Category Archives: mothering

in the fog: what we do when we can’t see where we’re going

Posted on by December 20, 2023

Kavanagh napping. Finn playing sweetly, but he’s loud enough to trigger neighborhood car alarms. Vin and I bossing him. Baby waking up after a refreshing 90-second power nap. Repeat until dinnertime.

And this, at least, has not changed in eighteen years of parenting – only then, it was two different kids who are both now in high school, and we are now old…er. Older. Oldish? Whatever. You get it.

in the fog: what we do when we can't see where we're going

It is a night for an easy dinner after a day of not getting nearly enough done and cringing from loud noises. Leftover pasta, leftover salad; sauté some broccoli to go over the top and give myself something to be proud of. Because somedays feel like nothing to be proud of.

Not enough time for everyone and everything. Heaviness in the chest. A sense of swelling behind the eyes that hints at tears, but no thank you, we don’t want that, we don’t have time for that. In this season, ain’t nobody got time for that.

I know what it is. It feels a little like PMS but it isn’t – it’s spiritual attack threatening to spiral into depression, the barrage of lies that shout failure from the rooftops in every area. Loud noises on the outside spike against the loud thoughts inside. The body hurts, the mind and spirit hurt.

And I can be a slow learner, but now I know the drill when it hits: Do the small things, the necessary things that fight the lies and the feelings and the oversensitive body processes.

Drink a glass of water. Take a dose of vitamin D. Rebuke the lie.

And find something easy to clean.

People sometimes seem surprised at how (relatively) clean our house is in spite of seven kids living here, and usually the credit goes to regular chores and a highly efficient husband. But every once in a while it’s something else entirely.

Every once in a while, the house is clean because the mama almost lost her ever-loving mind but narrowly escaped by taking it out on the kitchen.

Because order on the outside helps bring order to the inside.

And wiping down counters is easy, so much easier than the stressful intangibles that have no end. Clean counters help bring sanity and white space.

I cannot clean everything. Just like I cannot do everything. But I can clean this counter in front of me, and see the difference.

In so many areas, we can believe and hope and trust that what we do matters, but we cannot see it yet and the enemy takes advantage of that.

So doing something that we can see is important. It becomes prayer and prophecy; we see movement and change and impact. A clean counter can represent so much more as we pray.

The edge of the sink is covered in coffee grounds and water droplets. One wipe, and it’s clean. Perfect. Rinse the sponge. Done.

There’s a clear before-and-after here, unlike most of the other work with words, and situations, and people. And my own attitude.

For many of us it’s a season of refining, pressing further than we thought we could go, pushing through pain, taking maturity to the next level. And it hurts, like a muscle being strengthened.

We are refining character and relationships, habits, skills, and communication, for a great plan ahead that we cannot see, praying for rain but not yet seeing the cloud the size of a hand.

He sees what we cannot see – and sometimes, often, He lets us see these things for each other.

A close friend of ours had a surprise party last week. She was blindfolded; she didn’t know where she was going, or when she would arrive. But we knew, and we couldn’t wait for her to get there.

…As Christians, we will always live in tension between what we understand and what remains a mystery….We cannot afford to live only in what we understand because then we don’t grow or progress anymore; we just travel the same familiar roads we have traveled all of our Christian life. It is important that we expose ourselves to impossibilities that force us to have questions that we cannot answer.

– Bill Johnson, The Supernatural Power of a Transformed Mind

In the deep searching, trusting God when it feels like you have no choice but to trust Him (and is that really trust at all?) we’re pressed into voicing those gut-honest questions – the ones He’s not afraid of, but that we’re usually afraid to ask.

These questions lay us open, vulnerable to legalistic blind spots in our past, and the enemy hisses things like, If you really trusted God, you wouldn’t feel that way/need to ask that question/feel so uncertain. We think that Really Good Christians are supposed to find some kind of bliss in the pressure of not knowing, but that’s only because the enemy is liar.

Fire tests the purity of silver and gold, but the LORD tests the heart.

– Proverbs 17:3, NLT

God knows these seasons are not easy. He’s not mad at us for feeling the fire and asking the hard questions.

He’s not mad at us when we ask repeatedly for the cloud the size of a hand.

He’s right there with the truth – He knows the destination, and these questions are the sweet spot, the brave willingness to stare fears in the face and name them aloud, willing to surrender those fears to Him.

Here’s the root of it: If it really is that bad and our fears come to pass, will we still trust Him? Will we still talk to Him?

Of course we will. There is no one left. He is the only one who knows how to take us where we’re supposed to be going. Regardless of what the weather or the circumstances look like, He is rubbing His hands in anticipation, leaning forward, telling us, Just wait, you’re going to love this. I can’t wait to show you where you’re going.

Those who fear You shall see me and rejoice, because I have hoped in Your word.

– Psalm 119:74

And these curveballs, these situations of unknowing, and what-in-the-world-are-You-doing, prove that surrender is beautiful, and powerful, and victorious, and He knows what we want better than we do. He’s not afraid to give it to us, even when we’re afraid to ask for it or take it.

The unknowing and waiting are a lot like writing. Here too, we usually do not know where we are going:

At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it. You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then – and only then – it is handed to you. From the corner of your eye you see motion. Something is moving through the air and headed your way.

….You find and finger a phrase at a time; you lay it down cautiously, as if with tongs, and wait suspended until the next one finds you: Ah yes, then this; and yes, praise be, then this.

– Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

Bread crumbs from lunch cover the island. Scoop them into my hand, throw them off the deck for the birds, or maybe the mice, but with four cats I’m not worried. Easy, done. Moving on.

It’s hard to see outside of ourselves from the chaos and stress – it presses in, closing in on us just like the fog around the windows, obscuring mountains, neighbors, and the river of traffic going up and down the highway.

We ask for a cloud the size of a hand, and in perfect time He sends the fog rolling in, pressing us into questions and answers and growth we could not or would not have pursued otherwise. And sometimes in our own density, we don’t recognize that that, too, is an answer.

________________________

This is an excerpt from Work That God Sees .

time well spent

Posted on by October 5, 2023

I was up early – too hot, couldn’t sleep – so I finally got up to get a head start while everyone else was still in bed. I threw the office windows open and watched commuters pour down the highway from Houston, Big Lake, and Willow.

I’m never up this early, and I immediately questioned my judgment when the cats assumed my sole purpose in getting up was to feed them, howling for food loud enough to wake the neighbors. I hobbled downstairs, got their dishes, put old Gusser in the bathroom with his food and gave the other cats their food, went back upstairs, and turned on the computer.

time well spent

The summary of my productivity went like this: Open the document, change several sentences, consult the thesaurus for five different words, and say encouraging things to myself like, Wow, that’s a crappy segue.

Probably, I should’ve just stayed in bed.

It doesn’t help that I now have to wear house shoes, because I am fortier than I used to be. My arches started to fall during my pregnancy with Kavanagh, which aggravated a nerve injury in my foot and had me limping and occasionally losing balance. So now I clomp-clomp though the house in old, scrubbed tennis shoes and we call them my “house shoes” – a phrase I can’t even hear in my head without giving it a southern accent and picturing a polyester duster from the 70s.

You might know already that Alaskans don’t wear shoes in houses. Shoes are only worn in the house in those brief intervals of trying to run out the door, or having to deal with something urgent before even getting our shoes off when we get home. Or, as Iree pointed out, when we’re walking through glass and other debris from a 7.1 earthquake. So wearing shoes in the house feels inherently stressful, and I’m not used to it yet.

The week started rough, like we held time in a sieve and it poured out faster as the to-do list got longer. By the end of the day I was sucking wind and at six minutes after the hard-and-fast time we’d agreed upon for clocking out, I finally hit the shutdown button and closed the laptop.

It has to be enough, I thought. But it didn’t feel like it was. Does it ever?

On Tuesday I tried to make up for Monday. Here’s an example of how that went:

Go to Paypal to update account. Get error message with instructions to call Paypal.

Call Paypal, attempt to update over the phone’s automated system, which almost never works.

It doesn’t. Wait to speak to representative. Estimated wait time is 27-33 minutes. No problem, finding busywork for half an hour while listening to muzak is one of my very favorite things, like jury duty.

At 31 minutes of waiting, the call disconnects. YOU ARE KIDDING ME.

Call back. Estimated wait time is now only 17-22 minutes. This remarkable improvement is brought to us by a propensity to hang up on customers.

Someone picks up, hallelujah.

The representative’s ability to speak English is matched by her listening skills. I wish that was a compliment, but after interrupting me four times while asking what the problem is, it’s not.

Finally she reads from the same script I’ve heard from three other companies over the last month: “I have good news for you today, I can fix this for you.” But she can’t, because after putting me on hold two more times she informs me that my account is now under review and inaccessible by either of us. (Apparently Paypal’s security is so penetrative, it no longer recognizes you if you start wearing house shoes.)

“No worries,” she reassures me from her script. “You can access your account and try again in 48 hours.” Well, yippee. I have good news for you. I can fix this for you. No worries. I don’t think those things mean what she thinks those things mean.

“Can I help you with anything else?” she asks. Um, no thank you, I don’t think I can stand any more help today, I’m good, thankyouverymuch.

That was Tuesday.

Wednesday, five kids and I pile into the Stagecoach and drive over the river and through the Butte, to Grandma’s house we go. After the last two days it seemed like the wrong time to take the day off, but we’d already scheduled this and wouldn’t miss it for anything.

It was Kavanagh’s first trip there, probably his longest car ride so far. The wind was flying and whipping up waves of dirt and river silt in the intersections, and tiny tornadoes eddied along the road in front of us.

Two pictures of Grandpa sit on a shelf by her couch. One was taken a few years before he died; the other was black and white and faded, and he was young and handsome, six-foot-four, the guy Grandma fell in love with – sitting on a tree stump, filling his pipe, legs stretched out in front of him.

They’d known each other for about a week when it was taken. Grandma said he came by her mother’s store and she and all her younger siblings were there, probably driving her mother crazy. So they decided to take the kids all out for a walk to get them out of her hair. They went to a nearby pasture and he sat on that stump and filled his pipe, and she snapped his picture with the camera she took pretty much everywhere.

I asked her how old she was then. Now, she’s 87, though you wouldn’t know it from looking at her or hearing her voice. I grew up with her singing hymns around the house and leading worship at church, and her voice is usually still strong and beautiful – but it wasn’t when she answered my question.

“Twenty,” she said.

She was quiet for a minute, and then added, “I’d give anything to go back in time to that week.” Another pause. “Precious individual,” she said. “I miss him.”

They were married less than a year later, shortly before her twenty-first birthday. Had five boys: my uncle, my dad, and my other uncle within five years of each other, and thought they were done. But we’ve both had two surprises. We were both in our forties for the last one.

And Grandma wears house shoes, too.

work in progress, part one: what happens when we fill the lake

Posted on by February 28, 2024

Reagan is next to me, reviewing letter sounds. And not just that, but she’s also reviewing other important things, like how to pronounce “the” like thuh, not duh – and she plods through all of them in order: Thuh…E…says…ehh. Thuh…F…says…fff, and so on. It may be the first time in my life I’ve ever wished the English alphabet had less than 26 letters.

work in progress, part 1: what happens when we fill the lake

People often ask how we homeschool all these kids (“all these kids,” they say, as though we’ve collected them like so many postage stamps) and I hate to disappoint them, but the answer is pretty boring:

We don’t, really.

At least, not anymore. We put in our time with the older ones when they were younger, and now they mostly homeschool themselves; we just check and discuss their assignments and read with them a little. Life is all learning, of course, but as far as school goes, they’re pretty independent now.

So school-wise we direct our efforts to working with the Littles, as far as they will cooperate, which is…ah, how do I put this…extremely variable. And if you know us, you know that the category of “Littles” has less to do with age and more to do with ability and maturity. Our big kids are 18, 15, almost 13, and 9; our Littles are 13, 13, 3, and 2 months. Our 18-year-old recently moved out, and our little Kavanagh is just learning to take the world in. He’s growing like a weed; he smiles and laughs. Which might all be the same thing.

Last month I made filling the lake a priority again, and it’s working. I’m remembering that this is why we chose to write from home full time: I feel alive again when that’s what I’m actually doing, as opposed to the administrative, publishing parts that consume certain phases of it.

When we like what we’re doing, we forget that we’re working.

I like the movement of standing up to reach over the back of my laptop to grab a favorite style guide from my stack of writing books on the back of my desk. And I like having a row of finished works next to them, and different notebooks and journals scattered all over the place.

I like that one of the works-in-progress is not just a digital file like the one I’m currently typing on, but it’s a stack of research materials, a notebook, and Oh My Soul and its companion journal. Eric Liddell said he felt God’s pleasure when he ran; I feel God’s pleasure when I am in full nerd-mode with a pencil behind my ear, going through familiar books, rifling through pages and marking up passages, and typing as the words flow easy, fast, and furious.

And I even kind of like it – in a perverse, self-flagellating way – when I am in front of the laptop with no words, frustrated with the wrong words, and aggravated as all get out trying to pull a piece together before a deadline when the clock is ticking down (like right now, she thought nervously), because I know the thrill of accomplishment and relief when it’s done.

I don’t love it so much that I forget that I’m working, but I know that it’s worthwhile because whatever I’m doing is working. Purpose comes easier when we see the headway we’re making.

Like when Reagan pushes through and makes it to Thuh Z says zzz – it’s progress, and she is gaining. In the effort and aggravation, we see achievement and increase, and it’s worth it. You know, sort of like childbirth: Ta da, look, we did it. We made this.

The other day one of my kids asked me for harder books, but she didn’t say it that way. She said she wanted “books that would take longer than a day to read” and I had the happy task of going through the library with her to find a new stack that would keep her occupied. She didn’t want The Hunger Games, she wanted the challenge: The Scarlet Pimpernel, Mother Mason, My Antonía.

And this is when I love homeschooling and forget that it, too, is work: Learning, like teaching or writing or any other job, ceases to be work when we get lost in it.

Along those lines, this month I got to dig into the first chapters of Bleak House with my writing student. I almost wrote “dive” into it, but no, one does not dive into anything of Dickens. You wade in cautiously, stir a foot around the water to check for sharp objects, and, finding none, keep going deeper and deeper until you’re surrounded by 43 characters swimming around and splashing you in the face and pulling you under, and you like it. At least, I do.

And I might as well confess up front that I’m already reading Pickwick Papers with Iree and Nicholas Nickleby (one of my favorites) with the family as a read aloud. So, no, I didn’t pick Bleak House, but I’ve read it before and was thrilled that my student chose it.

Each of us read from our own copies. I leaned over to see where she was at, and she was a full page ahead of me, because I had gotten lost in sentences like,

Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.

And I forgot I was supposed to be working.

So now I find myself in the middle of three, count ‘em, three Dickens novels, and perfectly happy about it. Vin thinks I might have issues. I think I might want to be a Dickens scholar when I grow up…and that, too, might be the same thing.

_______