Ugh.
January
January 8, 2007
What a wonderful way to ring in the New Year, sick as soggy toast, not fulfilling a single one of the almost resolutions I had in my mind this year. Not a single one. It's a great start, can I have a start over? A reset? No? I didn't really write them down or anything, but they were a jumbled mess of jogging, getting up early, reading and meditating on the Bible, focusing more clearly on Kai's early homeschooling, working on my novel, and taking vitamins. I didn't do any of them. Not a single one.
It's actually good for me to start the year this way. It's like God saying to me, "Let's just put away any newly formed ideas about that whole Supermom thing to rest right away, shall we? Now that we have that out of the way, what do you want to do this year? I have some ideas."
I'm excited, when I stop standing over my own shoulder with a whip, to think of God's ideas for me this year. When I was younger, I used to think that those ideas would be mostly exciting things that included travel and people telling me that they didn't know what they'd do without me. I'm ashamed to admit it. Now, well, I don't know, but I think that his ideas are more about formation. More about tossing me ingredients and seeing what I'll make. Sometimes his hands work with mine, and what comes out is mostly his own creation, and sometimes I feel like I'm struggling along, messing it up. If it's clay, it comes out cracked and dry, and if it's food, the rice is overcooked and the beans are burnt and tasteless. But while I'm working on what I'm making, he's really forming me, which is the important thing. Am I making any sense?
Yesterday I felt like I was thrown a pretty big mess. We left to go to church and spend the day up in the college town north of us. When we woke up, though, my Superstar Husband looked at me with bleary, pleading eyes. He's been burning the candle at every end lately, and fighting the flu that I fell prey too, so I said, "I'll just go!" After some minor issues and a little fun stress-filled tearing around to get everything together, I was on my way with the three kids, and some friends; one visiting, and two friends who live here. About halfway through the day there was a crisis with the girl who came with us, someone who has been trying to get her life together here at the Land, someone I have really come to love in the last few months. At first it felt like something I couldn't handle, like too many ingredients to make anything that wouldn't be a huge mess, that wouldn't take hours to scrape off the ceiling. But then, I heard God's gentle voice urging me to jump in and try, and I did. And I found that a crisis like this brought total honesty, that maybe now I'll be able to help more than before, and then somehow we muddled through the day without anyone getting hurt or lost or too far gone. What emerged was a day of love and honesty, a day of softness with my kids, a day of working through hard things with friends.
I haven't been able to follow any routines this past week. My house has been rather messy, no matter my slow-witted attempts to clean it, and I haven't exercised. But I think I'm starting to see that this year is not going to be the year that I become the majorly sculpted and disciplined housewife, but more like the year that I learn a little more about how to listen. I've been tossed a family, and not only that, but a community, and sometimes I feel like I have nothing to offer, I haven't come out with enough arms to make something of this. I think God is still here, though, waiting to see what happens, offering a hand here and there. He's the one telling me that Yes, I can be kind to my children even when the house is messy and I woke up later than I wanted to. And most of all, he smiles at my efforts, gently taking that whip out of my hands, offering me a shoulder when I flop on the couch at night, exhausted. He urges me that I can be like a child, that this can be fun, even if it's not all travel, even if I'm not seamlessly saving the world. What a Guy. I guess that's mostly what I want this year, anyways. Just to be making stuff with God, in the kitchen, making bundt cake with the Lord.
January 10, 2007
Yesterday I fell in love with my Leaf baby a little more. I don't know why there are some days like this, where you look up and recognize each other and one more brick slides into place; your understanding of each other is a little more whole, you find that your heart can really expand just a little more. I never cease to wonder at the bonding experience with babies. Now Leaf says, "Hey!" to me when I come back into the house if I've been gone, and his expression is entirely welcoming, and I think I need that kind of welcome in my life. No one gives it like a baby, so pure and open.
*
The other day, the crisis that I spoke of got worse. It involved drug use, and the girl in trouble had to be taken to the Emergency Room on Monday night. Everything is okay now, and I think we're at the beginning of a long journey of working through a lot of emotional brokenness with this person, the kind of brokenness that would have her on a binge, totally out of the blue. I still feel so scattered. While Chinua was putting the kids to bed on Monday night, I was trying to break into someone's psychedelic madness and bring sanity. Renee and I tried to help for three hours, until we had to give it up and put it into the hands of doctors more capable than us. We had three hours of trying to communicate with someone who is not in the same world, mentally. Three hours of trying to convince someone not to walk around blindfolded, literally, not figuratively. Three hours of crying on and off, of witnessing heartbreak. And then after we had given it up, after we decided that all that could be done was to take our friend to the E.R., where doctors could give her sleep medication so she could sleep it off, to come back to my cabin and find Kai in the bathroom, asking me to wipe his bum. Suddenly, bum-wiping seemed so normal, so sane.
I'm rambling a lot, I know. I'm trying to make some sense out of this. I've seen a lot of really really hurt people who do things to sabotage good in their lives. And now here I am, with my community in the woods, and I bathe children, I send out tax receipts, I dive into madness, and I fold laundry. I work to keep my house peaceful, and then God asks me to leave that peace and help a person who is without peace, someone who is tormented. It has happened again and again over the years, and it always makes me feel like there are two of me. Different women to do different things. The noise of quarreling kids is a kind of peace, compared to the roar of cold brutality from lies, from madness.
Maybe there are a lot of different parts of me. There is the woman who washes dishes, and there is the woman who wants to write a novel, and there is the woman who says, "take off that blindfold, right now." And this is okay, and I am here to do this, to raise children and affirm them, and to help hurt people. Maybe we are all here for this, in different ways. It is no small thing, to move from one world to another. The bridge is not easy.
January 15, 2007
Last week I may have mentioned something to the world at large about how my Saturdays are absolutely, for-surely, positively going to be restful. I'm just not having it anymore, I said. I need to rest. Can't go go go like this. Dude, I believe in the whole Sabbath thing, day of rest and all. Not legalistically, but it's a good way to live.
Sometimes it's just not up to me, though. For instance, this Saturday, the one that I was so intense about, went something like this:
By 9:00 AM, I had already called poison control because Kai had a moment of out of control sugar craving while he was supposed to be going to the bathroom, climbed up on the toilet seat, opened the childproof bottle of children's ibuprofen, and drank the whole thing. Tom the poison control man was calm on the phone, but I suspect he's always calm. I wondered if they hired him because of his soothing voice. He assured me that Kai would probably be fine, but that I should be listening for any complaints of a sore tummy. "Just don't suggest it to him," he advised, "the idea of a sore tummy."
Kai was fine. Aside from a massive, enormous sugar high.
By 9:30 a new friend had shown up (this was the high point of the day) to do some volunteer electrical work on one of our cabins. He ended up fixing the problem, which was that the entire cabin had inexplicably lost power. By inexplicably, I mean that there is no explanatio
n other than our massively jury-rigged electrical situation here, which includes the fact that the power lines are stapled into trees that have grown around them in a loving embrace. The electrical system here pre-dates us, probably by a hundred years or so. It was probably brought here on the Pony Express, which, other than the fact that the technology wasn't available then, is quite possible, since one of our buildings used to be a stop on the Pony Express.
Our new friend fixed our problem for the time being, which was wonderful, but doesn't nullify the fact that the entire time he was here talking to me about work stuff, Kai was tearing around the house like a three foot tall Doberman Pincher. "Sugar high," I explained, rolling my eyes and shrugging.
By 10:30 I was talking to a fellow community member about what kind of intervention we should have with the troubled girl who is living here.
By 11:00 I had decided to take my poor, poor husband to the hospital. Chinua has been sick in bed since last Tuesday, feverish and delirious many times over. On the fourth consecutive day of fever and chills we decided to pack up the fam and take him to Urgent Care.
By 12:00 we were on our way.
By 1:55 I was tearing into the only pharmacy in town, which closes at 2:00 in the afternoon on a Saturday, and arguing with the pharmacist's assistant over whether my insurance covered the antibiotics for Chinua's strep throat.
By 2:45 I was in the midst of the aforementioned intervention. Think drama, pain, and frustration. And grace, lots and lots.
By 4:00 I was taking a break in an effort to get Kenya in bed for a nap. And by 4:30 I was giving up on an afternoon nap for either of my older kids.
And blah, blah, blahdee blah blah. Sorry for the boring details. I ended up talking with the girl for awhile, talking to about twenty people on the phone, asking for advice, making dinner, and all the other stuff, until:
At 8:30 I absolutely insisted on reading a book and doing nothing else until it was time for me to sleep.
So, I did get some time of rest after all. Thank God. It's funny, and I'm not really giving up, because I know these things come in seasons. Sometimes it is so quiet, and everything goes so smoothly that you look around and wonder what happened, where the turmoil went, why the river is so still. And sometimes all your reserves are called out, and all that peace can serve a purpose.
January 26, 2007
I'm showing up here right now with nothing good. I've been consumed in office work that sucks all my energy right out of me, I feel low, rejected, sad, and anxious. Let down, hanging around... oh wait, did I just step into a Radiohead song? I haven't been posting all that much because I found myself counting how many poopy diapers I had changed and how many loads of laundry I had washed, and I was writing it all down when I got sick of myself and deleted it, all of it, all my numbers and charts and adding things up.
Nothing adds up. I'm learning that I should just stay away from numbers. They don't feed me. What does?
My wood stove. It's purty. And warm.
A big heavy four-year-old boy agreeing with me when I tell him it's cuddle time after he's had a grumpy morning. I could sit with his head under my chin all day. I always marvel at the large skull that has grown from the tiny fragile head he was born with. Not to mention the long legs from those little bowed bird legs.
My Leaf Baby. He tries to make me laugh and he always succeeds.
Collecting stones from the beach.
A beautiful painting/song/poem.
BEAUTY. Oh I need it. In me, around me. Lately I've been rebelling, feeling like such a cleaning lady. I know it's all to the end of creating a beautiful space for my family, but does it have to be so repetitive? Does it have to feel so futile? Or how about other areas in life? Does loving people have to feel so one-sided? Can we get a little rain? Oh, here I am, complaining.
I'll write again tomorrow, maybe the morning will shake some of this out of me. I have things to tell you, I do.
Now I prefer to stew in my misery.
January 28, 2007
Today I flew to Chicago in a sea of pink-tipped clouds, by myself, happy and sad at the same time. I know I should relish every drop of solitude that I can get to trickle out of the bottom of the cup, but one of the paradoxes of being a mother, I've found, is that you desperately need alone time, but desperately miss your kids when you get it. Motherhood is a life vocation, comparable to nothing else, because it is a type of work that is encompassed by love and worry, a type of work that can never be banished from your mind. Sometimes I feel that I will never relax again. Talking this week with another mother friend whose children are adults, I realized that the fears with small children over choking and sickness are replaced with other fears as time goes on.
All to say that I have to learn to trust God more.
And despite saying this, I will not deny that there was a complete ease about checking in for my flight today, a simplicity that was precious, like water in the desert, despite being picked "randomly" (as always) for a special extra security check, and despite having my cream-top yogurt and Mango and Antioxidants drink taken away from me. Flying has become like paying to be arrested, I thought, as I was standing in a machine that blew air at me to make sure that I didn't have any hidden weapons or drugs on my person. I can't believe they took my yogurt away. When our kids are grown up we'll be telling them, "I remember the days when they gave us food on the airplane and- oh yes, the days when we were allowed to wear our own clothing, now we have to wear specially manufactured uniforms." It's funny, though, flying without my kids. It's not as if they aren't completely well-behaved in an airport--they're great--it's just that it takes so little effort to move my own gangly body through the line, down the hallway, into the seat. It's amazing. It's nothing like the effort it takes me to wrestle little people into car seats, just to go to the store. And yet every so often I found myself peeking up over the seats at the kids sitting three rows down because aren't they magical? Kids are just the most amazing small creatures, and even when I'm exhausted and finally alone, I'm watching someone else's kids, missing Kenya's hand on my cheek.
I sat on the airplane and read my new book, "Freddy and Fredericka" by Mark Helprin, which so far I am delighted with, and looked out the window. My mind allowed me to have a little glimpse of pure observation, and as we were heading up above the clouds, I thought, I can't believe I can fly. Really, we can be above the clouds, looking down at the mountains around Tahoe, catching sight of a frozen lake, marveling at a seemingly endless view of farms in a perfect grid, an ocean of clouds, the sun setting over Lake Michigan. We can FLY. I can be in Chicago, coming from San Francisco, in four hours.
This trip was a sudden decision, and was the only response I could think of giving to a friend's deep hurt and crisis. I should just go and be there, I thought, and not surprisingly, Chinua said it before I did. I'll only be gone a few days, and a friend helped with part of the ticket. This is what I love about a community that stretches across the country, that we can say, "I'm here," even when we can't be there all the time, that we can imperfectly love each other. It's got to mean something, this stumbling love we share. God has not given us any small task in commanding us to love him and love one another, but the gifts he gives are more than enough to make it happen.
I love the friend that I am traveling to see. She has amazed me so many times, and I think she is still like an unlocked door. We have barely seen the beginnings of the beauty that will come from within her. And she is hurt, and all I can do is say, "I'll come over." It feels so small. I begin to wonder, lately, in the midst of so many crises, what it takes to get through.
It's kind of like flying, I think. Everybody thinks you have weapons in your toothpaste, and they take away your yogurt and your lip balm, you have to be in this climate-controlled chamber in order to survive, and it's not exactly effortless, but we're flying. It's a miracle. We're getting there.
February
February 6, 2007
Yesterday I fell apart. Limbs were
dropping hither and thither, it was crazy. I still haven't found my right arm.
Why are women like waves? Why the drama? My Superstar Husband can cruise along for months without the slightest bit of drama, his emotional path is a solid line to the horizon. I don't understand the point of my ups and downs. As soon as I even think that I'm in the clear, BAM, I'm knocked down by the sheer intensity of my discouragement. The huge and pervasive piece of logic in my head is, "I don't think I can do this." And so, I fall apart.
Because who wants to spend their life doing something they'll never succeed at? Doesn't this seem like the ultimate road to insanity? And this is what gets me, this voice in my head throughout my day that tells me I'm not doing anything at the standard that I want. I think the problem might be my standards, as well as that stupid voice. (Shut UP, voice!)
A good thing about these waves is that I am forced to take stock. Often I am speeding along in my little path, not noticing all of the bad information that clings to me like barnacles. It's time for some picking off of the barnacles. I realize that I begin to measure everything with a little measuring stick, how clean my house is, how much work I get done in a day, and then when things crash in on me I look at my stick with new eyes and I'm amazed by this stick. Where did I find it? How did it make its way into my hand? What does this flipping stick have to do with dreams anyways?
Because dreams are very important, and dreams are not standards that crush you. I think the Bible is full of dreams, although it is often used as a stick. I believe that a lot of people are afraid of something as beautiful as these holy words because they're using them as another stick in their lives, and let me tell you people, they will never measure up. And thus, we are afraid of living our whole lives through, never being the thing we are trying to be. Insanity.
Trees Tall as Mountains (The Journey Mama Writings: Book 1) Page 15