Nicole K. Twedt

Being Brave When Life Is Hard

A Home For Books

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Hello lovelies!  I’m itching to write this afternoon but life in the form of summer vacation and home improvement projects is where it’s at right now.  Writing isn’t.

But my heart is full, very full.  After nearly thirteen years of living in the little grey-blue rambler we call home, I finally have a home for my books.  I couldn’t be happier.

Lauren helping me organize our books’ new home.
INFJ here. Heavy on the J. How I love putting anything in ABC order, as the kids call it.

Though I confess, I’m feeling like a failure as a mother right now, and a failure as a person in general.  You see, we’re in the middle of filling the new bookcases with our family’s favorites and it’s come to my attention that I misplaced my Chronicles of Narnia collection.  Also missing: Emily of New Moon Trilogy and Pride and Prejudice (gasp).  I know.   I have a darling friend from my old church who keeps three, yes three, copies of Pride and Prejudice in her bookcase at all times.  Just in case.  She’s a wise, wise woman.

I think I need a moment of silence to properly lament my first world misfortunes.

(Moment of silence)

Talk about being brave when life is hard.  Notice that I discreetly slipped in my tagline?  Did you know I have a tagline?  It’s now official.

Anyway, I may need to tap into Chloe’s bag of carrots for this.

The good news is that Emily came across my E.B. White Collection while gutting the bedroom she shares with Lauren.  She also discovered the Little House books and The Princess and the Goblin beneath the rubble.   She won’t let me keep her two illustrated Harry Potter books or El Deafo in the new white bookcase.  I’m holding onto hope.

That is all.

N.

P.S. What are your favorite books?

Hope, Always Hope

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All day I’ve been wanting to write about tomorrow, and what’s going to happen.  As it turns out, Greg and I are in the middle of a painting project and, although everything in me wants to sit at the keyboard and type, it wouldn’t exactly be the kindest of choices.

I’m going to spare you the details of our home improvement project.  This isn’t one of those blogs.  Nope, I’m not into writing about finding the perfect gray paint at Sherwin-Williams.  The perfect gray is a lie.  We have ten to twelve sample shades of gray ranging from Nebulous White to Krypton on the walls of our small rambler to prove it.  We decided on a lovely shade of blue-gray called Passive which is the less complicated choice, prettier too.  My life is complicated enough without factoring in the hunt for the perfect gray.

Kate did find the perfect gray.  I remembered reading about it after the fact.  So did my neighbor and my friend Sarah who came by yesterday to get our old piano, as did the Frontier guy who hooked up our Fios connection.

I’m hardly a DIY kind of writer, but I could easily get behind writing about feelings regarding home improvement, and how I felt about each choice we’ve made.  I’m a feeler through and through.  You know that by now.

But I won’t. No one wants to read about it, not even me.   Instead, I’m going to spend five or so minutes copying and pasting old Christmas letters to give you a picture of tomorrow morning and why I’m feeling (more than) a little anxious.  I realize this method is a bit disjointed.  My apologies.  It’s all I have time for.

The beginning of Lauren’s hearing story, 2013.

“I’m learning that faith is of the mustard seed variety. The unexpected happened this spring when our tiniest tiny was suspected of having the same type of hearing loss originating in the same ear at the same age as mine. How we wrestled with this one.

Our fears were confirmed in May. Lauren was diagnosed with a high-frequency hearing loss in her right ear not present at birth. Since the pediatric audiologist was unable to complete testing due to the sleepiness of our little one, she ordered us back in July, three days after Lauren’s second birthday. Until then we could only guess where Lauren’s hearing fell on the mild to moderate hearing loss spectrum.

We prayed and prayed, but our prayers were the half-hearted kind. Frankly, I didn’t believe God would heal Lauren’s hearing loss because he hadn’t healed mine. On this side of heaven we will never know why some prayers are answered and others aren’t, at least in the way we anticipate.

But he knows our wildest hopes and deepest hurts, for us in the area of hearing loss and deafness. He knows our fragile faith, tiny as the mustard seed, almost too delicate and afraid to voice. He held these in his tender hands and said Yes. On July 16, Tympanometry for both ears showed perfect curves where once there was none in the right, indicating normal middle ear function, followed by a perfect Audiologic Evaluation for both ears. Repeat tests in October yielded similar results. Thank you Jesus, thank you. And thank you those who came around us during our season of darkness. Your faith encouraged us and your prayers reached the throne room of heaven. Amen and Amen.”

And then came 2015.  I wrote about learning how to be brave and holding onto hope.

“A 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.  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 or sensory-neuro) 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. My heart broke.

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.

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 isn’t 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’m sorry for rambling on and on.  But Lauren’s story got a little dicey as it unfolded in 2016.

“As for Lauren, I think we’re a little shell-shocked by her story. It knocks the wind out of me, even now. I wrote last year about waiting for February for the follow-up with the pediatric ENT and audiologist to learn more about her hearing loss. How we prayed in the months between visits, many of you prayed, too. I could almost taste the good news that we hoped to get at the upcoming visit to Children’s Hospital. After all, a few years ago Lauren had lost hearing in her other ear and it was fully restored. And we knew from Lauren’s pediatrician that her eardrum had been spared.

Lauren’s story, however, ended up being a story with a twist. We didn’t get the answer we wanted when we wanted it. Something was wrong with the Tiniest Tiny. Lauren had lost more of her hearing.

In the darkness of night we had to abandon our victory dance and learn instead to simply cling to God. We had to learn to let him hold us as he whispered that he is good, always good, that he’s never going to let us down, the whole time feeling that he is.

And then we received the news we dared to hope for.  At another follow-up at Children’s, a specialist assured us that Lauren’s ear could indeed repair itself over time, as ears sometimes do after trauma. When summer came to an end, the same specialist broke the news that hearing in Lauren’s left ear, the one that was lost and lost again, was practically normal, with the potential for more healing to come.

I could have saved time and just skipped to the good news about Steven and Lauren (Steven had a story of his own in 2016). Or I could have ignored it all together and just wrote the typical family Christmas letter. It’s what normal people do and would have been kinder to my sensitive heart. I most definitely should have included more details about Em. She’s an absolute doll, and she’s thriving by the way.

But it’s kind of hard to truly rejoice with us unless you know where we’ve come from, what we’ve been through. Because for us, and many of you, it’s been a year of camping out in the middle of the story, with all the uncertainty that comes when victory is out of sight and the days are long and hard.

Yet hope and uncertainty go hand-in-hand, with hope winning out every time. I desperately want to shout this message to the world, or at least write about it more. I’m sensing in my bones and in the deepest part of my soul that now is the time to write.”

And now tomorrow.

I’m going to quickly wrap up so I can get back to paining my house Passive gray.  The reason I did all that copying and pasting nonsense is because tomorrow is the day of Lauren’s annual appointment with the audiologist at Children’s Hospital.  I’m feeling all the feels.   It doesn’t help that one of my audiologist friends recently pointed out that, since my mom and I have a genetic hearing loss, Lauren most likely does too.  It means the Tiniest Tiny could loose hearing again.  I hadn’t connected the dots.

Please pray for us, for Lauren particularly.  I’m holding onto hope, praising God.  I will always praise him.  Not matter what, I will praise him.  But I’m scared.

At the same time, I was reminded this morning at church that God still heals the deaf.  That wasn’t the point of the sermon, but what I needed to hear.  Oh, how I needed the powerful reminder, the encouragement.  God is for Lauren.  God is not against her.  God is able to accomplish infinitely more than what we dare hope for.

That is all.  I’ve got to publish this and get back to all things paint-related.  And quickly too.  I can hear Steven in the other room pestering Greg with a million questions about painting.  Oh dear, I think Greg’s letting him paint.

I love you, dear readers.  All two or three of you.  Thank you for praying for my girl.  Thank you for hoping and praying along with me when life is uncertain and kind of hard.  Thank you for trusting with me in the Name of Jesus.

Edited to add: In the spirit of keeping it real, I should add that in the short span of time it took to publish this little essay-of-sorts and post it to Facebook, Lauren wandered into the living room and splattered herself in fresh paint.  At least she’ll never have to search for the perfect gray.  While hunting down the paint stain remover to treat Lauren’s Hanna Andersson sundress, I managed to knock over and shatter a new bottle of Opi light blue nail polish over the toilet, tile, baseboard and wall of the master bath.  

The moral of this story is that good things never come from blue nail polish.  And always watch your kid instead of sharing your blog post with Facebook Land when your husband is painting the living room’s walls Passive Gray.

Weekend Roundup, July 28, 2017

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We had a minor setback with Chloe’s Behavior Modification Plan For Anxiety. It was my fault.  It was way too late in the evening to be walking the dog, at least by Chloe standards.  And it had everything to do with the sound of death rising from various automobiles, and their headlights, which was the worst part for Chloe.  Actually, the worst part of the nightwalk of terror was a certain siamese crouched and (hardly) ready to pounce or strike, all just a half-block from home.

Let’s be real.  There was nothing scary about the kitty, except that it was to Chloe.  The siamese scared the crap out of my little dog.  Literally.  Right there on the sidewalk.  My ten-year-old says I need to examine my word choice.  She suggests I write that the kitty scared the daylights out of Chloe.  My Apologies.

Chloe was given a few carrot pieces and all is well now.  And she performed just fine on this morning’s walk with Lauren and me.  Not that anyone cares.  Really, the only thing worse than tales of a cat lady is that of a dog lover.

But human anixety and real-life panic attacks, well, they don’t exactly come with a simple fix like Chloe’s bag of carrots.   I should know.  It’s more like one step forward and three steps back.  Or is it two steps forward and one step back?  I really can’t say.

The essays I’m about to share are a little on the heavy side.  If anything, writing has taught me not to be afraid of going deep.  So on this Friday afteroon in the middle of the summer, go ahead and kick off your flip-flops, or Birkenstocks if you’re like me and have issues with your feet, and pull up a chair.  We’re about to get real.

I’m glad I came across Kaitlyn Bouchillon’s essay, You haven’t been buried, you’ve been peen planted.  Kaitlyn writes, “I won’t pretend to know God’s timetable. I won’t attempt to put words around all He’s up to. But I can tell you this: You haven’t been buried, you’ve been planted. He’s weaving together a story that will tell of His faithfulness.”

The next one up is Tara Dickson’s I will not be shaken. I have a sneaking suspicion that I’ve shared this essay before.  I’m pretty sure I read it somewhere else.  Yet her tagline caught my eye: Bruised But Not Broken, which pretty much sums up my life right now.  I’m sure you can relate.  Earlier this year I wrote this essay about being scarred and how there’s beauty in suffering.  Our stories are more than profound, pain and all.  We’re shaped by them.

Mary Carver, a blogger whose work I’ve followed for the last year or so, well she wrote about what happens When You Find Yourself Caught In a Current.  Notice a theme with today’s shares?  And just for fun, go ahead and read this one about Wonder Woman, and why she’s the hero we need right now.  It wasn’t a Hope*Writer share but it caught my eye when I was copying and pasting the URL for today’s share.  I don’t remember reading this one, which means it’s probably lost somewhere in my overflowing email inbox.

Here’s another one from Glenna Marshall.  Glenna made an appearance last week when my Weekend Roundup was still called Friday Share Day.  So much can happen in a week around here (rolls eyes).  I know I’m kind of a downer this week with all these shares about brokenness and anxiety.  But really, the more we talk about and write about our struggles, the struggles are prevented from having power over us.  I’ve said it before and I’ll keep on saying it until it sinks into this stubborn heart of mine.  Sometimes our brokenness is what God uses to set us free.  I believe it, as crazy as it sounds.

Oh, and here’s another essay on anxiety!  Aren’t you glad you decided to stop by?  Just call me Ray of Sunshine Gone Wrong.  Anyway, in How to Answer Anxiety, Elli Johnson pretty much writes what I just said about personal struggles, in her case, anxiety, and how it helps to talk about it, to say it out loud.  She has much more to say about the subject, so go read her work.

By the way, I know that you know I’m not a medical professional or a trained psychologist.  Neither are these folks.  But it matters that we share our stories.  It means we’re not alone.  Get help if you need it.  We all need to deal with our stuff.

Here’s a guest essay from my friend-in-real-life Emily Sue Allen, the visionary behind Kindered Mom.  I can’t stop gushing about Kindred Mom, an upcoming blog about flourishing in motherhood.  This essay is technically not from Kindred Mom.  Whatever.  Emily’s essay is about infertility, but not her own.  It’s about being a friend when life is hard.

Another friend-in-real-life, Kate Laymon, wrote this post about why we don’t want to make time for God.  I’ve experienced this, in the past year even.  Hint: as Kate mentions, avoiding God has precious little to do with time-management.  In my experience, me running from God had everything to do with a deep hurt I was holding onto.  I wanted to link to my essay but now I can’t find it.   Back to Kate.  You’ll like her.   Kate is a tender-hearted mama, lover of Jesus and a kindred spirit.

And finally, Erin Whitmer wrote this stunning and frank essay about faith and prayer.  I didn’t want to read this one because it’s about the beginning of Erin’s journey as a mama of a very sick little one.  I’m glad I had a change of heart.  In Erin’s words, “When we can’t pray, when we’re really little more than a quivering, sputtering, salty-teared mess, if we believe just a little–we’re talking poppy seed, grain of sand size of faith here–the Holy Spirit will pick up the depth of our desires directly from our heart and He’ll translate all that mess for our Heavenly Father. And then He’ll go beyond that. Requesting even more than we know to ask for. Because that’s who He is.”  Enough said.

That is all lovelies, that is all.  Greg just walked in the door from a long day at work.  And it occurs to me that I forgot to make dinner.  I constantly miss the mark and will never attain Domestic Goddess Status as a wife and mother, but I’m a happy writer, even joyful.  I’ll be a starving writer if I don’t get my act together soon.  Thank goodness I have an understanding husband.  The kids, not so much.  Have a wonderful weekend.