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

Abandoned

They stand like witnesses to a lost era. Solid brick, lines still nice and square. I wonder if new floors and windows would be all they need, these abandoned houses. Who used to live there? Why did they leave? Why did no one buy a nice 2 story brick home? What led to the boards and the warning placards and the decay?

I suppose I could ask myself these same questions. Long ago, I chose to abandon myself just like an old brick row house that had long since passed it's purpose. I left emotions and being and conviction behind and I followed the paths others had broken ahead of me. I suppose that's how I became a nurse instead of a doctor: a PhD prepared professor instead of a clinical degree; how I became a mother quite by accident but slowly and surely let those responsibilities slide into the abyss of incapacity and unwillingness.

I sit in front of the 16th floor window.  The one that, ironically, still opens out to the street. The pavement glistens with rain many floors below and I am mesmerized. Somehow in this hotel room, accusations and invalidation have taken root once again; somehow, nothing else seems to matter.

But tomorrow WILL contain happy moments, carefree moments, even moments of satisfaction and fulfillment.  I WILL make it. My brain has tried to kill me before, and so far it doesn't fritz out badly enough that I lose myself completely.

So I walk away from the window and decide this is not about my own ugliness or failures at all - it's about those pathways in my brain that were ridden so often the pavement is wearing off. It's those slippery pathways I slide inexorably into, sometimes because of a single thought ("I'm not good enough" or "my place in this person's life is meaningless").

Today I'm paving new pathways. Today I refuse to slip into old patterns. When the ugly thoughts come, yes, I still think them. But somewhere mid-thought I realize I'm headed down that pathway again, and I stop and reassure myself and climb back up the hill to self-compassion. My therapist says eventually it will work. Eventually, if I train my brain to toss those useless, fictional thoughts, slowly I will go free from the prison of my own mind. Maybe someday, my brain won't try to kill me anymore.

Utopian? Yes. Unrealistic? Yes. Worth trying? Yes.

Standing still

If you stand still too long, the detritus of life begins to cling. Before too long, you look down and you can't see yourself any longer; only the barnacles of everything that's pulling you under the surface. Try to tear it off, and you'll bleed out.

He asks us to abide: stay under. Trust Him for oxygen when sobs wrack. Trust Him for a relief from this insurmountable pain of life that will someday come. That day when tears are wiped away.

But this year I asked for less. Revisionist that I am (aren't we all?), I want to say I want less of this. Less pain, less work, less abiding. But that's not what I meant by less. I meant less of me. Is this what it feels like to be reduced, refined, re-envisioned? Scraping off barnacles with a sharp stone while I struggle to stay here in the searing moment, sit with the pain?

Death is easy - you don’t know you’re a ghost

The fee is taken out nice and slow

While you’re walking around with your cardboard crown

We think we are kings

Wisdom warned us but our flesh is strong

we’ll find our own way we’ll  get along

Who knows what we need

But

life costs so much

Someone paid for the damage

the damage we’ve done

How else do you explain all these open graves we’ve got

Someone must have paid

‘cause life costs

~From Life Costs So Much, Christa Wells~

I want to fly away, fly away. Get away. Be someone, someplace else. Get out of this old skin around bones that ache. All the world is gray but I know somewhere, sometime soon, the colors will bleed back in. Right? Tell me so. Make me believe.

You don't have to ask me why

Because I know you understand

All the treasures of my life

Are right here in my hand

Suspended in a moment

No more breath to catch

If you hold on to your end

Maybe we can make this last

This is the greatest time of day

When all the clocks are spinning backwards

And all the ropes that bind begin to fray

And all the black and white turns into colors

I don't want to build a wall

Or draw a line across the sand

This is the greatest time of day

When there's no you and there's no others

And all the rules grow wings and fly away

And all the black and white turns into colors

Grace Potter sang this song, "Colors", for me on Friday night

Oh, I hope this doesn't go on very long

before the skipping stone hits the surface of the pond

Sometimes believing, sometimes pretending

The sky is a black void pebbled with stars, swept with the Milky Way's belt, like a chocolate cake gilded in gleaming white sugar sprinkles. Moonless and magical. It's been a day of feeling off, just a bit cranky, from the moment I woke up to my son's UFC style cuddling in our predawn bed to the hours spent editing powerpoints for the 39 hours of lecture I have to prep for in the coming month.

The stars hanging in still life bring the chaos to a halting stop, and the last breath I took is held in my lungs for a moment as I stand, hand in hand with my two youngest children, looking up, up as far as the naked eye can take us into the question marks of the universe.

They're tired for once, these late night children I've bred from my own insomniac bones, and the house goes still. Aaron and I pop in a movie, one to match my mood, The Gray. It's one for Aaron, all action, hunting, man against nature, survival. But deep in the plot are threads that pull at the frayed edges of my own: a man with a gun-barrel in his mouth; a poem about the exhaustion of putting up yet another fight to live; the poignant flashbacks to moments with a wife who died of cancer.

I break, just a crack this time, not into a million shards of shiny glass like I might have months or even two years ago. I stutter out the words, how I know the taste of rifle bluing. How I struggle with the exhaustion. How I fear abandoning this man I love to raise our children (can he do it? How can it be possible that I would watch from heaven without tears?).

I crawl into the familiar fetal position, knees to chest, my face still in the inner panic of the moment. And he, this Lover who abandons me not, folds himself into a warm parenthesis around my ache, diffusing the sorrow that I feel all the way down to the morrow of my bones.

My list of questions flows brittle, jumpy like a Jack Karouac poem up to God, silently, questions from Ecclesiastes, Psalms, Isaiah. A prayer from Revelation (come, Lord Jesus, come!) that ever more often finds it's way to my lips. And with the doubts, I've by habit paired the words of the desperate father in Mark 9:24: Lord, I believe! Help thou my unbelief!

How can I long for life so deeply that it threatens to break me in two, yet struggle not to give up in those moments of utter exhaustion when the very last thing I can do is fight longer and harder and for who knows how long?

How can He say that these are "light and momentary troubles" (2 Corinthians 4:17)? How could Paul, watching his comrades burn at the stake, run from lions, hide for their lives, starve in poverty, rot in prison? How is that light and momentary? Does He see our family? Does He see the struggle at dinnertime with Amelia (please just eat one bite of toast, I beg you child). Does He feel the heart flipping and leaping and pounding relentlessly in my chest throughout the day? Feel the blood drop from head to feet in one giant waterfall, and see the stars and hear the thunder in my ears and feel my knuckles whiten as I hold on for dear life so as not to lose a job, or knock something over with my head, or, God forbid, stop breathing during class or clinical or in front of my dearest, beloved children? How do we grasp eternity in the face of this compelling portrait of everyday gall?

How can He say there will be no tears in heaven? How can He make life so utterly beautiful, even in it's wretched brokenness, and say that we will not miss it even enough to cry? How can He paint such a shattered and desolate backdrop to the very aching resplendence of our lives here on earth?

Does He see my daughter quaking on the floor, froth on her lips, vomit on her t-shirt, excrement and urine rising putrid from her 6-year-old jeans? Does He hear my silent prayer for her life, hear my tears as I hold her until she stills in my arms and wakes? Does He know that I know that I cannot take care of a 40 year old daughter who soils herself and cannot drive or work? Has He prepared me for this, is He preparing me for this?

There are days all I see is the sovereign. The Judge on His seat, behind the bench, the finality of that gavel ringing in my ears. There are days I see only glimpses of mercy in between the God who says He will not tempt me beyond what I can bear (1 Corinthians 10:13). Why would a loving God tempt me at all? Is all this character building worth the blood, sweat, tears, vomit, poop, messiness, gut-wrenchingly hard work?

There is a moment in The Gray when the main character, desolate, alone, and hopeless, throws his head back to the heavens, an admitted atheist, and pours out his anger and his cry for help to the empty gray sky. There is no answer. He stands, and says, "I'll do it myself." He cannot wait five minutes for an answer from the God he does not believe in, trust, or wait on for rescue.

Sometimes it feels like I am calling out to an empty gray sky. But what are my alternatives? Whether He answers or not, whether I understand His will and His actions or not, I have only two choices: hopelessness and unbelief, or to walk by faith, not by sight (2 Corinthians 5:7).

And herein is the hard road of faith: the waiting through the long, dark night, for the next time you see your baby smile, and you glimpse God again. Those glimpses of sight that light our path like gifts doled out for the moments when we need them most, reassurance when we are about to give up and give in. For those who cannot wait for His rescue, who give up on the God who often seems distant and even not there at all, the smile of the baby is just another coincidence. But for those who have made the thousand choices to believe when all evidence is to the contrary, we see the handprint of the Great One in the smallest nuance of life. The smallest victory. The shortest moment of joy can redeem every long season of grief and disbelief. All that teetering on the shrouded path suddenly becomes two feet planted once again on solid ground.

I stare into her eyes, limpid. She doesn't know the hard path of faith. She is only six, and can barely understand seizures and brain injuries, and pooping her pants. She doesn't know she was the light today that brought me back to the path, relit the fire of faith somewhere deep inside. For her, her sisters, her brother, her Papa, I walk once more into the fray. However the road may twist or turn, however heavy the gray storm clouds are that shroud me from the face of God, I will keep putting one foot in front of the other, sometimes truly believing, sometimes desperately pretending that at the end there is a heaven where He will wipe away every tear and say, "Well done, my good and faithful servant." (Matthew 25:23)

image credit

What questions plague you in your daily walk with God? Do you find the daily practice of faith difficult? Do you struggle with disbelief?

Linked to A Pause on the Path's On Your Heart Tuesdays

I am the mountain

I walk the short distance to my parent's house, and I am in a cloud of yellow butterflies. My camera dangles about my neck, my computer slung over my shoulder. It's supposed to be a serious afternoon, writing papers, editing. But here I am in a swarm of yellow butterflies - the ones a friend calls cabbage butterflies and I push that name out of my mind because they are simply too beautiful to be linked to "cabbage" in any way. Click, click, click goes the shutter, but I can't capture their beauty, transparent iridescence in autumn afternoon sun, as they flit up from the green oats and loft into the shafts of sunlight coming through maples scarlet.

Perhaps this is another key on my joy hunt. Beauty is fleeting...indescribable...hard to put your finger on. Facts are easier, trials lending themselves to description. Health problems are so discrete, well-delineated. You can look them up in the dictionary and get a paragraph description.

There is no paragraph written to describe the soul's dance as the butterflies twirl carefree in a circle about you.

All this against a backdrop of gravelly tar, weeds in ditches, the sound of the puppies down the road caterwauling. The beautiful in the midst of the ugly.

The light is harsh on the cherry tree, barren now of leaves, it's fruit too bitter for the birds. A lone spider crafts his way from branch to branch, weaving lace between them. I stop to watch him work. What's he hurrying for? What happens to spiders in the winter anyway? Isn't he just working on the last stretch before his frozen death?

I push death back out of my mind and just see the maroon of the cherries and the white of the spider's lace. Force my mind onto the joy path again.

Over at the High Calling Focus, a prompt is posted: try to make rust beautiful. I find this ironic, because I've always loved rust. The only thing better than something new is something old, rusty, well-used, beautiful in it's old age. I have a hundred photos of rust. I take another just because. The rust flourishes out in florets from the center of an old gas can. It shines purple and red and orange in the sun. A smile flashes brilliant over my face, and I walk on.

Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning. (James 1:17)

Gifts, every moment of every day. The child who is disobedient at nap time ends up huddled in a little ball next to me under the comforter while wind brings a storm over the valleys. The curry not spicy enough is beautiful in it's gold bowl. The hard work of therapy melts into strength and calm at the end, as this beloved therapist guides me quietly back from grief to joy. I stand in mountain pose, thinking this is the mountain God wants me to move with my mustard-seed faith.

This body, mind, soul...what He wants to mold and change and move. The mountains and hills answer to Him already. The rocks stand ready to shout His holy name. It is I from whom He begs praise and love.

I love you, Father. Thank you for these gifts overflowing from every moment of my day.

Got nothing in my hands to part these waves 

Got nothing in my bank account that saves 

Got no more might left to muscle through 

But Oh, I’ve got you 

I’ve got you 

Got demons gather ’round oh laugh it up 

Spreading doubts a plenty I can’t drink this cup 

Got no one left who thinks I’ll make it through 

But Oh, I’ve got you 

I’ve got you 

Got faded memories of better days 

Got a prayer that they’ll come back around my way 

You’ve got me and oh that gets me through 

Oh, I’ve got you I’ve got you 

Oh, I’ve got you I’ve got you 

~I've Got You, Shaun Groves~

A day with no earthly helper

I wake up feeling full of holes. Son crying, poopy morning diaper, a kitchen island filled with the debris of a long and busy weekend, the summer-to-winter clothes switch just beginning. My mother, stalwart helper, has a surgical complication and is off to the doctor and I am here alone with my brood.

I think of these bits of foliage from my trip to Charleston. Still beautiful even though eaten through by a million tiny insects. I bow my head, pray that I will be a beautiful full-of-holes mother today.

School. I have papers to edit, a paper to write, am contemplating the potential of a new job at the hospital that will demand a month of my time. I am my children's teacher, and I think about time commitments and how much to ask of them this first full week.

This job never really ends.

In the hardware of a barn, I see my title in rusty metal. It's a mantle that I wore unexpectedly, a hat I didn't imagine I'd have to wear for four-children-in-four-years. Yet how lucky to have any at all, with my diagnosis of infertility! I remember that, and bravery steels my soul for a long day at home.

These days, too, shall pass. Too quickly.

Already I watch my friends and family, with their sweet, cuddlesome babies, and my heart is filled with longing and regret for what I missed during those years.

My prayer today: be mindful. Live in each moment. Absorb the events of the day. Stay engaged. Lord, help me in my weakness.

Excerpted from my gratitude journal #806-829:
#806 Rosy reads an entire Laura Ingalls picture book
#812 My auntie Rosalie coming for a night and a day
#816 My children in the parade I used to be in as a child
#817 The sun beating down hot in September
#820 Bean fields drying yellow in the heat
#826 Sumacs turning red in Echo Woods