life stories: white bloomers and mesquite

Springtime in the desert was hot. So very hot.

A wave of warmth each February tricked us into pulling last year’s t-shirts from plastic bins and we all talked of swimming. There was always a snap, the last hurrah of the winter wind, the weeks we were most likely to see snow. But spring – real spring – arrived early in April, and with it came a crisp breeze, an almost-beating sun and the creeping of temperature gauges toward 100 degrees.

My brother and I tore out the door during those in-between weeks, when it was hot but not sweltering. We built houses between spears of yucca plants and tall Joshua trees. Using California’s own hula hoe, we banished weeds and created hallways and rooms in the hard packed dirt.

(Did you know if you Google “hula hoe,” my tiny hometown shows up on the first page of results? We must have cornered the market.)

We fancied ourselves botanists during the gardening season, Zachary and I, setting up shop with boards nailed in the juniper branches, selling sprigs of unknown foliage and attempting to cure wounds with mud. We mashed yellow berries and flowers in a Mason jar, added a scrap of white fabric and filled it with water. We screwed the lid on tight, set our dye in the sunshine, waited a few weeks. The fabric was white, still, when we pulled it out, but our fermented concoction would likely have cured any backyard ailment.

garden

Our brows trickled sweat in the spring and my headaches returned every May, but those were the laughter days. I learned to climb trees in a dress then, handmade white bloomers peeking from beneath my blue jumper if its hem caught on a branch. Zachary wore buckskins every day, a wooden musket slung across his back and a coonskin cap atop his milk-chocolate hair.

Math books could wait on the kitchen table, science experiments would be finished in the evening. The spring days were running away from us, we couldn’t catch them, and we had bicycles to ride. We lived high in our mesquite tree, carving our names in the branches, telling each other stories.
 

Spring in Virginia is unsure of itself, ordering us to wear sweaters in the morning and shed them by noon. The heat will be here in a few weeks, the humidity suffocating and the thunderstorms exhilarating.

My boys swing wide the front door at four in the afternoon, drop backpacks with a thud and slam the backdoor. They flip and toss on the trampoline for an hour, climb a tree and find me when they fall. Then they ask to play the Wii or to watch Power Rangers and they want to dress up like Obi Wan Kenobi.

I think of buckskin pants and fermented yellow dye, read pieces like this one and make five second plans to homeschool in the fall.

The desert was beautiful in the springtime.
 

Exercising my simple storytelling muscles. Are you writing your stories?

May 15, 2013 8 Comments Filed Under: loving, storytelling

on the day after mother’s day

We’ve always laughed, John and I, and said it’s a cruel joke, this thing of Mother’s Day being on Sunday.

Mothers across the nation wake extra early, readying small ones for church, preparing for a long day of Sunday School and services, lunch with napless toddlers in packed-to-the-windows Italian restaurants, the typical Sunday evening preparations for another week. The mothers wear smiles and corsages, bracelets made with macaroni by tiny hands. Each mama welcomes the love and the honor and the accolades, but all she really wants is an infusion of sleep without wasting the time it takes to actually, you know, sleep.

Our Sunday was beautiful in all of my favorite quiet ways, filled with the running, giggling, and singing of little boys, sushi, and time to knit. I was showered with kisses and construction paper cards, poems and a hot pad with a painted hand print flower. John wrapped his arms around my waist, whispered of how he adores the three small humans we parent together, how he loves the way I mother them. We ignored the chaos, John cleaned the kitchen and I’ll spare you the story of the incident involving a small person and a full bladder. Mother’s Day was sweet and simple and good.

On The Day After Mother's Day

But today is Monday and Shelton coughed himself awake all night long. The morning began in earnest at 5:30am and there have been lunches to pack, a tired preschooler with a runny nose, a leaky diaper, a full dishwasher and a sink somehow already stacked with plates and bowls. I discovered too late we’re devoid of an essential food item, which means I’ll actually need to get dressed before school starts this morning and run to the grocery. My calendar tells me I have doctor’s appointments to schedule, phone calls to return (I’m the worst about that) and hours of work to squeeze into naptime. The basement is nearly unwalkable, the result of three neighbor boys over on Saturday to play Legos and Angry Birds. I’m afraid to use the toilet in the downstairs bathroom.

For an hour yesterday afternoon, I clicked my way through a few of the pieces shared in our simple stories linkup on Friday. I read Amy’s heartfelt letter to her teenage children and sweet Laurie’s tale of a day in early motherhood and both tangled up somewhere inside of me this Monday morning, because this is it, isn’t it?

Today is the real mother’s day, the day after our holiday, when the flowers are on the mantle but someone needs to water them, when the cards tumble like dominoes and the kisses are out the door on the way to school. Today there will be whining and the tiny humans will create gigantic messes and the notes we receive will come from the teacher’s desk. We’ll have heavy conversations with our older ones while wiping the faces of the small folk. We’ll oversee homework and fold five loads of laundry and we’ll grab take out for dinner. We’ll go for a walk, run 25 errands, read books, and do the bedtime routine. We’ll whisper to ourselves throughout the day, thoughts of life and wonder and philosophy and justice and truth. Then we’ll fall into bed, too late, without making time to write them down.

This is the day we are more than the cards, more than the accolades. We prove, here, our own faithfulness in doing the hard work of the daily loving and living, of partnering with any partners we have, of holding up our good habits and asking for help, of keeping our heads down through the rough patches and finding beauty in those gentle moments when it all comes together.

This is the day we become more of what we already are, the ones who do the sacred work of mothering and nurturing and loving deeply while hiding the dark circles under our eyes.

Happy Mother’s Day, mamas. You’re celebrated on Monday, too.

May 13, 2013 13 Comments Filed Under: loving

do what you do

My Sunday afternoon plan was to finish a work project I’d pushed aside until it was overdue.

After lunch I tucked myself into the corner of the basement chaise while the small folk whooped and hollered and swung their wooden swords at each other, the cause of simultaneous mayhem and magic. Laptop, notes, to-do list, calendar. Everything cluttered. The side table and the sofa cushions. My feet and my head.

I modified the project fifteen times because it had to be visual and had to be gorgeous and so three hours, a baby nap, an errand for John and two antsy big boys later, my brain was backfiring.

So we got up and we got out. I pulled on my favorite pair of worn-out-knee-jeans and the slouchy tee I wear three times a week these days.

We went to the park, which isn’t anything spectacular and amazing except that it was for right then, because we were doing too many things that didn’t matter and on a Sunday afternoon in April, it was spectacular and amazing to wear old jeans and drive to a playground hidden behind the trees and race the boys down the twirly slides and push Shelton in the baby swing while he shrieked and laughed with the deepest part of his tiny belly.

guysonslide

A few weeks ago I started reading Shauna Niequist’s Bittersweet. My kind and to-the-point friend Laura handed it to me with a knowing smile last autumn, saying Shauna’s words were good and needed and necessary. But life was life and I didn’t open the cover until March.

Have you ever had a book take up residence on your desk for six months or more, begging you to skim its pages, but when you’re finally three paragraphs into the first chapter you realize you couldn’t have read the words back then because you really, really, really need those stories right this very moment?

That.

In the seventh chapter of Bittersweet, Shauna shares a story of learning how to spend her days, what she should do, of knowing into what she should invest herself rather than, say, going rogue and baking muffins when she knows she should be, say, writing. She speaks of the realization that often what a person chooses not to do can be as significant than what she does accomplish. Accepting our true lives, defining what we are actually called to do and acknowledging our limitations and our strengths can be the castle drawbridge to freedom.

wsheltz

I’m rather obsessive about my to-do lists. I am neurotic about my day planner to the point of spending hours each January hunting down the absolute perfect spiral bound month and week at-a-glance calendar. Multi-tasking is my spiritual gift and I can accomplish a crap ton of work in a flash second.

But mere weeks into 2013 my new turquoise day planner resembled a graffiti laden underpass and revealed a life overflowing with do and very little don’t.

God did a wise thing when ordering the seasons, because we routinely receive fresh beginnings.

I’ve been reevaluating.

Things I do, right now:

  • Nurture my people with good food.
  • Write something, every day.
  • Fold one load of laundry each morning.
  • Complete the work I’m paid to do.
  • Pay attention to the health needs of my family and of my own body.
  • Answer fifteen thousand questions a day with at least an attempted measure of grace.
  • Value conversation and margin above my endless list of tasks.

Things I don’t do, right now:

  • Clean up the entire house before bed.
  • Play groups.
  • Agree to professional opportunities that feel inauthentic, no matter how lucrative.
  • Read how-to books – parenting, marriage, theology, Christian living.
  • Run regularly.
  • Return emails in a timely manner. (See also: phone calls.)
  • Go to PTO meetings.
  • Keep up with my favorite TV shows. (This one annoys me.)
  • Do the paleo thing. Or buy absolutely all organic. Or juice carrots.

 

There’s freedom here, in acceptance, in allowing myself to breathe, in knowing what I can do and not expecting from myself the ability to do the things I can’t.

 

(If you feel like it, I’d love to hear what you do and what you don’t do. But no pressure. Because maybe leaving comments is something you don’t do and I’m not going to get in the way of THAT.)

 

April 23, 2013 18 Comments Filed Under: journeying, loving

i only have my stories

I only have my stories.

I don’t have deep theological rants, or meandering dissertations.

I don’t lay bare my politics. I will no longer tell you how to mother your children. I can’t tell you what to believe.

I owned the answers, once, and I handed them out here and there and everywhere. My opinions were strong, my conviction mighty, my certainties unwavering. It all bubbled and spit until I laid it out in type.

But the boiling eventually spilled over, too much, too soon, and the heat was on. It all boiled down, and down, and down.

It boiled down until it was gone, all of it. The opinions, the doctrines, the practices, the reasons, the answers, the formulas.

pen

Now I have the stories.

I don’t have reasons anymore, but I am free to discover them again. I am here to be filled up, to seek and find. The boiling over and boiling down, it wasn’t for naught.

I’m filled with these stories, stacked by tens and twenties like an overflowing bookcase. I have stories of a little girl exuberant, knowing her own mind. I have stories of a young woman confident only in fear and self lost during the in-between years and little-girl-grown-up, found again.

Stories of handmade floral jumpers and pretty scarves of submission tied ’round my young head, of stapled paper magazines and old pen-pals. I have an account to give, here, of paradigms shifted, of crashing down and building up. Jesus known, Jesus lost, a new Jesus found.

Do you want to know the true tale behind that diamond ring finding its way to my 17 year old left finger, of babies born to young (yet married) parents, of childhood mothering?

I can talk to you about ten years of military life, the support, the hatred, the love, the quasi-pacifism, the pounding patriotism, the breast of conflicted emotions, the truest versions of those deployment sagas.

Let me whisper of family, the way we push and pull. The friendship casualties, the kindreds gained. I show the front of my marriage, the forward facing side, but perhaps this time I can be honest.

My ballet dancing son, my love of red wine, the way my fingers work yarn endlessly. My work and hiring a nanny. The way I read Common Prayer and took a break from church. The months spent curled in the corner of my sofa. The therapy and the doctor who discovered the secret. The horror of the midwife and the redemption of babies birthed. The months I contemplated walking away. My year in a hippie town.

These stories, I have them, tucked down deep and hidden, covered in a bit of a haze, bound tightly with a ribbon of fear. They beg to be released, to have the tape ripped from their lips, to climb to the rooftops and shout their own names.

Be warned, friend, I’m a new one, here. You know me and you don’t. I know myself and I don’t.

No cohesive topic. No pointed argument. No special knowledge to share. No axes left to grind.

But I still have my stories.

I only have my stories.

April 4, 2013 32 Comments Filed Under: believing, creating, journeying, loving, storytelling

water and coffee and Africa

We’ve rounded the bend with this only-drinking-water-thing.

I said I’d be giving up coffee and other beverages, and I have… for the most part.

Screen Shot 2013-03-23 at 12.14.23 PM

 ^^sportin’ the Blood:Water Mission shirt on Day 1^^

The headaches were the worst part, then the exhaustion set in. Then it was the snapping at my husband or at anyone else within earshot. After about a week I began feeling somewhat human without caffeine in my system and I decided I could do this thing.

Truth be told, I have had a cups of coffee on a few mornings after the baby has been wakeful and restless… back before we decided it would be John’s job to jump up and reinsert the pacifier for at least the duration of these 40 days. Aaaand, the past week has found me pulling some late nights and early mornings in prep for blissful events, so, yeah, a little coffee has happened there, too.

But, you know, I’m a bit of a legalist at heart, rather prone to rules and extremes and going overboard and at-all-costs. So I told myself early in this experiment that I’d avoid that tendency, admit the coffee intake, make the focus the reason for only drinking water. I am feeling it, the lack of coffee and cups of milk with dinner and diet Coke when we get dinner out. Oh, I’m feeling it.

Screen Shot 2013-03-23 at 12.09.14 PM

It’s really such a small thing, this minute sacrifice, and it reminds me of my humanity and frailty every day. It’s only a cup of coffee here, a glass of wine given up there, sticking with water when I really would prefer a soda.

But now? My friend in California is drinking only water in solidarity and is saving her dollars. My brother’s girlfriend gave up fancy lattes. My two biggest boys chose (without my prompting – promise!) to limit their milk intake – and we’ve saved quite a bit from buying one less gallon each week. Friends around the country and even across the pond have modified their beverages and the little boy from school chose to give up juice boxes for 40 days.

Together, you, me, my friends, your friends, we’ve already given up 8962 drinks. We’ve raised $17,472 toward building wells to provide clean water for six communities in Africa. And we’re not even done yet.

 

We’re giving up all drinks beside water for 40 days [or donating double if we do choose to partake] and putting all the money we’ve saved toward Blood:Water Mission’s project of building six wells in Uganda. Will you join us? It’s not too late.

Learn more, follow along, and create your own profile to track your drinks given up and money saved. Let’s do something to change the world, one less coffee cup at a time.

 

The caffeine withdrawal headaches don’t last very long. Promise. 

March 23, 2013 3 Comments Filed Under: loving, storytelling Tagged With: ,
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