Closed, Healing in Progress

I have quite a lot to catch you up on. There was a move, a baby and a lot of growing pains. For now, we're going to talk about a single hike, on hot summer day. 

During the end of the calendar's summer season {I'm quickly learning that Southern California's summer season never ends}, we went on a hike in Malibu Creek State Park, a little drive down the Pacific Coast Highway {PCH}. For those unfamiliar with the California coast, the PCH is a scenic route, winding adjacent the Pacific Ocean. It’s beginning to be one of my favorite parts of the weekend for our family. This park in Malibu is gigantic and on the day we chose to do our family hike, a 25k finish line was at the top of the parking lot where we chose to park. My heart ached as I watched runners cross the finish line. I’m hardly in the shape I used to be, and I miss the feeling of running without a lot of baby-related heaviness. 

My goal for the summer was to get back on my feet, enough to keep up with my family. I’ve been walking out my muscles, trying to remind them that they exist and that they are capable. My goal very simple: to not be the reason for going home. I didn’t want to be the first one to quit, the mom who was tired and ready for a break. 

We began our hike, not knowing exactly where we were going or where the end was for us. Just exploring. This is nice about hiking: you can always turn around. Michael and I are not serious hikers. We could be one day, but we keep the hike relaxed since we have two small children with us. 

As we walked, I kept seeing small, but steep, hiker-made trails. Little trails where hikers wandered off the main trails. Each with a sign at the base the little trail.

The signs all read the same: Closed, Healing in Progress.

The words stayed with me as we hiked. 

Early Postpartum, I'm mindful of keeping my life simple. I focus on simple things like sleep, very gentle exercise, feeding my family and the milestones in my children's growth. Then, I get comfortable and greedy for a more ideal looking life. I start hitting other trails. I wander away from simplicity. Sometimes there's a shortcut, a fast-track to contentment, a bunch of "stuff" to buy. The trail leads to a pool or a fun play spot, a group of moms with ideals and values that look tasteful. Add it to the map, the list of trails to take, and soon it becomes a necessity. I need it. Next week we find a bird’s nest, a coffee shop, a new distraction or hobby. These little trails all take us somewhere new and exciting and I want to keep track of them. All of them. 

Add it to the hike that is my life. 

Suddenly, the sun is setting and I’m stuck in the middle of trails leading to nowhere. I can see the mountain we were supposed to climb today, the simple one, but I can’t find my way back to the main trail. I’m out of time and I’m lost. My kids are hungry and I feel panic setting in. The golden grass is smashed beneath my careless feet. I don't even know which way to go anymore, which way is home. 

Four months postpartum is a forgotten mama, even forgotten by herself. This time is hard. It’s too far past the 6 weeks of postpartum, when I was supposed to get my life buttoned up and tucked away. Four months is growth spurts, teething, sleep regression and separation anxiety. It’s a lot of tired body aches. It’s a lot of my-hair-is-falling-out and my weight-loss has plateaued. Some days are so great and some days are too much. 

And it’s not easy to see the grace that was holding me together a few months ago.

This is the perfect time to close the trails and stay on the main trail, the familiar. Take in and study the mountains, watch the hawks fly by and not worry about where they are headed. It’s time to heal again. It’s time to turn to God, and His grace, and be courageous enough to be grateful for this single trail, and just this trail. Because this trail is enough. 

Sometimes, we don’t have to bounce back; sometimes it’s okay for an event to shake us and change us forever.

Motherhood is one those events. Motherhood is supposed to change us, constantly.  

And I need to stop trying to bounce back, I need to let true healing take place. Growth is an ongoing cycle of breaking down muscle and building it back up and I never want to rest when I'm growing. I want results.

So I slow down the glutton in me that wants to conquer this mountain and know all it has to offer and I'll take up this shady tree for now. Taking in my surroundings piece by piece, leaf by leaf, speck by speck. 

 This beautiful view will change too soon. It is only temporary. 

On that day, as we stayed on the slow and steady pace of the main trail up that hill, I made it to the top. I looked around and admired the beauty with my family, drank my water quietly and gratefully {and a bit proud}, and crawled back down. We went a little ways further down the trails when we decided that the kids needed to head home for naps. I passed Lillian to Michael and was happy to put Lucy on my back.

Then, we followed the steady trail back to a place of rest and healing, my back tired and my heart full. 

Here I Am

Sometimes, when I stop to think of how different life at home with children is today than it was twenty years ago, I'm utterly astounded. And sometimes, I wish there had been social media back then. I wish I'd had Instagram, because if I had, my baby pictures and little boy soccer pictures would be organized and preserved chronologically instead of in boxes on shelves in my basement. I wish I'd had online Bible studies because I would have discovered the joy of Bible journaling so much sooner. I wish there had been recipe apps because my cookbooks wouldn't all be splattered with decades old pasta sauce.

Mostly, though, I'm eternally grateful for the long afternoons I spent walking to the park and back, never once distracted by a screen. Instead, a friend walked beside me and we talked real words, back and forth, for hours sometimes. I'm grateful for naptimes spent mopping the floor with oil soap and watching bread rise. I'm also grateful for naptimes spent napping with my children, the chatterless afternoon lulling me to sleep. There was no temptation to just keep mindlessly scrolling, and I'm grateful for that. I'm grateful for the quiet and the blessing of growing into motherhood in relative private, away from so many opinions and comparisons. 

I'm not a giant fan of the internet.

But I love this space. I love to write, to play with pictures, to dream in narrative, to throw carefully chosen words into the wind and pray that they land in the right hearts. It's a little bit scary.

But mostly I love it.

We've had a rough few years here in my home. Much refining in fire. Now, it's time to retreat to this place (can you retreat to a very public place?), and settle into loving this creative niche again with my soul and my fingers. It's time to spend hours outdoors moving and breathing, and then to come inside and write so the words have a place to be.

Let's blog.

Holy Rhythm

With the occasionally crisp, subtle coolness of September in Virginia, my pace usually quickens just a bit in expectant hope. September brings order — the order of days that follow along the tracks of a schedule, the order of deadlines and appointments written in ink. I love order; it gives me a sense of security. Order brings rhythm and rhythm underscores a family in harmony with each other and God.

This September, the week after school started, I found myself staring at a tangle of crossed out “definites” in colors as numerous as the children for which they stood. There was no harmony. We had been walking in chaos and the dissonant noise reached an ear-splitting crescendo. I shut it all down. We completely upended our extracurricular schedule and prayed about some new ventures in new places. Please read the rest here.

The Lesson is in the Mistake

The happiest, most successful, most peaceful people I know are the people who know how to fail. They embrace the chance to try and to fall short. They approach the uncertainty of risk with a hopeful expectation that something good will come, no matter what. People who thrive at work and in personal relationships are people who see that they can be wrong and that those “wrong” times are the times when they learn the most about themselves and the people around them. Truly successful people grow in the freedom to make mistakes.

My child sits for hours, agonizing over his homework. Each problem draws out for an excruciating length of time, far exceeding anything the teacher intended, I’m sure. He doesn’t want to be wrong. This is a computerized assignment, and what he doesn’t know is what happens when he’s wrong. If he keys in the wrong answer, a dialogue box will pop up and tell him it’s wrong. Then he can try again before a final answer is recorded. He knows about the second try and the final answer. He doesn’t know the value of the first mistake.

When he tried and was wrong the first time, he read the first line of the dialogue box. It said, “Sorry, that is incorrect.” Quickly, he clicked the box closed. And with that click, he obliterated the value of failure. If he’d stopped and read the box, he’d know something more valuable than any algorithm he’ll learn this year or ever. He would know that in the mistake, lies the lesson. If he’d kept reading past the pain of “You’re wrong,” he would know that the dialogue box went on to explain exactly how he was wrong and what he should do next time.

I think that we can tell ourselves it’s acceptable to fail, it’s useful to make mistakes and to learn from them, but the reality is that, for some of us, mistakes are terrifying. Mistakes make us vulnerable. Mistakes reveal our imperfections — to ourselves and to the people around us. We hold tightly to our illusion of control, our obsession for order and our compulsion to ensure that nothing is ever even slightly askew. We exhaust ourselves in mind-numbing sessions of challenges where we refuse to access the dialogue box that tells us how to learn the lesson that only the wrong answer will yield.

I have a long acquaintance with perfectionism. We square off daily. I try to grab the demon it is by the neck and tell it in no uncertain terms that I live in grace and that grace allows me to stretch and grow and yes, to fail. I tell the devil that is perfectionism that creativity flourishes in a world where second chances, erasers, and new sheets of paper are plentiful. Sometimes, the demon slinks off to a corner and leaves me in peace to be brave about my day. Other times, I am paralyzed by the fear that I’m doing it wrong. Again.

I rub the shoulders of the child at the homework table. I sit beside him, pray for him (and for me), share with him the secret of the dialogue box, and then, together, we intentionally click the wrong answer. We read the box. We begin to understand how this works. How the failures are redeemed. How the final answer is a better one for the mistake that went before it. This is tricky stuff, this algebra.

But what comes next is far trickier. Life is full of opportunities to try and to fail, to take a creative leap and to fall flat on one’s face, only to begin the draft anew. While I hope that this semester is a resounding academic success, what I hope even more is that he learns at this tender age that it is right and good to be wrong. That’s where the growth is.

Where Love Lives

This time of year — as the academic calendar begins and the last strains of summer’s song fade — the people in my household scatter. College-aged children move into dorms. School-aged children leave and come back and leave again every day, making the case for a revolving door at our front stoop. Even the boy who moved clear across the country made his way home for a brief weekend at the end of August. And then he left again.

It has me thinking about what “home” is in our family. What do they envision when they are away and how do they feel when they return? I cannot shake the memory of a grown child, at once mournful and furious, declaring last summer that home didn’t feel like home any more. He was not altogether wrong. His passing comment, hurled in anger the cause of which I no longer remember, is seared into my memory. We’d lost the easy grace extended to one another that makes a house a place where one can be certain that love is unconditional. I’ve spent the last year trying to make home feel like home again.

Now, sitting at a dining room table scarred by the blessings of so many meals and memories, as we prepare to celebrate the canonization of Mother Teresa, my thoughts turn to the wisdom she had to offer mothers. A tiny nun who made her home amongst the poorest of the poor in the squalor of India, she speaks into my suburban maternal existence.

“Try to put in the hearts of your children a love for home. Make them long to be with their families. So much sin could be avoided if our people really loved their homes. Start by making your own home a place where peace, happiness and love abound, through your love for each member of your family and for your neighbor.”

Those are lofty words, tall orders, beautiful goals. In the quiet of a night, I go to comfort a baby, to feed and change a diaper and rock back to sleep. He knows he’s home. I know it, too, there in the dark, so enveloped in the same world that his beginning and my end are indistinguishable. This is home, a place of laying down life for a child.

The atmosphere of home grows from there, sinks its roots deep into the care of small children where the choice to love and the acts of love are so simple. Just feed the next meal, bathe the next mess, soothe the next hurt. And as you do, you create home.

Then, in the next years, the growing years, we cultivate the community of home. I have found this requires even more discipline on my part, nearly constant diligence. I love my children, to be sure, and so does their father. That is not enough. Care must be taken in the growing years to show them how to love one another. If home is to be sustainable, if it will still be there many years later — not a physical place, but a state of being — our children need to learn how to love each other well. Home is the safest community of all, or at least we hope to be that way. If it’s not, they won’t return to one another and what we built was not home at all, but a mere house on shifting sands.

St. Teresa of Calcutta writes: “It is easy to smile at people outside your own home. It is so easy to take care of the people that you don’t know well. It is difficult to be thoughtful and kind and to smile and be loving to your own family in the house day after day, especially when we are tired and in a bad temper or bad mood. We all have these moments and that is the time that Christ comes to us in a distressing disguise.”

Children must be taught to treat one another with respect and with kind regard. They need to be encouraged to lay down their lives for one another, to speak life into each other’s dark places. Brothers and sisters grow up to be husbands and wives. What lessons have they learned at home about dignity and decency and compassion that they will carry into their new homes? What have they learned about how to treat the other gender and what to expect in how they are treated? Is there gentleness and honor in their interactions with each other in the home of their origin?

We must be Christ to one another — tender, kind, overflowing with mercy — if we are to create home for one another. This is no small task. Indeed, I am quite sure it’s the work of a lifetime. Families are not accidents. They are deliberate acts of God. I may always wonder if God calls me to one cause or another outside my home, but I can never doubt that the people in my family are called to one another. Home is where love lives, and just as every living thing we know, love must be carefully nurtured lest by its neglect it withers and home is left lifeless.