Nicole K. Twedt

Being Brave When Life Is Hard

Christmas 2015

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Originally from December, 2015

It’s been a Year

I wasn’t going to write a Christmas letter this year.  I love doing it, but we’re in a busy season.  Also, it’s been a hard year.  I’m not sure how to include all that’s transpired over the last 12 months or how to write it well.  A bird’s eye view of 2015 would show deep heartbreak, but also such love and tenderness; a year rich in mercies and paramount change and healing in my heart.  I won’t bore you with all of the details because most are too tender to share and to be honest, I’m still processing.

The Husband and Me

Greg and I celebrated 10 years of marriage on January 7th.  By the time you read this we will have been married almost 11 years.  11 is nothing compared to 50 years, even 20 or 15, but for us 11 years is big and so we celebrate. It’s fun looking back at how stupid we were a decade ago.  Who fights over the correct way to enter and exit a shower, which grocery store is worthy of our patronage or how to chop a green onion?   (We did.)  We hardly have things figured out but we blindly stumbled upon a small part of the secret to a healthy and happy marriage, at least for us.  Just this November we learned that Greg is more than willing to accompany me to a show, and by show I mean theatre, and by theatre, I mean musical theatre, if only I would go to the local steakhouse with my date.  And they lived happily ever after.

The Twedtlings

The biggest little one is already a third-grader.  She’s a smarty, that one.  Emily continues with violin lessons and is super excited to be the Jingle Bells bell ringer in the 2nd/3rd grade winter concert next week.  Our girl is a Brownie this year.  If you are in need of a Thin Mint or Samoa fix during cookie season, you know who to call.  Really, please call Emily!  We can’t imagine she’ll sell too many Girl Scout Cookies in our mostly Gluten-Free / Dairy-Free / Paleo-Wannabe family.  Still, Emily is as determined as she’s always been.  Mamas and daddies with toddlers and babies, hang on!  It keeps getting better.  9-year-olds are worth the wait.  We promise!

As for the first-grader, it turns out that Steven-in-the-middle is an awesome soccer player.  We’re not sure if it’s good or bad, but our boy was christened The Beast by his assistant coach.  The Beast has a gift.  The Beast doesn’t get his soccer moves from his parents.  It’s trilling, watching Steven play.  I cried a bit during soccer season at how little his vision impairment affects his life (like not at all).  I never thought I’d thank God for sports, but I did. Every single game.  We’re still praying for healing for his eyes but until then, God has shown over and over that he goes before and after Steven in all his crazy kid endeavors.

Steven is not the only beast on the block.  After all, Lauren is a Twedtling and Twedtling preschoolers are not easy.  What 4-year-old is?  We never met a little one with such bold opinions about clothing, especially in regard to fancy party dresses and accessories.  Lucky for us, the Tiniest Tiny channels her dark side to a worthy cause.  She is whipping our dog Chloe into shape, getting her to mind better with the passing of each day.  With her hands on her hips, she demands, and not very nicely, “Chloe!  Go to your house!” And Chloe, tail down, does exactly what she’s told and heads straight for the plastic dog crate. I exaggerate only slightly because the beast in Lauren only comes out about 10% of the time, which is not bad.  Lauren really is a tender little girl, full of sweetness.  Life is a song and dance in her world.  She adores ballet with Miss Debbie and especially delights in “performing” with her plastic microphone at the old piano.

Being Brave

One aforementioned heartache worth sharing has to do with hearing.  It always does.  I took Lauren in for her annual hearing check in October.  On the way to Children’s Bellevue my phone was stuck on You Make Me Brave by Amanda Cook and Bethel Music, which is my current favorite since Courtney sang it last spring.  I didn’t realize I had it on repeat.  I guess the technical term is loop.  I didn’t even know my phone looped or that it could get stuck on loop or that I had a loop icon to begin with.  Come to think of it, it might not be called looping.  Maybe I made it up.  All I know is that I just completed an iOS update and everything was wonky with iTunes.  You Make Me Brave filled our van over and over, at least 7-10 times on our way to Bellevue because Lauren and I took the backroads to avoid 405 tolls.  As your love/ In wave after wave/ Crashes over me, Crashes over me/ For you are for us/ You are not against us/ Champion of Heaven/ You made a way for all to enter in.

I’m pretty sure God wanted me to know that his love for Lauren crashes over her in wave after wave.  He is for her, not against her.  You see, the Tiniest Tiny has lost hearing again, this time in her left ear.  This is not the same ear that hearing was lost and restored when she was little.  Her loss is conductive (mine is neurosensory) and is borderline normal.  Although she isn’t technically hard-of-hearing at this point, Lauren’s hearing is not what it once was in that ear.  We made an appointment for another hearing evaluation in 3 months.  Until then I was told to have her pediatrician clean out her waxy ear because one of the tubes is out but stuck in ear wax.  The audiologist is certain that a damaged eardrum will be revealed under all of the lovely wax.   Can I just say that my heart broke that morning?

I remember looking at my phone when we left Children’s. The loop icon, if it’s even called that, was not showing.  Yet the whole way back You Make Me Brave repeated over and over.  You make me brave/ You make me brave/ No fear can hinder now the promises you made.  It makes absolutely no sense.  It really doesn’t.  It’s really hard to be brave when there is something wrong with your child.  Despite all that, maybe even because of it, I think being brave means having the courage to believe that God is who he says he is and trust that he will do what he says he will do. And if we’re not sure how to pray and what these promises are, we should ask him.  The Bible is pretty clear about them.  I’m sensing in the deepest places of my heart that it is not the time for wishy-washy “heal her if it’s your will”  prayers.  It’s time to call on God to do what he promised even when it doesn’t make sense.  He healed her once before.  Why not again? It’s time to be brave.

Holding onto Hope

When I look back over these 12 months, and back further over the last two-and-a-half years, I have to remember the promise he gave me about Lauren during her first hearing crisis before he healed her.  In my deep place of hurt I wasn’t sure he was for us, but he led me to discover these words about himself, “He will cover you with his feathers.  He will shelter you with his wings.  His faithful promises are your armor and protection (Psalm 91:4).”  It didn’t make sense at the time, and it doesn’t always make sense now but I know him, I know him well.  This potential hearing disorder, it is not from him.

I risk ending this note with a faith story equivalent to a cheesy After School Special.  Yet I kind of have to.  I have to end in hope because what else is there?  It’s December and we are hopeful.  I took Lauren to the pediatrician to have her ears cleaned, to see if the tube could be removed.  Under all that wax was a perfect ear drum.  Perfect.  The pediatrician strongly believes that a combination of one very waxy ear and a tube stuck in wax resulted in a less than normal hearing test.  She believes that February’s evaluation will reveal perfect hearing once again.  It scares me to write this.  Not that I don’t believe Lauren’s hearing has been spared once again.  I don’t doubt it for a minute.  I’m a little worried that I will write about her healing and then it won’t happen and people will think I’m a nutcase.  More so, I’m deeply worried that someone will read this and think God loves Lauren or us more than he loves them.  Nothing is further from the truth.

I do know that God is for us.  God is for you.  Wether you are a carnivore, a dreamer, a Girl Scout, a soccer star or a ballerina and everyone, absolutely everyone in between, God is for you.  He is not against you.   He is for you, even if you have yet to see his promises fulfilled.  Hold on to his promises.  Let his waves of love wash over you as you hold on to them.  Merry Christmas.

Love,

Greg, Nicole, Emily, Steven and Lauren Twedt

A Time to Mourn

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Someone I know lost a parent over the weekend.  Her father’s death was unexpected.  I can’t say I’m super close to this person, but my heart aches for her and her sweet family.   The Bible teaches that in Jesus’s resurrection, death has lost its sting.  Yet as I write, someone I care about is experiencing loss like nothing she has ever known.

This can’t be happening.

I don’t know what it’s like to lose a parent unexpectedly.  But I know grief, I know it well.  I find it next to impossible to untangle what I’ve tasted and seen from what she’s experiencing today.  After all, I’m an INFJ in the realm of Meyer-Briggs, heavy on the F which stands for feeling.  I’m starting to think I lack the skills needed to set my feelings aside, at least for a while.  I can’t seem to remove myself from the situation and focus on something other than grief, hers or mine.

Knowing that another family is experiencing grief is like an emotional tidal wave, as suffocating today as it was twenty-something years ago.  I’m drowning in it as I fold clothes, unload the dishwasher and prepare an afternoon snack for the Tiniest Tiny.

I can’t stop thinking about dad.

Dad suffered six years.  When his life came to an end we knew it was happening.  There were no surprises.  We had more than enough time to say good-by, everyone did.  Sanguine to the end, his life wasn’t over until practically every one of his neighbors, friends and family members stopped by for one last visit.

The song If You Could See Me Now, not Eminem’s version or the 1980s cruise jingle, but the one by Truth, was playing on the CD player in the living room when he died.  It was rather loud because these hard-of-hearing ears of mine needed help unraveling the lyrics from instrumentals.  It was the middle of the night.

The song speaks of walking the streets of gold, of no longer being broken, of no more pain.  It is a song about releasing a loved one from a place of suffering to come face-to-face with Jesus, strong and whole.  I was seated next to dad, but almost missed that splendid moment when he took his last breath and slipped from his cancerous shell of a body into Jesus’ arms, victorious and cancer-free at last.

I’m thankful dad is with Jesus, I really am.  But I’d be lying if I told you I didn’t want him back for a little while.

Dad knew I loved children and wanted to be a teacher.  I would’ve given anything for him to see me graduate from college and set up my first kindergarten classroom.  I wish he’d been the one to walk me to meet Greg at the end of the aisle on our wedding day, though I will always cherish the moment I spent with Dave.  He was dad’s best friend.

And our three babies, his grand-babies.  It kills me that our kids will never meet their Grandpa Steve.  They will never hear his hearty laughter or sit through one of the many tall-tales from his childhood on the farm near Mt. Spokane.  On this side of heaven, our son Steven will never know the one he was named for.

One Father’s Day, when Greg and I were newly dating, our pastor preached a moving sermon.  He charged the fathers of our congregation to rise up, to be strong in the Lord and lead their families well.  That’s the kind of dad I had.  He loved the Lord with all of his heart and all of  his soul, and oh, how he loved his family.

I’m a private person by nature.  But even I could not contain the desire after church to ask Greg, my then boyfriend, to take me to the cemetery.  Greg was as distant as any one of his Norwegian ancestors would have been.  He kept his Oakley shades on and stood aside while I had myself a little moment.  I’m not used to breaking down in front of others.  The vulnerability of that afternoon was as new to me as our relationship.

Even though I shouldn’t have, I remember turning to Greg afterward and apologizing for the awkwardness of my crying fit, the grief that came out of nowhere.

“Yeah, that was awkward,” was Greg’s response.  The cruelty of his statement was out of character with the man I knew so swell, or as well as I could after only a few months dating.

He then removed his sunglasses and revealed a face streaked with tears, tears for a man he’d never met and for a woman who really missed her dad.  I knew for sure that afternoon that Greg loved me, and in his arms I could grieve.

I started a blog last June.  I love to write.  It’s the most tangible way I know to praise God and better understand my world.   In my mind’s eye, I saw my blog as a place to write about life and to bring the hope of Jesus to others.  An encourager by nature, it’s what I do best.  I didn’t really want a mommy blog, but I knew I was going to sprinkle a few kid stories into my writing from time to time to keep things light and entertaining.

The thing is, I’ve been running from writing lately.  I’ve been running because he (and by he I mean God) is prompting me to explore grief and write about the hard things in life.  It’s not a fun subject to tackle.  But I have to say, this little corner of the internet is serving its purpose.  I’m learning to be brave in this place.  I’m learning to air out some of the grief I’ve kept hidden all these years, grief I didn’t realize I had in me because everything was fine except it wasn’t.

I’m starting to think maybe, just maybe, I’m honoring God and giving him glory as I learn to take his hand and let him unpack the beautiful mess that’s called mothering in the midst of grief.

Happy Birthday, Blog!

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Today’s my blog’s birthday.  Kind of.  Eight months have come and gone since I first payed the fees and did all I needed to snatch a domain and launch a little place on the internet where I can go to gather my thoughts.  Except the launching part never happened.  I didn’t know what to do to make this place look like a living, breathing, functioning blog.  So I didn’t do anything.  How do you create something out of nothing?  Writing is all I care about!  Not the techno-junk that comes with blogging.  Plugins, tags, widgets!  Oh my!

This place has become such a spot, ever so slowly and just for me.   It’s still new to me, this blog, but I’m starting to use it regularly as a place to pour out my heart and soul through writing, my words under lock and key, for my eyes alone.

But today, by mistake, this baby went live and a blog was born.  For the whole wide world to see.  The birth was premature, just a bit, but she’s here to stay.

Here’s what happened.  I met Jody at a Panera in Renton.  She’s a seasoned blogger and willing to help.  But a mistake was made when we fiddled behind the scenes with the dashboard.  All of the sudden the blog went live.  We tried to get it un-live, but neither of us knew what to do.  Jody sent a message to her tech-y friend to see if she could kill it.  We tried creating a new Coming Soon plugin.  Not sure what happened to it.

Normally I would freak out.  Maybe not in front of Jody, but alone in a bathroom stall or on the car ride home from Renton.  You see, I like things just so.  My work doesn’t have to be perfect as perfect doesn’t exist.  But anything worth doing is worth doing well.  Can I hear an Amen from you melancholies?  I know you’re out there.

But something Kimberlee and Emily mentioned a few nights ago came to mind.  And what they said slipped from my brain and fell smack into this tender heart of mine.  You see, my writer friends told me about G. K. Chesterton and how he wrote, “If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.”    So there you have it.  Take that, perfectionism!  I’m going to be brave and let this blog be what it is.  It’s nowhere near ready.  It’s not even functioning properly.  But it will be someday.   Hopefully someday soon, very soon.  And until I get my blog’s act together, or pay the big bucks to have someone make it pretty, I’m going to start publishing my work, bit by bit.

Happy Birthday, Blog!