The lake is my happy place. My home. I love the way the water catches the light and the way the spray feels coming up over the sides of the boat. I love the faint fish smell mixed with sunscreen and fresh air. On the 4th of July, I loved sitting in a tube with Ryan, bouncing and laughing like little girls. (Yes, my husband, he does go right ahead and laugh like a little girl. It’s actually more inspiring than it is disturbing, surprisingly.) We bounced and let the sun reflect off our white legs and our boys watched from the boat, timid. Then we swam and Miles’ face lit up when I dumped myself over the back of the tube in a backwards somersault. Lakes make you feel more alive and it’s been so hot that the water was warm, I swear. It kept us from feeling the 100 degrees. That’s […]
I’ve been writing nearly all afternoon. I can’t tell you how long it’s been since that was the case. Simple uninterrupted time is a beautiful thing. And now I can’t wait for Ryan and the kids to walk back in that door. Asher will be sure to say something funny and Miles will lean into my side to hug me. Elsie will say Ma.Ma.Ma…over and over and over and come at my legs like hers have springs. Right now though, I love this time to just write. Before this afternoon it had been a couple of days since my fingertips had found their way or the time for a keyboard. When I sat down to log in and felt the familiar smooth indent of the keys and heard the clickety clack, I said, right out loud, OH I missed you! We had a combined birthday party for Miles and Asher this weekend and […]
Sweetland {photo courtesy of google images} There’s a scene in the movie Sweetland (which is filmed in Minnesota) in which the starring characters are in a barn and they’re shaking something out. A blanket maybe? Why can’t I remember, it’s one of my favorite scenes in a movie ever. I need to watch it again. Maybe even tonight. Anyway, the couple, who have taken a long and winding road to a different kind of “marriage” are in the barn and the light is just so and the dust is flying all around and everything is in slow motion. When I first saw this movie in a tiny theater in St. Paul, Minnesota with one of my oldest and best friends, I wept. I watched the barn air and the working together and I wept. I still don’t fully know why. When you’re from Minnesota and you come from a long line of Minnesotans, […]
I was looking at pictures on facebook. Beautiful ocean Instagrams to be exact. The kind that make you feel the salt water on your skin and the wind blowing your hair all the way over here in Minnesota, where we are ocean-less but full of lakes. The truth is, the ocean terrifies me. It’s beautiful and epic and I love it and it terrifies me. There are so many parts of me like this. Like that Sara Groves song says, “I’ve got layers of lies that I don’t even know about yet.” I haven’t been lying about how I feel about the ocean, that’s not what I mean. It just takes me awhile to admit some things to myself and then out loud to be heard and either tossed or taken in. There are layers with truths because my fear of the ocean goes beyond a fear of drowning or being eaten by […]
A fluffy baby robin bounced around our patio door like a little plastic wind-up bird. I could hear that tick tick sound of the dial on his side even though it wasn’t actually there. I knew he was a boy because bright orange is pushing through the down on his chest. He click click hopped up on a chair and stared at me, head turned for his side-eye to get a good look. I nearly cried for him because I know where he came from, his mama’s nest is right outside my kitchen dishes-washing window. I ran over to see if his brother or sister (I can’t see the chest) was gone or if his mama was around to find him way on the other side of the house. There was his sibling, head held up high searching around peep peep peep. I wondered if the wind blew out our patio visitor because […]
So often I ask them how much I love them and they say to the moon and then I say and back down again and we go back and forth like that until one of us speeds up really fast and back up and back down and back up and back down… INFINITY. When I imagined having kids I thought I’d tell them I love them to the moon, but then I had kids and I found out the moon isn’t far enough. Infinity is the only thing forever and endless enough. This weekend I saw these kids move from winter tones to summer kissed ones and somehow it makes them look older. And we moved the boys’ beds from apart to stacked and so they’re bunked boys now. Like the big boys that they are, apart and together. The duo and pals that run past laughing and asking what to play next. […]
Finally, I had time to sit with all of the submissions to the Use Your Words essay contest. With each and every one, my heart found touchpoints, the kind that mothers feel when we share our stories, the details of the beautiful mess. Reflections. She said, the lights were too bright in the hospital and she said she was scared on African soul, a new boy put in her arms, he’s yours now. What do I do with him? Where do I start? Who will tell me what to do? ::: She said she was scared on a hospital bed, arms spread out in the operating room. My life is over and begun. Every word and every line and every essay, a theme. We are all so scared at the start–that enormous engulfing fear, like lava, she said, how she flew over a volcano and saw Mother Earth spit it forth–covering and engulfing. […]
A robin was looking right back at me when I looked up. An orange breast just staring at me from a branch next to the kitchen window. I said HI out loud because when you live in the land of mostly cold weather, seeing a robin sends a flood of renewal through your toes and fingertips. I set down the dirty dish I was about to put in the dishwasher and I went out back to let out the chickens and then to watch them. There is heat in the morning air and there is a new kind of first light I wear flip flops or no shoes and see longer grass every morning. The boys are sprinkler jumping and bubble blowing and Elsie is sitting in the grass and taking it all in. She’s new here, to spring, and I think she likes it. Especially the grass and the chickens. The chickens […]
On Sunday morning Asher shouted, We have a leak! and I came down the stairs to see him standing barefoot, water up to his ankles, Legos floating by, plastic bobbing up and down and laughing at me in primary colors. RYAN!!! That was me, with the shouting this time and there came my husband to stand at the bottom of the stairs with me in disbelief. It had rained and rained the night before. So much that a big empty plastic bin that was sitting outside in the storm was full halfway up by morning. And this would be the night that our sump pump up and stopped working. I could write a million whining words about the mess, I really could. The sopping wet very large area rugs, the piles of soaked laundry, etc…but unusually, this became a day that I may even call good. There was panic at first and while […]
The weekends have been rolling through with paintbrush strokes lately. There have been many more bright yellows and reds where there had been a lot of darker things, like depression and colic. We are moving now, wheels turning down the road to places with familiar faces and isn’t it silly that I started to wonder if that would ever happen again? If we would always stand still? You do, you know? You start to believe that “it will always be this way” whatever that way is, but it never stays. We have that one constant, in counting on change. You would think I’d be sure of it by now but I still get scared sometimes when things are hard. I get scared they will only stay hard or get harder. But this weekend Miles had a play date and there was a pizza fundraiser and a huge indoor garage sale where I got […]
{Welcome to Just Write. This week, after you link up below, click on over to Momalom and link up there, too! We’re sharing words with 5 for 5 this week! The prompt is “Words” but if you didn’t get that memo, no worries. Your post surely has words in it, so it’ll work just fine. The link to 5 for 5 is at the end of this post.} {WORDS} On Sunday I got back into bed, overwhelmed and exhausted, my down comforter like a life raft. No TV, no book, no iPhone. No words. I was just thinking but not about much. Then I drifted off to sleep. I have no idea how long it’s been since I did something like that. Just calmly ignoring the loud sounds coming from the other rooms, coming in and out of consciousness. Peaceful. It’s been a really long time. It was the next thing on […]
My soul begs for quiet maybe even more than my body begs for rest. A quiet room and mind. No racing thoughts or legs no loud no hustle no no no no no strife no strain just peace just a moment. No, that’s not true. I want moments. Many many moments of quiet, in a row. It would take days and days of quiet moments for the recovering of this heart and mind. This person. I am tight shoulders and held breath, sleep deprivation and overstimulation. I am numb. I am not. I am crying. I am trying. I am not. I am feeling a tinge of pride when my Dad walks in and I’m making brownies with Asher on a very bad day. Look at me go! I found the energy! As if his love for me changes based on what I’m doing or not doing. As if he has a piece of graph paper and […]
My early riser is up with the light. Bouncing around and all chatter and energy. He passes the hours (yes, hours) before school with Nutella and checking in on the baby chicks (yes, chicks) and Legos and Animal Planet. Today we learned about walruses. Walruses apparently get annoyed with each other and jab those big tusks into each other. The narrator man says that’s okay because they heal fast and they’re made of six layers of blubber. On a commercial break, there’s an ad with a woman in a hospital bed. She says she had a stroke because she smoked her whole life. Her son is giving her a sponge bath and she’s talking about how she can’t do anything anymore. She tells smokers to “enjoy your independence now”. I asked Miles what he thought all of that meant and he said that everyone should stop smoking. Then he added that if you […]
Asher has a blue shirt with red and yellow headphones on it. Every night I sit on my bed and fold the laundry and it seems like that shirt is always in my hands. Half fold, sleeves together and folded back, half fold again. I stop to look at the front of it for just a second when I put it on his stack of clothes because it’s my favorite. I don’t know why. I just like him in it. Maybe because it’s his favorite, too. Right before the laundry folding festivities, I put Elsie in her crib. Every night, I rock and nurse her, run my hand over her head and put her down and look at her for a little longer than a second. I walk away and tell her Daddy that I can’t believe how beautiful she is or that she’s ours and doesn’t it seem like she was always […]
I reached up and pulled on my ear lobe and then pulled again and again. I don’t know why, really. Just something to do, something repetitive besides answering Asher’s question, the same one, coming again from the back seat. I don’t know, honey. I just don’t know. I don’t know what else to say about it. He asks the world’s cutest questions and so many of them don’t have answers. It struck me that my ear lobe is the kind of soft that aging brings, like the space between my neck and chin. It’s as if the skin has been stretched by gravity for long enough to have given up. The boys (and I’m sure very soon, their sister) tell me that I’m getting old. I laugh when they say that, but I’m sure this opinion won’t change. They can only see my outsides with fine lines and dark circles below the eyes. […]
“I’m going to live my life inspired. Look for the holy in the commonplace. Open the windows and feel all that’s honest and real until I’m truly amazed.” ~Sara Groves Elsie and I went with my Dad to visit my Grandma. She had knee surgery a few weeks ago and you should see her. She’s such a spitfire, she’s already walking with no limp behind her wheeled walker chair thingy. We talked about how it’s so warm for a Minnesota March and she said, It’s kind of scary and I said, Yeah! It is! It just feels so strange. It feels like July or August and so it’s like Minnesota has been tricked or like something daunting is happening. I don’t know why exactly, it just feels that way. Even though we’re REALLY enjoying the unnatural weather. The windows have been open for days and all the winter things are flying out and […]
I handed the teething and fussy and clinging baby to her Daddy right at the moment he came through the door. I said, I need to hide for a little while and here I am. It’s been not even five minutes and Miles has come to the door three times and Asher once. Elsie has been doing that thing with her walker, where she bangs it against the door while making grunt sounds mixed with whining for me. Ryan is trying to make dinner and Miles keeps asking to play a game. It feels a bit like the house is spinning, there’s so much activity. The witching hour(s). Everyone is done, over-tired, needing, hungry and did I mention over-tired? I think of all the houses breathing this same life right now and I know it’s so good that we all get to breathe this way together at all. In a few hours all […]
I avoided discomfort for most of my life. Now I’m learning to sit in it–to walk through it, not around it–but I still had the idea that discomfort would only come in waves. Ebb and flow. Easy then hard, then easy then hard. Like life was like a carousel moving slowly with the scenery changing from good to bad. It seemed like people take their turns, you know? That their seasons are marked with Joy or Pain, one or the other. It looks like that, when you’re a child because you hear about the Big Things but adults don’t really talk to you about all the constants. And it looks like that as an adult because we compare a lot and comparing makes everything seem big and black and white and one way or the other. I’m finally learning, since I can’t escape it anymore, that discomfort is there all the time. Of […]
I keep trying to take a picture of Elsie in just the right light to catch the way her hair is growing in. It is wispy light, so fine and thin as baby hair is, but so sparse it’s comical. She has baby orangutan hair. It’s hard to capture it in a photo, to do it justice. I want to remember it and maybe I will because I look at it so much. I carry her around a lot, wearing her on my hip and she clings like the monkey that her hair makes her seem to be. She wants me all the time and I want her all the time. I need breaks but not that many and not for very long because I am so smitten. The other day Asher hurt her, doing something a four year old boy would do in a moment of impulsivity. It wasn’t mean-spirited or done […]
It was a hard afternoon. Sometimes I’m just struck with the heaviest feeling, my whole body going kind of weak and I’m just done. I was sitting on the bed with Asher standing next to me. He was looking up at the wall at a vintage print we have of a boy going fishing. I was sitting hunched and staring at him, taking him in and I said, Asher, I love you. He didn’t seem to hear me because he looked right at me suddenly and very seriously said, How come you can’t see God? That’s a good question, honey. Mommy. Lift your head up. Look up. And ask Him. So I did, kind of awkwardly, God, why can’t I see you? and it kind of made me want to cry. I told Asher that I think I can’t see God because He’s a mystery, a good mystery and that what we find out about Him is always about love. […]
We went out for an early Valentine dinner so we could get back for putting Elsie to bed. She needs me at bedtime. We didn’t say, Now no talking about the kids! Because usually I think of the things They say to do and not do and then I fail and think about it too much. So we just did our thing the best we could on that day. We ended up not talking about the kids. I got curious about things I didn’t know, from life Before Us and so I asked a lot of questions and Ryan told me about road trips and moving to Arizona and the last time he saw his Grandma. I told him some stories too and we never run out of them, you know, if we just keep digging. I remember my Grandpa saying that he learned something new about my Grandma every day. I couldn’t really believe […]
That kid’s song says, “it’s alright to cry, crying gets the sad out of you” and I always thought it might be a lie. It doesn’t seem like it’s alright. So I would sing it as a kid and it would choke me up right there at school with no reason. It still makes me cry to sing the crying song, especially lately because this anxiety thing is wearing out my body and I’m so damn depressed. You might be wondering why in the world I would listen to that song, but I don’t know, it just came on with the ipod on shuffle because there are a lot of kid songs on there. It takes all I have to give to walk over and turn the power on, make the music start to change the house song, to keep going. But I did the hokey pokey. Miles watched with such intensity waiting […]
I turned the heat down. The burner was on high and the water was boiling over. I walked away and forgot again and came back to stir and the noodles were kind of stuck on the bottom. Elsie woke up from her nap and she was so snuggly. More snuggly than her usual, with one pudgy hand on either of my cheeks and her face smashed into my chin. She stayed that way a long time and I hugged her back. Then we went to stir and drain the noodles and the steam was going all the way to the ceiling and Elsie stared at it in awe. I turned the heat down in the house because it’s 30 degrees outside and that’s balmy for Minnesota. I knew if I left it up, Miles would sweat in bed later because he’s just such a little hot box. I fed Elsie from her tiny […]
We found some keys in the parking lot during pick-up from school, on the ground. I picked them up and looked around. No one. I looked for an answer but there were no words. No name or kind of car, just a symbol. I’m sure the symbol should have meant something to me but it didn’t. I needed words. We put the keys on the mirror of the driver’s side on the nearest car and Miles wanted to know what would happen if that wasn’t the right car. I don’t know, honey, but we tried. Maybe the people who find them next will keep trying. The keys were right by that car, so let’s hope we did the right thing. I say, Use your words a lot, all through the day, teaching. Miles says his teacher says that, too. He doesn’t like to talk to her all that much. He says he’s too […]
WE {a blog might say} I am a journal for you or for them and always for both pulled out from under the mattress seen. I am not taken seriously until I slap faces with perspective and the resounding gong of the universal human experience, pain-joy. I am a chameleon or a snowflake and always both. I will make you drop your fork to grab a pen to note the story for later’s keyboard. I tell that story, a pixel web vessel for the heart or mind or skill and for all of that and more and for the song to be heard. Behind me is a story-teller a person behind a screen fingers tapping. I am a mouth and an ear, I am the pretty things or the ugly things and always both. opinions words stories quotes voices platforms speaking out pissing off saying it gently like it is loudly like […]
I stood up in the balcony and watched my boys below, in the gym with all the other kids. I held Elsie on my hip and she watched with me. Miles was way off to the side, away from the other kids and I couldn’t see Asher. My heart dropped to my toes because Miles is always nervous in new places and around other people. He bites his nails like it’s his job and he stands alone while everyone else does what Simon Says. Then Asher came out of nowhere and Miles’ hands dropped to his sides and they moved closer to the other kids, together. They laughed and bounced and started running around when the game ended, Asher yelling, I’m chasing my bra-wer!! (brother) My heart lifted back up. The man who was trying to keep control asked the kids to sit in a circle. They were loud and everywhere. Miles sat down, […]
It’s a coffee shop made from an old house with hidden nooks and rooms. It’s cold up here in the middle room. I can hear a boy and his mother in the next space. The walls are thin and I am always tuned into a child’s voice. It’s becoming more and more obvious that they don’t just struggle here but everywhere. The mother’s voice is well-versed in soothing responses, trying to calm the boy who cannot leave the rigid confines of his concrete mind. She is kind and she sighs when he repeats over and over and over that she sucks because she won’t take him home right this second for video games. He’s loud. Louder and louder as he repeats and repeats and does not get the answer that is the only one he wants. Someone comes to close the door from another room and awkwardly explains why she’s closing the door. It’s […]
It’s been 2 years. 2 years 365 days plus 365 days or 24 hours strung together 730 times. I suppose I could go on with all kinds of numbers, but I’m terrible at math and the day must go on. That’s what they do, you know. The days go on, sometimes walking and sometimes running and sometimes marching. Oh the ones that march, they are the stompy and defiant ones, annoying and hard but entirely necessary. This morning I woke up to Elsie Talk, crackling at me over the monitor. I went to get her and nursed her in bed and when she was done she looked up at me and made the silliest face you’ve ever seen. Then Miles came in and sniffed her head and sniffed her head some more. It’s his favorite thing to do. We got up, we three early risers and I made coffee and thought my thinks […]
I came across this: No one else will ever know the strength of my love for you. After all, you’re the only one who knows what my heart sounds like from the inside. ba boom ba boom ba boom… I guess I’d change that to, you’re one of the only ones who knows what my heart sounds like from the inside. Since there are three children that have been there. Putting it that way makes three sound like not very many at all. Just three people, the only ones who will ever know my heart this way. Only three, on all the planet in all my days. So I have three to think of, as I sit here and listen to their sounds all around me. The boys discussing a made-up game of cars that race in just this way and in just this time. And Elsie rolling around me in her little baby walker, […]
I talked to myself today, as I cleaned up the kitchen. I forced myself to think of good things and I told myself that I’m a good mother. It felt weird. Maybe it shouldn’t feel weird, but apparently I’m much better at self-deprecation than cheering myself on. Sometimes when someone says Oh hi, how are you? I want to say something like, All twisted up inside! I want to say it with gusto, like how we say Fine! Or Great! Being all twisted up inside is just the truth and it’s not always bad. Sometimes it just means I’m a bundle of all different emotions, many of them good. We don’t say these things though, so I don’t. I was at the grocery store today and I was standing in front of the cheese. I don’t know how long I stood there but somehow it became a very difficult decision, choosing cheese. I’m […]
