Choices in the dark

I strap on the yellow snowshoes given me by my love early in our marriage, because yellow always makes me smile. But today, my face is stuck in fear, grief, despair.

Night is falling, and I trek down the woods path through 4 foot drifts, floating atop, falling occasionally. I'm on a quest to find the big cottonwood, the one it would take 4 grown men to wrap their arms around. Trees like this don't just happen in Wisconsin. This tree is sacred.

I have the vague idea that if I could just sit there a while, my back against the solidness of that trunk, there would be peace for a few moments. I think, too, about staying there in the dark. Wonder if it would be easy to just go to sleep in the cold. My brain catches the thoughts in it's sieve and I turn them over in my mind and reject them. No precious stones there. I thank God for the cottonwood tree, pray that He will help me stand up and walk home. Choose life once more.

Darkness falls quickly in the woods. But I am smiling now. My breath comes hard and fast, I take off my mittens because the work has warmed all the places I felt dead inside. I pace my breathing. I take a chunk of snow in my bare hand and push it against forehead, the cold bringing my soul rushing back inside, ready for the walk home.

And as the sun sets, and the woods turn entirely to shadow, the snow gray instead of white, I emerge from the woods onto the road and home. I have survived, walked through this temptation. I whisper words from the one Psalm that jumps like Living Water from the pages of an otherwise lifeless Bible:

Restore to me the joy of your salvation and grant me a willing spirit, to sustain me. Then I will teach transgressors your ways, and sinners will turn back to you. Save me from bloodguilt, O God, the God who saves me, and my tongue will sing of your righteousness. The sacrifice of God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart. O God, YOU will not despise. (Psalm 51:12-17 exc.)

Braiding rope

I know why the eyes are the windows of the soul. It's because all I love flows through these eyes. Images collected throughout the day are what make up the threads of the rope I'm hanging on to at the end.

Faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love. His back arches heavy over children late into the evening, after hours of wearing his lead apron at work. Love bending close to the ears of the son. His heart pushes away the frustration of living with someone like me, and instead he makes a funnel for love to pour forth.

As Christ loves the church. The egotistical, stubborn, idolatrous, broken church. As Christ loves that church. And he does, this husband. He holds onto the Word like rescue while I tread water looking for my threads, the threads of that passage that I am to be living. Ah, submit and respect. Those are my threads. For a moment, through the camera lens, I am in obedience. Every time he makes dinner while I battle demons, I obey this command - respect. Oh, how deep is this love, the circle of family, the threads of he and I and Christ surrounded now by the layers of each of our children.

You can try to keep me down

You can try to keep me under

But you'll never get my will, 

You'll never take my will to fight

'Cause I was born at the bottom of this mountain

I'm scared and I'll probably climb it ,

Climb it till the day I die

All the things I know I needed

Just keeps me going

All the things I never had

Just keeps me wanting it more

Fighting for it all

You'll never take my will to fight

I need peace of mind and a hopeful heart

To lose this rage and move out in the dark

I am looking for rainbows and shooting stars

Just some peace of mind and a hopeful heart

And a miracle for this broken soul

A little miracle for this broken soul

I need peace of mind and a gentle head

As I try to change the way I am

And hope God forgives when I can't

~From Fighting For It All and Peace of Mind, Mindy Smith~

The reforming pessimist

I've tried for three years now to turn myself into an optimist. But for thirty I've been a glass half empty girl. Now I have some type of binocular vision, seeing the world in both black and white, the positive and negative crowding in together a confusing mosaic of blessings and curses.

My messy house is the nest in which meaningful moments are carved out with children who are growing up way too fast. Busy days are filled to the brim with more important tasks than dishes and laundry, but I still sigh at the unfinished homemaking chores at the end of the day. I watch my kids running across the troll bridge in the autumn afternoon sun, and I breathe deep the crisp air, but half of my mind is on grading unfinished and schoolwork they're not doing and all the busywork I used to measure my worth by.

I've been a griever, a lamenter, a mourner for as long as I can remember. My childhood held a hidden pain too deep for me to understand, and twenty lifetimes of pain shoved in to my formative years billowed out in weird ways: I found things to cry about because I had to cry and I couldn't cry about what I needed to cry about. Now the well of pain is too deep to tap so I leave the cover on most days but still the pain aches there inside despite the gathering of joys and the counting of blessings I've made it a habit to do.

How does one go about healing wounds when it hurts so to peel the bandage back? When it's festered so long, it seems easier to pretend it's been amputated long ago. I guess that's why I run away so often. Run away from failure headlong into small adventures, like drives into the country to count the rails on a track with my train-crazy son. Like last-blast fully clothed afternoons at a splash pad, with all the other moms looking at me like I'm crazy, they fully prepared with their beach towels and their kids in swimsuits and goggles, and mine the crazy lady's kids dripping wet in jeans and t-shirts.

I don't know, really, if I'm teaching them to be spontaneous joy addicts or just social outcasts. I don't know if I'm teaching them the same bottling-up-pain coping I employ or if I'm showing them that you can salvage something out of a day lost to that deep ache after all. All I know is when the day ends, we are all smiling. The kitchen is still messy, but we're laughing in bed together under the comforter watching The Voice and trying to guess who's going to win the latest vocal battle. I haven't solved any of my real problems, I suppose, but I've enjoyed life anyway. Lived it. This day I lived. This day I smiled. This day I wasn't crushed by the granite boulder of a prisoner's existence. Today I was free for a while. Today I forgot for a time.

I'm trying to believe this is what it means to grasp the Promise - that I'm washed clean as snow, that all my past is forgotten in the outpouring of Love from the Cross. If He remembers it no more, do I really have to (Isaiah 43:25)? Do I have to go back there? Do I have to unleash those sorrows, work through them to truly be free of them? Or can I just shrug them off like old clothes, put on the new ones He's offered me (Colossians 3)? It is a crazy life, this Saved life, isn't it? Who cares if people stare? I don't have to drown in the pool of my suffering, because He's pulled me out of the mire and muck, and even if my glass is half empty for the rest of my life - the beauty of it is, that means it's still half full.

What I won't tell you on your first day of choir

They are seven and nine, strong and beautiful, and they can sing on pitch now, so we sign them up for the youth choir at church. This new church, it's traditions, they've felt like coming home. It's been my safe place after twisting, twitching in auditorium chairs in the dark, gritting teeth through sermons, muscles taught during worship music. I sat down in the hard-backed pew, the choir sang, we stood and sat, and prayed and confessed together, and I felt something open inside that had been locked tight for most of my life.

I used to wear glass around my neck like a worry stone heavy, grounding me in the present. My fingers found it every time I had to smile, had to speak, had to move through people. Glass must be stronger than rock, because I wore through the rock I held in my pocket for the same purpose, and my pendants are just shiny from all the anxious stroking. One is a whirl of color like a pinwheel of hope: through the grayest days of my recovery, I would look down into it's infinity and dream of living in color again.

The other is my Lake Superior. I carry a piece of this place I've loved, where I've rested, to remind me that peace is possible. I hold it tight between thumb and middle finger, like a piece of the land where hope will be found again. 

I haven't worn these much while sitting in the hard backed pews. But yesterday, my girls joined choir. It is an oddity of this era, that when your children join something, you join, too. Dropping the girls off, I was corralled into a small room adjacent to where they are rehearsing: mandatory parents meeting. We stand around the edges of the room, most of the moms sitting against the wall, in groups of three or four, a cacophony of laughter and the twitter of voices thunderous in the small space. I reach for my neck, my cheeks hot. But today my neck is bare. I finger an earring instead, try to put a neutral half smile on.

The meeting takes only 30 minutes. We are signing up to take turns in the choir rehearsals, chaperoning. All of it brings the familiar bile back up my throat, and my lips are tight now, not neutral any longer. It's not because I hate being an outsider. It's not because I wish I had a friend there to talk to. I don't feel left out. I am haggard with the desperate fear that I will be forced to be included.

Fear is not orderly. It doesn't measure threats and mete out just the right amount of panic. It is all or none. Put your thumb in a wound and twist, and there will be the metallic soulless scream, the tortured twisting of the body, the bunching up of the face. Put me in a room of church people, make me look in their eyes, listen to their conversations, and that is what is happening inside.

Oh, Father, how will this be possible? I have no desire to pass my wounds on to my children. I want to them to be in Sunday School, the choir, the pageants, VBS. I want them to feel included in your Body. I am much happier hanging out as the ugly little toenail on the Body of Christ. Yet I don't want to isolate my children down here by the dirt with me.

The meeting is over. The mothers gather around the rehearsal room door, peeking in at children. I give each of mine a passing smile. They can't see the glisten of tears through the glass. I walk down a quiet hall, give my silent scream. Wander back and find a recessed doorway and fold myself in it, sitting down there on the threshold, in the basement of this church. I am the woman battling, elbowing silently, isolated, through the throng, unclean, exhausted, reaching out to touch the hem of the Master's garment (Mark 5:25-34). Just a moment of healing, Christ. 

The children emerge, piling out the doors laughing, still singing. My oldest is her usual self: a new experience, however enjoyable, leaves her exhausted. Her younger sister is bouncing on the toes of her flats, talking a mile a minute. I put on the realest smile I can muster. For this - for you - I sacrifice.

What I will not tell you on your first day of choir is exactly that - this is a sacrifice, my children.

By the time I free myself from the throngs of the church, I am fleeing a haunted house, not a safe place. I run with the children across the park to the car, slam earbuds into ears, turn up the Grace Potter. My husband grasps my shoulder but I can't say it, I have no words now, I am still running inside. Tears pour, music flows, I find a rock in the bottom of my purse and I rub, I rub, my soul prays in sobs.

You would not let me be wounded again, Father?


We are home, and the cocoon of this day has surrounded me completely now, and I am huddled in the dark. My husband plays music out in the bright house, making dinner. He's out there, telling the night to leave me in peace. I hear the words of the song. Pull them to my neck to finger.

And you are the mother

The mother of your baby child

The one to whom you gave life

And you have your choices

And these are what make man great

His ladder to the stars

~Timshel, Mumford&Sons~

Hope breaking through

One misty, moisty morning,

when cloudy was the weather;

I chanced to meet an old man,

dressed all in leather.

He began to compliment

and I began to grin,

"How do you do?

How do you do?

Hod do you do?" again.

~One Misty Morning, children's nursery rhyme~

After a week of sun, we had rain and dreary skies yesterday. It was also my first day taking care of my home and children all by myself - the first time since late April. The weather matched my mood.

I'm a researcher at heart. Constantly on the look-out for trends, patterns, similarities, differences. I find myself applying a grid to this stage of poor mental health, looking for triggers and safe places, keys to shut things off and turn them on. Variables I can adjust.

The thing about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is that there are often multiple layers to it. For me it was the trauma of leaving our church along with the resurgence of memories of my childhood abuse. A month ago, my worst problems were flashbacks constantly triggered by weird things like flashlights and the smell of urine. I reacted to those flashbacks with anxiety that went through the roof, seemingly entirely out of control. During those times, it was the anxious worry that I would feel like this forever that drove me to attempt suicide. Sometimes the physical pain was my distraction, the flashbacks blurring in the background as I wounded myself.

The anxiety has ebbed away. The only time it is triggered now is in large groups (social anxiety). The blessing in this is I know beforehand when I'm probably going to face anxiety and can use the "as needed" medication to take me through that crisis. I also try to employ several tools from my "toolbox" of coping, like playing some piano before leaving for church, or painting something before we go out to eat.

And so, the sun leaks through as the anxiety dissipates. But bleeding through the background now is depression. My brain seems to be rebuilding in stages, from the worst traumas to the lesser, from the anxiety and panic to the slower, settled and quiet sadness that pervades the day.

Amy asked me, yesterday, what was making me sad. I have no answer to give, other than the grief over losing so many close friends. I think I am grieving all the way back to age 7, and slowly re-walking the path of life to grieve all the losses of 32 years.

I feel, in a very real sense, like being between storms. Last night ended better than the morning started. Today started well and I don't know what to expect - if sadness will strike, or if I can succumb to the joy all around me: lightening bugs, frogs singing, moonrise, misty hills, drops of water on my chive blossoms, children belly-laughing while they play on the XBox Kinect, warm coffee, maybe even a shower.

Slowly, slowly, He heals again.

I'm on the other side of the cloud

And life feels better somehow

The wind was harsh

The lightening worse

The rain, it left me blinded.

On the other side of the cloud,

where the blue sky is much bluer now,

I'm not afraid to be awake,

In fact, I want to live again.

I didn't have enough hands

to hold the pieces of my brokenness

Didn't have enough tears

to dry out my heart

Oh, the dark, dark cloud

didn't seem like it would every go away.

But now

I'm on the other side of the storm

Where the sunshine is wonderful warm

I've much to live and more to give

And laughter comes so easy

On the other side of bad weather

Where I'd love to write you all letters

Declaring Hope is always near

When darkness comes, do not fear

but remember...

There's the other side of the cloud.