Nicole K. Twedt

Being Brave When Life Is Hard

Learning

by //

Originally from a MOPS newsletter, winter 2012.  

When asked by my friend, Lea, to write a short essay about what I’m currently learning for the newsletter, my initial reaction was this: Are you kidding me, Lea?  I’m so tired I can hardly think straight, let alone write about learning something new.

I’m not usually such a downer, really I’m not.  It’s just that I’m aware of how little I’m retaining these days.  After all, I’m a mama to three young children, five and under, including an adorable baby girl.  I have trouble recalling lessons I’ve already learned.  I consider it a good day when I have enough mental energy to get dinner on the oak farm table in a timely manner.  It’s an even better day if the five of us are fed and I’ve not only washed, but put away our laundry.  Who am I kidding?  The laundry, even when folded, will be abandoned in the living room in piles for each family member on our caramel-colored couch.  I’m lucky to have my act together to bathe my kids more than once a week.

I’m may not be learning anything new, but I can tell you mindless things.  I can name how many half-gallon cartons of milk we go through a week (this was in the days before we went dairy-free), or how many of Lauren’s pacifiers should be in the pacifier jar by the garden window.  I can even tell you how much money I could be saving with coupons.

I don’t think Lea meant for me to write about such things.

Let’s redefine the question: What am I learning about God? 

Again nothing; or so I thought.

To be honest, I haven’t sat through an entire church service more than four or five times since Lauren’s birth in July.  These days I catch the sermon in the nursing lounge, surrounded by new and old mommy friends.  It’s not the same.  I get distracted.  It’s hard to worship before a TV monitor while my friends and I visit and feed our babies.

And it’s difficult to write about learning new lessons from God when you may or may not have a problem falling asleep during quiet times.  When I’m not falling asleep during sacred moments, God and I are usually interrupted by a certain cranky baby waking up early from her nap, or because my boisterous 3-year-old is trying to lick or bite his big sister.  Or because my tenderhearted 5-year-old found a bunny in our backyard.  The distractions go on and on; the learning doesn’t.

One early fall morning was no different.  I’m sure the scene is familiar to those who are in the trenches of motherhood.  I woke up (a little too) early by the baby.  She sleeps like a champ but decided not to this morning, which is the story of her now seven-and-a-half-month existence.  After coaxing Lauren back to sleep, I was tempted to go back to bed and hide under our warm down comforter with the Calvin Klein duvet.  But I decided to take advantage of the quiet house all to myself.  I picked up my Bible, the one with the worn black leather cover, with longing.  All I desired was to really hear from God, like I used to, coveting his presence sans interruptions from the little people in my life.  I began to read and pray, pouring out my guilt and frustrations to God about not having quality times with him anymore.  Instead of condemnation from him about what I could and should be doing, his tender voice spoke to my tired soul, reminding me that any time spent with him is quality time.  Come to me, he seemed to say to my heart. Come to me, covered in spit up, make-up less and tired.  Come to me anytime of the day or night.  Just come.

Just come.  Sigh.  I struggle with feelings of inadequacy, even as a child of God.   I often lose it with my kids, you see.  And I say things I should never say to my husband.  As I previously mentioned, I fall asleep when I attempt to pray or read my Bible.   I’m entirely too vain, I just know it.  I spend too much time worrying about the stretch marks that favor my right hip.  I waste hours of my life wondering if I’ll ever again fit into my pre-Lauren jeans before they fade out of style.  What’s more, my little house is constantly in a state of disaster.  If I have time to unload the dishes, the laundry is undone.  If I get to the laundry, then dishes take over my small kitchen.

But in all this negative self-talk, he reminds me to come.

He wants me to come to him because he thinks I’m something special, redeemable, even lovable, no matter what my house looks like.  No matter what I look like.  I’m learning once again that he’s all that matters.  He wants my heart, even when it’s going in a thousand directions.  He just wants me to come.

I’m reminded of my friend Lorrie, and what she told me when Lauren was born.

“Seize those quiet moments with God,” she said.  “Snatch them up any way you can get them.”

As a mother of twins, she should know.

So that’s what I’m learning these days, to seize quiet moments with God.  And in the process, my time with him is taking on a less traditional look.  I’m learning not to approach God like he’s an item to check off from my list.  No, I’m going for authentic moments, organic even.  I’m learning to set aside Bible reading plans, at least for now, and just pour out my heart to Jesus as I read my Bible.  I’m learning to listen to him as he quiets my attention-deficit soul.

I may smell like soy formula spit-up.  My dirty-blonde hair is a mess.  The bags under my eyes cannot be camouflaged, even by the finest concealer.  Don’t think for a moment I haven’t tried.  The view beyond my computer screen is of our tiny kitchen.  I see our white porcelain sink, overflowing with dinner dishes from the night before, and of bottles needing to be washed.  I spy half a dozen pacifiers needing to be rounded up and returned to the pacifier jar.  But my heart is full.  Because I’m learning once again just to come.

Just come.

New Year, New Word

by //

Originally from January 2017

Sometimes I have a word for the year.  You?  I started this practice in college.  Before choosing a word was a thing.  Maybe it was a thing but I didn’t know it then.  Come to think of it, I never really choose a word.  The word always chooses me.   Not in  a whoo-whoo way.   A word settles deep in my soul and I can’t shake it.  Like a fleeting thought that comes to stay, invading my heart and mind.  Sometimes it’s a word of encouragement, a guiding principle, even a cautionary word.  Sometimes this little word is for the entire year.  Quite often my word is for a specific season, for a time when needed.  Then a new word finds me.

My very first word was balance.  That’s a story for another day.  I was in college, living in the duplex townhouse on Superior Street and my life was out of whack.  It was on it’s way to being less whacked out but it was a long process and I wasn’t there yet.  Not even close.  Balance was my reminder to basically chill out and not fall to one extreme or another.

Some of the other words were Hope, Challenge, Quiet and Brave.  I was up at 3-something this morning, and too tired to think of the others.

Sometimes I get a phrase and not a word.  Sing a New Song was a biggie from the end of 2015 and stayed with me into the first part of 2016.  I wrote about it briefly.

I decided not to “choose” a word this year.   Not that I do the choosing, but a word didn’t fall into my lap by the time it usually did.  I simply forgot all about the practice of getting a word until the last days of 2016.  I was listening to the Sorta Awesome Podcast, or maybe it came to me while reading the first few chapters of Annie F. Down’s Looking For Lovely.   I don’t remember exactly where I was when the word for 2017 came.   But I’ll never forget the way I felt.  It came like a ton of bricks and settled like a pit in my stomach, much like indigestion.

Write.

No Bueno.

I don’t like this one.

I’d like another word, please.

Write.

Write, or the practice of writing, is what I’ve been running from.  But it’s hardly a new word or a theme.  Summer and fall of 2016 was supposed to be the time to write.  I was supposed to write while the kids were in school.  I was supposed to wear frumpy wool sweaters, black leggings (better yet, LuluRoe leggings), and type for hours at the computer desk in my family room with my Starbucks travel mug and my little dog, Chloe, by my side and bring hope through the written word, all in the comfort of my own home.  The truth is, I’ve never not written as much in my life as I have since June.  Even my prayer journal has sat neglected, hidden under my Bible.  I know it’s there.  But I can’t see it.  I’m not about to write in it.

Sure, I’ve been busy with other commitments, some legit like helping at school and mentoring through MOPS.   And there’s the basic time suckers like dishes and grocery shopping and always laundry, which will be the death of me.  Why do I feel like Jonah mounting the next ship to Tarshish, running from my calling?  Why, oh why, do I run from the very thing that brings me hope and joy and what I hope brings a little brightness and truth to others?

I don’t want to start writing again.  Why?  It’s in my blood to write.  Writing brings life, clarity, joy.  The very practice of putting pen to paper, even tapping the keyboard and seeing words illuminated on the screen before me, revives my soul.  But what usually brings life to me is kind of sucking the life out of me.  What’s my problem?  Don’t tell me, I know.  It hurts to write because to write is to process.  And it hurts to process.  It hurts to hurt, plain and true.

Here I am, the one running from my calling.  The one writing about not writing.   A walking contradiction, that’s me.  It occurs to me that for once in a long while I’m clearheaded, fire in my soul, alive and well.  And it occurs to me that while writing about not wanting to write, I’m actually doing it.  I’m writing.

Christmas 2016

by //

 

Originally from December 2016

It’s Wednesday morning in the second week of advent.  I’m meal planning for the remainder of the week, well at least that’s the goal.  I tap, tap, tap my fingertips to the iTunes app and select the perfect Christmas album to be serenaded by as I figure out what on earth to make for dinner.  It’s new to me, this album, and I have twenty minutes to listen to it and make a list before it’s time to set off for Fred Meyer and Central Market.

An hour later, here I am, basically ugly crying in the middle of my kitchen.  Alice Currah’s Savory Sweet Life cookbook is open but ignored on the cluttered counter top.   I have always been slightly melancholic and land on the introspective side of things but I wasn’t expecting this.  I am positively wrecked by the album’s stirring instrumentals and its lyrics of great hope.  For they tell the tale of beauty born of pain and suffering in a time when nothing made sense.  The album is on repeat and I’m keenly aware that Jesus’s birth story is warming in my heart the desire to write once again.  But to write is to create, and in order to create there has to be an emptying of sorts.  The process is raw and overwhelming yet holy.

It’s been a year of hurts, some big, some small.  It’s been a year of newness too.  A new beginning came in the form of full-day kindergarten for Lauren.  Steven migrated to second grade and overnight it seems that Emily has morphed into a strong and splendid beauty of a fourth-grader.  Then there’s church.  We left a church we loved as our family’s faith journey took a different direction and we said hello to something new, a church less than 3 miles from home.  Each time we’ve had to leave behind what was glorious and good before we could move forward to the next adventure, which has also been glorious and good.  It’s been exciting and scary and every single feeling along the way.

We encountered grief this year as a family.  My grandmother died in January.  She was my mom’s mother, and her death is complicated for me.  We bid farewell to the older gentleman who lived in the white house three doors from us.  We didn’t know him very well but his life mattered and we miss his presence in our neighborhood.

It’s been a year of setbacks and a year of great rejoicing.  I hardly know where to start.  Steven lost vision over the summer, you see.  It was truly alarming.  Our little boy had to do an extremely hard thing for a little boy to do.  He wore an eyepatch for six hours a day over his strong eye, mostly during elementary school hours.  It was a small setback, compared to how far he has come vision-wise.  And his suffering pales in comparison to the story of a young lady at our school who will go blind after complications from a kidney transplant.   But heartache is heartache.  Patching for six hours is quite the ordeal for a little kid acutely aware that he is different from his peers, though we promise he’s loved all the same.  I gathered Steven in my arms several times during the summer and into fall, all seven plus years of him.  Over and over and over again, I declared one of God’s promises.  The promise that Steven is deeply loved and not alone when he does the hard work of patching.  And then, about a month ago we learned that Steven’s hard work paid off.  He has regained sight, thank God, and patching was reduced to three hours a day outside of school.  We breathed a sigh of relief and offered up trembling hands in praise and thanksgiving.

As for Lauren, I think we’re a little shell-shocked from 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 did receive 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.  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.

Today marks the third Sunday of Advent and the Tiniest Tiny is on the verge of losing her first tooth.  I’m feeling all the feels.  Before long, a dairy-free version of Alice’s Spicy Sausage Kale Bean Soup is reheated on the stove top burner.  Leftover Thai food is thrown into the microwave and two-thirds of our children refuse to eat it.  Our family of five gathers around the oak dining room table to light the Joy candle.  As the flame of the little pink candle flickers and comes to life, we set our eyes on whatever is lovely and good, to the dawn of about to get better.  This is the song of old, the story rising in me.

Greg, Nicole, Emily, Steven, Lauren and our little dog, Chloe