The other day I came home from a long day at work, patted my bulldog on his massive head and set to work preparing dinner. It was on a third pass through the living room that I spotted them: a pair of perfectly innocent, somewhat camouflaged, rather unimposing boxers on the couch. Part of me smiled and thought perhaps there was justice in the universe after all. The rest of me quickly interceded on unfairness' behalf. These unders were dark, blending almost perfectly with the furniture. They were balled up, so if you weren't familiar with my husband's boxers, you could just as easily imagine they were a shirt or towel of some sort (and really, I hope no one out there is that familiar with my husband's underoos). And for a third mark: Boxers are just in general far more respectable than panties. I imagine certain men would have a much harder time taking themselves seriously if they were wearing bright red, lacy, high cut under-riggings beneath their slacks.
...
Oh and strange men weren't walking around our house all day to infer, surmise, and snicker at the naughties upon our sofa!
Wednesday, June 19, 2013
28
I don't feel twenty-eight. I lived my entire twenty-sixth year thinking I was twenty-seven and then tried to reverse the process for the following year. It didn't go well. I ended up being twenty-seven for two years, and now I'm having a difficult time breaking the habit. But whatever age you are, celebrations must ensue on your birthday, so here's ours.
Breakfast at Mimi's with the husband and Little Man. It was delicious, Noah only threw down all of his toys about 400 times each, and, I am happy to report, I kept it down... all the way until noon. Wahoo.
We took Noah to Farm Country at Thanksgiving Point. He seemed most interested in the goats. The horses scared him, and the chickens were rather concerning. Goats seem safe. (And yes, from the previous post, this is where I cried at a goat. For no particular reason at all. Poor goat: crazy lady crying at him and a baby boy pulling his ears. [It must be difficult to distinguish between a Dumpster, who's ears you can pull, and every other smelly, overweight creature out there.])
And what does an Abi want for her birthday? ...
Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
To end the day we went into the canyon to cook S'mores with the family. And somehow, although I can't stomach soup, crackers, or water; S'mores are no problem. I'm going to be living on Hersheys and marshmallows until November. Here's Baby Noah with his Grandma and Nana playing in the mountains:
All in all a grand birthday with only a little unsightly vomit. Now to figure out how to be twenty-eight years old...
Breakfast at Mimi's with the husband and Little Man. It was delicious, Noah only threw down all of his toys about 400 times each, and, I am happy to report, I kept it down... all the way until noon. Wahoo.
We took Noah to Farm Country at Thanksgiving Point. He seemed most interested in the goats. The horses scared him, and the chickens were rather concerning. Goats seem safe. (And yes, from the previous post, this is where I cried at a goat. For no particular reason at all. Poor goat: crazy lady crying at him and a baby boy pulling his ears. [It must be difficult to distinguish between a Dumpster, who's ears you can pull, and every other smelly, overweight creature out there.])
And what does an Abi want for her birthday? ...
Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
To end the day we went into the canyon to cook S'mores with the family. And somehow, although I can't stomach soup, crackers, or water; S'mores are no problem. I'm going to be living on Hersheys and marshmallows until November. Here's Baby Noah with his Grandma and Nana playing in the mountains:
All in all a grand birthday with only a little unsightly vomit. Now to figure out how to be twenty-eight years old...
The Wrecking Ball
At our ultrasound in two weeks we find out whether we are having a boy or a girl. It seems a formality only, to me. I'm 95 percent sure there is a sweet and fiery baby girl tumbling about inside of me. At my last appointment we had a hard time finding a heartbeat. This was not a matter of concern. Every time the doctor placed the ultrasound microphone against my belly, probably she/but maybe he would give it a firm kick. Eventually my OB guessed we were dealing with a girl. This doesn't mean much. He is the OB for my sister-in-law as well, and of the three children we already have, he's striking out on guesses. Noah was supposed to be a girl, and he is decidedly, all boy.
However, the real reason I know we have a wee femme on our hands is because I have become an emotional wrecking ball. I had a few little breakdowns with Noah, a few boohoos and woe-is-me's. But with this baby, it seems a weekly, if not daily occurrence. I walked out of our bedroom the other day, tears pouring in torrents down my face. "What's wrong?" my ever-concerned and ever-sweet husband asked.
"I need a sweater." ...
Justin's eyes flitted nervously back and forth. If he were a man of lesser character he would probably have bit his lip and looked for an escape. "OK," he replied cautiously, as you would speak if you were occupied with trying to diffuse an incendiary device. "So what's the problem?"
I just shrugged. There is no problem. Except that I am insane, swinging like a 100 lb concrete destroyer, ready to shatter anything I come in contact with.
I've cried at my brother, I've cried at my friends, I cried at the cable man, and at a bird. I cried at my dog, and a basil plant, and an umpire. (Poor guy. That must have been a first.) I have even cried at a goat. (Explanation in a future post.) And every one of these is a story that would take too much time to recount.
However, the real reason I know we have a wee femme on our hands is because I have become an emotional wrecking ball. I had a few little breakdowns with Noah, a few boohoos and woe-is-me's. But with this baby, it seems a weekly, if not daily occurrence. I walked out of our bedroom the other day, tears pouring in torrents down my face. "What's wrong?" my ever-concerned and ever-sweet husband asked.
"I need a sweater." ...
Justin's eyes flitted nervously back and forth. If he were a man of lesser character he would probably have bit his lip and looked for an escape. "OK," he replied cautiously, as you would speak if you were occupied with trying to diffuse an incendiary device. "So what's the problem?"
I just shrugged. There is no problem. Except that I am insane, swinging like a 100 lb concrete destroyer, ready to shatter anything I come in contact with.
I've cried at my brother, I've cried at my friends, I cried at the cable man, and at a bird. I cried at my dog, and a basil plant, and an umpire. (Poor guy. That must have been a first.) I have even cried at a goat. (Explanation in a future post.) And every one of these is a story that would take too much time to recount.
Monday, June 3, 2013
Mother's Day 2013
I didn't post forever because our Internet was down for a day. Our Internet provider promised it would be one day, but their days must be counted more biblically than everyone elses. 'To DISH Network a day is as a thousand years...' Punks. But I got them back. I called on Saturday when Justin needed to turn in his homework for online classes, and I wept like the mad, pregnant woman I am. There's nothing like having a customer crying on the phone to really turn someone's day cloudy. Perhaps, I was too cruel.
Noah decided to mark my first real mother's day by getting up at 4:15 in the morning, demanding milk, and then wanting to play instead of going back to sleep. The refusal of sleep lasted all day, and he was a joy to be around. He has been sleeping very well, so the sudden turn of events was both unexpected and untimely. All I wanted for mother's day was a nap, which was a request more impossible to fulfill than if I had wished for a Cadillac full of conflict diamonds.
However, Mother's Day night, my sleepy, grouchy boy, my own tired brain, and the week approaching, lost all meaning and matter in the light of the world crashing down. And this is more why I haven't blogged in a month.
Sunday morning my mother told me she had some concerning symptoms the night before. While working in the garden, she had pain in her face and jaw, felt feverish and generally ill. She googled symptoms for the most concerning of potential causes, and it didn't look like a stroke or a heart attack. She taught Sunday School, taught children's church, and was seemingly fine and dandy for the day. That night I got a call that my dad had taken her to insta-care. I still wasn't too worried. Our family frequents insta-care with an annoying amount of regularity, and generally, on holidays. We really ought to make it part of our traditional celebrations. Now dad will read the Christmas story, and now we will all bundle up and drive to Insta-care whereat we will have IVs and cake.
The following morning I got myself together, saw my husband off, fed my son, and lived my usual life. I decided to call my folks to make sure all was well. My dad answered the phone. "I'm going to the hospital, to see your mom," he said. The hospital is not Insta-care. "She had a heart attack."
There had been words after that. They were reassuring, explanatory, tired, and worried. They said she was fine. They explained how they ran a tube from her thigh to her heart, put in a stent. Lots of words. I heard almost none of them. The tears were drowning them out. Tears are so ear-drum shatteringly loud. Part of it was just the shock. My mother takes very good care of herself: she eats well, she goes on her treadmill, she lifts weights (otherwise known as a twenty-two year old handicap daughter). She doesn't look the way she wants, but who of us does. She's never had high blood pressure, or struggled with heart issues. I could formulate a very, very long list of names of persons who I thought would be more likely to have a heart attack than my mom. And my name might appear somewhere on that list.
My mother has always had a sort of agelessness to me, like Galadriel. Somehow you imagine that she has age, but simultaneously she is not old and never seems to approach old. She has always seemed strangely immortal. Not an immortality of power, but just of continuity, as every morning she rises like the sun and feeds her daughter, and does her Bible study without withering or faltering. It doesn't quite make sense that she could have a heart attack. Elves don't.
A week after the heart attack she fell and broke her ankle. Now, she seems like Galadriel caged in a body that does not suit her. As a dancer, I try to have a great deal of respect for the body and mind, how deeply they are connected, and how much our physicality is a part of us. But it doesn't seem a part of her. The woman I know is strong, graceful, and quiet, full of joy and fire. The body is weak, and a little clumsy, with a heavy boot and two extra crutch legs echoing on the concrete. I know she will heal, and she will appear as the beautiful elven lady again. But somehow I imagine she will have aged. Perhaps she will return to her agelessness slightly older, become again immortal further along life's road. Or perhaps I will be able to comprehend her as more human, and maybe that will be good for us. To be alive and dying and patient for our uncaging to be truly immortal again.
Noah decided to mark my first real mother's day by getting up at 4:15 in the morning, demanding milk, and then wanting to play instead of going back to sleep. The refusal of sleep lasted all day, and he was a joy to be around. He has been sleeping very well, so the sudden turn of events was both unexpected and untimely. All I wanted for mother's day was a nap, which was a request more impossible to fulfill than if I had wished for a Cadillac full of conflict diamonds.
However, Mother's Day night, my sleepy, grouchy boy, my own tired brain, and the week approaching, lost all meaning and matter in the light of the world crashing down. And this is more why I haven't blogged in a month.
Sunday morning my mother told me she had some concerning symptoms the night before. While working in the garden, she had pain in her face and jaw, felt feverish and generally ill. She googled symptoms for the most concerning of potential causes, and it didn't look like a stroke or a heart attack. She taught Sunday School, taught children's church, and was seemingly fine and dandy for the day. That night I got a call that my dad had taken her to insta-care. I still wasn't too worried. Our family frequents insta-care with an annoying amount of regularity, and generally, on holidays. We really ought to make it part of our traditional celebrations. Now dad will read the Christmas story, and now we will all bundle up and drive to Insta-care whereat we will have IVs and cake.
The following morning I got myself together, saw my husband off, fed my son, and lived my usual life. I decided to call my folks to make sure all was well. My dad answered the phone. "I'm going to the hospital, to see your mom," he said. The hospital is not Insta-care. "She had a heart attack."
There had been words after that. They were reassuring, explanatory, tired, and worried. They said she was fine. They explained how they ran a tube from her thigh to her heart, put in a stent. Lots of words. I heard almost none of them. The tears were drowning them out. Tears are so ear-drum shatteringly loud. Part of it was just the shock. My mother takes very good care of herself: she eats well, she goes on her treadmill, she lifts weights (otherwise known as a twenty-two year old handicap daughter). She doesn't look the way she wants, but who of us does. She's never had high blood pressure, or struggled with heart issues. I could formulate a very, very long list of names of persons who I thought would be more likely to have a heart attack than my mom. And my name might appear somewhere on that list.
My mother has always had a sort of agelessness to me, like Galadriel. Somehow you imagine that she has age, but simultaneously she is not old and never seems to approach old. She has always seemed strangely immortal. Not an immortality of power, but just of continuity, as every morning she rises like the sun and feeds her daughter, and does her Bible study without withering or faltering. It doesn't quite make sense that she could have a heart attack. Elves don't.
A week after the heart attack she fell and broke her ankle. Now, she seems like Galadriel caged in a body that does not suit her. As a dancer, I try to have a great deal of respect for the body and mind, how deeply they are connected, and how much our physicality is a part of us. But it doesn't seem a part of her. The woman I know is strong, graceful, and quiet, full of joy and fire. The body is weak, and a little clumsy, with a heavy boot and two extra crutch legs echoing on the concrete. I know she will heal, and she will appear as the beautiful elven lady again. But somehow I imagine she will have aged. Perhaps she will return to her agelessness slightly older, become again immortal further along life's road. Or perhaps I will be able to comprehend her as more human, and maybe that will be good for us. To be alive and dying and patient for our uncaging to be truly immortal again.
Tea Testimony
After a series of very humorous ploys by our loving Savior, I ended up sharing at the Women's Spring Tea. This is what it was sort of like:
"God has been incredibly faithful to me, and His promises have been so real in my life. Often these are very emotional experiences. And being so pregnant as I am, my emotions are neurotic enough. So I decided to share God’s faithfulness in my love story with my husband. Because it’s cuter and funnier and won’t make me weep like a little child.
At the beginning of 2006 I discovered a Youth for Christ summer missions trip to New Zealand. And I fell in love with this idea of serving people, and going on adventures, and pretending to be an elf off in Middle Earth. I became obsessed with New Zealand. All I thought about was going there, and serving God and His people, and following my Captain on His adventure. It was almost literally all I thought about.
Around the same time my-now-husband, but then just an undyingly handsome acquaintance joined Youth for Christ as well, and began planning a yearlong internship in where-else, but New Zealand. And around this time I started falling in love with him, but we are both such outgoing, big talkers (insert ripe sarcasm) that I didn’t dare say a word, and apparently neither did he. But with us both heading off to magical New Zealand, I imagined we must be cosmically connected somehow. Because once every five years I’m allowed to be a little girly.
God was amazingly faithful in helping me raise funds for this trip, and the people in my church were so generous. I started fund raising in February, and by the end of March I had raised $3000 dollars, which was $47 more than I needed. It was like this amazing confirmation that I was in God’s will and on the right path, and He was just going to bless me so much for making this decision.
Not so much.
The first week of April I got an email from YFC that my beloved trip to New Zealand was cancelled. I don’t tend to be dramatic, but let me tell you, I read this email and ran out of the office, tears pouring down my face. I was utterly devastated. I’m going to share what I wrote in my journal that night:
I thought if I read the email again it would change, that my eyes were just playing tricks on me. But reading the email three times more did not change the words on the screen. The dream which had become my obsession, the service I’d given my very heart to, the hope I’d fallen in love with was gone. And there was nothing I could do. You can’t imagine the sense of betrayal I feel, the first time I’d truly given my heart away to something, truly fallen in love, and my dreams are crushed. There is always the burning question, “Why God, why did You let this happen?” Why would God allow me to suffer after I followed His leading as best I could, after I took steps toward what I thought was His will, after I gave of myself to His work? And I had no clue. And I still have no clue.
Because I’m not at all ever dramatic.
But because his trip was just him and a year long, Justin was still planning to skip away to New Zealand for his missions trip. And let me tell you how happy that made me. Not only was I now stuck in Utah for the summer, betrayed by my Creator, it would be a year completely devoid of the man I was quickly losing my heart to. And I felt very sorry for myself.
Around this time I read Romans 8:26-28. I love this chapter of the Bible, and at the time it was so relevant. As my faith was faltering I knew I had an Intercessor, a hope, and a future.
In the same way the Spirit also helps our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we should, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words; and He who searches the hearts knows what the mind of the Spirit is, because He intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.
I clung to this promise throughout the following year. Another New Zealand trip came up for 2007, and I instantly applied. All my funds were already raised so all I had to do was wait. And daydream about Mr. Perfect Justin for hours on end.
I still didn’t know why God would make me wait, and what His plan was, but I felt like I had perhaps grown a little in my faith. Isn’t it a shame that pain is often the best way to teach us. And sometimes the only way I learn.
So Justin returned from New Zealand on July 20th, 2007 and I left for New Zealand on July 19th, 2007 and because of the time change we very literally passed each other in the sky. And I snickered at my Lord because He’s just so funny. And I spent a month in New Zealand. It was everything I hoped (except I didn’t turn into an elf, which was disappointing). I served, I grew, I learned, and prayed, and somehow I became less a little girl and more a woman. And I raced go karts down a mountain, which was almost as cool as the fact that Justin got to build a snowman on Mount Doom.
After returning home, and readjusting to non-missions life, Justin asked me out to coffee… like, every night for the next few months. But we weren’t dating… I just have to make that clear. We weren’t dating officially, until December. I asked him since we are both so shy and quiet, why he finally asked me out. He said since I had just come back from New Zealand, and I knew the people he met there, and had seen the places he’d been so recently that he felt like we finally had something to talk about. We had both just come back from this amazing experience, and we had a connection, not something mystical or magical, but something definitely God-ordained.
So maybe that’s why I had to wait for a year. Because my soon-to-be husband needed some reason to ask me out. And New Zealand, if nothing else, is a good excuse for a date."
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