Saving Seven

My therapist makes me think about the little girl in me all the time. It took me 30 some years to admit that she even existed. I didn't want to be "stunted" by my abuse history. I wanted to be normal.

The little girl in me is the part that comes out when I am afraid. She is a fierce protector. She has a notch in her belt for each of the brothers she saved from the filth of that woman. She has a notch in her belt for every time she laid herself down next to evil to prevent someone else from having to know that pain.

Now it is time for her to get back up. It is time for her to walk away from the dark corners she's been hiding in. It's time for her to grow up.

I've wept tears for her. There is part of me that can't imagine living without that little fierce creature within me. But it is not fair to trap her in a fear-filled 7 year old mind. I welcome her in to my own anxiety fraught brain. I imagine holding her close and the slow, tentative whimper that comes before the torrent of tears she always held in. I imagine her beating her little fists against my chest. I imagine her heart breaking right there in my arms. I know love is poor stitching for a broken heart. But it does close wounds.

I want her to know that I love her, bruises and brokenness and filth and terror and all. I want her to know it's okay to feel that way when someone does that to you. I want her to know it's not her fault.

I think she's starting to hear me when I say these things. And slowly, tentatively, she is walking toward healing.

Prompt: The Little Girl in You

I need Your romance

Somewhere in the haze of girlhood I lost my sense of whimsy. All the symbols girls adore grew stale, cliché - no more doodled hearts and rainbows dancing in swirls across lined sheets of notebook paper. I stuck between the lines, wrote in Roman alphabet, and taught myself calligraphy instead of doodling.

It's what happens when your heart breaks too soon in life, I suppose. You give up on romance and turn to logic because it's ever so much safer. Predictable, calm, precise and controlled. Just like you wish your life and heart would be. Just like you've trained your emotions. Just like the iron fist you've wrapped around your tear ducts, the roiling in your belly that threatens to spill vomit whenever your thoughts drift away from math homework or history books and into the dark crevices of memory.

I didn't get romance back even for my wedding day. Joy, yes. My smile was wide and free, and I threw my arms around my new husband's neck with abandon. I let him carry me off to our honeymoon, but I wasn't going to write a poem about the sunset, even then. Babies were born, and I let myself be carried away to heaven and back simply on the indescribable scent of their hair. Still no romance.

It started to seep back in slowly, the romance of life.

Songs penned.

Photographs taken.

A tiny pad of postcard sized watercolor paper and a single brush and two tubes of paint.

A space on the internet for a blog that started out simply to relay a few facts about cancer, but suddenly burgeoned with the overflow of the soul as the dam nearly broke in the wake of emotions that couldn't be contained any longer.

In the days that followed the surgery that changed my life forever, one symbol crept back in. Not a rainbow, a heart, or a peace sign. A butterfly. Your thyroid gland sits just below your voicebox, in the shape of a butterfly with wings outstreched, ready to take the next breeze heavenward. It is a thing of beauty, tucked in secret deep within your throat. A piece of poetry straight from the Maker to you, a little love gift right where songs are created by your own unique voice, right where you speak and whisper words of love, right where your laugh is formed.

When I lost my butterfly in the throat, the colorful creatures floating on the summer winds became precious to me. Whenever I see them, I smile and tears well, all in the same moment. I am remembering the beauty He gifted me with, the beauty that was taken away by thieves in childhood's night, and the beauty that was reborn out of cancer grief - the eyes that see again beauty everywhere, romance everywhere, the whimsy and lilt and lovesong of life. If I'd never lost my thyroid to cancer, I'd never have noticed the butterflies all around me. I'd never be a doodler or a dreamer again.

He has sent me to provide for those who grieve - to bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair. They will be called oaks of righteousness, a planting of the Lord for the display of his splendor. (Isaiah 61:1 & 3 exc.)

A girl, a cup, a tree in spring

You know how to make breakfast, and lunch. Some days you keep the laundry cycling through washer and dryer until there is a mountain on the couch for me to fold. Warm, wafting fresh, as I snap sheets and towels, and put order to chaos. You teach the other children everything you know - how to read, how to play the violin, how to make more mud in the spring. When you were a babe, I did nothing but pour, pour, pour to fill you up with my love and all the things I loved and wanted you to as well. We went everywhere together...bed, showers, everywhere I went around town, I carried you on my hip. People smiled at us, and you smiled back, with your eyes that look like half moons squinted almost shut.

Some days now, I miss you. You know so much already. You're growing independent. It feels a little risky, this grafting of you into the cool spring earth of 8-almost-9 years old. Are you full enough yet? Have you memorized this connection between the trunk and the branch, the mama and the girl? I long for the in-between, to let you warm your toes in the earth but keep you growing hugged to my chest. I don't want to set out you as an empty cup for rain. Father, fill her over till her cup runs beyond the brim, spilling your gold on the ground around her.

Writing on Lisa-Jo's prompt, "Empty"

Clinging

The cold, dark water swirls as four figures tiptoe into the deep.  The sisters stand tall, drawing in breath with lifted shoulders against the sudden icy dip.  Sun bathes white backs in warmth as they shudder in submission to a two thousand year old practice.  Father leads the way.  Preacher walks beside.  We head "down to the river to pray, studying about that good old way..."  I am an onlooker on a safe, warm shore, as they walk in the steps of many saints, out to baptism.

Waist-deep, these girls I've known since birth smile against the cold.  They have heard the Word of God (Acts 2:41); believed (Acts 8:12, 36-37); and received the Holy Spirit (Acts 10:43-44), so now they walk out into the water to show all.  The immersion in water a picture of the immersion of soul, the passing from death to life through belief in the Person, the death, and the resurrection.

Their father holds them, and their arms clasp tight as they wait to be cradled back into the lake.  Links in a family chain.  A grip that won't let go.  This father here on earth a picture of the Father in heaven, who promises never to leave us or forsake us.  I look at this picture, and it is something to work toward.  Something to teach toward.  I, too, am a link in a family chain.  A daughter and sister first, now mother to daughters.  I want them to clasp tight like these girls.  Even through the difficulties of a teen transition, even through sharing bathrooms and mirrors, dressers and closets, bedrooms and bunks.

I want to raise girls that jump from the water of baptism with a shout of joy and a string of laughter.  Girls who don't just do what they're told or follow the rules...girls that find joy in Christ, understand their wholeness and healing through the grace of the cross.

Girls who emerge from the water still holding hands.  Sisters who are unafraid in a culture where holding hands means something different.  Sisters who face the world together, united, intimate, and ripe with the secret joy of shared experience on the cusp of womanhood.

Girls who bow heads but paint fingernails; who wear white to their baptism, punctuated by lace; girls who see reflections of beauty in a sin-filled culture, embrace details that embrace truth and eschew those that reflect only sin.

Girls who submit to authority out of wisdom, not brainlessness.  Girls who learn and grow, blossom and put out roots, read and study and pray and sing and dance and teach others.

When the Bible teaches that men and women fulfil different roles in relation to each other, charging man with a unique leadership role, it bases this differentiation not on temporary cultural norms but on permanent facts of creation. This is seen in 1 Corinthians 11:3-16 (especially vv, 8-9,14); Ephesians 5:21-33 (especially vv, 31-32); and 1 Timothy 2:11-14 (especially vv, 13-14). In the Bible, differentiated roles for men and women are never traced back to the fall of man and woman into sin. Rather, the foundation of this differentiation is traced back to the way things were in Eden before sin warped our relationships. Differentiated roles were corrupted, by the fall. They were created by God. ~excerpted from Children Desiring God

Unfading beauty

Your adornment must not be merely external--braiding the hair, and wearing gold jewelry, or putting on dresses; but let it be the hidden person of the heart, with the imperishable quality of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is precious in the sight of God.  For in this way in former times the holy women also, who hoped in God, used to adorn themselves... (I Peter 3:3-5a)

It's been months now since the rock garden was resplendent with the cobalt blue of the hyancinth standing tall in the back corner.  I took these photos in the early days of summer, in Amelia's worst month of seizures, as I tried to keep house maintained and children safe and my own brain sane.  Every day Rosy brought me a nosegay of wildflowers: daisies and butter-and-eggs, bachelor's buttons, asters, thistles, clover, cinquefoil, columbine, devil's paintbrush, wild roses and spiderwort.  Wildflowers, picked from stems dripping with milky sap, don't last long in the vase.  My countertop was littered with these visible reminders that beauty - and life - is fleeting. The grass withers, the flower fades: but the word of our God shall stand for ever.  (Isaiah 40:8) As a father has compassion on his children, so the LORD has compassion on those who fear him; for he knows how we are formed, he remembers that we are dust. As for man, his days are like grass, he flourishes like a flower of the field; the wind blows over it and it is gone, and its place remembers it no more. (Psalm 103:13-16)

Little white hairs poke like wire up from the dark brown waves, more of them every time I brush.  Not enough for others to notice, but visible harbingers of how I will change with age.  I am soft instead of firm and muscular.  I had to permanently retire from softball this summer because of a pacemaker that was so necessary.  Cancer lurks in the background.  My children are growing up.  I look at the generation ahead of me, learning from them as they walk into grandparenthood and take in their parents and tend their adult children.  I wonder how things have changed since the social revolution of the 1960's and '70's.  How has a culture that worships youth, uses air-brushed Photoshopped images as propaganda, and idolizes virility, vigor, and physical beauty changed our idea of what "aging gracefully" means?  My grandparents generation went to work at 16 or 18, didn't dye their gray hairs or have plastic surgery or work out.  My parents generation is a shade different...there are less people who consider gray hair a badge of honor, they keep fit, many went to college and didn't begin their careers until sometime in their 20s.  My own generation has taken it a step further: I would hazard a wager that most of us know at least one friend who has had plastic surgery; many don't begin careers until their late 20s or even 30s, and often change college majors or even career paths even once they hit their mid-30's; many of my friends have been dying their hair, wearing make-up and working out to alter their body shape since their early teens.

As I read Dobson's Bringing Up Girls (well worth the read although perhaps a bit stressful as a reality check for parents of young children?) all this is rattling around in my head.  Culture, beauty, aging, keeping my kids safe on a spiritual, emotional, psychological level as well as on a physical level.  The petals fall, and my white hairs spring up, and my girls grow up.  I stand confused in the whirlwind of culture, clutching my Bible in one hand and desperately believing that the answers there will sweep away the confusion in the end.