Category Archives: Personal

About me and/or for my benefit

A Time to Cherish

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(Initially posted at Family News)

As long as I’ve had my own child in my arms I’ve been hearing some version of the line from adults my parents’ age (thankfully never from my parents):

“Enjoy it while it lasts, sweetie, it’ll be over before you know it.”Laying aside the fact that I was none of these people’s “sweetie,” the line always bugged me. I had several ready (rude?) responses:

  • If they stopped, well, wouldn’t that be worse?”
  • “Every stage has things you’re glad to get away from too.”

But mostly, I think with my girls the comment didn’t bother me as much as it annoyed me (someone telling me how to feel). I expected to have more kids. I would see this stage again up-close, and for now I was just living my version of “normal.” How many people want (or need) to be told how to be normal?

I have a friend I spoke with over the phone once when we both should have been starting dinner. We talked about being at home, and how glad we were to be our babies’ primary caregiver and the neat things we experience instead of missing. And alternated with that commiserations on the monotony of those days. I loved her summary:

“Every day is so different, and every day is exactly the same.” Continue reading »

“Processing”

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The main problem I see with “therapeutic” writing is how necessary (or, at least, strongly encouraged) it seems to be to focus on the negative you’re trying to deal with/process.

The implication is that you must define and identify it, I suppose.

But for me to do this I must submit myself to the negative feelings that pull at me (both now and during “real-life”), and that seems dangerous. Who surrenders to the mini-whirlpools that pull at their ankles when swimming in unfamiliar waters? Isn’t that just foolishness?

I am experiencing emotions I want to process, I do want to understand myself and be understood, but the cost of (potentially) becoming mired in them still seems greater than the cost of pushing, however muck-footed, through them.

A lot of wordless prayers these days.

Answers to prayer, and a curious difference.

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Jay found my Palm (PDA) yesterday. Thank you Jesus! It’s been missing for several weeks. I had assumed it was only buried somewhere, but we’ve cleaned the house a few times since it was lost and never found it. It was in the car. *sigh*

My “currently reading” is the other answer to prayer. I’ve been needing a new book/topic for H.S. Sunday School, and this (Fearfully and Wonderfully Made by Brand and Yancy) looks like it’s going to be our choice. I’ll be reading ahead to pick and choose, but I’m enjoying it for me too. I might say more about it later.

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Jay and I learned a new difference between us we hadn’t noticed before:

  • I’m ready for action when I plan the details– since I do most of my thinking and weighing of options (pro and con comparisons) before I get to absolute details.
  • Jay begins to do his thinking and weighing after he has the details in front of him.

The reason we noticed this is that we spec.ed-out a laptop together last Wednesday. We spent more than an hour looking and discussing specifics, and ended up with a machine we both liked (though part of the point of this is to have a machine of my own…). I felt excited, and asked (I thought rhetorically), whether he was ready to get it.

To my surprise he said no. And that’s when we had our little revelation.

By now I think we’re both planning to do it, we’re just waiting on the timing.

Muscle-memory

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Do we consider (I wonder) the way we’re training our mind/will/emotions in our daily responses to things?

Earlier this week a friend my mom’s age was mentioning to me how her mother’s dementia was worsening. This friend described how hard it was getting to shift her mother’s focus off the negative (real and imagined) of her own world.

I said that, since we all have to choose to be positive anyway (negative seems to come so naturally), perhaps her mother was just past that place of being able to make that choice. The daughter looked me in the eye and said, “It’s a muscle-memory thing.”

I’ve been thinking about that since Tuesday– Apparently this woman used to find the negative, even when she had the choice, and now that she has less and less capacity to choose, she’s paying for it.

That phrase my friend used seems so spot-on: “Muscle memory.”

It makes me think of my guitar practice, and how exciting it is when my fingers just go where they need to be, without my having to think about it. They’re beginning to be trained, but only because I made it happen at first, by doing and thinking about it, over and over.

First entry: who I am (in summary)

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(Originally published on Xanga.)

Just last night I gave my first speech for Toastmasters. That’s a club where members learn and practice giving speeches. The first required presentation is called the Icebreaker, where you (basically) introduce yourself to the group. Since it is as good a description as any I can come-up with, here is my introduction, to (from?) myself.

I found an encouraging quote from C.S. Lewis early in my college career: “God makes each soul unique. If he had no use for all these differences I do not see why he should have created more souls than one. Be sure the ins and outs of your individuality are no mystery to Him; and one day they will no longer be a mystery to you.”

I’m still in the process of de-mystifying, but here are three of the most significant categories in my life: First, my “unchangings,” being a Christian, wife and a mother; second, my business efforts; and third, language and music.

I call the first category my “unchangings” b/c they are things I have made decisions about, and I live the rest of my life within this framework. For example, as a committed Christian, I have developed a world-view that affects all the other elements of my universe. By believing in a God that is intimately involved in my tiny human existence, I believe the choices I make matter to him, and so are important.
As a wife and mother, I am the manger and keeper of my home, and my children are my long-term project. They are an investment I pour in to daily that I pray will produce great dividends for the world around me, and for a more eternal kingdom. My current dividends are small: a snuggle, or one child being spontaneously kind to the other. Their desire to sing was a larger and earlier dividend than I guessed it would be.

Sometimes feeling in conflict to the time I must spend with my children is the fledgling business of Gordian Knot Productions. I wanted to call it Gordian Knot something, because I had these fabulous quilts I could make and use for the logo, but also because the story of the gordian knot is a story about finding a new or unusual solution to a problem that was presumed unsolvable. GKP is about telling stories, and using stories to teach, and it is also about Teaching the Fertility Awareness Method– a behavioral form of birth control, that it seems most people have never heard of.

The most curious part of myself to me, probably b/c it is the least defined, is my writing and music; what might be described as my “artistic” side, or self-expression, though sometimes those categories fit about as well as me trying to describe my naturally blond hair as self-expression. All of these are more about who I am; part of the way I view myself and interact with the world:

I write long letters, dabble in fiction, and have been coerced, occasionally, to write poems. I’ve never written a song, but music, especially singing, has been a part of my world longer than I can remember. I come from a family of singers, and used to be convinced anyone could sing. It was as natural as talking. (easier, in fact, b/c you don’t have to wonder what you’re saying next– it’s already decided) There is a quote that’s been on my wall for the last 8-years or more: “For me, music exists to elevate us as far as possible above every-day existence.”

Because my talent in singing is genetic and was acquired through absorption, rather than discipline, I’ve always felt like less of a musician than friends who’ve actually studied. Mainly because of this I’ve been teaching myself piano and guitar. The process has been a long one, squeezed as it is between the more pressing pursuits of family and business, but it is sweet.

It reminds me of another quote that was good for me to find recently. Also from C.S. Lewis: “The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s “own” or real life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life– the life God is sending one, day by day.”