Nicole K. Twedt

Being Brave When Life Is Hard

Suffering and Sudafed

by //

Originally from February 10, 2017

The Sudafed lost it’s magic.  I’m having trouble catching my breath.  When is this cold going to end? At least it’s not the stomach flu.  This illness is unpleasant but I’ll take it any day over vomiting over the toilet or into the family barf bucket.  It could definitely be worse.

I’m thinking of suffering this morning.  Not me and this cold, but suffering in general.  Maybe it’s being sick or maybe it’s the ADHD, but it’s really remarkable how quickly my pondering moves from Sudafed to being glad that I’m not throwing up to thoughts of suffering, redemption and healing.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately.   Aren’t I a ray of sunshine this morning?  I’ve been so focused on wanting to be healed, and I still do, so bad I can taste it, but I’m also thinking of everything else that happens when we suffer.  How these experiences (dad’s suffering and death, my hearing loss, Steven’s vision impairments and Lauren’s hearing issues), are worth it a thousand times over, as painful as they are, if something better than the healing is coming out of it all.  It’s hard to imagine something better than healing but I know my God well, and he has a remarkable way of taking care of his children and blessing them when the world would say otherwise.  He has an amazing ability to take what the enemy earmarked for destruction and instead use it to draw his children closer to him, his glory on display for all to see.  I was thinking of Jesus on the cross.  How he had to die.  If his life was spared, Jesus’ power would have been displayed in his release from the cross but his divine power over death wouldn’t have happened.  It’s all so confusing, wonderful, glorious, heart-breaking and beautiful. Such is suffering.

Still, I really don’t like suffering.  If I’m honest, I just want the healing.

And I’m thinking of the times he does heal.  Or the times when nothing short of a miracle has occurred.  I’m thinking of a very specific situation last year involving an extended family member.  The story is not mine to share.  All you need to know is that it wasn’t looking good.  The situation was so full of evil.  There was no possible way for it to end well.  Yet in the final hour, God showed up in all of his glory and really showed off, making the impossible possible.  It’s overwhelming to comprehend how he swept in and made a way where there was none.  I still can’t believe what he did for my family member.

That’s all the thoughts I have for today.   Time to lay down again, or at least read this month’s book for book club.  In a few hours I will drive to school and pick up Steven, take him to Bellevue for an appointment with his pediatric optometrist.  I’m nervous.  I’m praying for good news.  We’ve had such good news but also such bad news at these types of appointments.  It’s enough to keep a mama’s emotions out of whack.

Thirty-eight Minus Twenty

by //

Originally from early February, 2017

I originally and inappropriately came up with the title Crazy Town for this blog post.  After all, the shoe fits.  A little too well.  I thought about Twenty Years or maybe even Battle Wounds.  But I’m partial to Thirty-eight Minus Twenty.

With a smile on my face I admit it’s true, the part about life being a crazy town.  My sanity is in question most days.  I have three children and a small dog, after all.  It’s crazy town all the time.  But this is different.  I’ve been wondering why I’ve been highly-emotional this year.  Highly-emotional, even for me.  I tend to fly on the side of highly sensitive by nature.  It just seems that I’m a little too quick to get teary about everything just about all the time these days, which is unlike me.  I may be highly in-tune with my feelings, but I prefer not to let anyone know what’s going on.  No one is going to see me lose it.  I’ll do my falling apart in private thank you very much.  I’m Scandinavian, after all.

I’ve been sick lately, really sick.  I’ve had a sinus infection since forever.  One of the perks (if you can call it a perk) during the initial fever-laden days was that I was too sick even to read, which forced me to sit on the couch and do nothing but watch TV and think.  Everything else hurt.  No complaints here.  When mama is sick and the kids are old enough to somewhat fend for themselves, being sick and homebound is honestly a little like a mini-vacation minus the spa.  Just me and the couch and season one of Bones.  Quality Netflix, I tell yah.  I’m living the life.

Someone like me needs time to process just about everything, and with three busy kids I don’t have the luxury to sit and think about much of anything.  But it hit me, this last week on the couch with season one of Bones in the background.  I know what’s up.

I turned Thirty-eight in June.  I love being thirty-eight.  The year began triumphantly.  For it was on my birthday that I pretended to be brave and bought myself this domain and purchased all that needed purchasing to get this blog dream into my actual life (even thought this baby isn’t launched).  Thirty-eight-year-old me took a very important first step.

But thirty-eight minus twenty equals eighteen.

I don’t know why I was doing the math.  I’m a word girl, after all.  Though lately I’m contorting into some sort of hybrid number girl.  If only I can view a number by its name rather than numeric form (like five instead of 5), which has nothing to do with anything.

Back to thirty-eight minus twenty equals eighteen.

I randomly came across a picture of a guy I went to high school with on Instagram.  I was thinking it’s been twenty years since I’ve seen him, which put me just shy of eighteen.  Suddenly all that happened right before I turned eighteen came rushing back.  I believe the kindness of the Holy Spirit led me to the make the connection:  It’s been twenty years, closer to twenty-one now, since I was almost eighteen and lost my sweet dad to cancer.  This is a fraction of what I don’t want to write about.

I can hardly breathe, but it’s not the sinus infection.  I’m reliving the horror that was 1996, but in many ways I’m experiencing my emotions for the first time.   During the real-time first time I wasn’t ready to face the darkness.  I focused on God’s grace in the situation, but didn’t allow myself to experience the full range of emotion that trauma calls for.  In other words, I set my feet firmly in the land of denial.  I remember how my throat used to hurt, burning as I held in the screams.  I couldn’t face them,  couldn’t let them out, couldn’t bear to hear them.  I wasn’t ready.  So I watched many a sad movie so I could cry for the men and women on the big screen.  What was I thinking?  Why couldn’t I cry for me?

For all the times I said everything was okay, it wasn’t.  How could it be okay?

And it’s more than my dad’s actual death, the most horrific, yet gentle at the same time, beautiful moment of my life.  It’s his illness and the overlapping time when I lost my hearing that haunts me so.

Almost two years ago God set me on an adventure.  Not an exciting adventure.  It was quite the gruesome one.  Through a writing assignment at a Story Retreat near Leavenworth, God set my feet back through time to show me that he was always there, during the darkest moments of my life, of cancer and the trauma of loosing my hearing on the cusp of high school.

God was tender, so tender to me during the writing activity.  I had always known that God was with me in dad’s actual death because I was getting to know him then.  But God spoke to my heart about how he was there in the darkness before I knew him.  And he spoke to me about how these experiences, these hurts, didn’t come from him, but he’ll use them for good, and I believed him.

Then last fall, maybe the end of summer, our church did a Sermon Series titled Do Hard Things.  I remember very little of what was said, but I can’t stop thinking about how it occurred to me during one of the sermons that it’s hard for me to ask for help.  Again this winter we are revisiting the Do Hard Things series.  I guess I’m not the only one who needs a repeat.  Anyway, I remember clearly in January one of the pastors saying that Doing Hard Things means it’s time for some of us to deal with our stuff (raises hand).

And that has to be why I’m running from writing.  You see, I started the blog in June but have written precious little since.  I don’t want to deal with my stuff.  To write is to process and make sense of my God, myself, my world.  But to write is to hurt because writing involves facing what I’m feeling, what I’ve been feeling and what I haven’t let myself feel for over twenty years.

Today was a much-needed snow day for our school district and neighboring towns.  The kids played for quite a bit in the back yard dusted in white. The kids had fun and the dog came back with her beautiful long hair dreadlocked in snow balls.  Don’t ask.

After showers to warm their bodies and lunch to warm their bellies, even if it was only organic instant oatmeal, we watched the rest of Pete’s Dragon, the newer version.

Grace (Bryce Dallas Howard) is the park ranger.  She rescued young Pete from the great Forrest of the North where he has lived for the last six years, alone she thinks.  Pete is an orphan.  His parents died tragically in a car accident on an adventure six years ago.  Grace tells Pete that he is a brave, brave boy and I felt the Lord whisper to my younger self and my heart, You were so, so brave.  You were a brave, brave girl.  You were so brave when your dad was sick and when you lost your hearing.

As the movie comes to an end, Elliot the Dragon brings Pete back to Grace, her boyfriend Jack, and Jack’s daughter Natalie.  Even a dragon knows it isn’t good for a boy to be without a human family.  As I watched Pete being welcomed into his new family, I could practically hear the Holy Spirit whisper once again to my heart.  It’s not good for you to be alone with all of your thoughts and experiences.  It’s time to process what you went through.  You are going to make yourself sick if you keep holding onto that time.  You were brave but I never wanted you to face it alone.  You can’t hold onto it any longer.  It’s time to deal with your stuff.  It’s time to write.  

I don’t know what this means for the blog.  But I finally know what I’m supposed to write about: grief.  And it’s the last thing I want to do.

I don’t want this blog to become a pity-party for one.  I want to write to encourage others, not to drown in a sea of narcissism.  It’s going to be hard, this writing.  But it’s impossible for me to move forward unless I deal with what’s behind.  Now is the time to release some of these toxic feelings, the ones I’ve held in for the last twenty-odd years.  Now is the time to let the bottle containing my deepest emotions explode, just a little, so it can be mended and filled again with beauty, truth, wonder and love.  Once again, it’s time to write.  Before I have it figured out.

Thirty-eight minus twenty.

A Time to Mourn

by //

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.