May all your kids come home, and may they get along with each other. Or at least fake it.
May you have a white Christmas to the point that you feel Christmas-y and can say no to an activity you didn’t really want to go to, but don’t lose electricity and heat. May everyone wipe their boots.
There was still snow regularly fluffing up the ground when I pulled out my seed starter this past winter. I enlisted my kids to extract seeds from little packages with technicolor images, and I was a little giddy with the vivid pictures in my head of a blooming porch and deck. For more than a month, my little sunroom was overtaken by pots, sitting there like kids waiting for summer vacation.
But then, I traveled for nearly a month, leaving my kids to maintain watering. Oh. And then there was a drought, to the point that the wooden Smoky the Bear stationed next to the highway held a sign reading the fire danger was “extreme” (and indeed, resulted in at least three area forest fires). In no shortage of irony or demise to my ailing plants, last week brought five afternoons of hail, plus area flooding that shut down the main highway. I was dumping water from the peonies I’d purchased, their two limp, torn leaves a far cry from the pink globes in my head.
So I have a teenager, and another just about. Most of me is tickled pink about all the real conversations we get to hold, all the fun we have as a maturing family, all the crazy jokes they tell me that leave all of us laughing.
And there’s this leeettle part of it that scares the bejeebies out of me.
Seemingly separate note: I have recently acquired an agent for a non-fiction book I’m writing, which makes my heart do little cartwheels of happiness. It was a moment I wasn’t sure would ever happen.
Allow me to sketch for you a brief (yet oh-so-vivid) moment from about eight years ago. You would have found me slumped against the wall in the hallway one afternoon. He was only a year and a half old–and the potential for catastrophe was spreading before me.
Funny thing is, I don’t even remember what my then-toddler did to cause me to groan in despair. I just remember a lot of the stories that give me a pretty good idea: like that time while I was in the bathroom, when he pulled a barstool up to the counter, snatched a packet of drink mix from the top of the toaster oven, wrenched it open, and sprinkled it around the house like fairy dust.
Do you remember the first time you wondered if God really was good?
I can’t say I remember the first. But I have to admit to you that it’s a constant decision of mine: to choose truth and trust. It was Eve’s issue too, right? Questioning the purity of God’s motives; her created brain and heart tossing around the idea that maybe he’s the one who’s lying.
This year you’ve read as I’ve wrestled with God here and there. Like Jacob, it’s left parts of me dislocated now and again. But there is too much evidence that he is who he says. And honestly, there are too many parts of me that are false and undeveloped and limited in sight: Let God be true and every man a liar (Romans 3:4).
In college, I answered a youth crisis hotline one night a week. So many who called in were so…raw. Or embarrassed. Or afraid.
There was something freeing, I think, calling someone anonymously; at finally being able to share the invisible bag of stones they carried around, its weight occasionally flopping over their foreheads and making it hard to see anything else.
My husband and I were riding home in the dark last night, drinking in that laundry-on-the-line feeling of spring, even though I know in Colorado it won’t last long. (I’m scheduling this post for a day when they’re predicting more snow.) We talked about some happy successes with my new business. I mean, it’s not Africa, but I’m excited about it, I shrugged as we pulled to a stop sign. It’s okay. This doesn’t need to be Africa. It’s a new box; new expectations.
Hey.
I was there just this past Saturday, too. Felt like it had been a year of keeping my head down, doing the right thing with a hopeful smile. Or maybe some tears. I’ve mentioned this last year my struggles with feeling powerless; with the tension of not living some dreams.
I may have even scrawled the phrase tired of a “Yes, sir” life in my journal this past weekend.
My house is (blissfully) quiet now. I sit at my clean wooden table. My stomach is comfortably satisfied. My kids are actually adjusting remarkably well to school life—something I couldn’t have anticipated after five years homeschooling them in Africa. (Adjusting so well, in fact, that after their dental appointments last week, the younger two begged me to return to the last hour of school. Um…okay!) My new job as a freelance writer—after a few weeks of what might be called panic—is actually a delight. And my husband is happy, which is just a good gift all around. We are all healing mpola mpola (slowly by slowly).
This is to say: I have a lot I am thankful for. Many of you have asked about our transition, probably because my heart has seeped out a bit into cyberspace. I would not be telling the truth to say something other than—wow. This has all gone much more smoothly than I thought possible. (Thank you, friends, for praying. He hears.)
The other night, one of my kids was at his finest. It was as if a switch had been flipped. He went from easy-going to stonewalling us, arms crossed, resolutely stubborn. And man, was I getting the stinkeye.
Though his attitude was not without consequences, God was kind to me. I think He reminded me that disproportionate reactions are a lot of times symptoms that something deeper’s being triggered. Thankfully, this tipped my husband and I off to dig and uncover the problem more than just slam down the symptom.
Because when you’re going through a hard time, life can feel a little…naked. So our emotional safety is directly tied to the degree of acceptance we sense from someone.
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