Tear-Jerking Laughter Ended the Day

Tear-jerking laughter ended the day. Children tickling bellies, dog play biting our protruding arms, legs as we three made sense of all the day’s chaos in a ticklefest. Mother’s Day couldn’t hold us raptured all day. We had to be human and fight a little. Tantrums, bumps, bites, and silence. Normal. The unmet expectation thwarts the beauty. I gave it my all and everyone sleeps now. I wanted to be virtue and love. I wanted to be thankful at all times.

In a flash of clarity, I saw anger, blame, shame, and heart given over to grace all in one run-on sentence. I let it keep writing as we sent bleary-eyed munchkins to slumberland and a documentary lulled us to sleep. And I awoke as inspiration came and everyone slept. I do this for the art, for being able to, for being able to write and writing away all the wrongs to right because somehow it feels better and I will. I will keep the art going somehow. In movements and seasons and life stages pounding in my ears.

I held my son’s words in my hand today from God-inspired creative Sunday School type craft-”I love my mom because she does everything for me.” And I know now that the fighting and the grace make friends as we move closer together in our smashing of ways and smooches of love. The beauty of this day is showing this dear boy and girl I cannot do it all.

Given, a poem

I hope this beautiful morning will sing over mad stomps thudding down the hall,

Over edgy words, and bent wills,

That the peaceful slumber of morning woken by robins

Will pour its peace over dusty corners and complaining hearts.

That the purple hues of redbud will paint color onto drab faces

And beckon us all to come outside and

Believe that we are Given more than we deserve.

Spring’s Soul Closet Clean Out

Winter barely touched down in the Midwest this year. And spring is in full force around my house. My redbud is budding, my tulips are tulip-ing, and my geranium I wintered in my bathroom for 5 months sprouted red blossoms.

Last year I subjected my house to a month-long spring scrubbing. It was an all out spring cleaning frenzy. I toothbrushed every corner in the kitchen. I hand-picked every dog hair off my wall. I threw out every unused knickknack in every drawer. It felt good. Something deep inside me desires to repeat it.

But my soul needs the clean-out this year more than my house. Little things are getting under my skin lately like my son’s stuffy nose and the dog’s penchant for butting his head up against the storm door with a crash when he wants to go out. Building annoyances signal bad habits that could turn into resentment and bitterness at the ones I love, so I am declaring war on my wayward soul. This will take some work, pain, but hopefully a lot of gain. Small changes to my life to create balance and stability for me and those I love.

I will…

1. Spend time with God in His Word consistently.

2. Take risks regularly to extend my hand and meet new people. My kids don’t know how to do this because I have never modeled it very well. I have a friend who models this for me in amazing ways. It’s amazing how easy it is to just introduce yourself and yet, so very hard for fearful me to walk across the room and do it!

3. Make space for 3 long walks a week.

4. Follow through with chore charts for my kids.

5. Put all this stuff on a calendar. If it’s scheduled, somehow it gets done, even a week later. It does get done. I respond well to automated authority.

6. Tell my husband thank you, thank you, thank you. Remember the stresses in his life and imagine the stuff he goes through. He sacrifices so much to do what he does. And I can’t thank him nearly enough.

7. Check on my friends in need. Ask them what could boost their spirits. And err on the side of being nosy and overly-hospitable. (Paul’s struggle in the New Testament to do the good that he knew he should do inspired this one.)

8. Draw near to my kids and husband when everything in me wants to run away, whether I am annoyed, angry, or just having a pity party.

9. Stop plotting my next move or word, and just be. How hard is it to just listen and ask questions? I am finding I am very interpersonally challenged in this department.

10. Move my body and my mind often. Those long walks are essential but so is getting out my extra frustrations and energy through concentrated, purposeful exercise. I also need inspiration! Pinterest is great, but what about just a good book of poetry or a artful movie? One can never be over-inspired.

I can’t do these all at once, of course, but I gotta have goals or nothing’s gonna happen. Maybe by the end of the summer, I will have created a more consistent life and I will be able to glorify God better in the small things.

The Delaying

Writing is like raising children. Don’t tell anyone what’s coming because something may explode and it may take a while to clean up the mess. So it is with the secondary blog on beauty I promised. It will come later. And I am ok with that.

In the meantime, I will write for my life because it is one of only a handful of joys that bolsters my spirit these days. Long sun-strewn walks and quiet heal most of all. But I find a purposeful hug from my husband or a conscious choice not to answer an email delay the stresses that impede my breath.

But the one thing I cannot delay is speaking out loud the fears all bound up inside. This is a simple, but loud breakthrough in these anxious days. Sunday I shared my fear of losing my dream of a perfect life with a few friends. And my racing heart slowed to a saunter. Today I avoided speaking my inner thoughts and I noticed the pit of despair grew with each word I suppressed. That is all I know today.

And tomorrow, I will talk someone’s ear off….

Homecoming.

I missed you, Me.

Yesterday after I propelled the artbox across the kitchen in a fit of not being enough,

You came back, ever-compassionate.

You wrapped your arms around me and my daughter, tear stained cheeks pressed together to save ourselves from horrible becomings.

You, my sane-ness. Reasonable heart.

The emotional explosion summoned you from slumber.

Later I went out in the rain, and you stared across the room at me in my alma mater’s coffee shop. I saw forever young college students engrossed in their equations and organic chemistry tests and happy. I remembered that I could be whatever I want. “Remember, you were youth once, anticipating these now hard years.”

Naive, my love, you were when at 22, depression stole you from me. Stay awhile. We can learn this living while we snuggle here and wipe up the pastel-marked linoleum on hands and knees when we feel the gift of it all more firmly.

 

The Knot

These days I am anxious. Anxious is a detrimental word. It builds a knot in my stomach on a blue breezy day. It tightens my chest in the midst of baking with a friend. It’s balled itself up, suspended, in my lungs today. I breathe in deeply. I exhale. My eyes take in the sun illuminating the light brown twiggishness of my peach tree’s branches. It’s Sunday and I want to reach up to my Creator on this glorious day. He is near, and I feel so far. Those branches sway gently and remain rooted. I can’t even sway. I am bound.I don’t know where the anxiety comes from. It started a few months back when my dog of 10 years, unexpectedly died of cancer. The chest tightening began. Autumn came and left. The anxiety slept dormant as winter arrived. I felt nervous about the holidays, family expectations, dinner preparations, and the like. But I sailed through with minimal damage.

Now February. And a rope of dread and disquiet weaves itself in and out of my good days and bad days. I wish I could nail down the source of this uneasiness with a sledgehammer. It could be the winter-induced chaos of my kitchen, where everyone gathers when Mother Nature bars them from entering her preserve. Bleeping and blinging computer games, boots thudding on tile, plastic sword wapping metal chairs, earsplitting whistles, wagging dog sticking wet nose and clumsy body in my face as I unload dishes. Space and quiet seldom visit this room. But I live here. In a single day I sigh a few dozen sighs, exhaling each time, hoping for an accidental respite.

I am selfish with my kitchen space I will agree, but my daughter has a way of pushing past open doors of welcome and taking over if I am relaxing for a split-second on the parents’ day off porch. She is strong-willed. I love it for her future, her present confidence, and her imagination. But for her interaction with others who are not as vocal, not as forthright (me, for example), life complicates with clashes and consequences. She has steam-rolled over me in a few days, and I see it. I have ebbed like the sea, too far from the shore. And my daughter has built a high-rise on our blissful beach when my tide comes in to rest. I cannot rush in this time to wash away her walls as I sometimes do when I see her building on the horizon. They are too high. I have to erode them with constant surf pounding and time. Long, stretching time. Then, and only then, will respect and love completely cover the sand again with their lovely forms, and she will go back to building sandcastles, as she rightly should.

These ocean versus high rise battles weaken my spirit. So I start gathering new tools to bring greater meaning to my daily kitchen pandemonium living. I jump out of a few small planes. I adopt a storytelling and writing team at church. I tell my husband, yes, we should consider where God wants us to live more seriously. I slip a friend a thank you note for showing me my own inability to be friendly by the example of her extravagant hospitality. I wonder if these risks are tearing my insides apart. But my soul-sense says otherwise. Anxiety stems from fear, this I do know.

And all the while, my angst grows behind my back, in my inability to say no to my daughter’s request to invite the whole neighborhood to her brother’s birthday. I smell the stench of my weakness when my son’s crying makes me want to run far, far away.

I am talking this out with friends. I am writing this out as you read. I write regretfully as I read this and realize I live scared for the person I cannot be. She is invincible, proud, and completely unreal. She tells little of how she feels to anyone, lest they think less of her. All she desires binds itself up in a knot. The knot, a bundle of seaweed washing in with the tide tangles itself at the arched door of a sandcastle newly built. The tide goes out. The seaweed stretches out in the sun and dries, dies, arms outstretched. And the little girl who carefully fashioned the castle pokes it with a stick. She examines it as a little scientist only can. And she buries it with a flick of her shovel and runs back to her Sunday picnic by the sea.

Think God. And One Blog or Two?

A cheesy-ball movie called Oh,God II came out in 1980. God appears to an 11-year old girl and convinces her to spread the slogan, “Think God” on every available park bench and billboard she can reach. God’s aim is to prompt a postmodern self-reliant world to remember Him.

I recently read Ann Voskamp’s One Thousand Gifts. Voskamp chronicles how she takes a friend’s challenge to write down one thousand moments or things for which she is grateful. After I read it, I wanted to start thanking God too. I even downloaded the app. (Technology point, please?)

But I am a forgetful postmodern self-reliant woman. I have chronicled three things I’m thankful for since November. I was grateful once, I think…

On a recent evening, the hour before dinner hell broke out like a smallpox epidemic. My man came home and asked, “You going to write tonight like you planned?”

“I don’t feel like it.” And I flattened what was left of my brain on my pillow. Fifteen minutes passed.

“Okay, I’m going,” I said as I
my bag.

The grocery store cafe transformed into my office. And I wrote. I scrawled for two hours about my inner workings. And with ten minutes left to relish my oasis in time, God popped into my head. God, the One who inspires. God, the One who convicts me. God, the One who invites me to enter relationship daily.

Today I cringed, bit my tongue, and almost swore aloud while a precious little voice replayed her plan for folding the laundry for the fifth time. Think God. What? Think God. Precious. That voice is God. Then that little voice gave me a handmade doorknob hanger to cheer me up. And I wanted to reject it outright. She saw it in my eyes. Why would I be so cruel? Forgetful. Hard-hearted. Self-made woman.

I will do what I have to do to remind myself. God be with me. Be right back.

My front step, my first step before I enter my door, must be the reminder to change my heart. So be it. A few feet from this step are some tulip bulbs that little voice and I planted before the chill settled in. I fear they will not sprout in this mucky soil.

The virtue of gratitude cannot grow in me today. Spring can only come as I wither away with the winter. Then I will say thank you as the precious little voice hands me a tulip and I will mean it.

I know I said I was starting another blog on beauty. It’s gonna happen. My question: Is 2 blogs too much? Or should they be separate sections on the same blog? Please comment. I am depending on YOU to save me from indecisive implosion!

Walking the Dog in the Name of Love and a New Blog Coming

I woke up early this morning. (Early is relative.) To me, anytime pre-7:30 am. I walked my springy setter we call Sham-wow these days. He bounded over the frosted grass with four furry chestnut paws a-blazing. And I hunkered in my hooded layers looking like a motherly hunchback of Notre Dame fending off the wind.

I shuffled. Sham galloped.  Frigid sidewalk squares passed beneath us. I began to uncurl myself as the sun branched pink rays over distant trees.

I have failed to get up at least a dozen times before. Call it what it is: hopelessly lazy or “I am just not a morning person.” The latter works for me.

As the black night passed away and light broke open, my mind began to thaw and my body to warm.

Why am I doing this? I thought. Exercise for me. Exercise for the perpetually perky pup. Calm dog equals calm children equals more peaceful day and less anger coming from my mouth. I walked partly for me, partly for my whole family.

Then I realized the walk was more than just physical exertion and sanity. It could be an act of love for my husband and children. When I get exercise, I am more loving because I have gotten some frustration and energy out, just like Sham. And as I said, Sham is more well-behaved with a good long walk, and chaos diminishes in our home.  To get up and take care of myself and the dog is giving my family a gift of patient love. I get clarity, my family gets a whole person to listen and take care of them. And Sham is more like this all day:

Seeing a chore as an act of love can resurrect even a late-night owl like me.

And…

An  idea has been thudding around in my brain for a year or so. A place to dialogue about that elusive essence called beauty. I am always obsessing about it or admiring it. I have spent over half my life chasing it. 

Without makeup vs. with

The hours I’ve stared, poked, and prodded myself in the mirror! The years I’ve compared my legs and life choices with fellow females. I could write a book. Maybe I will. But until that day, I will explore this subject with a new blog entitled Beauty Writes. Coming at you very soon!

Quiet Girl, Thoughts on Waking Up before 7.

I open my eyes to Dawn.
She beckons through the dark to come and sit.
Be here. Be quiet.
Her silence hushes the world until Rush comes out of its cave, the Lion who must be tamed.
I cannot absorb her peace in one sitting.
But I feel her pull, her call.
Others have told me Dawn is beautiful. Her silence golden.
I have only walked with Night.
Her stars dazzle me.
Her moon, her black blanket over the wild world.
But Dawn is different. She is bound
by brevity to fire up the world in a burst of morning light.
I sit and I soak her in, from indoors. The dog and I touched our noses to her cold
for 2 minutes and we retreated.
We will get to know her slowly.
Dawn is stately and still. She watches. She waits.
She spreads her white dress across the grass and then turns to smile on it with gold.
The frosty fronds gleam back.
Her God-kissed lips breathe us into being again.
My coffee curls up hot steam.
Am I alive? I feel it. I want it.
Dawn chills the front door, then pulls up the sun to make the grey leaves turn green and saffron.
She brings the color, the illusion we live. For color is not real, it is an illusion of our eyes.
Different objects absorb more light than others. That is all color is.
But we would die without miracle light, I believe.
She is hard to read, like the quiet girl in the corner.
She says little, but changes the world while no one is looking.
Dawn, we are moving forward.
Time is speaking.
Suspend me here.
I sip warmth. I breathe cold.
This is the chaos here, in perspective.
I breathe again. Are you there?
Exhale.

Dawn, you are broken, like me.

Bird Morning

Under the quiet nest of shaded morning comforter,
I snuggle with a fuzzy headed baby bird.
His feet padded thump, thump, thump up the stairs,
Knob clicked, door slammed.
Thump, thump, thump.
Little body plopped into my dreams.
He finds the safest, deepest hole,
head under my outstretched arm
Pillows, haloing his blonde crown.
He pulls my other arm across him as a shield.
He doesn’t mind my ranky breath
For I am his blanket, his bed, and the beginning of his world today.
I have vowed not to let this bird wrankle my morning nest.
It’s a bad habit, you know, and might make him too clingy at age 30.
But the days are short that I can warm my morning in the gray of half-light
Love filling my lungs and life
Our sighs and slumber, one,
And resting.