Five Minute Friday {Lonely}

Deep Breath. Here we go. The next words after that bolded “Lonely” down there are my first attempt at joining Lisa Jo Baker in Five Minute Friday. She puts out this lovely invitation every Friday to write for five minutes flat on a prompt that she provides (today it was Lonely), link your post on her linky at her blog, and then leave a comment for the person who linked before you. I have always admired her and the others that join her but I have always been terrified to join them! Write for five minutes without editing?? Without wondering if it sounds “good enough”? Oh my goodness… but I recently wrote like that in a quiet time by myself a few weeks ago and it was freeing… and the words actually flowed easier. I’ll be honest and say this time I paused the timer because I suddenly found myself in the middle of a tiny writing panic attack (insecurities much??!) and out of habit I fixed my typos as I typed… but next time I will be trying to just go straight through :) … giving myself some grace this time and linking up anyway…

Want to join?!? Go here :)

Lonely.

I’m sitting here, turning this word over and over in my head, silently rolling it around on my tongue, like a lemon drop, and I don’t know what to do with it.

Lonely.

Most of the time I think I am not. I crave the silence in this house of three guys and me. The two-year-old never stops talking and the baby never stops wanting the holding and I am almost… never… alone.

I crave alone. And because of my wonderful husband, sometimes I have it.

I pace the floors in the sparse minutes in between all that makes up the daily thing of mothering and I just don’t know what to do most of the time. Something keeps me from all the productive things and there are days that my fingers hover right over the screen and I seep in the news of all the people that I never really see and I realize… craving alone and being lonely can happen right at the same time.

Desperately wanting someone to say “yeah, me too!” when I bare my deepest vulnerabilities, and it almost never happens and the scary risky practice of being bare in front of my friends becomes so hard.

And why can’t we all just say the hard things and bear the truth and carry all our weaknesses right in our hands and hold them out gentle for someone else to see, and why can’t we all let grace just drip from our eyes and say “yes… me, too”?

Let’s stop being lonely…

just a baby post :) {and a little more}

So I’m still kinda quiet around here. Being a pregnant mama of a toddler is exhausting. And I’ve let some things go. And I was talking about my husband about the things that I’ve been letting go of, and his reaction? I’ve let go of the wrong things.

I guess my first reaction, when my hands are too full, is to drop everything that only directly benefits me and grasp tightly to the things that do directly benefit everyone else. Imagine my hands full of tiny strips of paper labeled with everything that actually do, that I wish I could do, that I think I should do. The slip labeled “laundry” stays (much to my displeasure… everyone needs clean underwear at least). The one labeled “art class” floats to the floor. The one labeled “feed the husband and kid (and self)” is firmly grasped. The one labeled “take a shower every couple of days” is… dropped. The slip labeled “give the toddler a bath” stays and I frown a little at it because I really should probably add the word “daily” to the end of that one. The one labeled “blog” is sitting at my feet.

Yeah… I need to do all of those things. The laundry, the bathing of the child, the feeding of us all… but also gripped tightly in my fingers are other slips of paper. Ones that I keep well hidden behind and between the ones I really must do. And those other hidden slips are written by me, in my handwriting, but they have the voices of other people. They are words that I imagine my friends, my family, even people I pass in the grocery store but don’t really know… what those people would tell me to write down. Scroll back. Did you see that word imagine? If not go back and read that sentence again. There aren’t (usually… ahem) people telling me what to do, but I see their faces (or imagine their faces) and hear the words and see the disappointment (again, imagined) in their eyes and so those pieces of paper sit there… partially hidden, because they’re not really mine and so I am unsure of them… but I prioritize them anyway. I keep them and let the parts that are really me – the parts that may in fact (according to my wonderful husband) benefit not just me, but also those people around me, the ones that love me – fall to the floor.

And so here I am. Writing a blog post. Not because I actually have anything of importance or profound-ness or any wit to share. But just because my husband, when I told him that I’d let my blog kinda go, told me “that is one of the last things you should let go.” And to be honest that kind of shocked me. And I’m still not sure I quite get it, quite believe it… but because I love my husband and trust that he knows what is good for me (because, afterall, I am the unshowered-for-the-second?-third?-day-in-a-row woman that he lives with and still loves)… I’m here.

So to give this blog post an actual point, and because it just so coincidentally is the day that the tiny baby is 15 weeks along, my ramblings are going to end with some baby stuff :) Just because. {Well, and also because I don’t have any art to share… because I haven’t yet picked that slip of paper labeled “art” back up off the floor, besides to write down an idea for a sketch…}

A picture! That sounds like a good idea…

That is 14 and a half weeks along. And, as I said when I posted it on facebook, a very very realistic moment in my life. Eli is not two feet away, and did you see the cat? Plotting. And I’m in pajama pants, and I’m pretty sure it was after noon that day. And my hair isn’t brushed. Yeah.

Did I tell you that I felt the baby move? At 13 weeks to the day. With Eli it wasn’t until 16 weeks. And it was Eli’s fault that I felt the baby move so early because he decided that day to plop down right on my stomach, and the baby jumped. Since then I can feel it shifting positions, and I finally felt some tapping the other day, too. And? When our pastor told us to stand up at the end of the service on Sunday, and think about Jesus walking right into the room and standing right in front of you… YOU… while he prayed… the baby moved. A lot. I started to cry… because up until that moment I was having trouble imagining Jesus right there in front of me. Well, baby knew. Teaching me things already…

On a random note… are you friends with your pastor? Because I am. And every time that I talk about him (on here or to somebody) I just want to call him Tom. Not “the pastor”… because to me he is Tom. Not the pastor. But noone would know who I am talking about…

Before this post gets too much out of control and really loses the claim to being a post about anything in particular I’d better go. You’re probably bored with all these words and not much pictures anyway. So I’ll leave you with saying that on Thursday Husband and I leave for three nights. Alone. Yay! Sooo needed. I can not wait :)

like leaves

Eli and I walked yesterday, and as he fell asleep sitting straight up for the first time ever, I stopped and collected leaves, and thanked God that He has made me like them. Green at first – new, and growing, but clinging. Clinging to all sorts of “branches”.

And then free. And though it feels like falling, it’s really being caught (because how can I not think that God would stop to pick up – or catch – colorful leaves, when He created me to be drawn to do the same?). And then realizing, He’d been there all the time, just waiting for me to let go, to fall, to Him.

And I am golden yellow, living in joy

And I am glowing orange, filled with warmth of peace

And I am blushing red, because I know I am loved

And He is The Branch that I cling to now… free and held safe, all at once…

 

a new way to see

I studied Deaf Education in college. I think I mostly chose that major because of the sign language courses, and because it was the most appealing sounding degree in the only school that I received a full ride at. I struggled through Methods and Student Teaching. I was told to “take off your ballet slippers and put on your army boots with those kids!” … and I did. It stretched me. A lot.

I haven’t used my degree for much, career-wise. I taught, online, for one and a half school years. Special Education. I had one student who was deaf, and I only taught him from November – May of my first year of teaching. I quit halfway through my maternity leave (that next December) because I realized that working at home with an infant, though seemingly appealing to the pregnant me who hadn’t yet laid eyes on the tiny human who would change the way I saw my world, was not what I wanted to do.

I don’t regret studying something that I no longer have a profession in. God used my courses to mold who I am now, to communicate with Deaf people who seemed to just “show up” in my life, to make friends that I am still so close to today… and most of all, to nurture, feed, and speak to my creative soul.

My favorite class was taught by my guidance counselor. I honestly don’t even remember what the course was called. The thing I remember most vividly (besides her telling me to put on my army boots, of course) was our writer’s notebooks. I found mine just a couple weeks ago.

My writer’s notebook was my favorite assignment. We were told to find a notebook – whatever size we liked, lined or blank. I chose blank ( though I appear to be a “goody two-shoes” on the outside, I am a rebel at heart and greatly dislike the constrictions of lined paper). We were told to write – write anything. Lists, quotes, funny signs, epiphanies, thoughts, poems, funny things people say… anything.

I have decided to start a new notebook. It just so happens that I found an empty sketchbook in my nightstand a couple weeks ago as well, the exact size (maybe the exact notebook) as my Writer’s Notebook in college.

I glued pieces of pictures from magazines onto the front and doodled because I disliked the plain forest green front with the name of whoever actually fabricated my notebook. I will probably continue to add layers to the front cover as I find things that belong there. I am not quite finished with it yet, but there it is for now.

This is the first page…

I love that quote… and several others from The Chronicles of Narnia but I have a plan to use this one in something else soon. To be shared later ;)

I will probably post more pages from my new notebook in here, too. I am hoping that it will serve as inspiration, as a new way to see.