A poem about… you tell me!

This is assignment 5 for my class. We are supposed to write about an abstract idea (like love or anger) but not use the word in the poem or title and the rest of the class is supposed to guess what it is. So what do you think? If you get it right, I’ll send you a Christmas card this year. (It may undergo editing – this is my first draft.)

A Precious Ache

She is the warm, yellow glow
of a table lamp
shining under the nursery door
at three in the morning.

She is a bruised, vulnerable spirit;
she doesn’t have the strength
to stand up under the pressure
of a calloused, insensitive world.

She’s the worn-through spot
in a pure gold wedding band
that never left his finger;
a perfect, broken circle.

She is the whisper
that coaxes down the last leaf of autumn.
She blows the gentle wind of spring
that melts away the wrath of winter.

She is the sound of a father
humming a sleepy tune
and the whisper of eyelashes
fluttering together in a butterfly kiss.

She’s the tears of a soldier
as he sweeps his daughter
up into his arms
while she cries, “I missed you, Daddy!”

She’s not hardened with age;
she’s an untrained, impressionable youth.
She’s not a tough, old oak tree,
but a young, fragile shoot.

She is the hand
that carefully bandages,
dabs the sweat,
and wipes the tears.

She buries a precious ache
deep in his heart
as he traces his fingertips
across her lips.

She peeks through the bedroom door
to see her little boy
as he sleeps peacefully in his bed
and just stands there, listening to him breathe.

Hope came home

After I found out I was pregnant with Ethan, I was scared to lose him. You might know that we almost did lose him much later in my pregnancy, but this was before that. In fact, I was only six weeks along and I wanted to see a heartbeat so desperately at my first ultrasound. In the car, on the way, I listened to a beautiful little song by Bebo Norman called “How You Love Me” and I probably sang it hundreds of times when I was pregnant with Ethan – especially after we found out about the pulmonary sequestration.

I sang it for my little buddy (who’s not so little anymore!) the other day and he loves it because I told him it made me think of how God kept him safe when he was in my tummy. He asks me to sing it and says it makes him want to hug me. I sing it all the time.

Here are the words:

Hope came home, home to me today.
Fear has run the other way.
Words are weak, they don’t know how to say,
“You know I still believe in You.”
And should my dreams fall through,
I will be safe with You.
And with every breath I can breathe
I’ll sing about how You love me.
I’ll sing about how You love me.

First loose tooth and a Marathon

It was a big weekend for my guys. Tom ran his second marathon and qualified to run the Boston Marathon. So now we are planning a trip to Boston in April! 🙂 I’m so proud of him and I think he’s awesome for setting a personal goal and following through on it.

The other crazy thing is that Ethan – who’s not 5 until November – has his first loose tooth!! I nearly cried. I can’t believe how big he is.

I love my boys!

My buddy. Sorry about the red eye, I am too tired to fix it tonight!

To Grandmother’s house we go

Tomorrow is my grandma’s birthday. She’ll be old.

Today, my mom and I took the kids to visit her. Grandma lives in a nursing home now, because she has pretty severe dementia. I have quite a bit of experience with grandma’s suffering from dementia. My other grandma suffered from it basically since before I was born – it grew far worse in the years before she died, but I never knew her before she got easily confused. So, even though it was hard to see her that way, it was what I was used to.

Not Grandma Lucille. She was completely intact mentally until just a few years ago. I’m not sure I remember exactly when it happened, but one time she got lost driving through the town she’s lived in most of her life. She was trying to go to stores that had been demolished years before. Then her grandchildren started getting married and having children and it was hard, even for me, to keep them all straight. She knew who we were, but not who they were – at least not all the time. Later, we’d go to her house for Christmas and she’d just sit there, smiling, but with a very blank look on her face. She’s looked that way pretty much ever since.

When it got to the point where she started wondering off by herself down the road (she lives on a major highway), her kids decided it was time to move her to a nursing home – she needed 24-hour care. I’ve brought my kids to visit her there only a few times. I’m ashamed to say that I don’t like going. I love my grandma, but it’s awful to go in and not have her know who I am, not even a glimmer of recognition. She’s not the grandma I knew when I grew up.

I think I’ll go more often, though – you should see how her face lights up when we come. I don’t know if it’s just nice having someone there, or if it’s the kids playing, or what, but she is happy when we come. And I want her to be happy, even if she doesn’t know it’s me who’s come to see her.

Me, my grandma, my mom and my three kids, Dec. 2008

Soap Operas and Bon-bons

Today is the type of day I dreamed about when I was longing to become a mother. Sort of. I mean, I think most girls have fantasies of sort about motherhood – baby sleeping peacefully while you sit and watch soap operas eating proverbial bon-bons. Or your kids being the only ones who made it through the nature walk with clean fingernails and all their clothes in one piece. There’s nothing like a flustered woman in mom jeans coming up to you and crooning, “Oh just wait until your kids use their poo-poo from their diapers to paint their walls” to burst your bubble. Well, actually, there’s nothing like having your kids paint the walls in your house with poo-poo to burst your bubble.

Thankfully, I have not experienced any poopy incidents – unless you count when my kids all three had a stomach bug and I had to change more than 20 poopy diapers in one 12 hour period as an incident. But I’ve had my share of crappy days. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.) You only need to read a few of my previous posts to hear about some of them.

The bad days are enough to make me doubt my capabilities as a mom. They make me wish I worked full time or sent them to preschool. They make me feel like a failure.

Today, however, I don’t feel like a failure. Because today I asked Ethan what his favorite part of the day was and he said, “School.” I smiled and said, “Oh, buddy, that’s great.” Then he said, “Wait, no, no, no, that wasn’t my favorite part.” Here it comes, I thought. “Mama, my favorite part of the day so far was hugging you.”

Melt my heart. Turn it to goo. Mush. Whatever. It made me feel good. Really good.

Of course, just now, instead of napping, Kaylee was stacking stuffed animals on top of Sienna while Sienna was sleeping. It’s a work in progress.

Loss – Assignment three

A bit of background – this is my third assignment for my creative writing course. We were to write an extended metaphor. We picked an abstract thought – in my case “loss” – and put it into a metaphor. I volunteered to do an “experiment” with the instructor and through various questions, I concluded that loss felt like a cake pan that wasn’t full. I know, silly, but I decided that it would be good challenge to actually write that poem. And this is what I wrote.

Loss

Loss is
when she pours the cake batter
into the baking pan,
slides the pan into the oven
and waits.

When the timer goes off
she pulls the pan out of the oven
and finds that the cake
has not risen,
does not fill the pan,
and is generally unappetizing.

She wonders,
Is it missing ingredients?
Is there a misprint in the recipe?
Is the pan the wrong size?

Since the house is empty
except for her
no one answers.
So she scrapes the pan clean,
discarding the remains of the ruined cake,
and begins again.

Her name is Joy

I went to the Women of Faith Conference in Cleveland (go Browns!) this weekend. Someone gave a friend of mine free tickets and she passed them on to me. I went expecting God to say something to me about my self-esteem or writing or something along those lines. I was caught completely off-guard (which is probably why He did it, much easier to deal with something a person isn’t guarding, eh?) when He brought healing to my heart for something I didn’t necessarily think I needed to deal with.

Remember how I said I went through some boxes of old stuff last week? I found old school papers, some birthday cards and other “take me down memory lane” kinds of things. I found the ultrasound images of the baby we lost between Ethan and the girls. It brought back a rush of raw emotions – anger and grief mostly. I cried. And felt guilty.

Do you also remember my post about my miscarriages? And how I didn’t want to think about them? I’ve always felt kind of guilty about that because those were my babies. It feels like I have been trying to pretend that they never existed. Especially Kaylee and Sienna’s triplet. I never really felt like that baby was real. How can you mourn when you have two healthy living babies to rejoice about? How can it feel real when I didn’t have to have a D&C that time? When there was no heartbeat to see? I’ve wanted some kind of closure – but nothing felt right since I had never even cried about her. (I don’t know why I feel like it was a girl, maybe because of Sienna and Kaylee?)

So there I was, in my seat at Women of Faith, waiting for God to tell me that someday I’ll be a famous speaker or writer, or at least that He thinks I’m good enough – and up on the stage comes Steven Curtis Chapman and his wife, Mary Beth. If you don’t know them, Steven is a Christian singer who’s been recording albums since I was just a little kid. He and his wife adopted three beautiful girls from China after their biological children were in their late teens. Two years ago, one of those sweet little girls, Maria Sue, was accidentally killed by one of the Chapman boys when he ran over her in an SUV. She had just turned five. How do you get past that? Especially given that they live such public lives and it was all over the news?

I don’t know why, but hearing Mary Beth speak as a mother (who never wanted to do anything other than stay home and take care of kids while Steven was on the road) who was still grieving and processing something that had happened two years ago, gave me permission to go back and process my own grief that I had never let myself experience. Steven also shared about a time when one of his other daughters needed to take a pill and she couldn’t make herself swallow it. Finally, after literally hours of trying to get her to take it, she was sobbing and said to him, “Don’t you love me, Daddy?” and he realized that God sometimes has tough pills for us to swallow, but if we can get them down, they will help us in the long-run. When they are terribly difficult to swallow, it’s natural for us to ask God, “Why are you doing this? Don’t you love me?”

I can’t explain why, but somewhere during their talk, it became real to me that I do have three children in heaven. I knew it before, but it felt almost like I was lying when I said that (even just to myself) because I had never really done anything to acknowledge my lost triplet baby. So as I was sitting there, tears running down my face (everyone had tears running down their faces), I silently thanked God for giving me that closure. And very clearly, in my heart, I heard God say, “Her name is Joy.” And I know – I know she and her sister and brother are waiting for me in heaven.

Ethan asked about our lost babies when I showed them the ultrasound picture. “Will she still be a baby in heaven?” he asked.

“I don’t know, Buddy,” I answered. “But I hope so.”

My very wise four year old answered with such sweet words, “Mama, I know why you hope she’s still a baby. It’s like when you want me to stay the same size I am – so that you can always hold me and I’ll always be your little kid.”

It feels good to finally acknowledge that Joy was and is my baby. That she is someone to be mourned – and remembered.

It’s a good thing God invented chocolate

I’m having one of those days. Nothing seems to be going right. Kaylee woke up with pinkeye. Ethan’s had a cough for weeks and I’m pretty sure he also has a sinus infection. And Sienna, though healthy, is acting like a little imp. I had to run to Walmart to pick up just a few things – new toothbrushes, a prescription, and some things we’d ordered from their website. It should have been fifteen or twenty minutes. (Hey, now, I can hear you all laughing from here – it was a reasonable estimate. Ok, stop that snickering. I often think that this time, I’ll encounter someone who actually knows what they are doing in the pick up location. Sheesh, I’ll stop now, as long as you promise to stop laughing at me.)

Anyhoo, as soon as we got there, I let the kids pick their own toothbrushes and in just a minute or two, they all picked ones that blink and light up. Great. Check one thing off the list. Easy peasy. The pharmacy was a cinch as well. She even gave the kids suckers. So we headed back to the Site to Store pick up area. I pressed the screen that said, “Press here for help.” (See I didn’t need a degree to succeed in life!) And then I waited. The screen said someone was coming to help but, after several minutes, it returned to the original “Press here for help” screen. I pressed it again. That’s when the creepy greeter guy (they aren’t all creepy, just this guy is a little too kid friendly for my taste) showed up and asked if we’d been helped. I said no so he radioed someone. Then he told Kaylee she had such a pretty smile. Eeek! And of course she showed him her new toothbrushes. That’s when Sienna decided she didn’t like hers. And Kaylee agreed that the blinky ones were indeed a terrible choice. For some dumb reason, I agreed to go back to the toothbrush aisle and pick new ones. Perhaps a degree in child psychiatry might come in handy?

Finally, a helpful lady showed up to help us get our items (a tent and a fire pit, if you must know). She really was nice enough, but she wasn’t from that department. (I don’t know if I’ve ever had anyone help me who was from the proper department other than the pharmacy and that’s because they are all locked in there, never to enter the real world again. Or so it must seem, since it takes them an hour to fill a prescription of a bottle of eye drops.) So Joanne, the nice lady, said, “You got an e-mail saying that your order was ready to pick up?” No, I just came back here for my jollies and to see how long it might take to get an actual human being to notice that I was there.

I agreed that, yes, I did have an e-mail and handed it to her. Perhaps English wasn’t her first language because she looked at that paper like it was written in Chinese for about five minutes. She finally went back to the store room and miraculously returned with our tent and fire pit. She couldn’t give them to me yet, she warned – she didn’t know how to ring it up so that I had the receipt when I went out the doors. Apparently people steal tents and fire pits frequently enough that they need that extra layer of security. Of course, I’m not sure WHERE one might steal those items from since they aren’t available IN the store and the back store room is, shall we say, filled with workers who are, um, standing around waiting for their shift to begin?

At any rate, 20 minutes after I first pushed the “Help me!” button, I had my tent and fire pit and was headed back to the front of the store to get Kaylee and Sienna new toothbrushes. I managed to convince them that the two cheapest choices were the best ones and we went to the check out.

Ahhh, the self check out at Walmart. It can be a great thing – faster than a speeding cashier. Or it can be the bane of your existence. I was making my way to the only open self check out aisle when a weaselly little man literally JUMPED in front of me and actually said out loud, “I guess I’m just faster than you. Ha ha.” Ya think? A mom with three kids walking in between her and the cart or in front of the cart or running around the cart – and said cart is overloaded with two large boxes causing the mom not to be able to see in front of her? Yes, little weasel, you were faster. But I could kick your behind any day of the week – just so long as my kids weren’t there to see.

When it was finally my turn, I begged the machine to give me a break; I just wanted to go home – like in Free Willy or E.T. It apparently was not in the mood to humor me because it didn’t register the weight of the first package of toothbrushes in the bagging area and when I put the second ones in, it claimed that I put in double the weight. Then, I scanned a coupon and when it asked me to drop the coupon into that confounded slot, I did and of course it didn’t sense it. Fortunately, weasel man had left his receipt and I stuffed that puppy in there so fast, the machine never knew what hit it. So I had to call for help. The lady touched the screen (that was still saying to insert the coupon) about 25 times. If you think I’m kidding, ask to see the security tape. Then she told me that “sometimes you just need to tap the screen a few times.” By the time we got back into the van, it had been more than an hour since I’d gotten there.

If that weren’t enough, by the time we got home, Kaylee’s pinkeye got worse and when I called the pediatrician to ask if she could call in a prescription for her, I mentioned Ethan’s lingering cough and cold. Of course, they can’t prescribe antibiotics without seeing him. And I understand that – there are people who think their kids need antibiotics the minute they have any kind of symptoms. But I’ve never been one to ask for antibiotics without a good reason. In fact, I just got over a sinus infection after having the same lingering cough and sinus junk that Ethan has – so I’m reasonably certain it’s a sinus infection for him, too. Even the nurse told me that the doctor thinks that is what it is. But rules are rules. I have to bring him in. Problem is, the earliest they could get him in today was at 5:15 – and she mentioned that they’d been double-booking appointments so it would not really be at 5:15. I have to be able leave at 5:30 to get to the Women of Faith Conference in Cleveland tonight (and 5:30 is cutting it a little close). So they said what about tomorrow? Well, gee, golly, they are having the Conference tomorrow as well, and I’m driving because the two friends coming with me don’t have a ride. Which means Tom won’t have the van to take the kids in. So we have to wait until Monday for him to get medicine.

I finally got the kids down for a nap a few minutes ago and then I cut myself a big slice of double chocolate chip zucchini bread and savored the soothing taste. I don’t know what it is about chocolate that makes the day seem a little brighter, but it sure does. In fact, I think I’ll go have some more.

Confession time

I haven’t been writing about my eating disorder issues in awhile. That’s because I haven’t been doing so hot. My counselor said I was doing well enough that I could try being “on my own” for awhile. It’s been a few weeks – maybe a month – since I saw her. The problems started again when I went back to the doctor and they knew I didn’t want to know how much I weighed so they didn’t tell me. I didn’t look either. But, gosh, I wanted to know. I wanted to know if the number had gone down since our vacation. Never mind that all my pants still fit. Never mind that I’d been listening to my hunger signals and eating well without denying myself. I still wanted a concrete number to tell me that I was doing good. That I was good enough.

Then I got a nasty cold that turned into a sinus infection. I was miserable, coughing all night and feeling unable to breathe. At first, I tried to continue to exercise as normal, but exercise made me cough so much I thought I would throw up. Normal people don’t exercise when they are sick. I am trying to be normal – to have a normal attitude about food and exercise. So I stopped exercising and that’s when I realized that part of the reason I was doing so well mentally was because I’d been exercising regularly and I knew that I was burning a lot of calories by riding my bike so many miles. When I knew that I shouldn’t (and really, couldn’t) exercise, I became very antsy and tried to mentally calculate how many calories I was eating so that I wouldn’t gain weight. All the time this was happening, I knew I was heading in the wrong direction. I knew I should exercise because it feels good and because it’s good for me, not because I’ll get fat if I don’t.  I was relieved to rest – my body really needed it. I knew I was doing the right thing, but still, I felt guilty – and scared.

I got over my infection while Tom and I were in Niagara Falls celebrating our tenth anniversary. I exercised in the fitness room at out hotel – mostly because Tom did and I didn’t feel like being alone. I ate way too much and tried not to feel guilty. And that’s where I’m at today. Trying really hard.

I am disappointed that it’s still a battle, but I knew after “beating” this mindset several times before, that this is a process. I can’t just reverse 16+ years of these kind of thoughts overnight. So I’m pressing on even though I really feel like giving up. The thought that someday I’ll have more positive thoughts than negative ones gives me hope.

“And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.” Romans 5:5 (NIV)

In Memory

Dislocation

The Sun had no idea
what would happen
that day.
It went about its normal
business –
floating across the clear blue sky,
enjoying the last few days of summer.
If it saw the planes crash
into the Towers,
if it heard the news about the Pentagon
or the field in Pennsylvania,
it gave no indication;
it never missed a step.
Perhaps it thought it best just
to go on.

Time stopped, though.
It held its breath
in pain,
dislocated
because the Sun kept moving
while it was standing still,
staring in disbelief
and grief.
Like a boy straining to see
his house burn down
while his father hurries him
down the street,
perhaps believing
he can shelter the boy
from the horrific scene.
But the son
had already watched
his mother
die
in the flames.

The next morning
the Sun
rose again –
just as it had each morning
after every heartbreaking,
excruciating,
devastating
tragedy
it had witnessed before.
And we were glad to see it.