Eat Your Peas

December 14, 2012 By
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“Eat your peas,” I tell my kids as a plate of lukewarm food sits in front of them. “They’re good for you.  And delicious.”  But no one really thinks peas are delicious.  They are just placeholders, something I opened from a can to fill space.

“But they are cold,” my daughter pouts.  “And you know very well that I don’t like peas.”  The fact that my daughter says things like “you know very well” and “if you don’t mind, I’d rather be excused” and in her free time dreams up song lyrics and imaginary worlds full of sparkles and iron gates with swirls – this alone I should cherish.  And yet all I want is for her to eat her peas because bath time is coming up on the evening schedule.  I toss away the remains of dinner to avoid a fight and allow her to eat applesauce against my better judgment.

I sigh at the waiting times.  I watch peas roll into the trash after dinner and I think to myself – what a waste.  I can’t see joy or light or give thanks and all I want is for bedtime to come so both kids are protected and safe. Sometimes it’s hard to sit through the raw edges of empty life spaces.  It is hard to be grateful for routine, mundane, headache-laden days. My head hurts and my soul hurts and this big world is full of heart-voids that I run around trying to plug up with duct tape, the edges frayed and worn.

Wait for the Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord! Psalm 27:14 

I hate waiting.  The very definition of wait is to remain or rest in expectation. But another definition is to delay, or remain temporarily neglected, like “the vacation we planned for years will just have to wait.”  I can’t just remain at rest with anticipation. I’m not good in this space. I don’t have skills that others have to tolerate it, and I start to get anxious and nervous and pace around like a crazy person. When will it get here?  How can I fix it? Is there a way I can hurry up this process?  Eat your peas already! It reflects so loudly my own anxiousness.  What am I afraid of?  Why am I not able to accept things that I cannot change?

Wait on the Lord.  In everything, give thanks.  It’s a refrain that repeats like an annoying Christmas tune I can’t stop humming.  Yes, yes.  Thanks for children and a home and health and all that business.  Lists and lists of joyful things.  Someday my prince will come and life will turn up roses and patience is a virtue. Jesus gave thanks and Ann Voskamp gives thanks and everything is filled with joy and thanksgiving and waiting for the child to be born under a shining star.  Blogs and books and little plaques with words.  Give thanks!  Find joy!  Tis the season!

And yet life is so full of hurt that it’s painful to sit down on all the tacks.  In my own life, I’m so focused on damage that I can’t keep enough duct tape around, constantly plugging and ripping and mending holes.  Then I pace around and bite my nails to make the time go by faster.  Bath time is a comin, kids.  Let’s get this dinner thing wrapped up.  I guess I don’t trust God’s big enough, or strong enough, to patch me.

And yet God is big enough.  He is powerful enough.  I don’t need to be in charge this time.  I stand up, red and blotchy from the tape marks, and begin to laugh.  Through my tear-stained eyes I laugh and dance to Taylor Swift with my sweet little girl and suddenly find myself offering a thousand little thanks.

Thank you dear Father, for this Christ child, who was half-man and half-God.  Thank you for peas and curling irons and children with big thinking brains.  Thank you for the ability to walk and write and drink clean water. Thank you for love.  Thank you for my warrior friends who pick up my deadweight and carry it on their backs until I can stand again.  Thank you for messages woven throughout the world in signs and emails and articles and dreams.  Thank you for the bible, that instructs me when I need an operating manual.  Thank you for never-ending grace that washes me clean.

The next time we eat peas, it will be a conscious act.  I will buy them split and simmer them with ham and garlic and sautéed vegetables.  I will spoon them in between my hungry lips and I will be grateful for their warm, comforting saltiness.  There is even hope for peas.

Sometimes it’s hard to wait in periods of stillness.  It’s hard to give thanks in those times.  That’s okay.  Keep telling yourself it’s wise and true, so that when your eyes are opened, you can see that angels were carrying you through the dark and warrior friends were shouldering so much of your heavy.  Then you will begin to smile again, and be thankful for God’s far-reaching mercies, and say thanks to the world and God and little green peas. There is no need for me to manipulate solutions and fix my own holes.

God’s bigger than you think.  Wait for him to do his work.  And in all things dance, and sing, and eat your peas.  Because they are delicious, after all. 

—

photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/haprog/4002891340/

Filed Under: Cooking, Inspirational, Love, Religion, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,

Wings

December 7, 2012 By

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“Surely He shall deliver you from the snare of the fowler and from the perilous pestilence. He shall cover you with His feathers, and under His wings you shall take refuge.”


Psalm 91:3-4

I’ve heard it said that God meets us in our darkest hour.  I don’t think he meets us there, like two respectable gentlemen before a dual.  It’s not like you call God up for coffee and you both sit on opposite ends of a couch making small talk.   You good?  I’ve been better.  You use two sugars, too?  Get out!

Maybe you and God have coffee.  That sounds very civilized.  I am the messy one who turns my face from truth and ends up worshiping at my own alter, from my bloody birth to dyed roots, running for the edge and jumping off sixteen stories of a hard-fought and so-called-perfect life.  I fall into depths so low I can’t breathe, my chest burning and my mind paralyzed by fear.  The pavement is coming up quick and I wonder if it will hurt but it’s so dark the timing is off and I just want to make the pain go away. Surely this blow will just crush me like the coward I have become.  And yet in this soul-battle I turn to see a wing, just a flash of it as it slows me down and breathes new life into my hyperventilating lungs. How can one see the corner of a wing in total blackness?  How did God know I needed saving?

Jesus was born out of human blood and walked the dusty roads of his chosen people with his God-trinity right under his epidermis.  Such knowledge would have burst out of my mouth like a secret and my heart would have exploded in tiny pieces because I lack patience and restraint and all other things the bible says are revered and godly and good.  I’m just a Gentile sitting in the crowd waiting for Jesus to come take mercy on this fallen soul and I keep looking for wings that never appear.  I scowl at the notion that things fly because all I see around me keeps falling into the ocean, sinking like a treasure ship.  Jesus talks of mustard seeds and yet I am forever searching and running for the ledge.

When God’s stories were laid down like lines in the sand and truth was finally self-evident, when lives were transformed like loaves and fishes, Jesus died hanging limp with a crown of thorns.  And yet wings lifted him, and carried him from the tomb.

God’s truth is eternal and never fails through the weeping darkness and blackest nights.  And when we fall from grace with blood oozing from our tongues and our crumpled hearts are left in a pile of rubble, hate rising to our chests, we cower.  We just allow ourselves to freefall into apathy.

And yet Gospel wings spread out before us wide.

One night, Jesus was born under the brilliance of angels.  Instead of basking in this truth, we flip over in bed, grasping this world with our tight curled little fingers and fretting about money and marriage and health and holiday parties.  We say it’s yours, Lord as we grab our own daily agenda and hold tight.

But in darkness you can’t see who’s holding what and where the bottom is, and God says it’s okay to just let go, uncurl your fingers, and let it all slip away.  He meets us in this bloody blackness because it’s the only place left for us to turn and he says Sweet child, I’ve been here all along, you just couldn’t see it in your own reflection.  God was born of blood and died of blood and washes ours clean with his grace. His feathers tickle our cheek as big hearty belly laughs bubble from our chest and we realize we are new creations, lifted and renewed and can soar like eagles.  We will run and not grow weary, and will walk and not be faint (Isaiah 40:31).

Oh, those brilliant wings.  They were there in a dark night in Bethlehem and they were there in the courts of Jerusalem and they are here in the freefall, in the broken-down trailer in Alabama and the street corners of Midtown and the stench-laden cardboard boxes of Kingston, Jamaica.  Even the girl typing away on the computer in a stone house on a rural road where children are tucked in bad and bibles are laid open and dinner is half-eaten.  In whatever brokenness is dark and hopeless.

God catches us wherever we fall. 

—

photo credit:

Wings of the fallen

Filed Under: Inspirational, Religion, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,

Little Boys

November 15, 2012 By

I cradle his head in my forearm, his droopy eyes and fat cheeks soft.  I lay my cheek against his and smell his quick honey breath.  It’s a small space between love and hurt because sometimes I want to squeeze him so tight the air squishes out and I’m left with a rag doll and I think how can I love this boy until the end of time?  I rock and rock like a ticking clock even though he’s asleep by now because I don’t want to break the spell.  I praise God for this magic who is a blessing.

At midnight I hear his cries, the pacifer, I dropped it, momma, and I run into shush him back.  And when he crawls into my king-sized dreams I welcome him in, even though he kicks and pats my face and says in a whisper are you awake?  Are you awake, momma?  He flips and tucks and pats me to sleep because that is the world of one who is two.

But I’m awake and angry at this boy for always yelling and kicking and screaming I want dat and never listening to my incessant pleas.  I want to make it stop as I run him back to the time-out chair.  Teeth are for chewing, not for sister’s arm, I say as I pull him back to a place of reverence.  He pouts and swings his legs and says he’s sorry.  He wraps his arms around my parched throat and says I wuv you mommy and I am suddenly filled, love pouring and drenching and filling what was never really empty to begin with.

Having a little girl is sweet and pink and bubbly but having a son is a different animal and it’s an Achilles heel.  I want to stay hunkered down in his devotion and I place my hand over his little child kisses like I can preserve them there, fossils of when mommy was everything and nothing else mattered. I want them tattooed on my cheek so I can see them there and weep.

This love cripples me so. Someday he will leave – they both will – and it reminds me again that there’s a small space between love and hurt and sometimes they happen at the same time and that’s okay.  So I rock and shush and sing and pray.  Lord help me see the beauty of spilled juice and toilet paper heaps and rocking babies.  It’s so precious and warm and soft.

Hurt or no hurt, it’s more love after all.

Filed Under: Inspirational, Love, Motherhood, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,

Free the bird

November 12, 2012 By

Not everyone is an artist.  It must be frustrating to be on the outside.  To fail to understand that artists need to create things.  That without the process of creating, their world fails to have meaning.  Artists create to feel.  They create to be sane and stop the ticking and urging and pulsing that comes during the in-between.

For those supporters and wives and husbands, for heaven’s sakes give them a knife to chisel.  Give them a canvas and blank page and stage with lights. Help them be who they were meant to be.  Because artists will create with or without you.  They will ignore reality and drag food to their hovel and make all things work around their craft like a bear protects her young.  It’s primal and essential to their very existence.  Screw the world.  They will stay up all night building paper houses.

 Because to them, it’s the only true thing they’ve ever known.

A sculptor sees an eagle buried in a rock and chips away to find it, smoothing and chiseling and releasing the wing and feather and beak.  If the hammer is broken they’ll grab a rock or a mallet in order to free the poor thing.  Because birds need to soar.  And to the painter who sees the sky as a canvas and clouds bursts of oil, they brush before they speak.  In their dreams they are forever layering and smoothing and adding or taking away.  And to strip them of paint means you’ll find them in fields like savages, beating and rubbing berries against flint to release color.  So they can sort out chaos and form shapes and get the ugly out of their head and onto something.  So they can be real.  Honest.  As true as the clouds that are locked in their minds.

And oh, how the blank page calls.  A writer runs and twitches and hurls himself toward words so he can unscramble the nonsense.  So he can show the world what he sees – the harvest moon plump and drunk.  The dimples of a woman’s lower back and the searing fierceness of mountains that will never be climbed.  Stories are spelled out in furious rhythm while he eats oatmeal or waits in line at the dry-cleaners or takes a shower.  He shakes his head and screams out loud and drives fast.  But they never leave.  He is always forming and creating and painting.   And he can’t breathe until the words are settled.  Nestled down on the page where they belong.  He runs inside and throws down his day, typing to free the bird.

Some think it’s a curse to be an artist.  To be shackled with feelings of creation. I think it’s a gift.  To have eyes that see what others don’t.  To feel for brief intervals a fullness and completeness that you are doing what you are truly meant to do.  What God intended.  What your soul was designed for.

My husband is a brilliant lawyer.  He won’t admit it, but he knows it is true.  He speaks and builds and has the gift of crescendo and cadence that most do not.  The feeling he gets when persuasion draws people in, through a mastery of facts and law and the art of knowing rhythm and timing and when to precisely strike after the strategic pregnant pause– this is magic.  He must feel on top of the world, and he knows he was built for this.   My dear kindred soul, I understand you.  I am you.  We can be nothing but who we are. 

Artists are lonely souls.  They don’t do it for fame or applause or attention.  They are artists because they have to be.  Because their life depends on it.  Because if they don’t do it, they feel lost and weary and worn.  We are all born with eyes to see the needs around us.  To put food on the table and clothe our offspring and develop friendships.  We understand the relevance of making a living and fixing leaky pipes and cleaning house.  And yet to some, God gives a different sort of vision. We owe it to Him to create what he puts on our hearts.  For our own sanity.  For the betterment of the world.   But mostly, for His glory. 

I have but one eye that works, the other ravished with cancer.  So I pry it open with stilts to continue to see, and draw with words, and sing.  To feel creation and music and stories pulse through my veins.  It makes me settled, and strangely alive.  It sets me free.

Encourage artists.  Help them do what they are designed to do.  Because the world needs more beauty.  More eagles and sunsets and books that make us weep. God is using humans to show but a snapshot of heaven.  Let them paint and write and speak and sing.

Honor their high calling.  

—

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/novaskola/3940350178/sizes/m/in/photostream/

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Billboards

November 9, 2012 By

I loathe hypocrites.  I hate them so much I wish I could spit on them and tell them that they can’t love Jesus on one hand and say they hate Democrats on the other. These people raise their arms on Sunday and wish the Mormons would move to Canada.  They tsk, tsk their way to Monday by whispering that gay people are harmful, rotten folk.  It’s a black-and-white billboard that screams “Don’t believe me!  I’m a walking double standard!  My God is only as good and powerful and forgiving as I allow!”

It’s no wonder why so many people shun religion.

I’m just as bad. I might not hate Mormons or hold picket signs at abortion clinics, but I have my own brand of ugly.  I accept that Christ can wash clean a heart, but it’s so terribly hard for me to forgive.  I nod my head that we should love freely and give of self, and yet I’m as self-centered as they come. I see the world through my own eyes because they are mostly right.  I mean come on.  If I ruled the world, it would be a much better place.  No one would contradict me, we’d all agree mushrooms are icky, everyone would listen to folk music on Wednesdays, and coffee would always be served hot with two raw sugars.  Can I get a hell yeah?

I like to think of my own ideas as far superior to most like-minded people.  So what if my plan has actual deficiencies, or that another human being can actually make a point that is equal and as valid as my own.  If it differs from my own ideas, I pout and demand and bring up my version at every possible opportunity.  Like a tiny sword a millimeter long, it might not kill.  But it scratches and itches and penetrates a tiny bit of skin over and over until the victim just caves in from the torture.

I suppose I am also one of those billboards that must sound to God like nails on a chalkboard.  Please do it my way.  I have the answers.  Sweet people around me, you are so cute and lovable but quite simply wrong.  I need to control something to make my life feel important.  I don’t show this interior self to everyone. I like to think of myself as magnanimous and loving and accepting of differences.  And yet in the hole of my own little world I’m a selfish being who likes to direct outcomes.  I use a lot of “I” and not a lot of “us.”

You and me?  Well we are all in this together. 

We are all hypocrites.  Human beings are remarkably great at some things and so pitifully bad at others. And as it turns out we can’t label others with this title because we’d only be marking on ourselves.  My 6-year-old told me over breakfast today that we all have “the sin sickness” that came from Adam and Eve eating the apple.  It’s true, sweet girl. We all have the sickness that comes from sin, and to some extent we all say one thing and do something else so insanely off-course.

But it’s never too late.  We can always change direction, and apologize, and forgive. We can lay down our picket signs and realize that without mercy we are all just broken-down hypocrites, screaming loudly and yet saying nothing.  To witness, we must serve.  To praise, we must be quiet.  To change, we must break down our old selves and admit we are wrong.

We don’t need to control the world.  We submit it all to Him, and accept the outcome with grace and humility.  He is the master and orchestrator of all that is good.  We are just innocuous players, along for the ride with the top down, laughing at the billboards along the highway.

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photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/codyr/234976867/

Filed Under: Inspirational, Love, Religion Tagged With: , , , ,

Rose-colored dreams

November 5, 2012 By

Sometimes I dream about silly things, meaningless combinations of people and daily routines and journeys to nowhere.  It’s like my brain can’t handle all the data and throws it together in perverted ways, going shopping for shoes while eating broccoli and meeting my husband for drinks without wearing pants.

Occasionally there is a peace that washes over my soul like blue waves.  I wake up softly, like on the shores of Maine, and flip over on the pillow with a sigh.  I thank God for coffee and warmth and softness, and it’s these moments I reach for him, lying beside me, to feel his touch.  These dreams are rich in color.  Green soothes my tattered nerves and Red rises up live lava from the underbelly of some great unknown.  Yellow bursts from clouds and Dark Violet erupts from the blackest of darkness.   Color is opera and it flows through my subconscious like a rich aria, and all I can do is be present in it, wallowing inside, basking in the glory.

And then the nightmares come.  Images that stain and bleed and cut so deeply I wake up gasping for breath.  I can’t shed the pictures and I end up churning and weeping and praying for my brain to un-pixilate the data.  It’s after these restless nights I wake alone in an empty bed with a dusty heart.  I want to shake these dreams free, angry at myself for conjuring up unwelcome images.  And yet they are all part of me, the waking and the sleeping and the living and the dead.  The sweet and the wholesome and the angry burning fire that consumes.

They all have their place, really.  The silly and the rich and the dark are all woven together to show what our minds are thinking while our bodies rest.  I had a dream once that a bomb landed in our home but didn’t detonate, and I went to the attic and clung to what I loved the most.  The very next day my life totally changed.  The bomb went off.  Pieces scattered.  I saw it coming.

I often lay in bed at night, wanting to find truth.  I pray and I read and mull over the day.  But truth is never evident in the twilight.  It’s only revealed after my subconscious repeats the day’s pattern a few thousand times.  When my body stops moving long enough to let God in.  And in the morning, things are clearer.  Not always more beautiful, mind you, but clearer.  Like a direction has been forged.

I don’t like the terror: I want to cling to the aria.  And yet we don’t get to choose these things.  We dream what we need to see in order to process life around us, and this is one thing we can’t control.  It’s a lesson to pay more attention to what your internal soul is trying to say.  To allow God a venue.  To hear the hard stuff.  Because it’s through the hard stuff that you grow, and change, and become stronger.

Dreams are not always rose-colored glasses.  Sometimes the rose turns dead and glasses break and we wake up hurting.  And yet there is hope that someday in the future we’ll wake up in Maine again.  That love will be there to hold onto.  That in time, the colors will return in waves, and we’ll smile in the knowledge that our souls are happy.  That we listened to truth.  And we’ll all dream about going to dinner without any pants while eating asparagus ice cream.

Oh my dear soul.  Let the silly come. 

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Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/zigazou76/6855067667/sizes/m/in/photostream/

Filed Under: Love, My life Tagged With: , , , , ,

When sin puts down roots

October 9, 2012 By

I think it’s a disservice to teach our children that good rides around on a white horse and evil lurks in shadows.  When they grow older, they will be attracted to what is sparkling and beautiful.  They will think that church always means goodness and prayer pills are popped for headaches and sour stomachs.   They might think that shiny happy people would just naturally have pure intentions, and fail to see truth.

Because evil lurks in beautiful things.

Sin is alluring, my sweet children, pushing a small seed into a pure heart, surrounded by warmth and lifeblood and privacy. A woman’s breast and curved back.  The shiny feel of money.  A message that tickles your inner euphoria and make you think, just this once.  It’s harmless.  No one will ever know.  The devil sticks his tentacles around the vessels and grows ever stronger, wrapping and leafing and blooming into a great darkness. And for a moment, during the pulsing and the beating and the loving and the looking, there is a sense of power.  Everyone is on even footing. No one is sanctimonious.

And just like that the heart grows hard, choked out by all the weeds and guilt and shame.  Out of it flows tainted blood and it’s no longer full of grace.  Because the heart is the key to power.  Sampson was stripped of it.  We are all bound by it.

It’s where evil grows best.

Jesus said that what comes out of a person is what defiles them, not what’s put in.  “For it is from within, out of a person’s heart, that evil thoughts come – sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance, and folly. All these evils come from inside and defile a person.” Mark 7:21-23. But what if darkness has grown so deep and so intertwined that the flesh is rotten underneath?  How can one ever crack open their chest and pull it from the roots?

I honestly have a hard time answering that question.  I hear things like be washed in the life-saving blood of the lamb, but try telling an adulterer this odd phrase as a helpful pocket tool of wisdom and watch them run for cover.  Try to find a way to explain the power of Christ or how hearts can be healed or how darkness abhors the light. It falls on deaf ears, because old habits die hard.  Humiliation and addiction are so strong that it’s hard to pull against them long enough to get a word in.

But the truth is more powerful than evil.  My daughter attends a Christian school, and last year I heard many renditions of Psalm 139. I remembered these words being uttered from my six-year-old’s tongue and they suddenly took on new meaning.   You have searched me, oh Lord, and you know me.   For where can I go from your spirit?  Where can I flee from your presence?  Surely the darkness will hide me, and the light becomes night around me.  But even the darkness will not be dark to you.

God knows the heart.  He sees the trunk of sin.  There isn’t anyone too broken to kneel down and pray those words in Ezekiel that a heart can be renewed.  There is no sin too great and deep to be forgiven.  Jesus did it over and over.  Put away your stones.  Walk away from judgment.  Accept the grace and mercy and new blood that so naturally flows from a pure heart.

Evil is everywhere, my children, and we must simply be strong enough to recognize it.  To pull it toward the light.  To ask God to rip it from the roots with humility and honesty.  And then we are finished.  Our jobs are done.  Our prayers are laid bare.

God can handle the rest. 

—

photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/e-coli/5519738897/

Filed Under: Religion Tagged With: , , , ,

Herd Jumpers

October 3, 2012 By

Humans are inherently pack animals.  I think it’s bred into our souls to walk together in groups.  Hillary Clinton says it takes a village to raise a child, and even Jesus chose twelve disciples to hang with.  We all huddle together as families, and units, and choose folks that think and eat and pray like we do.  When we stray too far from the herd, we are weak and vulnerable.  Wolves surround us and start closing in.  It’s safer to stay hunkered down in the middle.

And yet safe is boring.  So I start breaking free. 

I’m writing at (in)courage today, an amazing place where faith and community collide.  You can check out the full article HERE.

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photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/horiavarlan/4833864060/sizes/m/in/photostream/

Filed Under: Friendships, Inspirational, My life, Religion, Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,

Dirt

September 21, 2012 By

It’s so nice to see my children playing with dirt and plants and rocks and sticks.  This what I wanted when I had children – to see them use their little imaginations and explore the world around them. No television for my kids.  Nosiree.  Let ‘em get their hands dirty.

I see my daughter hauling the new Britta pitcher from our kitchen to the front porch to make chocolate smoothies. She’s loading it up with dirt and rocks.  Wait just a minute.

Then my son begins to yank off all the blooms from the plumeria with glee, just ripping and pulling and throwing them all around with wild abandon.  One after another he yanks at them like he’s some sort of flower executioner.  The louder I yell, the more he plucks.

“For the salad! It’s for the salad!” he screams. I can’t do anything about it now, their little heads lying on our front walk like corpses.

I turn around to see my daughter creating salsa with rosemary leaves and sticks, and she somehow weaseled her way past me into the kitchen again for the pottery barn dishes to use as place settings.  How do they do all this so fast?  Do they have superpowers?

“This has gone too far,” I say.  I walk over to remove the plates and I hear my daughter yelling for her brother to stop.  He has turned on the water hose and is spraying her down, trying to aim his hose into the pitcher she’s holding in her hands.  By now my kids are sopping wet and dirty from head to toe and that t-shirt from Janie and Jack is now stained and beyond repair.

I force both of them to the porch and run inside to get the broom, but now that the smoothies are done they most certainly must be tested.  Suddenly they are pouring the goopy mess into little cups, runny mud oozing over the sides and on our front porch to be dried into concrete.  These are so chocolaty, they say.  You simply must have one. I strip them both down and make them take baths before dinner.

After baths, they sit watching Arthur and I’m so thankful for television and quiet and warm bubble baths that make things right again.

It all sounded so good at the time.

 

A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood.

-Rachel Carson,

Filed Under: Motherhood, My life, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,

Letting Go

September 20, 2012 By

my daughter, now six

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Being a writer is hard.  I love the feeling late at night when I finish an essay, like I crossed a finish line or finally caught a breath of mountain air.  I like getting positive feedback as a balm to my itchy insecurities.  And when I sent my novel – my baby child that stole nights and weekends and so many rivers of tears– off to my editor, I was grateful when she said it’s good.  It’s actually really good.  And yet agents email me saying “it’s not you, it’s us” and “we are so sorry for this rather impersonal rejection.”  It’s a literary black hole, and you have to hold onto the railing to keep from being swept under.

I wish I could roll up my sleeves and go have a meeting with someone.  I wish I could just go make something happen. I’d curl my hair and put on my heels and pound my fist on a desk.  Progress will be made.  Things will crawl off dead center because I know how to make people jump.  I got a job once by making an appointment with the CEO.  Somehow a job was created.  A job I dreamed up in my head and convinced them they needed.

And yet here I sit alone, eating pistachios and drinking coffee and reading other people’s words.  I try and let writers inspire me, and be thankful for their successes, and try and feed on the natural creativity that follows.  I tell myself that God is listening and my blog followers are listening and these things matter.  And yet my mind wanders off to bad places – dark caves where I’m nothing and my life is insignificant and my words are just cheap imitations.

I think about that time six years ago, when I lay in a hospital bed staring at the ceiling tile.  After a prolonged labor and emergency c-section she was finally given to me, this beautiful gift from God that I didn’t deserve.  She was so white and angelic and I wouldn’t let her go.  But days after arriving home with my first-born they came to take me away, on some damn stretcher that held heart victims and dead people.  There were doctors and surgeons and tests.  There were re-incisions and pains and organs being shut down.  I just kept looking at that ceiling tile, thinking God just wouldn’t do this to me and he couldn’t possibly let me die.  Not now.  Not like this.  I’ve worked so hard, remember, Lord?  I make things happen. Are you listening up there?

I asked for the breast pump, my body filled with drugs and steroids and horrible chemicals of all types, and forced that milk out through excruciating tears as each surge of the pump caused my scarred and infected abdomen to seize.  But I was a fighter, and this wouldn’t break me.

See, God?  This is what you’d be saving. 

One night, a nurse came in.  She looked right through me. You need to let go, she said.  You need to let God to take over. I was angry.  I was pissed off at her accusations.  Who the hell are you, all up in my business about faith?  Have you not seen how hard I’ve worked?  Have you not seen my tears and heard my prayers? I am dying here, woman, with the fever and the infection and the chills.  Can’t you see that I’m trying?  Can’t you see I’ve not seen my baby’s face for weeks and this just isn’t working like I planned and I’m so damn sick of this place?  Can’t you see that I have this tube in my throat and my husband isn’t eating and it just never ceases?  Can’t you see that I don’t want to see a picture of her, my perfect three-week-old daughter, because it fills me with rage and sadness? Isn’t this enough?

You have to let it go.

I think about that night when I get this way.  When I think I’m in charge.  When I keep pounding away on the keyboard like the surging breast pump.  When the devil whispers in my ear that my words don’t matter and a book deal is the brass ring and all this is just a big vat of wasted time.

Stand back, Devil. 

It all matters.  My words matter.  My life matters.  Whether it’s typing or living or birthing or dying, we all just have to let go.  We aren’t the one making things happen. God makes things happen. We are just the instruments of his peace.

Filed Under: Inspirational, Motherhood, My life, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,

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