Breath

I remember walking between Mom’s room and Carolyn’s listening to the sound of their breathing during those precious last weeks.

You know those moments as a mother when you tiptoe up to the corner of your baby’s bed just to make sure that the next breath comes…

I would see the rise and fall of Carolyn’s chest, listen to that sweet baby breath…

Then…

I would stand in the doorframe of my mother’s room doing the same thing and knowing that at some point in the near future the next breath wouldn’t come.

I split time between the newness of my baby girls’ life

And the expiration of my mother’s drawing ever closer.

If I stood in just the right spot I could hear them both breathing…  The fresh intake of breath into the new lungs of my babe.

The labored exhales of my mother fighting for each moment

Each in their own rhythm.

I held my breath to hear theirs.

The very air of that house utterly sacred.

~~~

The baby and I lay on her bed one night—the three of us snuggled close together, breath mingling.

She said, “Oh Val.  This is perfect.  Just perfect.  To have you both here next to me.”

Perfection indeed.  I don’t know that I have tasted sweeter perfection since.

~~~

I lay on her grave two nights ago thinking of all she’s missed in seven years.  The delight she would take in Lainey stump-stump stumping around with a look of happy innocence perpetually on her face.  The way she would giggle at her closing her eyes to shut out the world when she gets angry.

I wonder at the ways she’d have seen my children and taught me to see them.

I ache at the tally of milestones that she missed.

I consider the woman I have become in her absence and muse that I wouldn’t be who I am in her presence.

Seven years later life is what it is without her.  There are pieces of it that exist only because of her absence.

It is still sweet.  Still full of goodness.  Still so beautiful.

But it is markedly changed.

~~~

It is the job of all daughters to separate from their mothers.  To become other and distinct.

I cook her recipes.  I say the F-word enough to keep it comfortable on my tongue.  I watch her TV shows to keep her at the surface of me.

But I emerge still my own person.  An amalgam of who I was with her and who I have become without her.

I think of her when an evening breeze cools me in the evening.  When a good old-timey country song comes on the radio.  When I hear people ranting about politics or when someone tells me the answer to a problem is just to tell ‘em to fuck off.

I am like her and unlike her.  More confident and less confident.  Unsure of myself in the same ways and comfortable in who I am in different ones.

She made me but she is not all that made me.

~~~

Seven.  Such a long time to have passed for me to still feel that I have only just kissed her good night.

Feeling the Sting

“Where O Death is your victory?  Where O death is your sting?”

That was the litany that wove itself throughout the worship service at my church this Easter Morning.

And it can’t have been an accident that it came as I stand staring down something I’ve wanted to avoid for a while:

A fear of death.

Friends and long time readers know that 7 years ago my Mom died of lung cancer.  And that it pretty much rocked my world. I was 24.  My oldest was four months old.  My husband was gone off and on just prior to her death and deployed for six months a month after.

I grieved hard and long.  Longer than many were comfortable with.  Some people told me that you have to get tough with yourself after about six months and not let it overwhelm you anymore.  Some people just intoned in hushed words that “they were very worried” about me.”

It took time.  Really, I find that grief is a lifelong thing.  Even if the active mourning is more or less over, I still have moments and days where I grieve her.  I suspect I always will.

All I know is that when she died part of my foundation was lost.  One of the anchor points of who I am had drifted out of the world.  As a dear friend of mine described it, I was “unmoored.”

One of the most important things I learned in that journey was that it’s ok to call a spade a spade.  Death?  Is bad.  Grief?  It hurts.  Sickness and pain?  It was not in the original plan for the world.  I became increasingly frustrated with Christian messages that told me to redefine the bad things that were happening to me as GOOD things.  I was supposed to wrap things up in a pretty little bow and say, “This was the hardest experience of my life, but it’s ok because I am stronger for it.  Isn’t God good?”  Or, “What a gift these trials have been to me because they have refined my faith.”

I could then and I do now vociferously get  behind the idea that God was in ALL of it.  That he was unraveling and unwrapping goodness even in the badness.  That he was using the ashes of my decimated soul to bring about a new and different kind of life.  That he could WORK all things for good.  But I could not get behind the idea that all things–losing my mother, watching cancer take over her body, the grief and loneliness that turned me inside out–were BY DEFINITION “good.”

Fast forward five years and there is a third baby on the way and I am a nervous wreck because months prior I’d lost a babe to miscarriage and there is a lump in my neck and the doctor has just had to wikipedia the diagnosis.

The physicians and medical journals dither and dally about how to classify the kind of tumor that I had, but it lands in the ‘cancer’ category eventually.  For the last two years I have been in various stages of living with the specter of paraganglioma.  Initially it was diagnosed and I was jumping through hoops trying to find doctors who understood the disease.  And then I was shuttled into a high risk group for pregnancy and told that labor could cause a hypertensive crisis and that I could not under any circumstances actively push my baby out.  And I had an amazing doctor and the most beautiful birth ever but it was rife with uncertainty and fear.

And then I had the surgery 3000 miles away at an amazing but foreign institution and parts of it were so hard.

And then I was grappling with life after and loose ends and extra questions.  At first they believed I had another tumor on the other side.  And we were ruling out genetic causes.  And one by one we crossed the questions that could be answered off the list until on this past Friday, Good Friday, in some capacity we could finally say, “It is finished.”

But still guardedness, caution, anxiety….  fear…  hang about me.  I want to be carefree and happy about the good news I have received, but the truth is.  I am still scared.  And I don’t want to be too happy only to find out that the journey isn’t over yet.

Furthermore, lately it occurs to me in a deeper way that I am a daughter–an only child–who lost her mother to cancer.  Who sat by her side as tumors ate away at her…  who watched the ugly stages of the progression of the disease.

And I am a woman who had cancer come knocking at my own door.

Stacked together, that’s really kind of huge.

My endocrinologist listens to me patiently.  Answers my long list of questions.  Affirms me for how much I have learned about my disease and how active I am in my care process.  He tells me, “I will be the objective one who realizes you are a patient who is scared of cancer and scared that this will come back.  We will talk things through together.”

I want to reject it outright and tell him that I have done my darnedest to be objective and to write my questions and present myself outside of that fear.

But I swallow hard and realize that he is right.

So I sat this morning and I listened to my pastor say over and over again, “Where O Death is your victory?  Where O Death is your sting?” and I tried to find my place in it.  But instead I felt the fear.

I am a believer.  I believe in the resurrection.  I believe in the redemption of all things…  Of me and my heart….  The redemption of the ugliness of things like grief and death and disease.  I believe that I will see my mother again.

But death?  It stings me.  I have felt the raging ache of loss at my core.  I have cried animal like sobs and lain awake at night re-living my mother’s last days.  I know what it is to move through life with a gaping hole where she should be.

I fear death.  Though I know if it comes to me…  If any of the subsequent aches and pains that I have that scare me enough to go to the doctor, or if any of the scans that I have come back and read that this disease or another kind has come knocking at my door and this time I am not able to stave it off….  I know when the inevitable comes that I will be with Jesus and it will be the most glorious of glorious days.

But I also know my children will know the ache of life without a mother.  And I know that if I can anticipate it’s coming I will grieve the loss of time with them, with my family and time in this beautiful, aching world.

I know, though I haven’t wanted to look at it up to now, preferring instead to keep it in mental generalities and spiritual platitudes, that I AM afraid of death.

I’m just not sure what to do with that right now.   I want to say with Paul and the Psalmist and my pastor, “Where O death is your victory?  Where O death is your sting?”

Right now though I am grappling with the enormity of losing my mother to cancer and then staring it down myself.

Incidentally my other pastor preached the Good Friday sermon.  He asserted that as Christians, we are more free to allow ourselves to feel and express our grief, our sadness, our hurt, and our fear because we know in the end there is victory…  Because we know that what undergirds us always is Christ’s victory over sin and death.  We can feel it all fully because on the other side of that darkness there is hope.

So maybe, in some backwards way, if I let myself sit here where I am…  And if I give myself the chance to do the work and process it, I am still grasping firmly to hope.

In the midst of the fear and the grief and the hurt…  In the midst of the enormity of living on the other side of all of this.  In spite of the fear and the sting I DO feel it is the hope that will allow me the peace and the defiance to say those words to death.  Even if this Easter Day I feel the fear more than the victory.

Six

Four walls of room containing
Simple explosion of common goodbyeing.
Vigil.
Me in the chair holding the wiggling baby
And her hand
Dad hardly bearing it.
Commonplace conversation takes place over the precious last few hours
Of chest-breath heaving up and down
She waited til he got there to take the hand that held hers
And walk me forward into the future
Built on the past she’d made… me the woman she co-created.
I natal, she natal both of us birthed in a new way that night
A kiss good night.
I love you. See you tomorrow, Mom.
And in the morning a world without her in it.
How have I walked without her six years now?

Because there are 100 Comments…

Because of those comments, I’m going to talk about my Mom, and where I am now going on 5 years without her (5 years in July). 

Tonight this post has 100 comments.  Some of those are replies that I’ve left in response to others, but still… 100 comments.

When I wrote it in March of 2007, I never dreamed that it would strike such a chord.  I never imagined that 3 years later I would still be getting comments in my inbox that make me cry.  I never dreamed I would be given the privilege to bear witness in some small way to so many people’s stories.  When I hit the post button, I remember feeling like I was maybe being a little ranty and wondering if anyone out there would ‘get it’ and know where I was coming from.  So many people did.  I think, honestly, that of all the words I’ve ever written, I’m proudest–or maybe more accurately, most grateful–for that post.  I’m so grateful that a community sprang up.  I’m so grateful to know that I’m not alone in my feelings.  I’m so grateful that hopefully, hopefully other people feel a little less alone in theirs.

I wrote a bunch of posts back then that I tagged with ‘Motherless Daughter.’  I got the term from Hope Edelman’s books about Motherloss.  But the more I think about that term, the less I like it lately.  I am NOT Motherless.  My mother is dead, but she is still my mother, and she always will be.  I am a girl with an AMAZING Mom.  My relationship with her wasn’t perfect.  I took her for granted far too often.  She wasn’t perfect.  She didn’t fit the mold of ‘Mommy perfection’ held up as the ideal today:  She swore in front of me.  She gave me fruit roll-ups as bribes to brush my teeth–often immediately after brushing them.  She yelled sometimes.  And she told me to tell people to F*** off.  BUT, she gave me the tools to survive without her way before I should have had to.  She gave me strength.  She gave me enough courage to know that even when I’m struggling, I am strong.  She taught me to value real people, people who work hard but who are a little rough around the edges.  She gave me a love of chocolate and of cake and of cheese.  She WAS a fantastic mother.  And  I am NOT Motherless. 

Last week I had a string of days where I couldn’t help but think, “I still really NEED my Mom right now.  Where  is she?”  I still miss her.  The memories have become less painful and more sustaining.  And I find myself just grateful that she was even if she’s no longer here with me now.  But I still NEED her.  I still MISS her.  I still GRIEVE her, even if I am not usually still in active mourning for her loss.  When I’m sad and want to talk things through with someone I still long for her.  When I’m sick I still want to be babied by her.  I still long to ask her how she really felt about the act of mothering (I know she loved BEING a Mom, but I want to know about her feelings in the nitty-gritty of it), and whether or not she ever went through depression, diagnosed or otherwise.  I want to compare my experiences to hers.  I want to see how we are alike and different.  And I long for her support, and her voice, her wisdom, and her ability to interpret people and circumstances for me in ways that gave me tremendous perspective.

So here I am 4 1/2 years later:  A lot of times I feel like in losing her I’ve lost my compass, but I do my best to follow the voice of the only One who can direct my path.  I struggle with depression, and apparently not just Postpartum.  I get lost in the mundanities and overwhelmed by the inane.  But even still, I know that I am strong.  I nurture others as she nurtured me.  I do my best by my own girls and pray like mad that in the end the balance sheet will show that I mothered them in a good way that helped them to get to know and to trust the voice inside themselves, and that my heart led theirs closer to their Father and Creator.  And as for the other side of that balance sheet, I pray like mad that God will fill in my gaps.  I feel so lost, so much of the time, but I keep walking with faith believing that I am where He wants me.  On the days that I feel desperate for my mother, and desperate to be mothered I cry out to God to mother me. 

I am still a young adult who grieves for and misses her mother.  But I go on.  And life is hard.  Very hard most days for one reason or another (and very few of those reasons are ever good ones), but it is also so very, very good.  And I hope I still make her proud.

The Ornament

My Mom gave me this ornament back in High School.  It was a porcelain(ish) white Angel, holding a basketful of stars.  Shortly after she gave it to me and we put it on the tree, I read Madeleine L’Engle’s A Ring of Endless Light in which the protagonist, Vicki, grapples with light and darkness and life and death.  I was going through my first real dose of the same struggle, and both the book and the ornament became a tangible symbol for me signifying that like Vicki, I was charged to choose light, and to bear light.  Since we’ve been married that ornament has gone at the top of our tree as a reminder to me.  After Mom died it took on even greater significance. 

This December has been a dark one.  December 2 I started bleeding and I soon discovered I was having a miscarriage.  The baby was planned for and wanted and hoped for.  I took 9 pregnancy tests (the last 4 of them had lines, the first two faint, the last two more solid).  The miscarriage happened very early before anyone but us even knew I was pregnant.  It was, unquestionably a blow.  Since then my heart has felt hollow.  The Christmas Season which I love even at the darkest times has seemed only a cruel reminder of what I had hoped for and prayed for and wanted.  I’ve always loved Advent because it meant the whole church was pregnant in anticipation of the Christ Child.  Obviously that metaphor is a painful one this year. 

I have held tenaciously to my conviction that Christmas is about a light in the darkness.  I’ve spent time each day covering myself with that thought.  I reread A Ring of Endless Light.  I accepted the charge anew.  I looked at the ornament each time I passed the tree and remembered what it meant even as I struggled against the darkness and the sadness. 

So when an exuberant game of tag tipped over the Christmas tree, and I heard the shattering of glass, and we righted the tree and I saw the white fragments of angel all over my floor, I was a devastated all over again.  It wasn’t just that the ornament was special.  It wasn’t just that my Mom gave it to me.  It was that this symbol of light in the darkness was shattered at a time when I was fighting with everything in me to hold onto that light. 

And then I saw the gift in what happened:  My husband swept up the fragments, and knelt down and painstakingly sifted through the glass to find the pieces of the angel.  He’s swept it into a bag.  Tonight he plans to pick up some Super Glue and try to piece it back together. 

This is the new picture I have to cling to.  In his loving actions my husband showed me Christ.  I am shattered.  The light seems shattered.  The joy and the hope of the season are like shards of glass on my dining room floor.  But Christ is kneeling down, sifting through the sharp, tiny pieces, and putting me back together.  Broken China is stronger when it’s mended.  Light seeps through cracks.  There is light in this darkness.  And I’ve been given the grace to see it. 

This is my Christmas.

The Notebook

Sometimes I still cry.

While we were cleaning out the ‘we don’t know where to put it so we’ll just put it in this extra room’ room that needs to become the ‘sparish’ room, I came upon a couple of notebooks.

The first one had some journaling, some grocery lists, some C doodling.  I tore out a few pages to keep.  The rest went to the recycle pile.

The second one took my breath away.

The first page began with a list of meds in my Mom’s handwriting.  Underneath that, a new and separate thought, were the words, “rapidly fatal.”  On another page there were the words “adenocarcinoma,” and “lymph nodes.”  There were words like, “Insurance Company,” and “MRI.”

In handwriting that goes back and forth between my mother’s and my father’s–often on the same page–I found the book that accompanied them to appointments.  That asked their questions.  That voiced their fears.  The book they carried with them after Mom was diagnosed with Lung Cancer.

There are test names and drug names and bold-faced facts that standing alone would elicit no emotion. 

And then there are the words that show me chinks in the armor that I rarely saw.  That maybe I was too scared to even look hard on. 

It was the fear.

“How do I manage the pain which is so bad now? (already….  at diagnosis)”

“Will I be paralyzed from this?”

“What can I expect?”

There are stark scribblings like “9-24 months.”  (We had 8 almost to the day when all was said and done). 

I wonder how alone my Mom felt in those fears.  I know I was just trying to be ‘the bearer of hope,’ and say only things my Mom could grab onto and hold with all her might.  But sometimes when you do that you deny a person their need to speak the truth about their feelings.  About their fears.  Which are real from the start.  I hope Mom didn’t feel too alone in her darkness as I stood desperately hoping to shine some light.  I hope that she knew she wasn’t alone in her fears.  I hope I did a better job than I remember of listening.

But what killed me in this notebook–what brought the tears pricking and overflowing and bewildering my husband who was sorting a few feet away–was what I read two pages later.

In Dad’s handwriting:  “Carolyn Helen, 8 lb. 1 oz.  20 1/2 in,” and the name of the hospital in which she was born and the number of days we’d be staying.  It was an empty page all by itself surrounded by all of this fear and pain and starkness.  It WAS the hope that I DID provide for them to hang onto.  It was the joy in the starkness.  Remembering that superimposed joy and starkness was overwhelming.  Remembering that year of newness and joy and pain and loss and the hugeness of it all, took my breath away.

The notebook also has the notes I scribbled after I called the Red Cross to let Husband know that Hospice thought she had two or three days at best.   Those notes were a lifeline of hope that I held onto.  They represented precious time I took away from being at my Mom’s side to tell my husband what was going on and to shoot a flare that might bring him home.  It did.  Mom held on, waited, lingered until Husband was by my side.  He came in late a day later.  She heard me say, “I love you Mom, Goodnight” and him say, “See you tomorrow Carol,” and a few hours later she was gone.   Such few words in that little notebook bookmarking moments and hours that I’ll never forget.

Further on, the notebook has notes of homes for rent that I scouted out that spring after staying with Dad during deployment when C and I went back to Washington for Husband’s coming home. 

It has scribblings I left for a babysitter during those six months as I tried to regain my footing. 

It has a years worth of experience and emotion and pain and joy all within a few pages of one another. 

And I cried.  And I held the notebook like it was something alive and real.  Like it was a link to those days and a way to hold my Mom’s hand again.

I thought about that year and the hugeness of all we lived through.  I didn’t minimize it or rush it away.  I sat there with it for a moment and remembered what it was like to have a baby.  Nurse my Mom.  Lose my  Mom.  Say goodbye to Husband as he left on deployment.  And live through the subsequent months of grief and aloneness while trying to piece back together the life I’d return to in another state.

It made me remember when I learned to take things a day at a time and to look only at “what is” and “what’s next.”

It made me miss my Mom and relive those days.

Sometimes I still cry.

Still Rippling

Almost two years ago, I wrote this post about losing my Mom as a young adult.  It is the post which brings in the most searches.  It is the post with the most comments.  Every couple of months, a new person (or two, or three) will comment and say, “Me too.”  Each time I am saddened, and humbled, and grateful to know that I know I’m not alone, and maybe my commenters do too.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my Mom the last couple of days.  The Steelers won on Sunday after all.  A friend of my Mom’s has been in contact with me recently, and today posted a photo of her for me to see on Facebook.   I just got done looking through about a dozen other photos that he sent me tonight via email.  I said this in a note to him: 

You know, I have so many photos of Mom–a whole album’s worth and then some, but I have looked at all of them so often, and studied them and memorized every little expression. It’s so nice to see photos of her that I haven’t seen, and see an expression I didn’t expect or have memorized. It makes me feel a little closer to her for just a second. Like she’s more than just a memory for that one little instant.

I miss my Mom.  And again today I was wearied and exhausted by the truth that I will go on missing her this way for all the rest of my life.  I have written here ad-nauseum about all the ways and reasons I miss her:  her wisdom and advice, her presence in my life, and in my children’s lives, her humor, and on and on…  I miss her.  And that just isn’t going to stop.  Some people would tell me that it should, but all I can tell them is that it won’t.  That missing is a much a part of me now as the joy that washes over me each morning when my children greet the new day with radiant smiles and kisses for Mommy. 

I still contend that the timing of my loss was unique…. was complicated.  It’s always unique and complicated.  But as 50+ people shared with me in the comments about losing a parent in early adulthood, it’s almost as though something developmental goes a little nutty.  I am still feeling the ripples of losing her when I did.  I was talking just today with a friend about how it seems that since dealing with losing Mom–her sickness, and death–I just don’t feel like I have it all together.  Ever.  I think part of that is my personality.  Part of it is the scatter-brained nature of Mommy-brain.  But I can’t help but wonder if part of it is this ripple effect that I’m still feeling from my Mom’s death.  My relationship with time is a little off.  My follow-through on communications and projects somehow gets left dangling over and over and over again. 

Some might disagree with me, but I feel that I am in a place of acceptance in my grief.  This is what it is.  Life has moved on in many, many ways.  I can’t go back.  I know this.

But something about this shattering of how I anticipated my life to look for much further into adulthood…  Something about the picture I had in my head 5 years ago of life as a mother with children, as life as a woman experiencing life…  Something about what I anticipated to go on for longer as a daughter of this wonderful woman…  Something about all of that keeps me off-balance.  The loss and the subsequent derailing of so many of my previously unknown expectations leaves me floundering in ways that I can’t even quite express.  They came at such a pivotal time. Just as everything was being built…  Just as I was piecing together what my life was going to look like as ‘a grownup’…  As I was putting together some pivotal pieces of the foundation of the rest of my life, one piece of the puzzle was thrown out…  I just still feel off-balance, off-kilter. 

But there is value in the tension.  There is value in knowing that security should not come from my expectations of how life will look.  My heart is different.  My lense for looking at life is altered.  I’m grateful to have come through the loss of my Mom.  I’m grateful to keep going.  I’m grateful that she gave me the strength to do so.  I’m grateful that I know a bit more about the depth of hurt and loss in this life.  I am grateful for the broken pieces of me that are gaining strength in their mending. 

The ripples of my loss go on.  They always will.  I continue to find new ones–some silly, some ridiculous, some deep and painful still. 

But I go on too.  One foot in front of the other.  Trying to make my Mom proud.  Trying to be like her often, but also trying to find the ways I am not like her–to embrace, and accept those…  and often, to be relieved in them.   I guess in those ways, I’m just like any other daughter, huh?  The ripples will continue, and I’ll continue wading through them.  Maybe I will always be a little ‘off.’  Or maybe in facing down the deepness of loss, I’ll become a bit more whole. 

The missing of her will go on.  The ripples will go on.  But most importantly, I will too.

Embracing The Muddling

Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas

The year after Mom died, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” became my holiday theme.  Not surprisingly, as the Holidays draw near again, it’s resurfacing for me.

Husband and I watched The Family Stone last week during a cheap-skate date (dinner and a movie in, free babysitter–gotta love that!).  I’d kind of forgotten that it had the whole ‘terminally ill woman spends Christmas with her family’ theme going on with it.  I’d never seen it before.

I would have been fine with the whole thing if “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” hadn’t been prominently featured in the film.  I really would have.  But there was Judy Garland singing her heart out, crying those beautiful vintage tears and bringing me back to reflect on the Muddling of it all.

“Someday soon we all will be together, if the fates allow….  Until then we’ll have to muddle through somehow….”  (I’ve quoted that line here before….  It’s a recurring theme, what can I say?)

I laid there that night, after we watched the movie, after I heard the song that packs such an emotional punch for me and all I could think was how prominent the concept of “muddling” has been to us.  And I cried and bawled and wailed, and poor Husband didn’t know what to do with me.

Muddling.  I feel like my whole marriage with Husband has been muddling.  Not because of Husband of course.  Our marriage has played out against the backdrop of a Navy lifestyle, the death of my mother, five grandparents, and several other significant friends and family members.  We’ve experienced the stress of raisingn two young children while enduring the yo-yoing of separating and coming together again with deployments and detachments.    Maybe it’s because I’m codependent and I like to create my own chaos, or maybe it’s because life has really been bits and pieces of chaos.  I just always feel like we’re muddling.  Just doing what we can to make the best of it.  Trying to embrace the beauty and the mess of it all. 

This year, the mess is me.  It’s us.  The mess is our healing.  The mess is Husband and I trying to reconnect as Husband and wife in the wake of all the previous mudding.  It’s the exhaustion and the frustration and the stress and the joy and the exquisite tenderness and the pure amazement of raising our two beautiful children. 

Muddling feels something akin to just surviving.  And my ideal is to do more than survive, but to really live.

But it occurs to me that maybe muddling IS living.  It is part of living life abundant.  Of feeling the heights of the joy and the depths of the pain.  Of facing the messiness that is you. 

It’s not that all has been joyless.  There has been much joy–exquisite joy.  Discovery, and abundant love, and wonder and amazement.  It’s not that the difficulties we’ve faced have been so extraordinary.  We have a very ordinary set of troubles.  We do.

This Christmas song that I love so much isn’t about muddling.  It’s a song about looking forward with hope despite less than ideal circumstances…  and living fully in the joy of the present in the meantime.   It’s not about having joy because of an absence of muddling, but about holding onto the light of now in the midst of it.

I want to learn to, or remember to, or continue to joyfully embrace my muddling.  I want to continue to look forward with hope…  to days of being together with people that I love, both on this side of Heaven and beyond…  to days of feeling together and not like an unraveling mess…  Days of sinking in solidly to the feel of my husband’s arms around me without a burden of cares and worries and disconnections between us.  In the mess and the muddling in the meantime, I want to grasp the reality of the joy of right now with both hands and hold on tight.

Days Like This

I hate days like this.

Days when everything feels fragile.  When I feel bruised and vulnerable.

Days when things between Husband and I feel tenuous.

And the big and small events swirling around us overwhelm.

Days when the yelling Mama makes an appearance far more frequently then the calm instructive Mama.

Days when the overwhelming longing to call my own Mama to talk over all of it, and my crippling inability to do so is just the icing on the cake.

I hate days like this.

My hope in days like this is that God is working. 

That he is sifting through my hubris. 

That the bruised feeling might be indicative of healing happening in the depths of me.

That he would mother me in Mom’s stead.

As I continue to grapple with the mess that is me.

I find that the new strength and steadiness that I have been finding equips me to deal with the bruised spots.

And I find comfort in the heat of the woodstove on these first cold days of autumn

In the blue-eyed stare of our new kitten

And in the knowing that days like this don’t last.

Marking a Space in Time.

Three years.