On Wednesday, I thought I’d be spending this Saturday doing two things: brunch at The Perch with the girls to celebrate Melissa‘s birthday, and celebrating the wedding of our friend Nathan‘s mom.
Then my phone rang at 4 am Thursday.
So, today, I sat with my best friend and held her hand as she said goodbye to her mom.
The bruises on my knuckles, when they appear tomorrow, will be no matter at all.
For the second time in five days, off we went to the zoo. Nathan was the organizer of this trip, and reminded me that he’s the only teacher I know who WANTS to hang out with a very select few of his students on Spring Break. We had a fun time (NO GIANT PLAYGROUND) catching up, handling the various tantrums, watching Whitney text 2,000 words per minute, and racing the strollers to the zoo exit (Nathan and I will NOT be participating in any 5Ks anytime soon–it was pretty pitiful how out of breath we were, but it got Baby Girl to stop screaming, which was the point).
This is Micah’s birthday week (which will be celebrated this year at Bounce U, the scene of all my sensory nightmares–thank you very much Nathan), which means it’s been three years since Kathy died. I hate to sound like a broken record, but sometimes I just don’t believe it really actually happened. I just don’t. These are always hard weeks for Nathan, and this time is no different. I just hate it. If there was ever anything I wish I could fix, wish I could undo, this would be one of those things. I keep having these awful dreams that take days to shake. I have a few images that I can’t get rid of, and I know Nathan and Kathy’s family have thousands more that are even worse. Two Sundays ago, someone was wearing this certain T-shirt that I associate with that day, and I thought I was going to have a panic attack. I simply don’t get it. Nathan is exactly the father he should be–I just always see someone missing. I know he does, too. I won’t tell his story here (and obviously his grief trumps mine by 1000%), but I am still really processing this. And not well much of the time.
But, every so often, her son snatches a humongous buttered breadstick from my plate like a feral animal and shoves the entire thing in his mouth before I can blink, and I just have to laugh. Come to think of it, he snatches food off my plate a lot. And he calls me ‘Nessa.
That helps a lot.
ETA: I posted this, deleted it pretty much immediately, and now I’m putting it back up. You know what? That’s where I was that day, healthy or not. It’s not where I am today, and the thing is whiny and self-serving, but that’s the purpose of a vent in the first place, right? It may come back down, but for right now it stays.
I’m sorry–this is going to be one of those cryptic vents. Do they still have those places where you can pay to go and smash a few boxes full of dishes? THAT SOUNDS FABULOUS right about now. It was a rough night.
I had this conversation just yesterday with two empathetic friends, so at least I know other people lose it sometimes, too. We even laughed about it. Maybe my memory and perceptions are skewed on this, but I’ve always seen myself as someone who is (most of the time) even and collected. When I would see other people flip out, even if I was right there in the middle of it and involved, seeing someone totally lose their cool and throw what amounted to an adult temper tantrum always made me just “click off” any frustrations I was feeling and let me find the ability to pull it together enough to just handle the situation and get on with it. Practical to a fault.
I don’t think I’m that person anymore. When I’m frustated, I feel like a ticking time bomb. I feel selfish and unreasonable; I feel like my emotions are not in sync with what’s going on and they’re often just firing randomly. I’m anxious in the face of nothing in particular, and completely ice-cold calm when I should probably be doing a good amount of justified freaking out. I haven’t figured out how to reset myself and start acting like I know I should when I should.
I know none of this makes any sense. It sounds about the same in my head, believe me, like white noise.
There. I feel better.
Now, I’m going to schedule this for later so I can decide if I should even post it or not. It helps to get it out, even just a little bit of it.
…and your child asks you a question you’re not prepared to answer. Sometimes, a conversation just cuts you. This was one of them. I’m pretty much shredded.
I thought I was just driving to church, but Baby Girl (who just turned four-AND-WHEN-WILL-I-BE-FIVE??? and probably needs a new, more fitting blog moniker) was thinking about the care package being assembled on the kitchen table at home. I had (shocker) intended to have it in the mail by now, but we’ve been saving pictures BG draws for her buddy Tim, picking up lots of fun and practical things (you know–deodorant, good snacks, and fantasy football magazines), and choosing photos to print. She was there when we saw him off at the base this summer (and it was all I could do to keep her off that bus, believe me) and she understands he’s far away, but I have intentionally not talked to her about why he’s gone and what he’s doing. She hasn’t asked, actually.
Today, out of nowhere, she shot a barrage of questions at me about where he is and when he’s coming back.
Sidebar: There have been a few select times when I found myself thinking, “Oh, I hope I can just get this conversation OVER WITH and answer her question without saying anything that will screw her up too, too badly.” I know that’s a little overly dramatic and she’s so very young and probably will never remember anything I say right now, but I have been struck so hard lately with her shining innocence and impressionable little mind. I mean, at this age, I could teach her (literally almost) anything, and she will just…BELIEVE it. Just because I told her it was so. That is just…wow. What an awesome responsibility. Of course, I know I haven’t even hit the really, truly hard questions yet. Good luck with that, future self.
Anyway, to make a long story short, we spent the drive talking about deserts, wars, fighting, good guys, bad guys, guns, maps, protection, and missing people you love. You think you know how you feel about war? I don’t care what side you find yourself on, try explaining it to a four year old. Try explaining to a four year old in the context of someone she loves. It was one of the hardest things I’ve done in a long time. I wanted to be honest, but also not give her more than she needed to know or more than she was asking (which is where I usually err).
Enter tightrope.
In the end, she told me that she would like to go there (on the bus she saw, of course) and teach them how to lasso people who want to fight, and that she would take lots of cold water so that Tim and his friends would not be thirsty in the hot desert.
Then she asked me what kind of snack they would have in Sunday School.
And when, by the way, will she be five, because she has been WAITING A LONG TIME.
Whew.
You know what?
I talk too much.
I know. This is not news to anyone but me, I imagine.
I was at lunch yesterday with a rowdy and awesome group of people, and someone said something that made me think. It was a totally innocent comment about something else entirely, but I realized (well, remembered) that people hang on to our words and associate us with them. It also reminded me that I have no business giving anyone relationship advice, but that’s another story for another day. Now, I’ve never been someone who is indifferent or has any trouble forming an opinion on anything, really. If you are one of those people who just shrugs and says, “I don’t care…” I DON”T GET YOU. AT ALL. If I don’t already have an opinion, I can put a little thought into it and have one. Done. Easy-peasy. Paint color? Pick this one. Project? Here’s how we approach it. Problem? Here’s what you should do. Sometimes to my detriment, but the opinions are there. To be perfectly honest, I’ve always thought of it as an advantage. I’m typically decisive and productive, it makes me a good planner, I can be a leader at work, etc. However, I know it’s also a problem for me. I’ve always associated being silent with being passive. Passivity makes me remarkably uncomfortable.
I think about this whenever I’m around my immediate family for a longer period of time, but then I pretty much just shove it to the back of my mind. We are all talkers–and we talk loudly and ALL OVER AND AROUND AND ON TOP OF each other. It never seems to bother us, but I really only seem to be able to tolerate it with them. It’s also incredibly annoying to watch, I know.
My three biggest pet peeves:
Hello, double standard much? I know. Why is it that the things we do are often the very same things that EXHAUST us when other people do them?
I spend too much time talking and not nearly enough time listening. I complain about the lack of silence and tranquility in my life, and I am often the one who just can’t be quiet. If I do happen to get a small moment to myself, I’m often on the computer/the phone/the iPod/Pandora. I complain that I can’t even hear myself think, and then fail to even try to listen.
Not every one of my many opinions needs to be heard. Not every person in my little circle needs to hear what I’m thinking about every little thing at every given moment. Not every thought I have needs to be voiced. My point of view is not always the right one, and I’d do well to remember that. This is a hard one for me. My ideas always sound brilliant in my head, of course.
Easier said than done, but I’m going to try it out for a while.
2:00 am.
3:00 am.
4:00 am.
Ugh.
I have seen these hours roll around on the clock more in the past few months than, well, any other time I can remember. I don’t know about your house, but the conversations that happen around here during these hours are the types of conversations that make you want to stab your eyes out with the nearest available kitchen utensil. No good can come of it, I’m confident. Between the hours of 1 am and 7 am, my normally lovely personality is pretty much reduced to grunts, eye rolls, and that special edge-of-crazy feeling when you have a newborn around and only sleep in 30 minute stretches for days on end. The only upside is that I lose all desire to have the last word in whatever is being “discussed,” a desire that is normally so strong in me that my oldest friends have learned it’s just easier to let me have it. 
Do you have “discussions” at your house? I bet you do.
As a bonus, I keep having these dreams that just make me tired. I’m either waiting tables and can’t remember how to get people their drinks for hours and hours (I think this is my version of the classic ”came to school naked” dream), or I’m walking the endless circle at Opry Mills Mall looking for something I can’t find (I actually went to that mall last night, so maybe that one will go away for a while–maybe the act of shopping there will get it out of my mind…any excuse to shop, really).
All this sleep insanity is making me a little manic during the day, which is actually not so bad. There’s a lot to be done.
So, welcome to the insomniac party. If you want to join in, please show some manners and at least bring me some drugs. I think I could ignore the possibility of dangerous headline-worthy side effects for a finite period of time in order to get some decent sleep.
Well, for starters, I suddenly find myself in Nashville again.
I have been writing this post in my head for about a week, and it just will. not. write. It always ends up in the trash file, because there are just too many eyes to see it. I know, I’m the one who puts it out there for the world to see. I know, I know. I struggle with that, too. I need an anonymous unloading blog. Duly noted… Never have I been able to find the balance between saying too much and leaving too much unsaid. Over the past several months, I’ve been constantly bouncing between wishing I hadn’t said something that I did say and wishing I could find the words to find what I do need to say. The end result has been pretty much one of two things, most of the time: sullen silences or unintelligible tirades. Sorry to you if you’ve gotten both–it sort of swings from hour to hour. Either way, I haven’t gotten that one down just yet. CLEARLY. I’m either mentally clapping my hands over my mouth to keep it all in, or standing there like a moron with a brain full of everything but no words at all.
This time, I really do want to be careful what I say here. The shorter I keep it, the better chance I have of not saying something I’ll regret later. If you know me in the real world and want the whole gory story, feel free to call me and ask. The biggest change is that we relocated back to Nashville last week after Andrew was asked to step down from his position at Grace. In short, the elder team there felt that his spiritual leadership was insufficient for the position. So…what can you say to that? We knew for about a week before the rest of the church body and tried to honor their wishes for us to wait to tell anyone. Of course, that meant we weren’t able to even access the support system we had started to build in Iowa at a time when we really needed it. Anyway, I think I’ve given personal apologies to almost all of the people I blew off that week or generally acted strange around–so that’s that. Long story short–after we got over the surprise of it, we made the decision to head back to TN to regroup and decide what to do. That was able to come together pretty quickly, so here we are. We called a few people before we came, but lying low for a few days has been kind of nice, what with my head about to explode and all.
Because we have renters in our Murfreesboro house, we made some calls and were able to move into one of Andrew’s parents’ rental properties here in town. We gave them no notice, and they were literally mid-remodel (and not one complaint from them, God bless them), so there’s a lot of work to be done. Work is good. I could definitely use some mindless labor right about now, and hopefully I can find some clarity somewhere between paintbrush strokes. I have a few job interviews this week, and I am just hoping I can pull it together enough to remember what it is I do, exactly. Should be interesting. I don’t know if Nashville is home for a few months, a year, or forever. That remains to be seen. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I felt a little break in my fog when I saw that skyline. There’s something about home, even if you don’t get to stay. How could I have not known that before I left?
So, to sum up:
So, okay, there could be pages and pages here, but they’re all in the trash file. I also hate that I didn’t really get to say goodbye to anyone in Iowa, other than the 6 wonderful guys who packed our truck (and by packed, I mean there was not one single iota of wasted space and I have no idea how they did it–and it was about 5 degrees) and then sang worship songs with us in the almost empty living room. However, I have never been good at goodbyes, so that may be just as well. I hate goodbyes. Many people from Grace called me, and I could barely get through the phone calls without losing it. Thank you to everyone who did call or sent a quick gift before we left–it was much appreciated, even if I sounded a little checked out and probably didn’t even respond in complete sentences. Hopefully, I used words that made a little sense. There was a lot of good there.
A few good things, though:
So, fresh starts and all that. I’m going to call that good enough for now.
P.S. I’m working on launching a new blog site, but as it turns out I have no earthly idea what I’m doing, it’s taking a little longer than I thought. It’s all pretty but terribly nonfunctional at the moment, so stay tuned for that. Clearly, working on that is more important than unpacking, job searching, painting, spackling, and just thinking in general. You must have your priorities, really.
P.S.S. You know what I hate? Complainers and whiners. I’m going to stop being one. Soon. I think.
Baby Girl turned three this past week, and she is taking this no-longer-a-baby stuff very, very seriously. The result is twofold–she is unbelievably verbal and brilliant and hilarious and perceptive, AND she is unbelievably rigid and unpredictable and opinionated and oh-my-word can this girl throw a tantrum. I love being her mother, and in the same breath I will admit that she tries every last ever-loving nerve I have. Oh, THE DRAMA. Just off the top of my head, she has thrown kill-me-now-turn-it-up-to-level-12 fits over the following things in the past 24 hours or so: the fact the steering wheel covers has holes in it, the moon was not a circle in the sky (half moon), she had a crease on her elbow from the pattern of the recliner, she misses her white house and doesn’t WANT to go to I-Wa and live in a sandcastle (that’s Iowa, and our apartment building is a sandcastle, obviously)…and on and on. That doesn’t even include the little facts that she has worn the same three dresses since we moved here in June (Did you know that only blue dresses make her like a beautiful princess???), she wears a crown just about everywhere we go, and she never takes off her white Sunday-shoe-type shoes (not even to sleep). If I manage to cajole her into another dress for Sunday (just to show that she does, in fact, have other clothes), she weeps and wails, “Okaaaay, but it doesn’t make me like a beautiful princess and I’m not beautiful AT ALL!” Pants or shorts are in no way acceptable for any reason. Take that.
She also builds awesome forts for all her babies, asks me to read to her all the time (love it), tells me I’m her bestest beautiful mommy, cuddles up to me and fits right into my side like a little puzzle piece when we read Twenty-six Princesses for the fifteenth time, runs over to tell me that she just made a new friend at the playground, writes “once upon a time stories” for me, helps me cook/eats my ingredients, and gives me a little glimpse of what I must have been like as a child. She thinks that getting to buy and eat an apple when we start the grocery trip is the greatest treat in the world. Other current favorite activities include using my cloth napkins and water to wash the kitchen floor (like Cinderella, you know), taking as many baths as I will allow her in a day, hiding tiny pinecones all over her room (she sneaks them in from outside), and using an entire roll of toilet paper to make a wedding aisle so she can marry her Diego doll. In short, she’s amazing. I’m so glad I get to be her mother.
Just so you can see some of the fun:
All trash is a toy to her. She stole the cardboard packaging from a new vacuum cleaner to make castles for her many babies
I’m not sure what was happening here, exactly.
She thinks I’m a genius because I can make heart-shaped sandwiches.
And the stillness only Cinderella can bring.
Oy. I’m exhausted. I think that I’m wound a little too tightly to cry, but it sure has crossed my mind today. Andrew being out of town obviously throws things out of whack, but Murphy has moved in to keep me company. Awesome. Honestly, I hate it when people gripe (especially chronic gripers), but this is pretty much just a gripe. Be warned.
Here’s a run down of the last day or so:
, etc. It looks really awful, but stopped bleeding really quickly. BG tries to resume jumping on the pillow on the floor within about one minute, which was my alternate (safer, right?) suggestion when she wanted to jump on the couch. At this point, she’s still actively bleeding. He seems like the sort that would stand up in court for me. Good things, good things. There must be some good things:
I have been writing this post on my head for about three days. I think about this all the time, but mostly in quiet moments in the car (50-minute commute, not a friend to the distracted brain). Even as I write it, I’m not sure if it should be posted or if I should just type it to get it out of my head and delete it. Even in my head, it doesn’t make much sense, and I’m confident it won’t come out the way I intend. That frustrates me, so I tend to write and delete a lot when it comes to the serious stuff. Witty banter? Potty pictures of Baby Girl? Much easier for me than this. I call it sarcasm as a defense mechanism. Handy, but not always real.
I am still grieving for my friend. I hesitate to say even that, because my next immediate thought is this: …and a mother is grieving for her daughter, a sister is grieving for her only sibling, a husband is grieving for his wife, and a little boy will someday grieve for the mother he didn’t get to meet. I’ve always thought of friendship as such a strong concept, but it pretty much pales in comparison to all that. Not that loss is any kind of a competition; it just feels strange and somehow wrong to talk about my grief when what others have lost is so much greater.
It is so painful to see my friend hurting and be able to do nothing meaningful about it. I am hurting for the pain and confusion that a precious baby boy will someday feel when he learns how much his mother loved him, but that she didn’t get the opportunity to raise him. I am hurting for a husband who is trying to grieve in the tiny in-between moments crammed between 3 am feedings and a full-time job. I am hurting for the adults that will need all the wisdom they can muster to help that little boy understand when he’s ready to learn about his mother. I am hurting that my faith doesn’t seem to be strong enough to handle something like this. If I can be really honest, I am pretty much in the same place I was when Kathy died five months ago. I am shocked, angry, bitter, and disappointed. I can laugh and tell funny stories and love on baby Micah with abandon, but all that gross emotion is right below the surface. I am not able to say with any conviction that it was God’s will, that God will be glorified through this, that God will take care of Kathy’s family. I believe it (way, way, way deep down), but I can’t bring myself to say it out loud–because I still don’t. get. it. My brain refuses to understand, and a part of my heart is still very hard. I am thankful for good and honest friends who are able to admit they are feeling some of these same things–because I feel like I’m not progressing very well with it. A gurgling baby boy is a good distraction, I must say. I’m lucky enough to get to see him pretty often.
Raw grief is messy and real. It makes me uncomfortable. It makes me terrified of saying something offensive or hurtful (I tend to put my foot in my mouth, even in the best of times), and I’m also afraid of hanging back and not helping when I’m needed because I’m trying to be polite and respectful (again, not something that comes naturally to me). I will admit that most of the time I have no idea where that line between supportive and intrusive is. It probably changes from day to day, I imagine. Unfortunately, my default is to do nothing (not a very good strategy–that helps no one and just buries the hurt). I am constantly reminded that this kind of grief is both overwhelmingly public and excruciatingly private. None us can really “get it.” In some ways, I think what should be private is made public (because people far and wide know details, etc.), and what should be acceptable and public (the simple fact that it hurts and will for a long time) is sometimes swept under the rug and not discussed.
I am learning that all kinds of things can bond people. Some of my closest relationships have come from the best of times, but the worst of times are just as bonding. I guess you just have to dive in and do the best you can. I am newly and painfully aware that I am not guaranteed forever, especially with my husband and daughter. That is a paralyzing, awful, sobering truth. The thought makes my mouth go dry and my heart pound. It gives me a lump in my throat and a weight in my chest that takes a long time to go away.
See? I still haven’t said what I’m trying to say. I just hope it makes sense to those to read it. File this under “work in progress.”
In order to relieve the tension (and keep you actually reading this blog), frosting-covered 2-year-old birthday photos and witty captions to come, I promise.
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