Suffering

Originally from early February, 2017

Today is another snow day for our district. At this rate the last day of school will be near the end of June. I am not complaining. How we needed another day to get our hygge on! This body of mine is still fighting a cold and nothing is more appealing than another day set aside for the one and only purpose of being lazy, to relish the rare gift of time to heal my body and soul.

There’s not a lot of snow at this point. But it’s freezing and the ground is wet. The Twedtlings refuse to play outside for very long. I hardly blame them. There’s not a lot of snow going on but roads are treacherous, so I’ve heard. I haven’t driven anywhere or even left the house since Sunday. Greg hasn’t had a problem getting to work. Then again, his car is a snow champ. Mine, not so much. Home I shall stay. Normally cabin fever would rear it’s ugly face by now, but I am loving this. Bring on the snow days!

I wrote a post yesterday. It was intense, even by Nicole standards. Just writing about what happened, the practice of putting words to feelings, is a tremendous thing. It feels ugly at the time, putting myself out there. Even if it’s not out there-out there, since I have yet to introduce my blog to the wide open and scary spaces of the internet. By the way, the post I wrote, it will never see the light of day because it isn’t entirely my story to tell. I had to get it out in order to process this wild thing called grief. But it involves someone else and their lack of processing, or processing the only way they knew to do it. Hurt people hurt people, and that’s about all I should say.

I can say this: I’m starting to wonder if there’s more to do with the havoc in my present life than what happened twenty-plus years ago. I grieve more than death. I’m very much struggling with the trauma of Steven’s birth defect and vision impairments, and I’m deeply scarred by Lauren’s hearing journey. It’s an alternative form of grief, but grief all the same. And I’m feeling guilty for being heartbroken in the first place since God has done amazing things in both of their stories. Add to it, I’ve never had the luxury of time to process the latest bits of my own hearing loss story. I’ll have to go there eventually.

I’ve pondered the idea of being brave over the last few years. Maybe being brave right now means declaring out loud that I don’t have my act together. I was never supposed to have it all together. My shoulders aren’t wide enough or strong enough to carry past hurts or the wounds of the world. But they don’t have to be. I’m reminded of Jesus and how he calls me to come to him, leaving the heavy burdens of life at his feet.

It’s humbling to admit that I’m deeply broken. I don’t like saying that I’m really just clawing towards the light, scratching to grasp onto what I know is true. I know where I’m headed, I’ll get there in time, but the process, oh the process.

I recently bought a print to hang next to my bed. It’s one of those Bible verses with fancy pants lettering that are everywhere these days. It’s part of Ecclesiastes 3:11, “He has made everything beautiful in its time.” I’m counting on this promise. Only the designer wrote it’s instead of its and the English major snob in me can’t get over it. And when I finally did get over it and had the print framed and ready to go, I noticed the verse’s address was printed as Ecclesiastes 33:11 instead of 3:11. I’m no Bible scholar but I can’t get over that one. It won’t do. Not that anyone beyond Greg and me would see it. But I see it, and it was supposed hang next to my side of the bed.

I placed a second print underneath the bogus Ecclesiastes one, before I knew it was bogus. They were all part of a close-out sale. It’s a Christmas print with lyrics from O Holy Night. The plan was to switch it out with Ecclesiastes and hang it in the living room during Advent.

A thrill of hope

A weary world rejoices

This one is going up. On the wall next to our bed. White chalk lettering on a blackboard, without the dust thank you very much. The print suites our bedroom well. After all, I was a teacher in a former life. Added bonus, I fall asleep on my back but wake facing that side of the room. Hope. Rejoice. The first words I will see in the morning.

I am weary. But I’m holding onto hope. I will rejoice.

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.