Easter to Advent

During Lent we were mourning the loss of several loved ones and my husband gave me this Scripture passage to comfort me:  

"And as for the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was said to you by God, 'I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob'?  He is God not of the dead, but of the living."

- Matthew 22:31-32

Now here we are, all the way in Advent and the same verse still hits me hard. My secret dark feelings that something will inevitably go wrong with this pregnancy and I will have to say good-bye to yet another loved one this year, are tested by this verse.  God is God not of the dead, but of the living.  Even as we say good-bye to our loved ones, God claims them as His, and promises us all new Life!  There is hope.  It seems dark even now, but light trickles in ... through Jesus.

This little life that I have nurtured for nearly nine months can be a source of secret fears for me, or I can acknowledge God's power in this baby's life and God's power in this baby's death, and this baby can be a reminder that ours is the God of the living...perhaps the joy of new life can relieve some of the pain of loss our family has experienced this year. 

My fear of death is selfish, after all.  I hate saying good-bye.  The hope I feel God pressing on me is the hope that these farewells we say here are temporary.  I must not take them as seriously as those who have no hope of seeing their loved ones again.  And...there are always more people to love.  We have to stay hopeful so we can keep on loving.  When we keep on loving, despite loss, we keep on hoping.

"'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all." -Tennyson

Why I Dread

I started dreadlocks eight months ago when Steven died, and then Plain Ol' Grammy died.  The world turned upside down.  Grief besieged me.  Two lives ended, and nothing was good, or right, or beautiful.

My hair became an outward symbol of the tangled mess living ... and dieing ... are.  My hair became a sloppy-looking hope, that someday this mess will be manageable, live-able, maybe even sort of lovely.  It is a daily reminder for me that there's not always a "cure" for the mess.  Sometimes you just have to ride the fuzzy mess with your eyes closed and try to keep your feet under you.  And sometimes the mess will surprise you, and you will feel loved and beautiful despite the mess, and really know that this sort of love is best:  the love that loves despite, or even because of the tangles.

My dread locks are not what I expected.  Some days I wonder, "What have I done?!" but most days I think, "This is the best decision I've ever made".  They are a challenge to clean (yes I clean my dreads regularly!).  They do not allow my husband to give me a scalp massage (oh I miss head rubs!).  They get stuck in tree branches and in zippers and my children like to pull on them.  They are moody, they are frizzy, and they sometimes bring strange looks down people's noses in my direction.

I'm told dread locks take a while to mature.  When they're mature they require much less maintenance.  I imagine that's the way of most things.  My grief included.  Perhaps it too, will mature, and become more manageable.  Some days I can't believe that I go on living - without Steven in the world.  Without Grammy.  I'm always amazed that another day has gone by without the influence of that soul on this time.  I love that every time I catch my reflection in the mirror, my hair reminds me of my loved ones.  And happy coincidence: the conception of these dreads coincides with the conception of a third little Thiessen baby.

But most of all, these dread locks of mine are accurate.  This is a hair style that screams, "LAURA".  My life is a mess, my hair is a mess, but I have hope because God loves beautiful things, and can make beautiful things out of this crazy life, out of this crazy grief, out of this most crazy time.  I keep looking for beauty in the tangles.  I keep hoping.  And I accept the mess, the grief, the tangles, for now.  They are where I am.  They are okay - more than okay!  They are right.

Merging, or Starting Fresh with Five?

 People in Winnipeg don't know how to merge.  There are only a few places in the entire city where it is necessary, since Winnipeg doesn't have any freeways.  And still, I expect people to get it: If you drive the speed of traffic, that gap is big enough for your vehicle!!  If you sit on the side of the road waiting for a gap at a total standstill, you will never find your opening....and I will be here, stuck behind you (stupid head).

I learned how to merge by necessity.  Bakersfield was a 20 minute freeway's ride away from Shafter, and Bakersfield was where the interesting stuff was happening (don't get me wrong - Shafter's volleyball in Mannel Park, and yearly 4th of July Parade were pretty darn fun, but Bakersfield had a movie theatre!).  If we wanted to get to the FUN, we learned how to merge early in our driving careers.

In relationships, merging is much more complicated because you can, and have to, expect the other drivers to take you into consideration.  It's not just about speeding up and jumping in.  Sometimes you just don't click.  And sometimes you spend so much time looking around at everyone else that you forget what you're supposed to be doing!

Our family is in the middle of merging.  It's pretty distracting, and sometimes difficult...for some of us.  Seamus has no trouble at all loving the newest member of our family.  He just adores the idea of having a baby around to kiss and hold.  Luke is pretty worried what another little brother is going to do to his lego projects, or his complicated maze of train tracks.  Derek has to schedule ten minutes into his lunch time just for saying good-bye to all the little ones.  And I somehow have to work a fourth person into my sleep schedule, my homeschool schedule, my menu planning and laundry...not to mention the current difficulties I have in just walking and sitting and sleeping while pregnant.

I've been using this metaphor of merging as I think about baby #3, and then I found this painting.  I painted it in November 2007.  Everyone on my Christmas list was in the middle of some "New Start", and I was considering painting each of them a unique symbol to represent a new phase of their life.  Kathy had a new baby, Amanda was pregnant, I was pregnant, Sarah just moved to Fresno, Mom had an empty nest, Dad was doing something just for fun (for maybe the first time EVER), Melissa was considering a big move...



Maybe this metaphor is more helpful in considering our family life with baby #3:  A new start.  It's not exactly that this baby has to jump in our busy lives.  It's that we all have to pull the car over to let in a new passenger, and start down the road again - start fresh - with Five.
 

35 Weeks

Wherever we Are

According to my yoga training I am supposed to attempt to be present in this moment.  I am supposed to take advantage of this moment by acknowledging it, appreciating it, being grateful for it.  Today is one of those days filled with moments I'd rather forget.  Moments when I lost my cool, or when my kids lost their cool, or when I felt so sick and tired I could hardly have gotten out of bed if it weren't for the one kid shouting about how the other kid just threw all the bath towels in the bath tub full of water...

How should I appreciate these terrifyingly disgustingly disturbing moments?

Like when you go outside to check on the dinner you've been planning and marinating for days, made special for company, only to find the BBQ appears to have (at some unnoticed point in the last half hour) been engulfed in flames and totally given up the ghost....dinner a burnt offering to the apparently vengeful BBQ god.

Or like when you're in the middle of shouting at your kid that if they had started practicing piano fifteen minutes ago instead of farting around they could have been done by now and they choose that moment to fall off the piano bench and hit their head with a sickening crunch on the floor?

Or like when your kid is begging and nagging and hounding you to let them eat more Halloween candy and you find yourself manipulating their naive enthusiasm to bribe them into doing something they should have done without being asked?

Or like when you haven't slept through the night in weeks and your kid is downstairs crying your name and you actually find yourself thinking, "Maybe I can pretend I don't hear him"...and you sort of hate yourself.

Oh Lord.  What I come to see after writing it all out (and crying to my mother-in-law over a cup of tea), is that I am thankful the kid didn't drown in the tub instead of the towels.  I am thankful the house didn't catch fire when the BBQ exploded.  I am thankful the head smashing didn't require a visit to the ER.  I am thankful that no matter how manipulative I am, my children still seem to know that I love them and I am so thankful I am not the only adult influencing their growth process.  I am thankful for the little boy who comes stomping up the stairs shouting, "I'm awake!!" after naptime and wants, before anything else, to give his baby brother a hug (yes, the baby in my belly).

I am thankful, but it is so hard to see past my anger and anxiety sometimes.  It is so hard to see past the blame and guilt I cast on myself, to the beautiful, forgiving, loving-ness my family and friends cast on me.  But it is there.

I learn again and again that, wherever we are - this moment or the next or next week or next year - I can find something for which to be thankful...even if it's only, "Whew, that could have been a lot worse".

When the yogurt hits the mat

I don't allow myself the luxury of many beautiful things.  With boys, it's just not realistic to think that beautiful things will make it long or far, and I get so tired of saying good-bye to beautiful things.  I just needed to cut out the emotional reaction to each and every CRASH.  Because there are so many CRASHes in our house.

Out went the gorgeous thin glasses in iridescent rainbow colors - one CRASH at a time.  Out went my great-grandmother's crocheted afghan (with scissors instead of crashes).  Out went my fancy crystal vase, my glass salt and pepper shakers, my ceramic african violet pot.  Pretty soon my heart felt like it was in as many pieces as the shards of my butter dish and I made up my mind: No more pretty things until the boys are older.

Then I began doing yoga.

In yoga I breathe more intentionally.  I slow down and allow my attention to be drawn to things I am grateful for.  I am grateful for the things in my yard that are pretty, and will always grow back (even if the neighbor kids mow down my lilies this year, they will grow back next year).  I am grateful for the colored glass in a high window that (so far, fingers crossed) the boys haven't figured out how to reach, but even if they did I would know that each glass cost less than a dollar (thank-you thrift store!).  I am grateful for colors on the wall. I am grateful for smiling boys.  I am grateful for sunshine.  I am grateful...most often, I repeat, I am grateful for this mat.

I say it again and again.  I am grateful for this mat.  I am grateful for this time I have to do yoga.  I am grateful for the way I feel after I have done yoga.  I am grateful that my children get to see their mother working hard to stay healthy, mentally and physically, and having fun doing it.  I am grateful for little boys that giggle and laugh when their mother asks them to do "Dead Bug", and then they DO it!  I am grateful for this mat; this mat where I laugh and cry and remember and breathe and feel strong and feel beautiful.

To do yoga, my mat needs to stay unrolled.  It needs to stay accessible.  Otherwise I will not take the time, I will not remember my need, I will get complacent.  So my mat stays unrolled on my bedroom floor.  And the dog chews his toys on it, leaving fluff and plastic behind.  Once Linus even puked on it in the night.  The boys drive their race cars over "the bumpy road".  Occasionally a child wanders into the room with hands covered in yogurt or strawberry juice, which make their way onto the yoga mat.  We all walk across it daily leaving dust and hair and footprints on it.  And each evening before bed I shake it out, step onto my mat, and find I am still grateful for this mat.  This beautiful thing I am allowed, in the midst of my rambunctious, sticky, messy, loud life.  I have a beautiful thing.  My yoga mat.

21 weeks.  And yes, that is batman.

Covenant

We have been attending Covenant Mennonite Church in Winkler for seven months now.  Our first impression of Covenant was a very good one, and so far nothing has happened to mar our impression, only to strengthen it.  Last July we visited Covenant to hear a particular person speak and ended up discovering the pastor, Kelvin Dyck, was someone Derek had been told to seek out to discuss his theological interests.  That first Sunday there was no childcare provided by the church, but when the pastor's wife saw us walk in with our kids she came down the aisle and asked if she could take our kids downstairs to play.  I got to sit through an entire sermon!

After the service Derek and Kelvin visited for an hour and we were invited to a potluck scheduled the next weekend.  Without talking about it much (which is unusual for us), we just ... went to the potluck with a group of people we knew hardly at all ... if at all!  Our children were played with, talked to, Seamus took seven steps in a row from the hands of Don Bergen to me, the food was delightfully healthy homemade, whole food type stuff, mostly from people's gardens, Derek sat by the BBQ with Kelvin and Dave, and I was told by several people that they were "So pleased!" to have us there and if we would continue coming to church we would be snatched up and put to work.  We left with warm fuzzies and once again, with little discussion, we decided to keep going to Covenant.  It just felt good and right.

We continued attending, and our children continued being loved on, and every summer Sunday we would eat lunch in the park or at the drive-in after church with whoever could make it.  People talked to us like we'd known them forever, people called us up when they were heading to the lake, "Want to come along?".  People carried our sleeping baby around the foyer while visiting, people asked us over to their homes for meals.  People asked for book recommendations and actually read the books, and loaned us books in return.  People found out I was a photographer and asked me to take their photos!  Good things are happening.  Different, and good.

A few weeks ago we were having dinner at the Drudge family's house.  I was talking to Rochelle and saying how Covenant just felt like a natural fit for us, and wondering what our lives would have been like if we had found it four years ago, when we first moved to Winkler...less frustrating for sure!  She responded with a phrase that has stuck in my mind and I feel speaks exactly how Derek and I feel at Covenant.  She said, "We came to Covenant and we just felt like we had finally found our people.  These are our people."

So we keep going and in very natural ways, by eating together and spending time together, each week we get to know these people a little better.  These people who are our people, and who feel like they've always been our people - we just didn't know where they were.  We keep eating and singing and praying with them, and they let our children run up and down the aisle and shout out questions during the sermon or children's story, and what's more: they answer the questions with straight faces.

Last week Derek read the scripture out of Luke for epiphany Sunday and Seamus wandered around up front before finally standing beside Derek and leaning his head against his leg.  After a few moments Derek leaned down, picked him up and continued reading.  Nobody blinked.  Nobody grimaced.  Afterwards someone said to me, "Seamus made that passage come alive!"  Thank goodness for community that includes and embraces our children, and values and honors our aged and debilitated.  This church has made these things real for me by loving my family, and sweetly and graciously expecting me to love them back.

Merry Christmas!

Although it doesn't make me proud, I'm going to tell the true story of this Christmas morning, so that we will remember what having kids is really like (it's not all as cute as the photos I post!), and so that those of you who read this will know that my life isn't all lollipops and twinkle lights.  This Christmas morning started out with the lighting of the Christmas candle, the reading of the Christmas story, a poem and a prayer.  It was lovely, and I really imagined that Christmas morning would be topped off with a jolly opening of presents, a family meal around the table, and a movie from somebody's stocking.  Well, as soon as the stockings were opened there arose shouts of, "But I wanted that!" and "I don't like this candy, I want a different candy!"  And I am sad to say, those shouts were from my very own son.  As you can imagine, gift opening was put on hold, a very angry four-year-old was sent to his room, and everyone heaved a big sigh.  This idea of a "perfect" Christmas morning is, apparently, not attainable until our children learn a very important lesson about gratefulness, thankfulness, graciousness, and humility.

So we very literally pushed the pause button on gifts, I attended to the pancakes, and Derek went downstairs and had a chat with Luke.  Seamus was just wandering around in his new hat, eating a caramel, totally oblivious to the challenges that accompany the rather arduous task of maturing gracefully.  Eventually Luke decided he was ready to be gracious, maybe if he didn't like the caramels he could still say thank-you and then give them to someone who appreciated them (don't worry, he discovered he liked them; we are in a phase where anything "new" or "different" is automatically labeled "bad"), he even began to understand that the What of the gift is not as important as the Why...I hope.

And so Luke decided he wanted to hand out the presents to his family, Seamus decided that collecting the paper and putting it in a box was more fun than opening presents, and eventually (much later than planned, and after much hungry crying from Seamus) we ate pancakes.  Seamus ate five.

I cannot know that my son learned exactly what I hoped to teach him.  But all we can do is try to explain, and live like we believe it.  Giving is wonderful, receiving is delightful, and giving and receiving graciously is truly a skill worth the effort of learning (and teaching). 

One of the lessons I have been struggling with lately is that Luke is his own person, very separate from me.  For the longest time he was part of me, then for a while he was an adorable accessory, now he is most certainly his own person - developing thoughts and ideas with no input from me.  I would have thought this would be obvious, but after so many years of, "Say buh-bye! Say Gramma! Go potty?" it's hard to wrap my mind around the fact that this little person will decide if he needs to go potty on his own.  He will call out what he's thinking during the church service when the moderator asks what she thought was a rhetorical question.  He will wear nothing but gitch around the house all day and ask for a knife to cut his pancakes at breakfast.  He will be himself, and I can only hope now that we will love each other enough that he will continue to want to be like me...and I can set a good example.

Merry Christmas!  May your Christmas enlighten your family relationships, as ours is doing, and promises to continue to do.

For 3 Someone Elses and a Dog.

I guess you could say that mothering is a full-time job.  I guess you could, but it would be totally misleading.  Mothering is not even close to a full-time job.  It’s like two full-time jobs where you live at work, and eat at work, and never get to walk away from work like that woman I see walking home from Eden every night.  She jaunts out the door, swings her purse over her shoulder and lets her skirt sashay across the parking lot, across the street, down the sidewalk.  Sometimes she’s on the phone, making plans for the evening.  Sometimes she’s reading a book.  Sometimes she’s just walking, breathing in the outdoor seasons, filled with the knowledge that work is behind her and need not be acknowledged until tomorrow morning.  Sometimes I am positively green, watching her saunter along…how I wish I could saunter!  

I am a mother of two boys, a dog, and wife to one husband.  That’s a lot of needs waiting to be filled.  And they expect me to fill them.  Most days I am honored to be that servant.  I love the old hymn that asks, “Will you let me be your servant, let me be as Christ to you? Pray that I may have the grace to let you be my servant too.”  Then there are those other days; those days when that special moment I had carved out of the day just for me gets snatched out from under me and I fall into the my-life-stinks sinkhole of self pity.  My shower is interrupted by a boy emptying out the cabinets looking for band-aids and muttering, “I’m bleeding I think, so I need a band-aid but I don’t see them, and they’re usually here but where are they!? MOM!  Where’d you put the band-aids!?” My reading time is interrupted by a teething baby who won’t sleep, or a four-year old insisting there are crocodiles under the bed chewing on his books.  My phone call with my best friend is hijacked with, “MO-oom!! I need sumpin’!”  That precious mocha I saved my pennies for gets spilled when somebody climbs over the backseat of the car in the grocery store parking lot.  I am interrupted from an exciting editing job by a little one wandering into the room covered in a mysterious viscous substance.  I come upstairs with a sigh after putting the boys to bed to find the dog on the dining room table chowing down on the leftovers I had planned on feeding the family for lunch tomorrow, and yet again, there’s a need.  I am the only one to fill it.  Clean up the mess, bandage the hurt, reassure the fearful, discipline the naughty, find the lost, and so on and on and on.

I had it.  Tonight at the dinner table my husband noted my unhappiness (it would take a seriously self-interested introvert to not notice my dramatic sighs and slouching shoulders).  He asked if I was going to be okay.  With a pout to prove I am my son’s mother I responded, “I just want to take my journal, and a pen, and hike out into the wilderness and stay there forever!”  Luke promptly responded, “Oh no, Mom.  You’d get eaten by a bear or sumping.”  And I laughed, and the laughter turned into crying, and the sinkhole turned out to be a pothole.  I knew he was right.  I would get eaten by a bear!   I would miss little boys who in all seriousness suggest with concern that I would get eaten by a bear. I would miss their incessant yammering and the inappropriate shouting.  I would miss my husband’s distracted fathering, and even his inability to put his pants away properly.  I would miss letting the dog out the back door and shushing him while he tears around barking at birds on the fence.  I would miss filling a need for someone else; for three someone elses, and a dog.   

   

 

 

Fathers

I know it is getting less and less common for children to have their birth parents married, and their grandparents still married.  But our boys have three generations of faithful spouses, faithful parents, faithful grandparents to learn from.  I hope they learn the lesson well.  We believe that this is our genealogy of love: God, Jesus, previous generations, Derek, Luke & Seamus.  God the Father's love shows future fathers how to love.  

Boys of mine, for you the road ahead seems long, but I see you growing up so fast!  Soon you will be men.  I pray you grow up to love Jesus, be faithful husbands, loving fathers and grandfathers!  Love your own father and grandfathers, cherish the gift of their good examples.  Carry on the good example for the next generation to learn from.

Turning

The garden is full of so many wonderful metaphors applicable to life.  And death.

On Good Friday we began to turn the compost pile.  It took a couple days because we hadn't done it in a while.  It looked like such a towering rat's nest!  I finished pulling out the lovely black stuff at the bottom Saturday morning, tossed the rest of the decomposing material back in the bin and closed it up again.  It was really hard work.  Heavy lifting, shifting, carrying the compost to its new home and digging it in.  I was sweating.  Sweating and thinking.

It is so rewarding to harvest your own compost!  All that delightful black soil that I am feeding my garden with this year, was our kitchen garbage last year!  I find myself hoarding scraps in the kitchen to add to the pile because I love the freeing process, I love the end product, so much.  Linus does his part too.  He sniffs around the bottom of the box and finds any tidbits that may still be tasty and takes his teeth to them.  Then we toss them back in!  Last year our compost pile grew two heavy-yielding tomato plants - pro bono!  The compost bin gives back, abundantly.

The more you turn the compost, the better the decomposition, and the more harvesting you can do.  My goal this year is to turn the compost once a month.  That doesn't sound like much, but we turned it once last year and we got a good six inches (maybe eight!) by four feet squared of compost this Spring.  In my life, the more I turn the better I get too.

I've been feeling bad about how often I have to apologize to Luke for losing my patience with him.  I lose my cool, I shout, I get angry, I send him to his room in tears, and then I make myself turn and apologize.  It's become a pattern.  A pattern I have been ashamed of.  Then one day a few weeks ago I got impatient with Luke climbing all around inside the car while I was waiting to buckle him in.  Luke lost it first, and screamed at me.  I had a few choice words to say, but I held my tongue and before I could get angrier I got into the driver's seat, and took a few deep breaths.  Shortly, I heard a sniffle and a quiet, "Mom?" from the backseat.  "I'm sorry I screamed at you," Luke murmured.  I was so surprised I could barely choke out, "I forgive you".  My three-year-old has never apologized under his own steam.  Not until this moment, anyway.  It made me pause, and I realized that all of these times when I've been so ashamed of losing my temper, I did something right.  I apologized.  And my son's heartfelt apology is proof that we can learn from somebody else's mistakes.  I have to keep turning.  There's more to harvest.

The great thing about compost is that dead doesn't mean gone, or useless, or even sad.  After you finish that delicious, juicy cantaloupe, you put the rind and seeds in the compost bin and a few weeks or months later you find the most healthy, warm, black soil in the entire world, just waiting for you to plant something new in it.  Yes, perhaps you wish you could eat it again, if it was that delicious.  But the memory is savory enough to last a long time. Or perhaps it was moldy before you got to it and nothing good came of it in life, but in the compost bin it can find a new cause!  You might even get a surprise and find that one of the seeds has fallen just outside the bin and sprouted all on its own, volunteering a new, fruitful vine!

Three days after we had a wonderful Easter dinner with Derek's grandparents, celebrating Jesus's resurrection, Derek's grandma died.  We enjoyed her company Sunday, alive, smiling, talking, eating.  We talked to her Tuesday, while she lay unconscious and nearing death.  We saw her Wednesday, an hour after she breathed her last breath.  We saw her Thursday, dead, and in a coffin.  Sunday we buried her.  We enjoyed knowing Grandma, Great-grandma to our sons.  We sometimes regret that we didn't know her better.  Like me, she enjoyed gardening, and I think she would appreciate being compared to my compost.  I am sure Grandma turned plenty in her life: apologizing, repenting, forgiving, loving.  I didn't know her that long, only ten years out of nearly eighty-five.  And the last few of those years her dementia really got in the way of our relating to one another.  But I know she loved Jesus, I know she prayed, and I know she loved people and did her best to love them like Jesus does.  She did a lot of turning, had a really good life, and death is the last turn before the harvest.  We literally get to be dug into the ground after we die, left to decompose in the earth for Jesus himself to harvest when he returns to make a new creation!  How lovely is that metaphor!?  We will have new life - no!  We will BE new life, made from the old, made from the turning and turning and turning and turning.

This I believe.  Praise Jesus!