Wounded birds flock together

It seemed such an odd love to develop, given my age and work experience. Trauma and I have been in many battles together.  Between the injuries I've seen and the few I've heard or felt, it seems unlikely to want to fly in any way, shape or form. I was petrified the first time we took off on a machine to achieve that feeling - it was both petrifying and intoxicating. I learned the first day that you don't fly off a motorcycle willy nilly, and a good driver can guide you through the ride with ease and grace.

My wife got me a bike a few weeks ago. I cannot remember the last time I enjoyed a thing quite so much. Probably not since I was a kid, at Christmastime. I couldn't ride today, even though the afternoon was beautiful. It was Homecoming, and we had 3 kids going, so it was time to be a mom. Evening came, the long shadows of an autumn sunset, and I headed down to the garage to look at her, ending up hauling her out for a bath.

She's been through a battle, I thought as I washed the saddlebags. I found gouges in the crash bar on the back side and a little chip out of the paint. Her scars don't make me love her any less. I'm scrubbing this bike, and thinking of some old Scriptures I used to love...how God used Rahab the "harlot", Mary Magdalene, Deborah the Judge who stabbed someone through the eye with a tent stake. Scarred and battered women who couldn't be quelled by the evils they'd seen, the sins they'd committed or the men who tried to crush them. How those stories used to give me hope, used up, battered and scarred before I was old enough to make those choices for myself.

Loving something (or someone) scarred is to participate in redemption. Reclamation. It's an honor to be the one to put footprints in the dusty earth that bears the disfigurements of the war that passed through. To tend, to water, and finally, to harvest from that land. You'll never forget that the ditch there used to be a deep furrow - now covered in lush grass, your feet will still remember the gash exposed. Time - and love - heals all wounds.

My own scars have faded, from red to pink to flesh. Lines still cut across but I don't catch strangers staring at them anymore. My bike is a lot like me, scars hidden now, there only for the intimate touch, not the casual glance. I'm going to enjoy riding my bike even more, knowing those scars are there, that she carried some other rider out of a battle. May she be a part of my own Phoenix story, part of the healing.

Part of the reclamation of this battered old self.

Volume 2

There was a tornado last month in my old neighborhood. My kids and I were rather hilariously trapped in Kohl's during the warning, miles from the touchdown. We heard about the storm and it's aftermath almost incessantly for days and weeks afterward. Today, I drove by the site on my way back from my parent's home, marveling at how much damage was done now that the debris is cleared and you can see the gash the tornado cut through the very earth. It was also remarkable that rebuilding has already started, lots of new framing going up as survivors try to get enclosures up, belongings and livestock sheltered before winter hits.

It seemed a fitting analogy as I embark again as a writer in the ever more crowded internet space. I've been quiet for a long time, years. Writing was one of the buoys that kept me afloat when I was in the midst of the storms of life. For years afterward, as we began to assess and repair. And now the storm is but a memory, and life has carried me along on a rip current of both joy and new challenges that keep me off the computer and in the moment. I wrote through coming out, loss of faith, divorce, and rebuilding life as a single mom in a tiny apartment. I stopped writing when it seemed the story quit flowing from these fingertips, and because I gave in to fear. I could not write to the same audience, it seemed. I didn't know if I had anything worthwhile left to say to that audience, the Christian world, moms from homes that looked ever more different than mine.

So why write again? First of all, I'm not sure I will, or if this is just a brief hello to my old blog and old readers. I'm going to try. Most of all because it doesn't seem right to end the story just because I became afraid to tell it. And because I never know who might be listening, who might need the words I'll spill, the journey I'll share.

Today, I am remarried. I am a mom of seven kids, five of whom are teenagers. My oldest just got married herself. Two of my children have changed their names. I am no longer a full-time professor, but I work two jobs as a staff nurse and I teach part-time while still editing for a large educational publisher. I constantly feel like I have too many irons in the fire and something is going to blow up or turn out wrong. I am a rescue dog mom. I drive the same car. I love to drive my motorcycle. I recently quit smoking, a bad habit I picked up to carry me through the darkest times that seems silly now that times aren't so dark.

Life is good, and it is sometimes very painful. I continue to see a doctor at least every 3 months for constant changes in treatment to keep cancer recurrence at bay. I don't have many of the same friends and extended family can be a minefield. I don't know how to do this mom thing yet and that bothers me immensely. Stepmomming eludes me most of the time. I don't know how I relate to God, and I know that I don't relate well at all to religion.

Here I am, living life and loving it (most of the time). Still struggling with all the metaphysical questions that have plagued me in their ephemeral and gargantuan complexity. First to admit I don't have answers, I'm also first in line at the question window of life. How about you? What has changed about your life in the last five years? What questions are you wrestling today?

Grasping the Dichotomy

I remember clearly how I countered atheists as a child,

"I would rather be wrong on the side of faith."

Life sometimes feels reduced to a risk-benefit ratio. Children grow at astonishing rates, far quicker than my aging parental intellect can adjust. The times are changing. Taboos are on pyres of social media before our own eyes. As in generations past, what was dangerous is not only cool, but a political stance, an identity defensible: our children mount heights both indefinable, ineffable, but conscious, decided, strong. They are the new warriors on the edges of social norms. Challenging ideologies and forging paths through a wilderness all their own. Yet I cannot but see them as the college men placing daisies in rifle barrels in the 1960's, my father's generation growing beards in defiance of gender norms in the 1970's, myself growing up sometime shamefully, sometime shamelessly dyke in the 1990's.

I am softened by the Catholic hospital I work at. The humanity and humility of people of faith who surround me astounds and ashames me. I am by definition a fence-sitter in faith: I cannot make myself plant a foot on either side of the fence. My empathy needs bolstering after years of being on the fringes, my seat amongst the outcasts. I carry my identify carefully and stand watch as my children (rebels and pioneers) blaze new trails, yet the priests and sisters who walk an old, established road that has fallen into disregard join them as rebels and pioneers while wielding tried and trusted tools to reach the hurting and restless of this world.

You say I'm stubborn and I never give in
You say I'm selfish, and I agree with you on that
I say we've only known each a year
You say, "I've known you longer, my dear."

You're so provocative, I'm so conservative,
You're so adventurous, I'm so very cautious,

Walking with each other,
think we'd never match at all,
but we do.
(My Same ~Adele, 19)

I look around at a house of mirrors. Faith has always been dichotomous to me: heaven and hell, righteous and sinful, lightness and dark. I remember a quote I loved long ago:

Muses of the gray, beyond your binary definitions, my children and I still adrift on our raft together, and now we gather souls - my wife, stepfamily, friends... trying to live life outside the margins but looking for other outliers. Longing for community, even when we have accustomed ourselves to being outsiders.

I feel the pull of the universe. The need to be right on the side of what is truly right. A song by a favorite bluegrass gospel family band haunts me. I wonder if I can again master the idea that God's hand is unchanging, true...but loving, accepting of difference, uncertainty. Master the dichotomy. I ponder how we all start out so sure of our intuition, fighting for the things we simply know as true, yet as we age, wisdom adds questions, not answers. Survivors and embracers of dichotomy. We are all on this journey, spinning through the stars, marking our short years in evolutions around a dying sun. Of the stars, embracing darkness in light, light in darkness.

Believers. Doubters.

Perhaps we all hold an eternal thread and tug in tension with all of humanity. The pull between knowledge and knowledge of limitations. Love and hate. War and peace. All a part of the dichotomous universe that cradles us in our unknowing. Each of us earth-shattering and brilliant, dull and muted by the mundane of our reality.

Time is filled with swift transition,
Naught of earth unmoved can stand,
Build your hopes on things eternal,
Hold to God's unchanging hand.
(Hold to God's Unchanging Hand, The Franz Family, Sorrow and Wisdom)

I reach into the dark, I struggle for faith. Struggle for vision that Christ is Love, that God, deity by whatever name known...that it is love that wins in the end. That my children and I can be loved with abandon here... and eternally.

Why being humanist means being a lover

Faith has served a purpose in my life. It provided resilience in the face of some of the gravest difficulties I'll ever face. It taught me to question, debate, and defend my ideas and dreams. It taught me the value of believing I am here for a purpose, that there was a metaphysical something that could see my potential in all my flawed humanity.

Because of the physical reality to which human knowledge is constrained at this point in history, it is hard for me to comprehend that something can come from nothing. All matter comes from other matter - there is nothing spontaneous about the development of our observable universe. Where did we come from? Were we created, either in a fully functional state as posited by the legends of the Bible, or as embryonic chemicals stored for eons in the stars and released by an explosion that transformed primordial soup into an evolving universe with an ever-changing genetic and phenotype landscape of mesmerizing, if possibly impermanent, beauty? Is it possible to live agnostic, accepting ambiguity, the I don't know answers to our deepest questions?

Perhaps what I conceived of as divine is actually human: I have a unique potential that serves me well as a professor - to see the hidden beauty and potential in the living, breathing miracles who cross the threshold of my office. I see the purpose concealed there, too. Perhaps this is love. To believe in people, to trust their journey and process, to have confidence in our ability to shape a future world in which respect defines us more than differences do.

After a long hiatus

The urge to write, so strong my fingers tap, eyelids flickering, as I try to sleep - it hasn't kept me awake for almost a year now. The creative fire burns brightest in my soul when the stress of life is overwhelming. When things go smoothly, I don't have to burst at the seams with words and images, I don't have to hunger and thirst for beauty like food, or air. What is that urge, that we must birth something from within to render significance to the events that are shaping us? Is it wielding control over the very things we can not control? As if by constructing our own narrative, we might dull our own pain, blunt our own experience. Is it the drive to share or at the very least, shine a light on the dim and lonely path for the next poor soul who stumbles down it?

Choices and ideas flow out before me like a waterfall of intersections. In the chaos, I lose clarity, the end goal is lost in the mist at the horizon. I know what I want. I want to love and be loved, to be free to do that in the way I need to do it. I'm not here to argue what made me this way, or even whether it's right or wrong, generally speaking. I just want to be free to love and be loved.

Thoughts from the bedside after a long night shift

My mother has bad feet. This is because she rarely gets off them. And so I sit - to chart, to tie my children's shoes, to visit with a patient. I've learned that sitting - the actual sitting part is key - with a patient is often the most therapeutic intervention I can offer in a 12 hour shift. When I enter the room, and I see a damp cheek, or glistening eyes; sense the reticence in the air as the person in that bed tries to hold themselves together while you measure vital signs and trade small talk. I'm not a fan of small talk, and measurements tell me much less about that person's health sometimes than a good chat can. I pull up the hard hospital chair, pull it close, and often reach for my patient's hand.


Last night, a stoic Scandinavian spent 10 minutes talking about the weather, her grandchildren, and her favorite card game before her eyes moistened and we got down to business talking about her looming cancer work-up. We cried together, her apologizing for taking my time with her worries, and I lamenting that I could do nothing more for her than accompany her in this pain. In that moment was a bit of the "silver lining" to my own cancer battle: I can say to that patient, "I have been in this space you're in. I know how difficult it is to want answers and find none. I know what it is like the first time you stare your death in the face." It really sucks that one of the main reasons I can figure for my own suffering is that it allows me to deeply empathize with patients going through similar trials! I wish I could say this to a few students I helped through hard times during nursing school - someday you will be glad you went through this, if only for a brief moment. It redeems some of that pain you've gone through when you can ease the pain of someone else because of it.


Back at the station, I was charting furiously and listening just as intently. I hear it all the time - this patient really should take better care of themselves. That patient should never have let it get that bad. Why is this patient so filthy? Why is that patient so addicted? The truth is, caregivers are as human as their patients, and cleanliness and good manners will get you gold stars in the hospital halls, too. If you haven't suffered much, it's hard to imagine not being able to wash your own feet, shave your own legs, not to mention those poor souls who can no longer clean themselves after toileting. Yet very few of those patients are dirty because they want to be. Whether they are hampered by more visible impairments like limited mobility, weakness, and disease, or the invisible tethers of mental illness, chronic pain and fatigue, they did not obstinately refuse to bathe. No homeless person set out to be so. I've never met an uninsured patient on state benefits and food stamps who planned that out while they were in high school. Why do we have expectations of others, even when they're ill?


Nurses, caregivers of all kinds, pull up a chair, take time to know the person you are caring for this shift. Not the diagnosis, lab values you are watching for, or med that hasn't come up from pharmacy. There is a person lying there suffering - vibrant once, with passions and fears, all kinds of adventures to tell you of, things they regret they may be pondering right this minute. Those moments spent just talking have become the most treasured of my career.


And if you ever have to go the hospital, take your grandma's advice and ALWAYS put on a clean pair of underwear!

Divorce: Feeling lost but being found

Saying goodbye to dreams in increments tends to cloud your memory of how you came to these decisions in the first place. I never imagined a life in which my children were not always with me in my home. I didn't set out to put myself at odds with my family and friends. Yet here I am, this week bidding adieu to my yellow farmhouse at a new level.

I never wanted to change the man I married. I never wanted to change my children. They all came to me - the man, his children - foreign, wholly other beings brimming over with themselves from the moment I first laid eyes on them. Why would I change creatures who fascinate me so? I don't want to change them now, even in this season of loss, as dreams warp and dissipate and relationships break and heal and change.

A person doesn't join another person in life choosing someone to change. A mother doesn't adopt children into her paradigm, but must evolve herself as each new being enters her care. The responsibility of parenthood in it's truest form is to nurture the child that comes into the family, celebrating and honing strengths and cradling weaknesses. I stand against those who've tried to teach me a child must be broken, their will crushed, or their character molded. I looked into the eyes of those babes as they came forth into the awareness of this other world we live in. I saw there the power in their personalities. I heard in their cries and felt in their rhythms their Achille's heels long before I could craft a description of them. I know they were fully and wholly themselves as they came to be, and I can only come alongside each of them as they emerge into the people they were born to become. Whoever that is - however different than my initial visions of them, however "right" or "wrong", healthy or unhealthy I perceive their choices to be, I was joined to them irrevocably as their blood and mine pooled together beneath me in their first minutes of life, the first of many sacrifices to be made so that I might reflect their most beautiful light. I can never forget that in the forge of life itself, in the muck and mire of family life, the diapers and the midnight bleary eyed dances in the kitchen; in the sorrows, losses, triumphs and simple moments of joy - we became ourselves together, these four people and I. This metamorphosis may have been halted somewhere along the way by the trauma of evil for me, yet it is the wisdom of such paralysis that has opened the floodgates for me to spill forth this third decade of my life. Right alongside my growing children.

I am their mother. I will cheer when they succeed (and probably shed a few tears). My heart will break with theirs as this cruel world crashes into theirs in all it's beauty and tragedy this next decade. Their words will pierce deeper than any other arrows into my spirit. And mine could do the same to them. Yet, ever more often, these compassionate little people, wise beyond their years, forged as they've been through suffering - they build me with their words. Caleb, with his sudden, fierce hugs, harshly whispers, "You're the best mama in the whole world." Amy, who cannot get enough of my skin, who needs me like the rest of us need water. Rosy who is quick to notice my mood and comfort and encourage with a specific strength or joy she noted in me earlier. Katy, who has always been a little me walking around outside my body: yet she is resilient, alert and stalwart in a way I wasn't born to be, and so I see myself, but sturdier, conscious, methodical, loyal.

In reality, I haven't said goodbye to my dreams. They've evolved, as I have, by necessity. I helped build a yellow farmhouse that was supposed to be where I raised a simple Christian family. Dreams can become prisons if they chafe the new, tender parts of you that emerge as you grow. I no longer fit that particular vision for my life: it isn't surprising that the life I made for the old me didn't match the me I found when I finally had the courage to look inside. The house and the dream aren't mine any longer, yet I feathered a nest with memories of comfort and the type of joy that is dancing spontaneously with your arms flung free, and I've left this legacy to reach into my children's futures in their hours apart from me. Some of us are the hermit crabs, shedding shells and walking vulnerable until we find a new home that fits.

I'll hold yin and yang for you, my children, and for myself. I will call twisting reshaping; I will see breaking as gaining perspective; I will try to hold your lives ever in the balance when I work hard to support you but never so hard that you lose me for it. In all this, not to ever lose myself again either, because in losing myself you all lose me, too, and these four at least need me.

It's like coming out of the long Alaskan winter, when the sun never rises. I am shaking the cold off my bones, I'm walking without a visible limp, my laugh has it's ring back. I'd recommend it, a thousand times over, for all it's agony, this journey of self discovery. Find yourself. I promise it's worth it. I promise you're so much more beautiful than you imagine. I promise you'll see what others have seen - however rare, we've all had a friend or two, a family member, a teacher, a coworker, someone who sees us and loves us. You've spent a lifetime already, I imagine, looking for the person inside you that people dislike. Have you ever thought to look for the person others do like? Why not give it a shot?

Coming out might not mean what you think

truth sometimes settles out of dust and chaos
in unraveling and uncoupling we find deeper wells
despite of or perhaps because of
the tragedies that have swirled around us
we are driftwood strong and smooth

Remembering ourselves
can be radical self-preservation
What you see as selfish heedless foolish
might just be the last spark to my candle
It takes courage to light your own flame
in a howling wind of nay sayers
Acts and deeds over words and creeds
the proof is in the pudding
I'll show you my love - show me yours please

it has been a season of iPhone photos
my camera gathering dust on a shelf.
I am a brushless painter, voiceless poet;
fine art is eye of the beholder stuff
simplicity of routine
the gathering of warm bodies to us
in a shelter we've made a nest
is there anything finer
than growing beauty in tiny humans?
working at what makes our soul sing?
purity of a simple laugh
ringing through a lazy after school afternoon
or the perfection of an embrace that fits just right
I gather moments more than images
for moments mean more and sharing them less

feet on the frozen lake
I sink my feet into life's unadulterated facts
We've no idea still what dawn will bring
with all our devices and sensors and data
it is still a surprise - that first conscious breath
absorbing daylight as much through our noses and lungs as we do our eyes

It's not been just on lonely incense evenings
or in the leaving or the forging of new life
it is in the arms of the lover my soul wailed for
finally cradled in just the ways I need to be held
and love filling empty spaces
that have long collected only wind and rain
I whisper she and am not undone by fear

Who judges what spring will awaken the slumbering hibernation
we willingly or inexorably lull ourselves into?
For me it has been the winter of separation
feeling air all around my soul
in walking away from dogma and certainty
I've found peace bobbing about on the ocean of life's ceaseless wonder and pain
Lifting anchor was the last tether cut
In the reflection of memories forgiven, waves of losses and disappointments
If I can forgive those who twisted me
Perhaps I can even forgive myself

The color, wideness of grin coming back
a gust of wind now and then through my wings
and you can take the high road
I'll take the path through the woods
along the detours, on those dead ends
I've met healing and safety
Pain doesn't paralyze me anymore
because it is important to let yourself be alive
let your humanness breathe without analyzing every detail
get dirty in life together, perfection isn't all -
that's freedom, my soul sings,
and freedom is worth the price.

I don't wear the clothes I've been told I should
I'm a patchwork quilt
A repurposed thrift store find
but for all my scratches and patches
there's eyes that see my beauty
I'll be a Breakfast Club revolutionary
bear those scars and scratches
for the world to see and scoff at

because if one person sees strength
and it catches fire in one soul
if it spares you one moment of pain
I will bear the harsh gaze
I will cut the apron ties
so your kite flies








Some thoughts today on the importance of making your own path: more on why I believe in being authentic and visible here.

I hope you love this post

Many a time I've heard that writers are a weird crew, and it's true: the need to write, like the need to eat or breath or sleep, must be satisfied, and the results are these streams of words strewn forth into the world, bound or on bright screens or on bathroom stalls. It occurs to me that some may find an open Christmas letter to the world by blog a bit strange: some will wonder if this isn't a symptom of my generation's compulsive social sharing in the online sphere; others will long for days when the only airing of skeletons that occurred was through Grandma's shaky cursive on handwritten letters that arrived via snail mail to tell the family news.

My world has shifted again over the past year. These are details of life that I share with colleagues, students, friends, family and therefore details I long to share in a Christmas letter. The Christmas letter of my dreams arrives at your door in a thick paper envelope sometime a week or so before the holidays. Inside is tucked a carefully posed family photo on nice card stock with a wish for your happiness and a handwritten signature. It's typed in Word without any spelling errors, and printed on Christmas paper like it used to be when I had my life "together". I know you're reading this on a rather impersonal screen, and I know it's not the same. I know the photos aren't perfect and I didn't even snap an iPhone pic during that 20 minutes the kids and I had coordinating holiday outfits on Christmas Eve. The whole mission of life this past year has been honesty, so here I type regardless of these failures. I sometimes think my very existence is a punch in the throat to the world in general, and my poor, dear Christian circle in particular. And so I {tentatively} give you...

My Awkward Family Christmas Letter 2014

The year began with enrolling the kids in public school, which was a major sock in the mommy gut - and the former fundamental Christian mommy gut especially so - since I had shakily envisioned at least getting them through basic math in homeschool. Even when you know something will be okay in the end, even when you're sure it's the best decision - it's still hard to buck tradition and long-held personal values.


The kids did enjoy and succeed in school, for the most part. This fall semester has been much easier for all of them as they understand school culture now - where to walk, how to behave, that sort of thing. They've met fewer bullies than I would have imagined, and have made friends on different levels and in different ways. They excel at different areas - some socially, some in math, some science, some reading, some as hard workers, or helpers, or for their empathy - but all stand out as artists and musicians, which makes my mama heart swell with joy. They frequently are singled out as loving and giving, and also have a reputation for being a bit quirky, intellectual and funny. Teachers enjoy their silly accents, professor-mama factoids, and original ideas.

I've continued on faculty at UW-Eau Claire and have enjoyed a stressful but successful beginning to my 3rd year. Health continues to measure high on the Richter scale of our family stress, but the storms seem to at least come fewer and farther between these days, and the seas aren't quite as high during them.

In some ways I wish I didn't have to type this next paragraph. For my own children, I dream of and work toward a world in which they will simply declare whom they love, that person, and those of us who love them will love their person and there will be no more "coming out" as anything. 2014 marked the end of a long process in coming to terms with my identity as a lesbian. "Coming to terms" seems more fitting than "coming out", because reaching acceptance of myself was at least as much part of the process as inviting others into the reality of my life and my being.

In August, I moved full time to my apartment in Eau Claire. Reaching the decision to drive away from the farmhouse I crafted in my dreams, the home I thought I would raise my children in, raise them a certain way, with their parents always there, was the most difficult point of my life thus far. Once it was made though, I felt myself quickly and easily relax into the form of my new life like an old glove. It felt a little like picking up in my early 20's, and re-envisioning where life might lead me, now with four precious pieces of cargo and a heavily invested career in tow. There have been little discoveries of lost joys, like perfume, candles, and funky art; new discoveries, like a garbage disposal and a buzzer to let guests in. New challenges, like establishing a home again at a time when professors haven't been paid for months; and new experiences, like single motherhood, paying for hot lunches, doing homework evenings, and managing a custody schedule.

I will file for divorce legally in a few days. By the end of spring semester, I will be Doctor Holmen instead of Doctor Thul. I have a beautiful girlfriend who has brought my life full circle to a type of joy and peace I haven't known since I was a small girl on a farmstead in fields of gold. The future is still hazy: a lot of puzzle pieces still have to be found and fit with this new, complicated life. The haze isn't the cold fog I've walked alone, though: it is the warm lemony mist of the morning of a beautiful new day, the kind that shrouds the world in tantalizing mystery but holds no fear within it's curtains.

I was starting to heal when 2014 began, just barely budding into new growth. Choosing freedom and truth over rules, judgments and lies set my feet back on the path I know as my own. Walking confidently forward, however alone I felt, has led me to a place I am proud to call my own. Whatever steps I've taken that have required bravery and strength and support, I share because I want it to take a little less bravery, strength or support for someone else to become who they really are, to let their true voice be heard.

So here's to a New Year that is a little less awkward and a little less brave. A little more ordinary and a little more joyful. Here's to a bit more Bohemian drama and a little less stark and stoic, a little more responsibility and fewer expectations.

Wishing you and yours the chance to celebrate the holiday truthfully and fully,
Genevieve & crew

Staying afloat

Why is it that shame drives us further and further away from what we need, instead of calling us to repent? It is shame that sends me lurking into the shadows - not the most menacing of shadow, albeit - when writer's block or sadness or pure joy or just plain old life gets in the way of working through my thoughts here with this proverbial ink and page.

I guess I'll shrug that off and take you to this evening, when I threw a ginormous adult sized temper tantrum over the state of my house, which was justifiably dumpster-like and potentially unsanitary in places. I ranted at my kids about the bowls hidden behind chairs or under a blanket surreptitiously lying on the living room rug (carpeted in land mines the likes of gummy worms, Sour Patch Kids, popcorn, dirty socks and old cereal spoons. Honest to Pete.) I pleaded with them that my health was actually suffering, that theirs was as well, that I can't shoulder the burden of the rotten banana peel cemented to my counter with cooked on over-boiled coffee - at least not alone. I wept rather openly (although I tried to choke it back a bit) as I scrubbed mildew from a oatmeal bowl and tossed Clementine after Clementine down the garbage disposal to cure the stink. Then I threatened to retreat to my room. Not exactly...I stated the fact that I would need a grown-up sized time-out for my grown-up sized tantrum and that said time-out would take place in the confines of my room, door locked, and no replies to incessant requests for Mama in any shaper or form unless I could verify that there was, indeed, an emergency - meaning an emergency by nurse definition: blood, limb hanging by a thread, or you just really need a good cuddle because you are falling apart, really falling apart and you really need me.

My eldest handed me a school paper as I retreated to my room, nearly stuttering in horror at the depths to which my housekeeping zeal had disappeared. Her paper was topped with a decidedly unpoetic heading, "The UWEC Nursing Building". I notice she offsets her name, date, etc. on the right side instead of the left. A personal seal. A small "stick it to the Man" á la Breakfast Club. I begin reading...and devour the page, in a single gulp without hardly coming up for mental punctuation pauses, no air, just diving the length of this page of such love and such purity and beauty, I know in a moment why I named her "Katrina" ("pure one"). She describes the details in expanded, imaginative and flourished details seen from a child's perspective. She opens right up and spills her dreams, in all their vivid and glorious beauty, in all their charm and originality, right there on the page in stark and everyday font. Just 26 letters, yet their illusive and expansive possibilities, their ability to save a life or lift one up from the depths or express the deepest of human emotions? My daughter lassoed the loosed words and corralled only the most beautiful and rare for a piece she wrote candidly. She showed us her way of seeing the world, the bias toward a particular beauty her eye and brain possess. In that moment, she chose me, wildly, utterly lovingly and perhaps irrationally.

I feel it heal, this achey old wound, and it's you touching it, child-nurse, you who healed me as you split me in two - literally one of my hearts still beating inside, one teetering perilously close to the sidewalk's edge...the bus route...the Future Leaders club. If ever you do catch fear in my eyes as you press onward, my love, know for sure it is this you see, not what you might imagine: it is that watching you leapfrog the chasms, no matter how ordinary, reminds me what potential loss I have faced down before and of the exact distinct value and beauty of this day here, with all it's troubles.

The brave break

Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus. (The Spectator Bird, Wallace Stegner, 1976)

We saw each other in the context of our dreams: a wife busy in a farmhouse kitchen with toddlers playing at her feet in the sun; a husband who could protect and care for a family, legitimize a lost girl by making her a wife. Friendship ripened into love and love flowed quite naturally into marriage and four babies and the making of a family. This was my dream from the time I was small - a man like my father, to know and be known, to birth babies and raise them in a farmhouse on my family's land.

Childhood was full of other people's dreams. It takes the shipwrecks of life to chip away the façade I'd helped the world construct around the real Genevieve. As pain continued to flow as constant as waves on the ocean, I was tossed and tumbled until the sheen of my soul began to shine through. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror of therapy, in the wake of my own early exit plan. I was overthrown by a vision of life that I'd never imagined. A life in which I was important, and beautiful, and whole.

Life changes us, for better or worse. There were decades I was sure I was being broken, used up, stamped out. Hindsight is 20/20, they say, and so it is: all that wreckage was just the shellac of that shell I'd adorned for the sake of others, although at the time I thought I was donning it for myself. I thought I was setting myself apart, keeping myself holy, doing what had to be done - my duty as a woman and a follower of Christ.

I've been living naked, without the lies, without other people's truths, for 3 years. It's scary to choose your own path when it means walking through the woods away from the highway you were set on as a child. Yet wandering alone to find my place, to find myself, reminded me of the little bits I'd salvaged of Genevieve along the way: a preponderance toward lone wolf, the small unexpected joys of the universe cherished close to my soul, the love that used to pour out of me as naturally as blood courses through my veins.

It has always been in the desolation of the wilderness that I come face to face with my own soul. I wish it weren't so, because it is a lonely way to find yourself. I was taught, in a thousand different ways, that it is only through the sharing of ourselves that our lives have meaning and purpose. What I've discovered in my personal wastelands is that life itself is precious and very beautiful. I have no doubt now, finally, that if I were alone for the rest of my life, there would still be something to live for. This breathing in and out that is a daily miracle beyond our understanding is the greatest gift we ever receive. A gift that often gets highjacked by expectations, norms, social patterns. From birth to the grave, it is possible to live never knowing yourself at all: for our strengths are often cast as weaknesses and our weaknesses as possibilities, and we push, push, push to be better, to do better, to be different so we can be the same as everyone else, to be right...do we forget to pause and reflect on what is glorious about ourselves in this very moment on our constant quest for perfection?

It was just a footpath through the woods I stumbled upon at first. The people who had walked this path had tried to leave no trace of their existence. There were no ghosts of campfires built to keep themselves warm. There were no groups of tents pitched in community. There was no other life visible...just an almost imperceptible line weaving through the underbrush far out here from the highway where there is no background noise save for the noises of the earth. Here, on the unbeaten path, the footsteps finally match my own.

I had to leave people behind on the highway. I had to wave goodbye, and it was the hardest goodbye I've ever said. For three years I would hike back to the highway after a while, but I left my trail marked. I retreated to the woods when the din began to drown out my thoughts and my own voice in my head. I showed my children the trail, and it turns out they love being in the woods with me. They have hated the highway as much as I have. And although there are times when we all miss the ease of walking on a paved road with big glowing signs and mile markers, we've come to peace with the fact that we're not highway people. We remind each other through the fireless nights, that we are strong, and we are brave, and we can do this together. I never expected my own children to be my encouragers. I never expected them to love the paths I love or the person I am. But as I slowly shed layers of the world's myths about me, my kids fell in love with me in a brand new way, a much deeper way. They see me in ways I can't yet recognize my own reflection.

And so I've said goodbye to the wife my husband saw in his dreams. I've said goodbye to the husband I used to see in mine. The truth at the center of the heartache is that there is something between us that may just stand the test of time...four little hearts that beat a mixture of our blood, his and mine. All the mistakes we've made together are being transmuted from suffering to awe. I see the truth of him now in ways I never could see clearly when I was standing next to him. He sees me for who I am, and even when it is not who he wants desperately for me to be, I can see the truth reflecting bright off his pupils, and perhaps it is because truth is undeniable that he has been able to loosen his grip on those dreams a little.

I live today in a small apartment by myself. There are days it is filled with the noise and chaos of the family I helped create. There are days when I find my path in the woods waiting for me at the door when I walk into the quietness of my own space.

..............................

I suppose all of this is to say a very simple yet petrifying truth: I am going through a divorce. I am going through the wreckage of old hopes and shattered moments, I am sifting through waste looking for long-lost treasures. I knew there would be a moment when it was time to tell the world. I am not the person I thought I was when I was 23. I cannot dance to the music played by my small world. I will not watch myself disappear into the dark night without struggling to keep breath in these lungs and fight in this body. I finally care. I finally want it, life - like I've never wanted anything ever before.

Here, amongst the wreckage, I am discovering that I never did fade away into nothingness. I just quit speaking, I quit feeling, I quit dreaming, I apologized profusely for the very things that make me, drive me, inspire me. What I found at the end of a marriage is the beginning all over again. I can no longer make amends to the world for being who I am. I can no longer go under the surface just to keep the world afloat.

It may seem like the most selfish choice in the world - and perhaps it is, at the very core: I cannot live in the life I chose at 23. It is brave and hopeful and revolutionary, to choose life over life for others. What I have learned through all my suffering is simple: life for others can never be lived until you choose your own life first. Most people don't know this because most people never hold a knife in their hands and push it down into their own flesh. Most people don't understand choosing life because it is a default decision for them. All they see is the crooked and thorny path that leads off the highway, full of danger and unknown. To them I say, you don't have to understand and you don't have to know. I do. This is my life I'm talking about. Although it may seem scary and fraught with threats, I will say it again: I am brave and hopeful and I am a revolutionary. I will find my way. After all, this is my home and these woods wanderers are my people, and here I am finally NOT afraid.

If it is on this path that you find yourself? It doesn't matter how slow the going is or how alone you may be. There is sunlight filtering through the trees and eventually you will come to a clearing where you can spread your arms for the very first time and welcome yourself home to your body and your awareness. Don't lie down in the cold and agree with the world's assessment that only the hopeless wander off into the woods alone. Be brave. Be hopeful. Be a revolutionary.

Because the revolutionaries of our times? They aren't wielding weapons on a battlefield of wrong and right. They are seeing through wrong and right to beauty and truth. They are the ones who are smiling because the breath is still entering and exiting, and they are the ones who know the preciousness of seeing yourself clearly. These revolutionaries might turn out to be the visionaries, and they just might be the ones living best for others, because they've bandaged their own wounds and learned how to heal firsthand.

Maybe the road less traveled is for the faint of heart after all: here, in the stillness, we can remember our heart's rhythm and nurse ourselves back to bravery and strength and, most of all, love.

Get help if you are suicidal

Losing light

Robin Williams’ release into the universe has dramatically effected an entire global wave of mourning, perhaps felt most acutely by we who struggle with self-hate, painful memories, suicidal thoughts. Radical acceptance is the only thing buoying some of us through. It is what it is. What it is? A horrible tragedy, a loss to us all, launching a collective scream into the wilderness of the world, begging for help and change. If his desperation does not release from us a communal wave of our innate goodness, our individual opportunity to heal ourselves, each other and the world…we will continue to lose the unique human life light of our brightest, most beautiful, complex and necessary brothers and sisters. We are all made up of the stars, and none of our matter is lost, only transmuted to something less visible to us in our realm of reality. Robin contributed a beautiful verse; but now, for the rest of us, the powerful play must go on without him. 

O ME! O life!… of the questions of these recurring;
Of the endless trains of the faithless—of cities fill’d with the foolish;
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light—of the objects mean—of the struggle ever renew’d;
Of the poor results of all—of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me;
Of the empty and useless years of the rest—with the rest me intertwined; The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?  
Answer.
That you are here—that life exists, and identity; That the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse.
(Walt Whitman)

*Reblogged from my new DBT blog, Damn Marsha!

I'm not the worst mother

I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul,

The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are with me,

The first I graft and increase upon myself, the latter I translate into a new tongue.
(Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, 1892)

Every day, I know I've failed. I can feel it in my bones. The dangerous, no warnings world I grew up in taught my brain to tune to the negative frequencies. My mind as an adult is bathed in adrenaline and a very motivating sense of shame. It's taken years of therapy to understand that the picture I paint at the end of the day is not realism. It is dark, devious, like one of the Black Paintings by Francisco Goya: an incomplete representation that captures the darkness of the mind, not just the negative facts in the everyday.

Then something happens: I come across a painting like the one above, left for me on the kitchen counter by my whimsical 9 year-old, who thinks, dreams, breaths music and laughter and sunlight. It seems miraculous that anyone sharing genes with me could be so fancy-free. I read the words slowly: Beauty. Freedom. Love. Peace. Everything. Even through the sudden stars of tears in my eyes, the black letters are shouting to my soul. You taught her this!, my brain screams. All that blackness, fear, pain, suffering in your life? You've transmuted the sorrow into thankfulness for joy. You've taken the fear and transformed it into an immutable longing for peace and love. And these translated whisperings of the soul? The faintly glimmering flame of hope that life can be different and perhaps even beautiful? They have whispered their way into the depths of her heart and this is the song she sings, hope and wide-spread arms flung far toward both horizons, unafraid of sunrise or sunset, sunlight or storms.

I've spoken of this through gritted teeth: those who know the full depths of the pain proffered in this universe have unique ability to comprehend the beauty, to take each nugget of pleasure and value it, celebrate it. Locked in the inhumane routine of the psych ward in June, trying to piece together a spring season fraught with failure and old threats, I stared out the hazy safety glass at a world bathed in the summer sun. I knew I would feel the sun afresh when I walked out those doors. I didn't want it to take misery to make me appreciate life yet again. I want to remember on my own, that every day is a gift, and suffering always passes, and new seasons bring new challenges and new joys. 

I will my body to remember. Remember the significance of every small smile and momentary joy. Remember not to take it for granted. Remember that failure is often the prerequisite for success. What is it about our frail 3 pound human brains that allows us to forget this? To forget the hardest lessons of all?

And so I write. Think. Breathe. I refuse to forget that bittersweet still has sweetness and failure still has possibility and fear can be conquered. Remembering that gives me the bravery to open my eyes to each new day and believe that my scars are equalled by my sacredness and my pain is assuaged by the gifts from the universe that surround me each and every day.

You are your own champion

I went to the same gray-blue office for 4 years. Every week, I sat on a 1980's reception area couch that had been repurposed for my therapist. As time went on, I discovered that my therapist was standing on the shore of the sea I was tossed about in, and she held a rope. I'm sure there had been other people standing on that shore holding rope before her, people whose presence was blurred by the gray fog of depression and voices swallowed by the deafening wind of the screams of my self-hatred. My therapist was just the first rescuer I could see.

Life is a series of small steps. In 2010, I took a small step into a therapist's office, a tentative conversation that led to four years of the most intense emotional healing I've ever experienced. Seeing my therapist and the rope - hope - was another small step. Each step carried me further away from the precipice of suicide and onto ground more solid than I'd believed possible. I wasn't able to do much other than hold on to the rope, hanging on it while the waves continued to pummel me. It was my anchor to a sense of direction in the endless gray seascape of emotion, chaos, trauma. It was what kept me afloat. My therapist stood patiently for 4 years, urging me to climb up the rope to the shore. But all I could do was hold on.

I held up a knife made out of lies. Lies told to protect myself from the x-ray vision of a trained professional. In my tears and my tormented monologues in the office once a week, I was shouting, "Pull me in!" with new desperation. But my therapist kept up her calm encouragement, "Pull yourself in. You can do it. You are stronger than you think."

The rope was cut without either of us realizing it at first. It was only when she pulled in a frayed length, the weight on the end gone, that she looked and realized how far I'd drifted from shore on a tide of those lies. I hadn't shown her myself for weeks, buried as I was under a mound of deception, a maze constructed subconsciously to lead people away from the rawness of my innermost self. She walked away, unable to help any longer. She left a sign on the beach for me, "I'll send someone back to help you."

.....................

For a while, I was angry and grief-stricken. I had become so used to looking at shore and seeing her comforting presence, still holding the rope through every storm. Now I was left to my own devices and adrift once again. What I discovered is that I became more buoyant during those years she supported me in my swimming. I'm more athletic - I can cross great swaths of ocean using only the power of my own body and mind.

Taking ownership of your own recovery is another small step. I still need a therapist every week. Sometimes I still call out for her to toss me some rope. But with each extra hour spent treading water all by myself, I am building the strength to heal myself, to love myself, to navigate without someone on the other end of a rope.

Someday I might even make that swim to shore.

Amputations

I warned her long before, that I can't just let life take it's course at the end of relationships. That my track record is a pretty unblemished path of destruction. I tried to tell her all of it, but damned if my brain didn't hogtie my tongue. What came out wasn't a clear enough description. Once again, someone I loved and trusted, someone who trusted me, I broke it all to pieces and here I am with the sledgehammer in my hand and dust still settling and I'm crying because it's all broken. I broke it. I can't stand it being broken. Where is the middle path? 

In that moment, the waking up moment when your rage and fear subside and you look around and you see what you have done, that is the most sickening sensation I've ever known. When your sickness leaches out and suddenly you are someone else, someone you can't control or predict, understand or desire to be - when all you can do is try to hold the reins as tightly as possible so you are still in one piece when the ride is over - the crash at the end is as much a surprise to you as it is to anyone else.

I didn't see it coming. I can't hear the train of my own crazy leaving the station. I don't even know it's moving until I'm trying to hold everyone in as the wind threatens to tear the cars to pieces.

Much of what I say to the sky these days is unintelligible. The person I'm most angry at is myself. I hate that I haven't grown up or learned or progressed. How is it possible to regress in an instant to the social function of a small child? Who is going to fix me if I hurt anyone who comes close? How do I quit hurting people?

More questions. Fewer answers. More desperate for help, less help available.
No matter how hard you fight the current, we're all just circling the drain.

Missing branches

I think perhaps we're all like trees, and some of us are mighty oaks and others temperamental maples; bristly pines or the social butterfly birches. Our shapes are different...some of us, like the oaks, born more resilient to the elements of the earth, to unexpected storms that threaten to transform us in ways we may not like. I'm a jack pine, I think - I grew up fast and skinny in a lot of ways, thin in places that ended up mattering later on, bent by the winds of my own secret life.

I've been myself at times, sometimes bravely, sometimes barely. Even recently, coming out at work and to my children freed me from another layer of shame that has blanketed me since I can remember emotion. Yet, however dear the new re-envisioned relationships of today, loss of daily intimacy in our most basic humanness - sleep, drool, sex, snoring, unconscious vulnerability - this opens up a deep channel of longing of such an intensity it twists us into a vortex of greed or need, never sure which. Reality is skewed by the pull of that need, as if it's only along for the ride, like a security blanket trailing on the ground behind a child bound for mama. 

Musical notes

It's a classic April day, wet and cold and gray. I turn up the radio as if the beat can drive out the chill and the gloom. I'm humming along, and I realize the tune is "Call Me Maybe", a song that went down in infamy and parody. But I am smiling, and there are tears forming, because this song means Rosy spinning in circles, singing every word into her hairbrush microphone, a sunny summer when her very best friend came to live with us. It means the smell of coconut oil, the glisten of children's skin in the long shadows of evening, crickets singing us through the night.

Music is woven into my very soul. I wonder sometimes if it is my framework, my foundation. Songs become part of memories, and I am used to the saudade that comes with theme songs of friendships, lovers, family. Not until today did I realize that entwined with the faces and places of my 35 years are strands of specific times, vibrant, almost piercing memories of my children's paths to adulthood. It is beyond bittersweet, that unbearable ache that accompanies the joy of our most precious memories. Longing because we wish we were in that time now, in this moment. Sadness that it was so beautiful and now it's over. Ecstasy - a little taste, at least - because you experienced it.

I am learning to walk something called the "middle path". I can hold a burning coal of pain now in one hand, and a bouquet of happiness in the other. My past has been very black and white: people, activities, possessions, goals, hopes and dreams, inner longings and outward behavior - they were all neatly divided into two piles, good and evil. As my eyes adjust to the many shades of gray that is life in this beautiful, tragic existence, I slowly gain a tolerance for ambiguity. I can rest even if I don't have something figured out. I've learned to put deep questions on a shelf in my head when life needs to be lived instead of figured out.

My everyday playlist includes a song from every decade, every genre: because music is paired with memories, not taste. Local Bon Iver is tucked next to Pearl Jam; Chopin's Raindrop prelude is followed by Regina Spektor...
Rascal Flatts for a pity party...
the Weepies for rainy days...
Jewel for my first girlfriend...
the Allman Brothers and Jackson Browne because of my papa...
Bonnie Raitt for the ups and downs of marriage...
Coldplay for a year my best friend spent in Europe...
Linkin Park brings back the dance of snowboarding.
Simon and Garfunkel for the almost suicides...
Rufus Wainwright for babies and children tended on death beds...
Alicia Keys and Nelly Furtado for the summer my first baby girl was born.

Follow this link, click full-screen and turn your speakers up.

Confessions of a former christian blogger: A sense of Pride on Easter

I used to travel a lot. It's one of the shared passions that drew me to Aaron, in fact. He suffered as much wanderlust - if not more - than I, and I thought then it was for the same reasons. We both get wild from being in the same place for too long. He says it is a prairie boy thing. For me, it is the need to blow the dust off and remember who I really am. I have hungered for this my whole life, as long as I can remember. A need for isolation, and unfamiliar vistas, and long periods of relative inactivity of the mind that allows one to drift along through many problems in a short period of time.

I'm driving down the road in the afternoon, on my way back to town to pick up my kids when I stop to take this picture. It's warm, and I'm looking down at the cuff of my chore coat and a sweater, and I'm driving this big truck past the muted fields that seem to go on forever in some places. I am not seeing rural Wisconsin, though. I am seeing somewhere in Wyoming, Montana, Vermont perhaps. All that's missing is the mountains in the distance.

I used to talk to myself in the car when I was younger. It was only by talking to myself out loud that I could unravel my ideas in a time of life that involved a lot of uncertainty and uncontrollable pain. I always tried to stop because I thought it was crazy. I have lived life in fear of crazy, in fear of people, in fear of being shunned and alone...and therefore crazy. Lately, I've taken it up again, along with fantasies of other states and countries. I guess some pain sinks you so deep in the mud of your old self that you start acting like you're 17 again. The inside of yourself is so loud with keening and details and paranoias that you have to say things out loud in order to hear them. You get so lost in the way you're supposed to be, the way that would make other people feel less pain, or accept you, the way that wouldn't change any of your relationships except the one you have with yourself...you get so lost there that you can't remember the sound of your own voice.

And so it is on the eve of Easter on the first year I didn't beg at the foot of a cross to be rid of all this. The first year I have spent this holiday with my very own unredeemed and unabashed self and not needed to join in the scourge that is celebrated at Easter. Like it or not, universe, I don't really have any other choice but to be myself. Even if it takes the occasional trip to the relative isolation of a different place, even if it means talking out loud to hear myself think. Even if it means temporary pain and even if it means losing some things along the way.

Maybe someday I'll go to the mountains just to see them.

I have nothing to say

My feet take me places and my fingers forget to follow: it's as if life, in all it's vacuous chaos, has drained the words right from me with nothing left to put down in black and white. A writer's life has seasons as any artist's does: sometimes life inspires you and you record your perceptions in your own unique voice; then, too, the magnitude of the visual expanse of our world stops us up with it's enormity and no words are adequate to describe it.

My camera is dusty, too. A recent thrift store acquisition of a Yashica medium format SLR camera with a ground glass lens, and an original Canon Super8 video camera have left digital media far behind. I stood in a St. Louis hotel suite a few weeks ago stopped up by the chair they had left for me, the symmetry of it in the lance of light through the crack in the drapes, but more so the fact that I had four days alone in the anonymity of a fancy hotel, with THIS chair to sit in and look out on the urban landscape.

There were other moments of happiness captured: green grass in March under shiny new gray oxfords. An Ethiopian restaurant where I ate mounds of spicy lamb curry with hot from the oven injera. I was on my way to get a new tattoo: something I do when the pain of the past threatens to swallow me whole. I call it alternate rebellion. My brain is sending me on impulsive journeys to places I no longer want to visit, and pain is what stops me in my tracks. No longing wielding weapons against my own body, ironically it is healthier to hand a stranger a hundred and sit for an hour while they stab my skin with a high speed needle and paint.

I rented a car and when my mind began to wander to the sadness and stress of my everyday life, I hopped in and drove fast on the highways to a totally different part of the city. I travel to old St. Louis, which everyone tells me to avoid. I'm not very good at listening to warnings when I'm on an adventure. Especially by myself. So I take pictures of the boarded up old French row houses in the slums; I find a huge stone column, some remnant of a majestic building from the French period - now standing testament to a long-gone era, right in the middle of a road with a round-about built to avoid it. I drink espresso and eat beignets at a bakery advertising "hot and fresh". The windows boast iron bars to deter break-ins, and the inside is dingy and old with cracked linoleum underfoot and wobbly oak tables and chairs. There is a dusting of sugar on everything I touch. The beignets are roasting hot, the sugar melting into the crust. They're the best I've ever eaten. The "espresso" is Southern style - made from fine ground chicory and coffee.

Flowers are just beginning to bloom and I pick a magnolia blossom and set it on my dash. All this beauty in a four day business trip. I breathe deep and think I am lucky - for that is what it is, not a blessing or some experience designed to delight me, but just luck. The worst days of my life have occurred over these same weeks of silence, and it is only by building happy moments into bitterly difficult days that I thrive in no-man's land in a battle I stumbled upon.

The tattoo is my largest yet. I choose my left leg, I choose symbols carefully for their meanings in this season. The top is an enso, a mark that symbolizes an unfinished volume or chapter: it is for strength and for the void that coexists with our universe. Below it, I ask for a colorful eban, a West African symbol that is painted on the fences of small towns vulnerable to pillaging, attack, and other unspeakable violence. It represents the strong fence protecting the village: security and safety for all within it's walls. The diamonds are homes, and the colors all mean something that speaks peace into my situation: black is for warriors; green is for the ability to provide; red is for the deep attachment between the community or family members; and yellow means the space is precious and beautiful to it's inhabitants. The two "e" symbols mean something to me as well. It is a bold move for a bold time, marking a new step in my transformation, a step toward maturity, self-sufficiency, and - perhaps most important - my newly brave and powerful voice.

I return to winter and to adventures with my kidlets. We go to the American Girl store and I am surprised to enjoy it, such a girly place. In just the past year, femininity has been both something I can ignore or choose depending on how I feel, and also it is no longer dangerous. Instead it feels peaceful and joyful and expressive. Watching my girls and niece dance around the store in giddy delight over all the dolls reminds me of the countless hours I spent playing with my baby dolls all alone, dreaming of babies and a home to call my own someday. That desire seemed antithetical to my tomboy nature and my fear of marriage. Things work out differently than we imagine in our heads.

As I write here less, I have sometimes felt a twinge of guilt. But this blog is simply my story. Some seasons have required many lines typed to cipher through all the thoughts in my head. I have less to interpret these days, living authentically instead of in a cage of expectations. So the blog rests for weeks on end while I am busy living.

Which is the best possible development on a blog that has chronicled cancer and illness and loss and grief and shame. Join me in quietly celebrating by simply living the life you were designed to live.