Coming Up....

It's been a busy summer, and so I haven't had a lot of time to post here. To be totally honest, I haven't known what to write. So many of my posts were becoming unbearably sad, and I don't want you to think that's how I feel all the time. Because my new goal now is to embrace the joy in my life.
                               

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That said, we take our last child to college this weekend. I've mentioned this a couple of times and while I don't want to beat a dead horse, it bears saying again -- this is going to be an adjustment for me. I have had kids at home for 29 years, and they have been my focus the entire time, so I feel a bit unmoored right now. Don't get me wrong, I have about 60 bazillion ideas/goals/dreams, but still...still...you know how my heart works and I am sad.

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BUT....didn't I just say all these posts were veering toward the tearful? Not this one!! I have so many things I am looking forward to!! My husband and I are taking our first trip to Italy soon. It is going to be fabulous, and I will be telling you all about it when I get back. I am also thrilled to be leaving a few days later to visit my daughter who lives in Boston. I never get to see her as often as I wish...but we are going to have a BLAST. She wanted mom to help her with decorating ideas for the new house she just bought, and I'm glad to oblige. We also are going to have one incredible weekend at Cape Cod. I had read her blog and noted she wants to run a 10k before she turns 30, and I saw that ZOOMA is having one while I'm there, and voila! We're in!! I love, love, love that we are going to be doing this together -- it is such a special time for us, and I am grateful she wants to do this with me. It makes an old lady happy.  :) I will SO be running, laughing, and celebrating my love for her!

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In October, I'll be doing my very first Mud Run in Atlanta! I have never done one of these and have always wanted to. What is going to make it even more fantastic is that several of my facebook friends are going to run it with me. (Yes, Kim McKinney, you will be up to a mile straight by then!!) We've never met in person, but have really hit it off, and I know we are going to make a hilarious memory of a lifetime doing this race together.
                                           

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Then November is an action-packed month for me also. I will be running my very first half marathon in San Antonio!! Again, another facebook friend will make this special for me.  I am really looking forward to meeting Debra Higginbotham and her family, in addition to rocking and rolling through this half. It's something that I've dreamed of doing for a while, and last Sunday I ran 13.5 miles so now I know I can survive. So it is going to be AWESOME!!!

After that race, I'll be doing the fun Color Run 5k in Charlotte NC, my hometown. Running that one with one of my best friends and her daughter (yay, Wendy and Renee!!). It will be their first race ever and promises to be loads of fun!
                                                                                   

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And after that, we'll be taking off to visit my husband's family for Thanksgiving. I'll be looking for another Jingle Bell Jaunt in December and that's pretty much my life planned out! What are YOU up to?????

Carnage

What kind of world do we live in, when people go out for dinner and a movie and end up losing their lives? 


A birthday celebration, and candles blown out far too soon...
Dad wanting to spend a special evening with his teens...
Men who had served their country faithfully only to be cut down in their prime...
A young man not yet out of school...
A loving mother...
A sassy, independent young woman...
A sweet, fun-loving little girl...
Heroes going to see Superheroes...
All out for an innocent night of fun.
A moment of confusion -- is that part of the film? --
Turning into a trap of terror.
An explosion...smoke...
Assault rifle cutting off the screams one by one.
Then we are left with unanswered questions.
How do you find meaning in a meaningless slaughter?
There is no answer here.
We watch people kill each other on the silver screen for entertainment,
Then we are horrified when it occurs in real life.
How has it happened that some people's souls have been massacred? What
Twisted thing
Grew inside them to fill their need?
And why?
The age old-question with no explanation...
Evil lives
While good people die.
Our only recourse is to live our own lives in ways that matter
Knowing that at any moment
It could happen again.
The curtain falls,
The lights go out,
And we are left in the darkness
To cry.

A Love Letter to My Body

Dear Body,

I hate to say it out loud -- but for most of my life, I haven't liked you. Oh, there was a time, back when I was a little child, that I thought you were the greatest. I can remember, dimly, when you ran  like the wind, and you were pretty, and strong, and I felt free. But then I got a little older, and people began calling you names:

Toothpick
Skinny
Too tall
Anorexic
Sickly looking
Bony
Flat-chested
Scrawny
Knock-kneed
Ugly
Never will find a husband

And I believed them.

I'm sorry. I should have closed my ears to all the hurts and insults. But I was just a child, and I thought they knew what they were talking about. After all, they were the adults. They were gods.

I grew up believing this as Truth. Then I met a man who loved me. We married, and we had  four children, but you had six miscarriages too. I hated you for those deep and basic betrayals. It is so simple for so many women -- you couldn't carry a child for me?? What was wrong with you?

I aged. My youth passed, and you started to wrinkle, get flabby, and sag. For heavens' sake, could you not hold out a little longer? I'd never been beautiful, so didn't you owe me? You'd think you at least could have waited a little longer before you started giving out on me.

I got sick. The doctors couldn't find out what was wrong. I was practically bedridden for a year. I thought you were dying. Then one day, I could feel you getting a little stronger. Each day you got a little better.

Not long after that, our daughter told me about a running program she was doing. You'd never exercised before in your life; I don't know why she thought we'd like it. But on New Year's Day 2011, at the age of 52, I decided you could do it.

You surprised me. In fact, you amazed me. You did everything I asked you to do. Oh, you complained about it. You wanted to give up. I put you through a lot, and you groaned, hurt, were weak, and sweated a lot. But...you did it. 

And you got better at it. With every punishment I meted out, you got stronger. I began to treat you better. I fed you healthier meals, and gave you more water, and stopped eating things that were bad for you. I began to give you more exercise. I began to push you to your limits.

You blossomed. Now to my admiration, you are strong and healthy. You have taken me places I never thought you could. You have done things I never believed you would. And --


I see you for who you are. 
Really see you.
And here are the names I call you now:

Strong.
Dedicated.
Determined.
Able.
Beautiful.
Warrior.

And now I love you with the love you have always deserved.


Thank you for sticking it out and believing in me, even when I didn't believe in you. You taught me well.


With all my love~
Us

(This was written as participation in the syncroblog SheLoves: A Love Letter To My Body.)

Graduation Time

Christian Michael Albrecht graduated and it was a proud day for us. A day of great celebration. Not only did he successfully achieve this milestone, but he is the last of our four children to do so. We did it! We got them all through school!!

                                                                             

I survived the preparation and then managed to get through the ceremony without crying (much.)  Then I spent the next two weeks hauling the grandmas from one end of North Carolina to the other. We all had a great time, except unfortunately the last week I ended up getting stricken by the bubonic plague. It has had me in bed for over a week now, coughing, congested and not being able to speak above a whisper. My husband is delighted!! I suspect he somehow masterminded the whole plot behind this thing just so he could have a vacay from me nagging him to do chores.

Anyway, lying in bed this long gives me much too much time to think. And what I have been thinking about is storytelling.

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From the time I was little I loved to write. When I was in the first grade, I wrote a killer story about "How the Mouse Got a Long Tail." There was this mouse, see, who ran under a door because the cat was chasing him, and the cat caught his tail just as he squeaked under (get it? squeaked?) and the mouse kept on running, and the tail stretched out longer and longgggggger...Really, the story arc was fabulous.
                                                                            

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Anyway, when I was in the 5th grade, I read my father's book of The Collected Works of Shakespeare and for some reason got it into my head to write my own abridged version of "Julius Caesar." Ok, ok, I was a nerd even then. But I like mine better: short and to the point. "Et tu, Brute?" Thump.

                                                                               

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I wrote and wrote and wrote, and somewhere along the way, graduated from college with a BA in journalism, got married, worked at an ad agency, had four kids and....stopped writing. My words dried up. I was so busy being a wife and a mom, and teaching our children, playing with them, telling them stories and loving them, that there was no time to even take a hot bath, much less put a sentence together. The bubble baths I loved when I was young gave way to quick hops in and out of the shower, dropping into bed, and dreaming the dreamless sleep of the dead. All to wake up and do it again the next day. And the next. And the next. And the years rolled on.

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Until here I am.

The youngest will be leaving in less than two months to start his own life at college. He is more than ready to write his own story. We are finished with the hands-on parenting, my husband and I. We managed to raise four kids and keep them alive until adulthood and now they have all pretty much flown the nest.

It hits me at odd times, that THAT focus of my life is now complete. My sole identity, through my own choosing, has been as "Mother." And now, there are no children any more.

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It's so cliche, but it honestly does not seem possible that the time has gone by so quickly. When I look back now, I see a roaring wind of time that flattened me in its path. The squeals of  laughter, petty squabbles, the telling of stories, the "Moooo-oommmm!!", the teen angst, the heartbreaks of adolescence -- all of it -- finished. Done. Over. A quiet is descending slowly upon our home. Christian works long hours and I have a foretaste of how life will be when he leaves for college, never to return home the same.

It is so bittersweet. All the years when I thought, "I can't wait...." -- well, the waiting is over. It is here. They are all moving on, into their own lives with their own children, and their own stories, and Mom is not the first thought in their minds anymore. That's ok, although hard to accept. They have been the focus of my life for 29 years, so it is a little humbling to realize that I am no longer the focus of theirs. I've been left behind, like the "Where the Wild Things Are" book, the Candyland game, and Ashton's stuffed bear named "Mooney." Loved and cherished above all at one point, but now...better tales are calling.

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That's as it should be. They are all entitled to their own lives, to seek out their own adventures, to write the stories of their own souls and they should not be held back.

But in the silence that they leave behind them...
in that silence I once longed for but now rings a little hollow....
in that silence...


I will find my own words again.

Cleaning House

All the craziness I've been dealing with over the past couple of months has a purpose   -- Christian, our second son, the baby of our 4 children, is graduating from high school in a scant few weeks, and we will have family and friends coming to witness this momentous milestone in his life. Hence our flurry of activity. For goodness' sake, we can't let people see how we really live on a daily basis!!

Housekeeping is not my strong point. Never has been; never will be.  There are mysterious, hygienic-related rituals that other people seem to know innately, about which I have absolutely NO clue. 

Like cleaning above your interior doors. Do other people do this? REALLY?? Apparently so.

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Now, to me, my house looks clean. I mean, I worked on it QUITE a while recently and it looked the best it has looked in a long, long time. That was before I had a housekeeper come out to give me a quote for cleaning. She was trying to be nonjudgmental, I could tell. She went through the house and pointed out things that I swear I would never have noticed in several decades, saying that when she took on the job, she would be deep cleaning these areas. Huh?? I thought it was clean. Apparently not.


The quote was staggering, but when she was finished inspecting, I felt we were living in a home that had been a main target of germ warfare, had someone die in it from bubonic plague, and was a petri dish for e. coli. And it was all my fault!! She said she would bring in a team of "her girls" and they would be in my home -- here she looked me directly in the eyes, and seriously and firmly, to underscore her point, pronounced -- all day. All day.

She wasn't kidding. They have been here for 4 hours as I write this and they have only cleaned my bedroom and bathroom so far. 

I truly have no idea what they have been doing. I have been moving from room to room, trying to keep out of their way, too ashamed to look them in the eye. I mean, for the love of all that is holy, I can't even think of anything that could possibly take me 4 hours to do in there!!

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This is, without question, an embarrassing and humbling experience for me. I am good at so many other things. I want to follow them around and say, "I make a mean tuna casserole!!"  "You should hear me crack people up with my one-liners!"  "I taught Bible Study for 15 years!" "I am really great at accessorizing!"  "I won the class spelling bee in the 4th grade!" But no, I think, I must acknowledge that this is not my shining moment and swallow my pride. Apparently... I suck.

Well, as in other things in my life, I will defer to the experts. I am paying them, despite my extreme discomfort, to clean up our crud and make our lives better. It sort of reminds me of a conversation we had in Bible Study once, about how Jehovah's Witnesses go door to door to evangelize. "Well," I said, " we are doing our part. Somebody has to be home to answer the door." See, I can feel good because I'm helping somebody have a job; I'm helping to boost the economy.

I'm also having to come to grips with the fact that, no matter how hard I try, there actually is one area of my life that I will never be successful at. I just do not have the cleaning gene. I respect people who do. I'm amazed at their knowledge and aptitude.  I'm not good at organization either. I remember once my oldest daughter came back home after she'd moved away, and she was helping me clean our computer room. Scattered around  the desk were a lot of pens and pencils; she picked them up and put them in an empty cup that was sitting there. "That's genius!!" I exclaimed. Yes. That's just how seriously deficient I am in these things. I do not lie -- I would never have thought of something that simple, that basic. My brain just does not work that way.

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BUT....I remember once telling my mother-in-law, who has always been an immaculate housekeeper (God knows how she has endured visits to our home all these years but she does it with grace), that at the end of my life, I know I will never say, "I wish I'd cleaned more."  I have played with my children, I have read books that have opened my mind, I have explored forests, I have painted pictures as gifts, I have visited dear friends, I have written poems, I have cooked meals for my husband (that's sort of waning also, but that might be another blog post), and I have run like the wind. Ok, a slow breeze. But I have been busy living, putting my time and talents into what I have been created for. And I have tried, in my own pathetically inept way, to keep up with our home.

The point is, we all have something that we're not good at. That's not a crime; it's a simple fact of life. And we can let it make us feel bad, and inadequate, and a lesser human being, or we can laugh at ourselves, count our blessings and turn to others for help. Our faults do not  define us.
                                                                                 

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Cleaning house has made me think about the life that I have left to me, too. It's time to take a look at the things I carry within me, and toss out what doesn't work, what I no longer need, what no longer fits. Time, too, to dust off what I cherish, shine what's gotten dull, and pull out what's gotten pushed to the back of the closet.  My gut feeling is, I am in the midst of upheaval or renewal.

Christian's high school graduation will end a chapter of my life which has lasted 29 years. For more than a quarter of a century, I have had children at home with me. 29 YEARS, people!!! We have been through many journeys, my children and I, together and separately. We've shared both laughter and tears, we've seen joy, and we've gone through some tough times, too. When I started out as a mom, I was young and incredibly unaware of what was about to shape my life. I end this part of motherhood much older, I hope a little wiser, but as always,  deeply, fiercely in love with my children. As this chapter closes with my own bittersweet graduation of sorts, I am excited at the possibilities ahead  -- what shall I do, what shall I do? I have, oh, about a million ideas.

                                                                                 


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Rivers Of Joy

I have four children whom I love so much that sometimes I can't breathe. If I let my mind go there, I would live in a constant, paralyzing fear that something horrible will befall them. We live in that kind of world, you know, where unspeakably horrific things happen every day. But I don't think we're meant to live life in terror of the storms to come.

                                       
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I'm not naive, though --I know firsthand that tragedy can strike out of the blue. Everyone has their crosses to bear, their personal sorrows. During the years we were optimistically trying to expand our family, I suffered six heartbreaking miscarriages. All took place around 9-12 weeks -- just long enough for me to be firmly entrenched in morning sickness, just far enough along to be deeply in love with that child.

It is so hard to to say good-bye to a child that you will never see or hold, to relinquish the yearning of your heart. If you are a mother, you understand what I am saying -- from the first second you learn you're pregnant, you dream that child into reality. Their hair color, eyes, voices, a little girl, a little boy...you conjure the hopes of the life you will have together. And then, so unexpectedly, so irretrievably,  one day can arrive when you realize something is very, very wrong, and there is pain, and then...oh, the depths of anguish... death.

                           

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During my 6th miscarriage, in that lull of learning that yet another child had passed away and the long, dread-filled waiting for a natural miscarriage to happen, I heard a song that literally transformed my grief and my life. It was The Valley Song by Jars of Clay:

My pain was an ocean. I was tossed around on waves of sorrow, drowning in despair, only to be thrown onto the shore of complete desolation.

                                                                           
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But through God's mercy, He gradually calmed that vast sea of grief and brought down my mountain of pain. It took years; it took complete resignation; it took my trust in Him to lead me through the terror of the storm. It wasn't easy. I had to let go of the pain -- no simple task -- and look for happiness wherever I could grasp it. But when I did -- slowly, tentatively, like a child  learning to swim -- I discovered those moments more and more. The fear-filled darkness of murky water gave way to crystalline peace as I -- faltering at first, then gaining strength -- put my toes into the water and finally, with a deep breath of faith, plunged in.  I'm not going to sugar-coat it -- pain can and will change a person forever. I remember reading during those dark days that "it can make me bitter, or it can make me better."  I fought hard, and continue to wrestle with it to this day, to choose "better."

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But I have an unquenchable joy in my life now. Running has given me a clarity and peace of mind -- an unfettered happiness and enthusiasm for life that I never thought possible. When I put on my shoes, and it's just me and that road stretching endlessly before me, I have come to realize that each day IS a gift, a blank slate, an opportunity to share happiness, kindness and laughter with others. I am more compassionate now, because I know they all have their owns sorrows they shoulder. I feel an urgent need to help, to lighten their load,  to walk side by side with the wounded on their road to discovering life again after adversity. There is so much to live for, so much joy yet to come. All the tragedy and pain I've experienced has burned through my soul and taught me lessons I would never have learned otherwise. They've made me into who I am:  a woman grateful for the children I was blessed to bring to this world, thankful for the graces bestowed on me, and looking forward to meeting my other six babies. Although I no longer carry them in my womb, I forever carry them in my heart.

God is good.  I am His; I am sheltered in His loving arms, and my name is engraved on the palm of His hand. I trust Him to see me safely through my journey in life.

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Above all else, I still look to the Heavens.

The Dreams That You Dare To Dream

I dare to dream that 

SOMEDAY:

Human beings who are

gay

straight

labeled

heavy

thin

cursed

black

white

harassed

red

yellow

excluded

rich

poor

persecuted

impaired

enabled

mocked

liberal 

conservative

bullied

depressed

happy

ostracized

homeless

fortunate

hated

will all recognize  

WE   ARE   ONE.

We are all lovable.

We are all valuable.

We are all important.

WE    ALL   MATTER.

Each and every one of us is 

LOVED

by the same God who created us.

He makes no distinctions.

He loves you just as much as He loves me;

He loves "them" as much as He loves "us."

And we all have the same 

hopes 

sorrows 

pain

  wishes 

prayers 

dreams.

We all live on this one tiny planet, 

hurtling along in the immeasurable darkness of the universe,

sharing our journey together.

We all want love and peace and happiness and respect,

 a little spare change to jingle in our pockets.

We all hurt, cry, bleed, suffer.

We all want our lives to have meaning.

We all cry out to our God to save us.

But...we all could  bear one  another's burdens 

with

ARMS  WIDE  OPEN

and make each other's lives easier.

I'm not better than you; 

You're not better than me.

We are each unique, dancing flames of light

and 

Together we could set this world on fire.

Why, oh why, can't I?

Why can't we?

That's my dream.

I know that

somewhere over the rainbow, 

far above the prejudice, hate, and discrimination,

skies are blue,

and the dreams that we dare to dream 

really can come true.

Let's start today

to make that a reality.

Let's do something small     --

Can we just smile at each other?

If everyone in the world 

smiled

at the same time,

who could dare to

hate

again?

Simplistic, I know. But it could just work.

A smile could  melt a hardened heart.

It's a start.

One small thing...

Like a frail paper boat, 

setting sail onto the vast and endless ocean,

almost invisible to spy, 

yet the ripples it causes are 

unimaginable.

Then think 

of what we could do

TOGETHER.

A tsunami of change.

ALL ONE.

Spread the love.