When it's all over

There is something about sunshine and open spaces that lights the fuse in little children. They're off and running before you can even shout a warning. It's infectious, it's beautiful, it's a picture of that full joy many of us spend our entire adulthoods trying to rediscover.

Yet, even in the darkness of persistent depression, you get days like this every once in a while. Today is one for me. I am too exhausted and drained from a heart incident yesterday that landed me in the ER - I can't jump for joy. But my soul is!

In the ER, they ran a chest x-ray to check on my pacemaker. You know those 30+ nodules they found last time, that they thought were cancer? They are GONE. Without a trace. It's not cancer!

The theory is that these spots on the previous x-ray were pockets of infection that came along with my pneumonia.

Thank you for your support through this "waiting game". So glad the wait is over and we can get back to normal - work, school, play, mining every day for nuggets of joy.

Feeling my way through the darkness

Guided by a beating heart

I can't tell where the journey will end

But I know where to start

They tell me I'm too young to understand

They say I'm caught up in a dream

Well life will pass me by if I don't open up my eyes

Well that's fine by me

So wake me up when it's all over

When I'm wiser and I'm older

All this time I was finding myself

And I didn't know I was lost

I tried carrying the weight of the world

But I only have two hands

Hope I get the chance to travel the world

But I don't have any plans

Wish that I could stay forever this young

Not afraid to close my eyes

Life's a game made for everyone

And love is the prize

~Wake Me Up, Avicii~

Look what's peeking through

It is piling up again out there, the blanket of white stretching it's arms far into April, and we tough Midwesterners are beginning to truly say "Uncle". If there is one more gray day, we say. If it doesn't start to warm up soon...

I silently wonder if winter's expanse hasn't lingered just for me. The gray days match my mood (or do they cause it?) and snow keeps scars under wraps. Summer is not so kind.

I am cutting cords, this wintery spring. Trying to be willing to change. It's a big leap for me. After all, I've kept myself relatively safe with this way of coping and I'm scared that the new ways won't give me the armor I need.

Happiness creeps in with the study of a list of Scriptures with my mama. This list tallies all the ways healthy coping is straight from the good Book. And I breathe - let myself believe, again - that this might work. I feel happy and say so, and then touch my chest in shock that those words just slipped easily from my lips again.

It's a little like the blades of bright green grass sticking up through the snow, the crocus leaves catching flakes in the diffused light of the snowstorm. It has grown in silent and the secrets of my heart these last weeks, this tiny fragile piece of happiness, and it is birthed, even through snow. There it is. I think that it might be hope. He is saying

I have swept away your offenses like a cloud, your sins like the morning mist. Return to me, for I have redeemed you. (Isaiah 44:22)

"Jump"

Stepping in front of the lens

It was my 34th birthday. And all I wanted was a picture of the joy we shared as a family. With me in it. 

It wasn't so long ago I hid behind the camera, the family historian. I weigh more than I want to. My hair never seems to cooperate. My everyday clothes are yoga pants and a t-shirt. Who wants to have photos of a person like that?

My husband, my children, my parents, my siblings, my nieces and nephews, my friends. That's who. It wasn't until I was browsing through photos shortly after my cancer diagnosis in 2008 that I realized how few pictures there were of me with my children. And I wanted that to change. I wanted there to be a visual legacy of our relationship.

It's hard. I have to ask someone to take the photo. I have to ask Aaron to go fetch the camera during those spontaneous moments when the last thing you want to do is interrupt it to ask for a photo. But that's what you have to do when you're the photographer in the family, and you want to have photos of yourself.

There are many candids I'd never share here. Pictures of me in my pajamas. Pictures of my belly roll exposed because I'm wrestling with my children. Pictures of yoga and pictures of dancing and pictures of cooking and pictures of wild games and crazy family moments. Those are for my children and my family. Not social media. But the point is - they exist. They are in the photo albums and on the walls of my home and in the cockles of my heart.

Because the point is not perfection.  The point is I was here, I was with them, we did these things, and I want something to remember that by - for me and for them.

How about you? Are you the mom with a plethora of "selfies" on Facebook with your kids? Or are you the mom of whom there are few photos? Be brave, friend. Be courageous enough to be beautiful in all your forms and for the posterity of the camera. You won't regret it.

Warrior children

You are my tumbleweed children, hurtling down the gravel of the country road in a fury of dust and dreams and flying off into the dandelion ditches when you hear the hum of car wheels approaching. It is that sweet mix of childhood, the daring-do of your young bodies coupled with the innate sense of vulnerability that scatters you far off the road if danger approaches. We've been vulnerable together, these past years, through the dissolving friendships following a church rift, through the darkness of depression when all your mama wanted to do was sleep, through the deep mid-winter of my cancer and your uncertainty whether I would live or die.

You know vulnerable as well as your own skin. I look at you, the fragile strong, and I wish I had been able to protect you from the knowledge that life is brief if beautiful, wish I had a shield that was impermeable to the dark darts of fear and trembling. We huddle like embattled Narnians on our homestead, lean hard into each other's warmth, and there is joy found in family although we are adrift from civilization. You gather "wish-lions", dandelions gone to silvery seed, and we blow a tornado of trouble off into the spring breeze with eyes squeezed close.

Perhaps it will be the family gift within the family curse, this early understanding of life's difficulties. When you are all grown through the stage of scrambling with fresh tears at night from your bed to ours...grown out of checking that Mama is still here when you wake alone in the dark...you'll be left with the fragile-strong, singing the Psalms as you face the brave new world of your own generation.

Let the weak say I am a warrior. The Lord roars from Zion, and the heavens and earth quake. But the Lord is a refuge to His people...(from Joel 3)

You are my hiding place,

You always fill my heart

with songs of deliverance.

Whenever I am afraid,

I will trust in You.

I will trust in You.

Let the weak say I am strong

with the strength of the Lord.

~Selah~

Linked with Emily for Imperfect Prose