Nighmare-chaser

I ran out of the woods once, when I was seven I think, and I could feel something fluttering at my ankles. It felt heavier than gravity, magnetism, alive - as if the back of my body had unraveled into strings and I was disintegrating, smaller and smaller, into atoms, bosons - the whole of the woods the unseen entropy of a black hole gaping, choking me back into nothingness, lost forever. 

The clearing in the woods used to be a magical, Narnian kind of place, with dappled sunlight diddling down through aspens and long waltzing grass that sprouted just there on the forest floor, because of the light. I read Bridge to Terabithia and that clearing was my Terabithia, and after it became the landing zone for my torment when I was seven and eight, I thought maybe I'd reclaim it someday with my little brother, like Jesse in the book did. But it never happened.

Now I am in my 30s and for a long time I've lived with torment, until it has become like water washing over a river stone, so much a part of life that you don't even notice the layers of self washing away down the stream.  Torment comes out of nowhere and never like a train through the dark, with the noise of wheels clacking steel and a whistle to warn you. One night you sleep like a happy mother of children, and the next night you close your eyes and all the people you love, those faces you cup between your hands and call holy and beautiful, they twist into awful visage and become villains of the very worst kind and your heart is broken over and over. Broken worse then the worst break-up you ever had. Broken like if your daddy ever said, "I hate you," or you were 3 and landed in foster care, or maybe broken in some small way like Jesus on the cross when He had to look all that evil in the eye and say, "I love you anyway." 

You wake between each nightmare and in that panic in the midnight black you try to remember just one verse to latch on to, because your mama told you the verses will keep you from sinking, a verse to pull yourself out of the ocean of fear. 

A verse comes floating out of the deep, and off your lips in the wrinkled pentameter of breathlessness and half-memory:

What time

I am

afraid

I will

trust

in

Thee.

In those few moments between each nightmare, when you are fully awake, the night is just night, and people just people, loved ones sleeping and breathing. Out on the porch, the air is velvet with the moisture of mid-summer, and you bring the dog out with you for company. 

Because you can still feel the fluttering around your ankles, no matter how many years pass, no matter how many times you run out of the dark woods without getting trapped, no matter how many staircases you make it to the top of without being pulled down...they are still there, nipping at your heels and laughing because they've got you running scared.

The husband sleeps, and the children sleep, and over the grassy hill your mama and your papa sleep, too. No one is awake at 1 a.m., 3 a.m., 5 a.m. when you can't shake the nightmares. Just the dog. She doesn't speak or make a sound. But in those honey eyes with just a hint of red sunset in them, the way the lids pull up and the bottoms droop - those eyes say, I see your pain. I know you're afraid. And that is what is saving me these long, sleepless nights.

She lays her chin on my bare, unshaven leg, and the fluttering around my ankles stills. We breathe together. She lets out a long sigh (ending in grumph) because she can't take my pain away. And I because I can't chase it away. I say it slowly, this time a prayer, a talisman for the next time I close my eyes this night - please, Lord, let me be at peace.

What time I am afraid I will trust in Thee.

Spiderweb sleep

A nightmare descends, all twisted up, pains of past and pains of present, and all the fear one length of sleep can heap on you.

You're lost in a maze of the subconscious, clawing up for air through layers of sleep, trying to escape terrors you've repressed, suppressed, redressed.

But sleep hangs on like the last tiny drop of ice melt to the tree branch, bent by the wind of your fear, but still persistent.

And then finally it's over and you're the lone bud climbing for the sunlight of early spring. You wake to memories appalling and chew them over all day trying to wrap arms around the lessons wrapped in the velvet darkness of the night.

Sometimes, after nights like these, the only thing that breaks the spell is the familiar. Verses memorized, prayers holy and hushed, said in unison. This morning, as I woke from my nightmare, it was the Lord's Prayer that pulled me gently back into the sunrise of love, that promise of every day, that no man controls, the orb of the sun pulling herself gently up the eastern sky and the moon putting himself gently to bed in the west.

Our Father, which art in heaven,

hallowed be thy name.

Thy kingdom come,

Thy will be done,

in earth, as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread,

and forgive us our trespasses,

as we forgive trespasses against us.

Lead us not into temptation,

but deliver us from evil.

For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory,

Forever and ever.

Amen.

(Matthew 6:9-13)

A new page for our hymnal

It was a long day of testing. She drew circles, squares, crosses. She stacked blocks, arranged them by color, counted them out loud for the bird-thin woman whose body had miraculously housed three children but seemed hollow now as it bent unnaturally into a "C" around Amelia's small hands. They measured how those coils of brain matter communicated, how they functioned all by themselves, which coils are damaged, which coils show promise, which coils came through the fire of brain infection unscathed.

It is her left brain that is hurting. The part she inherited strong from both parents - the logical, orderly, sequential, analytical, words-and-numbers side of the brain. Her right brain is fine (thus her left hand, her left eye, her left leg). This is why she stumbles to the right, her right hand twitches when she holds the pencil, her right eye glides in to study the curvature of her nose when it should be looking elsewhere.

Those precious curves of the brain, coiling in and out, glistening platinum, bathed in the white vernix for safe-keeping. I am to believe there is purpose in the searing of what is precious in this cursed world, that by this sacrifice He will receive glory.

My mother taught me verses as a child, many, many. Set them to music. Sang them, sing-song through the day, singing a way to a peaceful home, begging God for a peaceful heart, pleading God for rescued children. Two and a half long hard years ago, the doctors told me I might lose my voice forever during my cancer surgery. I bought a USB microphone and sang and read stories long into the sleepless nights, read them and sang them into the person-less laptop computer, with a photo of my children in front me. Children who might never hear me speak or sing again.

How do you mourn these losses, these temporary but oh-so-anguished losses? How to keep the tears from my songs in those recordings, how to make the voices of the stories come alive with the whole spectrum of human emotion, not just the anguish and the pain and the pleading and the grief? Somehow I did it, and the stories have the rasping voice of the crows, the high-pitched voices of fairies, the hilarity of the three singing pigs in Sandra Boynton's classic.

And now those hard, long anguished years have passed. And we are still in the thick of the battle with Satan - the Job battle, the battle where your body is beaten, battered, languishing for a Word from the One who loves, protects, strengthens. I still speak, I still sing (albeit my voice more faltering, projection lessened. I am no longer the singer-in-the-bathroom-corners searching for acoustics to magnify this unsure that is my songbox).  I sing my mother's songs...Not by works of righteousness...For there is one God and one mediator...Search me, O God, and know my heart...And these words which I have told you this day shall be in your heart...Trust in the Lord with all thine heart...

The time has come now. I feel it, pulling, tugging hard at my heartstrings. I am woman now, mother to these four who grow so quick, keeper of this home teetering on the edge of disaster and in the arms of Greatness. I have sung her songs...my mother's...for these three decades. We worship quick in the cracks of the day's work, we worship long in the last lingering moments of the evening with the children huddled under covers and Mama in the blue rocker whispering the last refrains of the day's verses. Now is the time to add our own songs to this hymnal of the generations.

Ten years ago, I worshiped quiet with head bent, eyes closed often, finger tracing the words under the music score of the red hymnal full of centuries-old songs of praise. Then I learned to lift hands, and, slowly still, believe they can be holy hands. They still feel wooden, hypocritical, copy-cat, demanded. Not like holy hands, yet. I wash them daily, hourly, moment-by-moment in the prayer of confession, and I see the blood run off in the Living Water and how they go from scarlet to white, clean hands cleaned by Grace. Maybe if I close my eyes with hands high in worship, faltering voice joining the throng of other believers, maybe I can feel holy hands, with eyes closed.

It isn't enough - Memory Madness drills, devotions in the morning, reading the Word at dinnertime while the youngest splats potatoes on the clean floor and his sister has a seizure and vomits on her plate and the older two try to help - find glasses, get silverware, get towels to clean vomit. I need to sing my own songs. Write my owns songs on my heart. The Scriptures are already written there, rich, bountiful. Now the notes. Please send me the songs, Lord.

May every generation of this besieged family write a new page in the hymnal of Scripture-songs my own mother started, with her song-bird voice and her lilting melodies that pour easy from her right brain.

Amy's left brain doesn't work. Maybe she can teach me to be more right-brained. Maybe we can use her melodies and my memories to write Scripture songs that are the reflection of the broken.






I've attached a few of the mp3 files of the recordings I made before my cancer surgery.  Although I didn't lose my voice, I did suffer vocal cord paralysis (at first) that has now progressed to vocal cord paresis (weakness), and my voice is forever changed.  These days, my kids beg to listen to one of two CDs at bedtime: "Mama Sings" or "Mama Reads".  I would encourage moms everywhere to make CDs like this for your kids.  What a comforting, delightful way to go to sleep - and eases the burden of sitting there to sing every.single.night.

Gen sings Proverbs 3:5; recorded June, 2008, just before surgery for aggressive thyroid cancer


Fern's Song: I Timothy 2:5-6


Search Me, O God (Psalm 139:23-24)


Teach them diligently unto thy children (Deuteronomy 6:6-7)


Reading Sandra Boynton's "Moo, Baa, La la la!"

Amelia recites

From the lips of children and infants you have ordained praise...Psalm 8:2a

Amelia is memorizing Bible verses along with her sisters for a memorization challenge at church. She has a different approach than the older children, but we are continually astonished by her ability to remember, and her sweet spirit as she quotes the verses.

Post-script:

Several months after this video was taken, Amelia prayed to accept Jesus.  Too young, I thought.  The skeptic in me slowly quieted as the months ticked on and she really was changed.  In October of 2009, I heard through a horrible buzzing in my ears as a doctor told us we had a 50/50 chance of keeping our Amelia here on earth.  She had encephalitis, nearly died, and now has global delays and difficulties related to a life-threatening and constant seizure disorder.  We beg your prayers, if you see this.  For more information, click on the "Amelia's Illness" link on the top menu above the header image.

Grasping grace

...to humble and to test you so that in the end it might go well with you...Deuteronomy 8:16 (exc.)

I heard this verse quoted on the children's Bible hour we listen to on the radio on the way home from our small group meeting. It really struck me that being humbled and tested by cancer is an opportunity for obedience and submission that will result in good things for my family and I. As I read verses to the kids, and talk with them about our upcoming separation for my next scan/treatment, it shocks me how clearly they see the love of God in this difficult situation. God has provided doctors, and treatments; He watches over me so I can come home to them again. I admire their attitude and grasp on His grace. I want to absorb it, emulate it.

On a lighter note, a couple of gratuitous pics for the day...of the Moroccan dark chocolate bon-bons and traditional honey and almond pastries I made from scratch today. These will be served at the Valentine's Dinner & a Movie event I am cooking & baking for on Saturday. Trust me, you want these recipes! Click on the links to go to them!