Savior did? I think it’s possible. I think I want to be that kind of bride.  - Jordyn Osburn

Here are tangible, beautiful ways I've been stretched.

 

 

 

Auntie Marion

My Auntie Marion died last week. Her funeral was held today in St. Louis, and my heart and mind have been there too even though my body was stuck in Seattle, over 2000 miles away.

I have been trying for days to think of an eloquent post through which to pay tribute to her, but it becomes too painful to think of what to say and so I become distracted, and it's just easier not to face the fact that she's gone. My words fall flat when compared to the dynamic, three-dimensional person she was.

Auntie Marion was truly one of the most remarkable people I have been privileged to know. She was generous beyond reason, and invariably chose joy and gratitude though her life could have be written up as a heart-breaking tragedy. She was feisty and a little eccentric, and had a funny little cuckoo clock and piano-playing bear in her apartment that was bursting with relics of the life she had lived (she called it her museum). She could tell stories from her life that seemed too outrageous to be true: stories of hunting and fishing with the men decades ago (when it was very taboo); of river boat cruises on the Mississippi; of adventures and a life well-spent; of a real-life Native American princess who was an opera singer.

Auntie Marion lived to be 99, so in many ways she already seemed immortal to me; certainly this is part of why it's hard to believe she is gone. I really cannot fathom how different my life would be without her influence and support. She put me through school; she encouraged my music unfailingly; she loved Orion and the kids hugely. We were not related by blood, but there are bonds stronger than blood.

Tonight I played Rachmaninoff for you, Auntie Marion. I hope it can begin to express how grateful I am for you.

Love you much.

Frayed

"There's Uncle Rigel's piano!" the two year old cheerfully exclaimed from the living room last night, and I nearly collapsed to the floor in sobs.

I was in the kitchen. Again. Cleaning up a meal. Again. After I'd made a meal. Again.

What do my children see when they think of me? They don't even know that I am a musician. They see others at the instrument more often than they see me there.

"Hey Silas, you can be the fire chief and I'll be the firefighter, and Annalyn can just be the one who stays home and makes supper."

And another piece of my heart broke. Is this what my sons see modelled, day in and day out? Is this what I am? Is this all I am?

I am so aware of my limitations, and right now my limitations are cutting away at my wrists and my heart. I sacrifice things I love for other things I love, but sometimes all it does is hurt.

I would never, ever, ever trade away the time I get with them. I have felt my heart get larger and stronger over the past year - enlarged with love for them: more room for each wildly unique soul. Drawing near and being intentionally present with them is my choice, and it is oh so rich. I love sitting close and drawing near, walking with them as they discover and learn and grow. The privilege of knowing them and watching their eyes open further is unparalleled. I know that we are choosing a rich life, a life of nurturing each other and showing up for each other, day after day.

But I'm tired and discouraged. The lies are blaring.

A friend was once explaining the concept of gifts to her son, and as he thought of things people in his family were good at, he declared "Mom, your gift is working!" And she died a little inside.

I am not looking for a lecture on how this is a short season, on how I will never regret this time. I can not even let myself begin to imagine life without them, because the pain of even imagining becomes stifling in a heartbeat.

Sometimes I wonder if I love too many things, and I'll always be hurting because I can never have enough of any of them at the same time. Sometimes I have more questions than answers. I don't even know what balance looks like, or if it exists.

But really, all I am saying in this moment of vulnerability and humility is that sometimes the sacrifice hurts.