Memories versus moments

The photos of me sniffing my babies are covered in dust, thick as carpet. I remember when life was like soup broth, thin and warm and full of good things, beauty, joie de vivre. Then came the great reduction, the splitting off of people and things and places and beliefs and safety. Life is kind of gravy right now, not in an easy way, I mean the food. It takes time and energy to produce but you don't need much gravy to live on. I've learned to live with less. I'm still learning to love with less.

Through the fog of depression, love leaks out of me in long wails like a wolf at twilight. The children's happiness is as unreachable as the moon is to the wolf. Instead, my mind goes skipping off across the mirrored pond of memories using shards of broken dreams like stepping stones. They are as hard and unyielding underfoot as real rocks born of eons of pressure and heat.

Memories are mirrors because they only reflect ourselves - our perceptions, our truths, our meaning. There is no going back to understand. There is no way to break the mirror and see through to the objective truth. Many are more beautiful than the actual experience, some are even more ugly. The pain of the insults tossed my way in 7th grade? It's like the state of Texas in the nation of my memory. My brain seems bent to crystallize the bad as if to freeze it's power, to breathe in the good as if to swallow the sensation. Those glaciers of the bad times are fraught with danger - sharp ice, gaping crevices, avalanches and cold temperatures. Go exploring there, and you just might get lost forever.

Acceptance slowly leads me to see those sharp and scary parts of my life kind of like Mount Everest. I know it's there. I can see beauty there from afar. I just never, ever want to try to climb it. The view from the top isn't worth the risk. That sense of conquering? I've given that up with my youth. I don't need to be right; I don't need to be the best or brightest; I just want to survive. It would be a fool's game for me to climb up those memories in some quest for understanding or meaning.

The kids come running to cuddle when I say I need to "soak up some love". They know it means I will open the pores of my consciousness to the moment with all my will. It feels quite literally like soaking something right up into the very core of me. The dried out painful sharp-cornered wad there fills and saturates and becomes forgiving and yielding again.

Sometime soon I will master the closing of my pores to the sadness. I will let memories wash over me and bead up and fall off like water on a duck's back. I say this to myself like an affirmation, as if to will it into being. I am learning to speak positive words in the same certainty and black ink I use for the negative ones. All part of changing the voices in my head.

Meanwhile, I soften my arms for hugging. I curl the edges of my lips up into a half-smile. I bury myself in moments, pour my very soul into them. I hope that's what the world sees. I hope you see my love and not just my pain.

For that would be a successful life.

Saving Seven: The Next Generation

She just couldn't quit crying when I told her I was going away for the evening. She is seven and all she wants is mama to hold her hand while she falls asleep every night. I was on my way to a tour of the Basilica of St. Mary with some friends. Maybe dinner. A few hours away from the craziness of the holidays and finals week and grading. A few hours with people who "get" me - so I can just laugh and enjoy.

I brought her with. My friends - childless - were entranced by the bewitching intricacies of this very special seven year old. We stopped at the organ shining silver in the candlelight of the silent basilica. I think about all the music Christendom has written over thousands of years. Haydn, Beethoven, Bach, Mozart.

The sanctuary is as cold and soundless as a tomb. An angel lifts her arms to the heavens, face upturned. She is in the deep shadows, lit only by a single strobe. I am this angel. Questioning, begging, gesturing. I am no longer able to talk because I no longer think anyone is listening. But for some reason, the sky still feels the full weight of my fury and my torment.

What do I tell a 7 year old while we tour a basilica on the brink of Christmas, the year I lost my faith? We talk about art. She talks, mostly. I listen to what an innocent seven sounds like. She is so accepting. Everything and everyone? They do their thing, she does hers, and she loves everyone anyway. Why couldn't we always raise kids this way?

Mary looks down from her perch and I feel sorrow like a waterfall falling off that stone. Did she know, when her son was in his 30's and bloody on a cross, that what she believed may not have been true? That now her son suffered and died and she had no idea why or what would become of all of it? Did she ask god why he allowed this? Did she beg for her child's life? Did she wonder, afterward, where her purpose lay?

It is a huge burden to watch my seven year olds grow up. When I was seven, my world shattered and bent like a tilt-shift lens that could only focus on one thing: pain. I've spent my lifetime in a bittersweet romance with pain, because pain causes panic but when I am in control, my hand on the knife, it also numbs me. I look at my little girl barely tall enough to look at the candles on tiptoe. She does not know that pain. She is so different, so real, so much herself, so audaciously Amelia.

I don't know much this Christmas. I know it doesn't feel like any Christmas before. There is an aching grief that comes with loss of faith, a heightened sense of emptiness and futility, an instinct to give up hope entirely. What I forget in those moments is that what I believe in now -

It's right in front of me.

Hemingway said, "Write hard and clear about what hurts." Amy is hurtling up the stairs curving up to the exit. My mind is remarkably silent. Hurt isn't there. There isn't enough belief left to be hurt. Now, I have to pick up and figure out and DO.

What if that man hanging on the cross just thought he was god, like so many before him? Did he know he was going to die, that there was no rescue. Did he wonder about what this "bearing the sins of the world" thing was going to hurt like? His statue at the basilica points to a deep scar on a thorn-cased heart. He points, directing our gaze. Is he telling us about a sacrifice, or just telling us how badly life hurt him? A warning, perhaps, that faith is a cage for the heart that cuts deep when one struggles against it.

I've spent many midnights during advent pondering what in the world to have faith in if it isn't a higher power. Every time, the faces of my children float up into my subconscious. I have to do this right. I have to save seven. I'm no longer waiting for a different savior for them. If he's there, he's not much of a protector. The statistics dictate that someone like me, a long-term, ritual abuse survivor - I should be an abuser, physical, sexual. A predator of children. Instead I have chosen to be a mother hen my whole life, gathering the fragile and vulnerable under my scarred arms and simply loving them. I have made my choice, and I'm going to live for good. I will not waver in that.

Saving seven is complicated. I don't want my children to be burned by the acid of my disillusionment and anger at the universe. Their childlike wonder if refreshing and beautiful. They can hold many truths in their hands at once, never asking how they fit together. They just exclaim at the beautiful colors of these jewels of human tradition we've handed them. Soon will come the time for questions and explaining and their own decisions about all of this.

But what I want to save about seven is seven. Innocence, imagination, the world revolving around their out-stretched arms, scattering love like snowflakes onto their open souls.

………………………..

My faith is in the very flawed thing that I fear and hate. Humanity. Mine, yours, ours. Because we all have choices whether to join the ranks of those who hurt, maim and scar - with words, weapons, bodies, voices; or to be instead healing, light, love, acceptance, grace. I choose to join the ranks working on the unseen hospital wards filled with the aching and broken. I see them pass me on the street - disheveled sometimes, usually with those dead eyes that look right through you because not one passing stranger holds a candle of hope up anymore.

It is easier to understand evil as a simple choice rather than some labyrinth scheme of opposing narratives that frame an awful, awesome, terrible, fearsome, merciful, bountiful god. Would a god of love drown the whole world? Would a god of love destroy cities, murder men, women, children - would he ever give up hope on a whole generation? Would a god who is all-powerful and all-present and all-knowing need to send his son to sacrifice, to pour out his wrath on his own flesh and blood - was that really the best he could come up with? More death and suffering?

Christmas is here, and I am delighting in wrapping paper, sugar cookies, children wound tight with excitement. This year, I'll be listening to the Christmas story read aloud, as I have since I was a small girl. This year, I'm going to listen and think of that innocent baby on whose tiny shoulders was placed an enormous responsibility by society. I know what it's like to hold other people's happiness like a dozen balls I'm juggling, desperately trying not to drop one. I don't want who I am to shatter anyone. 

I can still be friendly with the idea of Jesus. A peaceful prophet, an introvert, tempted, divided, wandering the earth for years on end. I just can't fathom that his father, whose name is Love, sent him as a tiny babe to be born in a stable and to take on the weight of the world.

So as we (the "good guys"?) send drones into the Middle East with no regard for innocent bystanders; as men hurl homemade bombs and face tanks without weapons or reinforcements in Syria; as Filipinos bury their dead and rise from the wreckage of another natural disaster; as we reel in the face of a media onslaught about bullying, suicide, teen aggression, murder in schools and no answers for any of it: there is nothing more - and nothing less - we can do but love where we are, who surrounds us. Grieve with the grieving and dance with the rejoicing.

As for me, I'll keep my questions about futility, being born into privilege, and social justice all to myself. After all, a made up day to be happy is a good reason to eat too much and laugh as much as I can.

The road ahead

Remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become acutely aware of all I've taken for granted. (Sylvia Plath)

I've fallen for the promise of a mirage a hundred times. Ran toward it, only to have it escape me like a handful of smoke or dreams. And so I've learned to live here in the now instead of staring at the road ahead. I suppose graduate school trained me to always look ahead - and of course, work demands it, too. Life demands it. But not every moment of every day.

I used to daydream while I worked. My mind rarely came back although my hands were hard at work. I watch my students, in the lab practicing skills, in clinical helping real people. It's all so new to them, they are completely absorbed by the mental part of the task before them.

I teach them life is messy, even nursing. It's better to make a mess on the floor and clean it up later than it is to endanger a patient. I think this goes for all of life: people, relationships, they are always paramount. When I was a young mom, I had to have a perfectly clean house to have a friend over. How many visits did I miss because I was focused on the mess on the floor instead of the face of the person begging for my attention?

The children come with when we go to the lab on weekends. They take blood pressures, they do CPR, they like to put tubes in and out of the "fake people". It is their favorite place at the university (well, maybe 2nd only to the vending machines). They are here in the now but also hard at work on their futures.

I am on a road to change. I can see the vista in front of me is quite different than I imagined. And the mirage? Yes, I'm tempted to run pell-mell toward it, leaving all else behind. But this time I'm wiser, older. I'm walking slowly, testing it out. Is the freedom and peace I seek really there in front of me? Or is it perhaps beside me in these moments, just waiting for me to notice.

Forgiving the past one moment at a time

I've cried countless tears about our story, how you're woven into mine and I into yours and the threads cannot be teased out from each other. In China they say that a red cord runs through us, those of us destined for each other's lives, a cord that we all hold part of inside. Mine has frayed edges where I've tried to pull it out. For once I truly believed you were all better off without me.

When your eyes have been trained for hate every time they look in the mirror, you forget that someone had to train you to see yourself this way. I remember when I look at the photos of my childhood. I vaguely remember seeing a lovely self with the same equanimity I saw the rest of the people I loved. I remember being proud of my thick head of hair, how everyone said it looked like my grandma's. I remember the swelling up of love like a drenched sponge in my chest when my grandpa held his ear to my tummy and said he could hear me growing like corn. Then he'd wrap me up in his pipe-smoke and down feathers smell, his enormous arms swallowing me whole just like his love for me, and for those moments I sighed into his arms, gangly and brown and warm and cherished.

That urge to disconnect from my story, to disconnect from my life, to disconnect from my loved ones - really it's fear baring its ugly teeth. I am afraid of being lost, forgotten, dismissed or left behind. I am afraid my story is too messy to fit in this Christian family of good people. I am afraid I am the ugly duckling for a lifetime swimming among swans.

I added one little phrase into my daily thoughts and words this year: "You're doing the best that you can." That one phrase has revolutionized our story: children who aren't being willful but still can't get a task done? They don't get punished, they receive help and grace and understanding for where they are at. They're doing the best they can. House messy at the end of the day and no supper plans yet? I did the best that I can. 

This is not a permission slip for halfway effort. It is not a get-out-of-jail free card for consequences. It is a way to forgive the past so you can live in the present. It is a way to recognize the good instead of the bad. Saying, "I'm doing the best that I can" dismisses the failures of the past hour and seeds hope for the next. 

Next time you send your child to wash his hands and he makes a mess of the sink and still has dirt on his face? Try saying it instead of "why did you..." with a furrowed brow. Even if it comes out with a sigh, this phrase allows us all to be where we are without the constant comparison with where we think we should be.

And if at the end of our story that is what they say of me? "She did the best she could." What a victory that would be.

"Story"

Mermaids

She is older than I was when the darkness dragged me down. She is so much wiser. Sweeter, more adventurous. Were those things stolen from me, too?

The questions I would ask are drowned in the twilight ringing with laughter from the pool. I feel it - 7 years old - and I act it, splashing, diving, doing headstands underwater. Showing Amy how to breaststroke and kick turn.

If you are one, like me, with the hyperactive thoughts, if your thoughts cascade over your head as full and powerful and rushing as a waterfall...drown them. Find something that shuts them out. Find something that makes you SO happy, you are literally soaking up every moment of it.

When you are sad, won't you remember that you were happy and you will be happy again? I dunk down until only my nose and eyes are above water. I look and I breathe and I save these images and the sensation of the water on my skin and the muffled sounds of tinny laughter. I save them for later. I save them for now.

The camaraderie of sisters. That's what I was promised that fateful year of seven. And still that wish hasn't come true. I hold my sisters-in-law as close as I can, trying to be a sister, feel like a sister.

The laughter winds down as the crickets drone louder and the frogs belch their love songs in a chirpy chorus from the wetland. The long grass is alive with the crickets hopping, the air filled with bats dipping and drifting, trolling for their mosquito meal. And we are midnight silhouettes against the pink of the sun's goodbye sky. A moment cherished and savored is a moment I couldn't feel pain or torment or torture.

When you can't stop thinking, what's your "hard stop"? Do you have an activity you can do to take a break from thinking?

How to squeeze the most out of every day

I watch children because I am a mom. They do one thing at a time, whole-heartedly concentrating and finding bits of joy as they go along. Their inner monologues aren't well developed yet because they are in such a stage of discovery. They finger things carefully, inspect what makes it work, listen to the sounds it makes, feel the textures under their hands.

Pausing to listen to an airplane in the sky, stooping to watch a ladybug on a plant, sitting on a rock to watch the waves crash over the quayside - children have their own agendas and timescales.  As they find out more about their world and their place in it, they work hard not to let adults hurry them.  We need to hear their voices.  ~Cathy Nutbrown

Children are the picture of being present in the moment, and their parents are usually the antithesis. We boast about our ability to multitask but are swarmed with regret for all the moments we did not savor when we lie down in bed at the end of the day. Yet we wake the next morning and repeat the cycle. Is it because we have so much to accomplish in each day? Is it possible to load the dishwasher, cook dinner, clean the counters, mop the kitchen floor, AND attend to the inevitable 20 questions our children will come to us with?

Being mindful - present in the moment - is the art of paying attention fully to one thing at a time. It's difficult when you first start, but it is addictive because it allows us to be free from responsibility for little moments throughout the day, sharing in wonder and joy instead of the anxiety of deadlines and schedules.

When you're in the pre-dinner rush, doing 3 things at once, and you feel the tug of a little hand on your leg, STOP. Just for a moment. Crouch down, touch their shoulders, look into their eyes. Listen to the inflection of their high-pitched voice, notice their expressions. Answer their questions and smile. You may avoid 20 more questions by attending fully to that one. You have also recaptured your own joy - a type of joy cooking dinner does not usually bring.

The present moment is all we're guaranteed. The past is gone and the future uncertain. But in each moment lies the gifts of life, and if we'll only take time to stop and take the world in - it's smells, sounds, colors, sensations, tastes - how much more joy we will squeeze out of each and every day.

"Present"

Check out some free mindfulness exercises here.

Here comes the sun

How easily we forget the past. Five months into this season of depression, I'm finally experiencing some freedom from the oppression - by practicing skills I've known for 2 years now. I brush the dust off slowly as my therapist reminds me how to bring the sunshine back. Opposite action - throwing myself into the life God has set before me, children, messes and all. Accumulating positives - a scribbled list of gratitude in my Joy Journal. Mindfulness - ignoring my constant, self-refreshing mental to-do list and entering into the present moment completely.

Returning to these practices slants the sunlight back into our home. There are long periods of freedom from sadness and guilt throughout the day. The urge to simply leave, either temporarily or permanently, eases as life becomes less difficult. My eyes are no longer blind to the beauty that surrounds me - the dancing girl on the dandelion lawn infusing my day with yellow; the orioles glistening in the morning sun as they sing to heaven; the twin mama cats co-parenting the little brood of kittens that arrived on Monday. It soaks in, finally. All this joy!

A line from a favorite song floats in - "we went dancing in the minefields, sailing through the storms" - yes, that voyage sounds like our lives. For a season, perhaps we'll walk easy on a safe road. Perhaps the minefield is in the rearview mirror for now.

The children always feel it, the lifting of oppression. They pronounce to the sky above that I am healed! Getting better every day! I wonder if they remember that depression has repeated it's turbulant course through our lives multiple times now. Another thing I've felt guilt over: they are all too familiar with suffering, pain, anguish and torment. Is this because of my weakness and my failures? I have to lean hard into the truth that God sent these children, these specific four, to me to mother, weaknesses and failures and all. It's all been seen by Him and allowed by Him and only He knows what He is shaping these children for. As much as I would love to believe that their lives will be easy, is there such a thing? Is life ever truly easy? I know so many of the house of faith for whom life has been an aching bittersweet experience. I know no one who does not miss someone, long for somewhere or something. How can I expect that my children will be free from desires, from failures, from heartbreak?

They are marked for glory, four baby believers already on the hard path of faith. I pray their journeys are marked with the beauty and sunshine I've been blessed with. Rosy wrote to me this morning, "I had a lot of fun through my life and most of it was with you." I feel just the same - my family is the most delightful blessing I've ever been given.

May you dance freely with no fear of danger today...for He can take away the fear even when dangers still lie ahead.

...when I forget my name, remind me.

We bear the light of the Son of man,

so there's nothing left to fear.

So I'll walk with you through the shadowlands

until the shadows disappear,

Because He promised not to leave us,

and His promises are true.

So in the face of all this chaos,

baby, I can dance with you.

Let's go dancing in the minefields,

let's go sailin' in the storms.

this is harder than we dreamed

but I believe that's what the promise is for.

~Dancing in the Minefields, Andrew Peterson~

Linked to Heather:: Just Write

Traveling from pain to glory

Here is the joy. Here in this moment, this place, this space. And fear is a thief, a joy-monger, launching into the moment to devour the gifts at your feet. You may think fear is not the enemy when it's just soaring in the periphery of your vision. It only takes one glide for it to dive into the present and scare off the kids and birds and leave you alone with it's devious face, it's cackle of triumph. 

I hold a turquoise cross tight in my grip, bending it's soft form between thumb and forefinger. I do this because the ache in my hand keeps me present in the moment, instead of soaring off with fear for wings. For emotions are as fickle as the April weather here in Wisconsin, and fear could drop me from a thousand feet high and crush me on the pavement far below. Choosing this moment, with whatever it contains, sometimes isn't so attractive. Last night, in a group, I didn't want to be present. But I grabbed my cross from my purse, and the bite into my palm forced me to stay nailed to my chair, body and spirit. That cross keeps me on the ground instead of floating off into the tornado of grief above me.

I think of the Savior lugging His heavy cross up the hill at Golgatha, Place of the Skull. Did the bite of the slivers into his shoulders striped from beating keep Him on the ground, keep His mind from wandering too far into the future? Was it mindfulness of the weight of the moment that kept Him going that last day? I follow the path, with my small cross in my hand, and the snaking line His cross ground into the dust is sometimes hard to find. I only know it's on the ground, not in the sky, and so I pin myself to moments and find the path now and then, and this is how you get from one place to another. From one emotion to the next. From pain to glory.

"Here"

Wise little owls

They know things, these children, that I didn't know when I was a child. They know all about how the ocean moves, how to get out through the break and ride in on the surf and not get swallowed up in the salty undertow. They also know all about lumps and what they mean.

Last Friday, Rosy noticed the lump on Amelia's neck because it is visible to the naked eye. We hadn't talked to the children about our concerns because it seemed brutal to involve them until we had some answers. Amy was, of course, marginally aware that something was wrong, because we kept feeling her neck every morning. But we hadn't said the "C" word aloud to any of them.

Rosy came running to me with horror in her big brown eyes and told me about the lump, asked me if I knew about it. I reassured her that I did. The tears sprang sudden, and she stuttered out her heaviest question, "Will Amy die as fast as Tally did, Mama?" Our dog, Tally, died just 2 weeks after we learned of her cancer recurrence, and really 3 days after we knew for sure that it was cancer. To the children, it seemed like a very fast death. I held Rosy to my chest, felt her whole body ravaged by the sobs, shaking under the weight of the world no 7 year old should be carrying. I assured her that Amy would not die in 2 weeks. Her sobs ebbed slowly away.

She looked up, this time her face serious but no longer frightened. "Okay. Well, what do we have to do about Amy's cancer then?" A rational question following all that emotion. Alright. If we don't have to deal emotionally with her dying right away, what needs to be done? How many doctors appointments are we talking? Will she lose her hair?

We talked long about the many things that can cause lumps. In her 7 year old experience, lumps are always cancer - they were for Mama and they were for her favorite pet. It was news to her that you could have a lump that wasn't cancer. But she also wanted to know about cancer. What type it might be, what the treatment for it is, how hard the surgery would be for Amy. How often we'd be going to the doctor over the next few weeks, and would Amy lose her hair?

She knows these waves, and she isn't overcome by them. It's an amazing thing to watch, as a mother. I was traumatized when I was just about her age, deeply, in ways that stunted the way my brain grew up. My reaction was to shut off the emotional switch as often and as quickly as possible. I've never been much of a crier. I've been a brooder. It wasn't until I entered counseling at 31 that I started to learn why I acted that way. I lacked a skill known as "Wise Mind". It's the ability to react emotionally and rationally at the same time, using both sides of your brain to respond to a problem. My 7 year old daughter can do this. I still have to practice it.

If you experienced abuse or trauma at a young age, this might be something you need to work on, too. The trick is to allow yourself a modicum of emotional response, followed quickly by a rational list of options for responding to the problem. I actually consciously think, "I need to enter Wise Mind". Then the tears flow for a few moments, and then I get started on solving the problem. It's allowed me to cope better in the moment because I don't bottle up emotions anymore. They come out right away. And I can still view myself as a rational person, just like I always have.

If you'd like to read more about Wise Mind, visit this link to a video walking you through the technique.

Miraculous mundane

It's been days of sandy feet and brown skin flashing in the bleak May sun of South Carolina. Afternoons lazing around the screen porch with books and the sounds of the birds over the marsh and the wind through the palmettos. A foreign climate and culture that's begun to tarnish to the comfortable feeling of home over the 5 summers we've spent here. This place is full of romance and familiar haunts, tattooed surfers striding home in the sunset and the smell of salt on the afternoon breeze. A magical place to make memories for little people.

Today we napped together, shivering in the air conditioning as the wind howled around the corners of the house on stilts. We went down to the main street late in the morning, and came home laden with beautiful shells, shovels, and inner tubes. The kids all wanted to ride the waves on the top, after days of body surfing and boogie boarding and being pummeled to the sandy bottom by the crash of the break. I gamely blew 20 minutes of breath into the tubes and we shivered into our suits, cursing the air conditioning that a few days ago couldn't eradicate the crushing humidity.

They piled in the back of the truck, and I in front, barefoot, with the hiphop blaring. We jived our way down to the far end of the island, the side we've never been too, I feeling adventurous and they always game for my hare-brained ideas. The beach was cold and deserted, lashed with 30 mile an hour winds, and only surfers in body suits could be seen out in the waves. None of this triggered my "mommy alarm", though, and we waded into the gray seas. I quickly realized they were gray because the break was only a short way out, and the sand was being stirred up into the water by the powerful waves. We shuddered in our line of fiercely gripped hand-holds, the waves driving the children past me even though we were all still on our feet. I pulled them as hard as I could, back to shore.

The little girls were screaming with cold, but their shrieks only grew louder as we scurried out of the water and back into the cold air. They talked (or shrieked) me into taking them back out with the tubes. I gripped their taught little bodies and propelled them back to shore over the tops of the breaking waves. Katy, the cautious eldest, stood on the shore screaming at us to come back to safety. Caleb was completely disoriented, and tried to get back out through the waves to me.  Stunned by the force of nature whirling around us, I could barely gather my wits enough to herd them back to the sand. Someday they'll tell hilarious stories about the day their mother took them swimming in the hurricane (I learned from the weather station back at home that Tropical Storm Alberto is bearing down on the "Edge of America" as Folly Beach is known).

Somewhere between the shrieks and the howl of the wind, the aching beauty that is the tragedy and miracle of motherhood seeped through. The gray sandy feet pattering over the worn boards of the beach walk, the music throbbing through the speakers and four kids bopping in the rear view mirror, the goose bumps on my son's brown skin as I hold him close to warm him with my body... We know this dance of the sacred and the mundane, the beautiful and the drudgery, the sacrifice and the pay-out, we mothers. We feel it deep when words can't capture and memory can't hold the little joys of the everyday miracles. Our souls sing with the rhythm of life that plays out in detail before our eyes in the lives of our children. We live and breath hard work, yet in the cracks of life seeps that aching beauty: the blush on a baby's cheek, the smell of your young cuddled up to your neck, the 100 watt smiles of childhood happiness, the muddy feet and the bug bitten legs, the birdsong of little girls' laughter and the earthier burliness of our sons.

In our failures there is beauty...in our success there are shortcomings. Whether a failed beach trip in stormy seas that has our children shivering and shrieking, or a long lazy afternoon sitting on the dock listening to the dolphins talk to each other, it is beautiful, this dance and work of motherhood. The memories of our children will be highlight reels of the highs and lows of our family life. But I treasure a richer and fuller sense of the organic wonder of this mundane miraculous, a collection of vignettes that open the heart of the Father to my understanding, the wonder of His love and the tenacity of the hope we hold dear for those we love most.

She sees me

Anne of Green Gables called them "bosom friends". I have several. Count me among the lucky. All have helped me through this maze of depression, validating my feelings and helping me cope.

Last night, I was a complete mess. My face covered in tears, I listened to the voice at the other end of the telephone telling me how to pull myself out of a flashback or a panic attack. She spoke wisdom. I'm going to follow it.

Are these moments of transparency a gift from God?  Honesty that makes the soul of the other translucent, pink faces of flower shining but brief, looking through each others souls.

Two ships sinking bind their brokenness with the cords of compassion. The sweetness of her voice lingers in my ear this morning, a reminder that, despite differences, we all share or deny love. Thank you, friend, for reaching out your hands to me once again.

"One can give without loving, but one cannot love without giving." 
~Amy Carmichael

Today I am trying a coping technique called Mindfulness. This simply means that "carpe diem". Really get engaged in the goings-on of the day, notice things and make memories.

"The mind governed by the Spirit is life and peace." 
 Romans 8:6