I have a confession (or a few really) to make - beginning with this one: I am writing this post at 12:15am. Meaning that it's actually day 16 (troubling to my rule-following self), and well-past the time I should be sleeping in order to make functioning tomorrow a possibility, following Caden's several wake-ups throughout the night and both children rising before the sun at 6:30am. Sigh.
But I was laying in bed tonight (promise) by 11pm. However, then Caden woke up a few times and I laid BACK in bed at 11:30, and now I have been tossing and turning for the last forty-five minutes.
And so I have some confessions for y'all, things I feel compelled to get off my chest. I also, of course, feel compelled to delete, to hide, and to pretend this post doesn't exist. But sometimes God whispers louder to me at 12:15am when I've been fighting against His promptings for the better part of the last hour.
- I confess that today was HARD. That the one-year-old and four-year-old combo phase is NOT my favorite, particularly when they seem to work in concert to defeat me. I spent most of my day widening my eyes towards Adam and wiggling my eyebrows forcefully as he labored over the chicken-coop, insisting to him that somehow we had made a grave error, and these simply can NOT be the children we are raising. I'm weary. And lonely. And am slightly frightened that I will just never get the hang of this motherhood thing. That I will always have to drive back and forth from the post office several times a day in 3pm traffic with children whose clothes smell like mildew because my license is expired and you need valid ID for getting a passport for your child whose social-security number I cant seem to track down currently.
- I love my husband desperately, he makes me laugh and also is probably the only reason I eat on a regular basis. Left to my own devices, I sort of scrounge around for snack-type foods and would probably subsist on granola bars and sour patch kids with diet coke and coffee for when I get thirsty and/or tired. We also irritate each other a lot lately. I insist that he somehow corral HIS LADIES (who, have I mentioned, Ihate strongly dislike?) and also would he please, for the love of pete, spray off some poopy diapers since it was his-stinkin idea that we CLOTH DIAPER in the first place. Has he met me? And also, if he could watch the children for me, because it's just too hard for me to handle them both on my own for more than approximately twenty-seven minutes. I recognize that I put him in a lose-lose-lose situation here, where nothing he can do will ever satisfy my demands. But still.
And so we fight. Only we're not so much fighters as we are turn-on-ourselves and/or shut-downers. Which is easier to hide, and a whole lot quieter, but doesn't contribute to intimacy or romance or the kind of marriage we KNOW God has intended for us.
- I'm still in this weird in-between worlds stage, even after over a year in our new neighborhood. Where most of my close friends live in the suburbs, and I rarely even talk to them. Not to mention that I've possibly stood a few of them up because we're so busy and I can't seem to get-my-crap-together long enough to write anything on a calendar. So I feel those friendships quietly slip away, and yet there are very few new friends nearby with whom I have allowed the armor to come off. I cant even figure out how to make time to work on those friendships, to build them without children screaming for my attention and time and distracting me from conversation involving grown-up sentence structure and/or content. I'm good at writing things here, at telling y'all my faults. But in real life? It feels harder. And so I stand alone in the midst of a crowd of kiddos boisterously yelling from the front porch, crying over things like spilled laundry detergent.
-When someone doesn't talk to me (or call or write) for a while, I immediately assume they no longer like me, and clearly dont want to be my friend. And who can blame them, really? (have I mentioned my tendency to self-bully?)
-I take anti-depressants. And have for quite some years now. And sometimes I fear that possibly they aren't "working" anymore. The darkness slips up on me sometimes. The light dapples in my soul like shadows on the road. Shaded moments filter next to impossibly-joy-filled-sunshine-drenched ones. Past hurts and demons and temptations flit, and in the midst of double temper tantrums and persistent knocks on the front door peppered with little voices yelling through the window, they threaten to overwhelm.
-I love our church. Like super-duper-love it. Seriously. And yet, I hardly know anyone, really. And so I sit on Sunday, rubbing goose-pimples off my arms from worshiping our Savior so fully and beautifully, and I even brave an amen every once in a while. And yet, somehow I'm still alone and uncertain of how to turn the idea of community and life together as a church and the body into reality.
-I worry that we are failures because we haven't done enough to get enough kids mentored. Things move slowly, community builds painfully and relationships take time. I realize that, and yet it feels like we have no results. And what if I stop writing, if I tell y'all what's really going on in my heart - then no one will want to support what we do or believe in ME anymore. One of the boys we mentor just got out of jail, and slips out the door every time we try and see him. And my heart feels wounded, rejected, like a failure.
-Caden goes to the cardiologist this week, and every time I think about it the fears and darkness and remembrances threaten to overwhelm me, despite an under-girding assurance I feel that they are going to assure us that all is well. He is active and busy and silly and not-sleepy and eating and gaining weight. Truthfully, I would be shocked if they didn't say everything looked good. Yet, the pit in my stomach remains. Because we just never know, we didn't know, and there are no guarantees.
-I want desperately to teach my kids to be kind, loving, gentle and graceful towards others. But most days, I struggle extending kindness to my own family for an extended period of time. And I feel fairly certain these qualities are hard to teach without first practicing them myself.
So why all the confession tonight? Just skip today's post, right (I mean, it's tomorrow at this point anyways). I'm certain that in the morning I will wake up and things will feel brighter. Everything always feels better in the morning, before the kids have done anything to try my patience (besides waking up too early) and when the sun streams gently through the blinds, leaving lines and shadows dappling our faces as we snuggle for a few more too-short minutes under the covers before emerging to face another day.
But here's the thing: I'm choosing today to believe in something that I've said all along. To believe in community, in y'all, in beauty, in Truth, and in trust. To believe in a God who remains on the throne despite hard days and longer nights. To believe that I'm not alone (please, please say that's true) - that there ARE other moms who struggle. Other wives who just aren't sure their husbands hear them. Church-goers who cant seem to find their niche. Friends and neighbors who smile and nod and long for someone to really know them.
I am taking a stand for the sake of communion. For a place where we can meet eat other and say: "here I am," and that's enough. To discover anew what I've been learning all along: that we belong to one another. To accept each other's limits and hurts and woundedness, but also our gifts and beauty and capacity for great growth and love. To walk with each other in transforming relationships, the kind where my belief in your goodness lifts you and empowers you, and your belief in me does the same. To recognize that it is precisely in our weakness, in our brokenness, our confession, our poverty, that God reaches in and meets us. That He will use our wounds, our hurts, our fears. He will use them to heal, to transform, to liberate, and restore.
This is post 15 in a series of 31 posts (one for every day this month) on margin. Read all the posts here. And visit The Nester to see all the 31 Day link-ups (but be warned, you could literally read for days and never read all the good stuff linked up there!)
But I was laying in bed tonight (promise) by 11pm. However, then Caden woke up a few times and I laid BACK in bed at 11:30, and now I have been tossing and turning for the last forty-five minutes.
And so I have some confessions for y'all, things I feel compelled to get off my chest. I also, of course, feel compelled to delete, to hide, and to pretend this post doesn't exist. But sometimes God whispers louder to me at 12:15am when I've been fighting against His promptings for the better part of the last hour.
- I confess that today was HARD. That the one-year-old and four-year-old combo phase is NOT my favorite, particularly when they seem to work in concert to defeat me. I spent most of my day widening my eyes towards Adam and wiggling my eyebrows forcefully as he labored over the chicken-coop, insisting to him that somehow we had made a grave error, and these simply can NOT be the children we are raising. I'm weary. And lonely. And am slightly frightened that I will just never get the hang of this motherhood thing. That I will always have to drive back and forth from the post office several times a day in 3pm traffic with children whose clothes smell like mildew because my license is expired and you need valid ID for getting a passport for your child whose social-security number I cant seem to track down currently.
- I love my husband desperately, he makes me laugh and also is probably the only reason I eat on a regular basis. Left to my own devices, I sort of scrounge around for snack-type foods and would probably subsist on granola bars and sour patch kids with diet coke and coffee for when I get thirsty and/or tired. We also irritate each other a lot lately. I insist that he somehow corral HIS LADIES (who, have I mentioned, I
And so we fight. Only we're not so much fighters as we are turn-on-ourselves and/or shut-downers. Which is easier to hide, and a whole lot quieter, but doesn't contribute to intimacy or romance or the kind of marriage we KNOW God has intended for us.
- I'm still in this weird in-between worlds stage, even after over a year in our new neighborhood. Where most of my close friends live in the suburbs, and I rarely even talk to them. Not to mention that I've possibly stood a few of them up because we're so busy and I can't seem to get-my-crap-together long enough to write anything on a calendar. So I feel those friendships quietly slip away, and yet there are very few new friends nearby with whom I have allowed the armor to come off. I cant even figure out how to make time to work on those friendships, to build them without children screaming for my attention and time and distracting me from conversation involving grown-up sentence structure and/or content. I'm good at writing things here, at telling y'all my faults. But in real life? It feels harder. And so I stand alone in the midst of a crowd of kiddos boisterously yelling from the front porch, crying over things like spilled laundry detergent.
-When someone doesn't talk to me (or call or write) for a while, I immediately assume they no longer like me, and clearly dont want to be my friend. And who can blame them, really? (have I mentioned my tendency to self-bully?)
-I take anti-depressants. And have for quite some years now. And sometimes I fear that possibly they aren't "working" anymore. The darkness slips up on me sometimes. The light dapples in my soul like shadows on the road. Shaded moments filter next to impossibly-joy-filled-sunshine-drenched ones. Past hurts and demons and temptations flit, and in the midst of double temper tantrums and persistent knocks on the front door peppered with little voices yelling through the window, they threaten to overwhelm.
-I love our church. Like super-duper-love it. Seriously. And yet, I hardly know anyone, really. And so I sit on Sunday, rubbing goose-pimples off my arms from worshiping our Savior so fully and beautifully, and I even brave an amen every once in a while. And yet, somehow I'm still alone and uncertain of how to turn the idea of community and life together as a church and the body into reality.
-I worry that we are failures because we haven't done enough to get enough kids mentored. Things move slowly, community builds painfully and relationships take time. I realize that, and yet it feels like we have no results. And what if I stop writing, if I tell y'all what's really going on in my heart - then no one will want to support what we do or believe in ME anymore. One of the boys we mentor just got out of jail, and slips out the door every time we try and see him. And my heart feels wounded, rejected, like a failure.
-Caden goes to the cardiologist this week, and every time I think about it the fears and darkness and remembrances threaten to overwhelm me, despite an under-girding assurance I feel that they are going to assure us that all is well. He is active and busy and silly and not-sleepy and eating and gaining weight. Truthfully, I would be shocked if they didn't say everything looked good. Yet, the pit in my stomach remains. Because we just never know, we didn't know, and there are no guarantees.
-I want desperately to teach my kids to be kind, loving, gentle and graceful towards others. But most days, I struggle extending kindness to my own family for an extended period of time. And I feel fairly certain these qualities are hard to teach without first practicing them myself.
So why all the confession tonight? Just skip today's post, right (I mean, it's tomorrow at this point anyways). I'm certain that in the morning I will wake up and things will feel brighter. Everything always feels better in the morning, before the kids have done anything to try my patience (besides waking up too early) and when the sun streams gently through the blinds, leaving lines and shadows dappling our faces as we snuggle for a few more too-short minutes under the covers before emerging to face another day.
But here's the thing: I'm choosing today to believe in something that I've said all along. To believe in community, in y'all, in beauty, in Truth, and in trust. To believe in a God who remains on the throne despite hard days and longer nights. To believe that I'm not alone (please, please say that's true) - that there ARE other moms who struggle. Other wives who just aren't sure their husbands hear them. Church-goers who cant seem to find their niche. Friends and neighbors who smile and nod and long for someone to really know them.
I am taking a stand for the sake of communion. For a place where we can meet eat other and say: "here I am," and that's enough. To discover anew what I've been learning all along: that we belong to one another. To accept each other's limits and hurts and woundedness, but also our gifts and beauty and capacity for great growth and love. To walk with each other in transforming relationships, the kind where my belief in your goodness lifts you and empowers you, and your belief in me does the same. To recognize that it is precisely in our weakness, in our brokenness, our confession, our poverty, that God reaches in and meets us. That He will use our wounds, our hurts, our fears. He will use them to heal, to transform, to liberate, and restore.