Enough

Third grade. Summer camp. To be able to access the pool, swimmers had to prove they could tread water for at least a minute (maybe two?). The only problem? I had never treaded water before in my life. Somehow, through swimming lesson after swimming lesson, no one had taught me this basic skill.

I literally threw myself into the deep end of the pool. Somehow, I managed to keep my head above water for the requisite amount of time. To this day, I'm not sure how I did it. Swimming skill combined with pure determination is the best I can come up with.

Turns out, that was good practice for . . . life, I guess.

It doesn't feel like there's enough of anything in my life right now - not enough time, not enough energy, not enough money, nor enough sleep. I feel like I can't possibly spend enough time with my kids, and yet there's so much more to be done. Dishes are a necessity and, when you find yourself trying not to swear in front of the children for the fourth time in an hour because you stepped on something pointy or yucky, vacuuming is, too.

And all of that is before the necessities of my own soul: the words I have to write because doing so helps keep order in my mind, the few minutes of quiet that I must have because I don't function well when my brain is always abuzz, the exercise that often feels like a waste of time but that keeps me positive and healthy and so much more whole.

People tell me I'm doing a lot, and I can see how that would look true, but I feel like I'm just treading water. Not drowning, not racing, just staying afloat. And I don't always know if I'm even going to do that.

Sometimes, it's that day in third grade all over again. I fling myself into life and just hope, hope, hope that I can do enough to keep us all sane. As I do this over and over and over again, though, I'm coming to trust the process, and not just what my eyes can see. When I look out over everything, it's too much. But when I narrow my focus and look at the next thing, then the next and the next and the next, I get through what needs to be done.

I'm coming to see the gift of a day, of 24 hours. It's not enough time to do everything, but it's plenty for the things that matter most, the ones I'm actually called to.

There is enough time, when I don't cram in things that aren't mine to do.

There is enough rest, when I take the opportunities for it when they come.

There is enough energy, when I choose carefully how I'll spend it.

I've been given enough of everything, but it takes faith to believe that's true when it seems so false.

Light . . .

What brings light? That's essentially the question I've been asking myself in these long months since baby boy was born. What brings light? To me, to my children, to my family, to those around me.

I find different answers than what I'd expected.

Light comes when I offer my kids what I have, what I'm strong in and good at, and offer God the rest. I'm good at reading stories, talking about feelings, holding kiddos close, explaining things in ways they can understand and helping them pretend. I'm not so good at arranging play dates, getting us out of the house, and always being gentle. And that's ok, because God holds us all, and I will never be more than human.

Light comes when I walk away from the shoulds to pursue the things that give me life. I don't cook and clean much these days, but I play with kids, teach my classes, take some quiet time, and write.

Light comes when I put words to page, even when they're scattered and few and I don't know if they mean what I want them to mean.

Light comes when I work my body hard, when I don't shove personal wellness to the bottom of my to-do list because everyone else has needs I want to meet.


I'm breaking my silence here to join The Gypsy Mama for Five Minute Friday. Today's prompt is "light".

Jumbled Thoughts on This Tightrope Life

Finally, a spare moment to write, and she starts talking over the monitor. I wonder if she'll last until I can marshall some order to these words, and if it's fair to ask her to.

***

I'm tempted to feel pushed to the margins of my own life, sometimes, like the things that value most to me get the least time right now, because of kids and teaching and being a wife.* Tempted, I say, because this IS my life. The diapering-feeding-sweeping-washing-reading out loud-cleaning spit-up off the sofa again-all of it. It's not glorious and it doesn't make for feeling significant or important, but it's my life.

It's the life I chose and the life I was given. Wishes, here, have become horses, and so beggars must ride, whether that means holding on for a pell-mell run over rough terrain or trying not to fall asleep after hours in the saddle when everything looks the same.

***

There's a balance, I know. My heart matters, even when there are a million things that legitimately need to be done before I do the things that nurture it the most. Sometimes, though, it's not a matter of not leaving room for self-care, but of looking up from the tasks that must be done to achieve basic living and realizing it's time for bed.

Jesus calls us to give up our selves, but to give up a self, you must have a self in the first place. To give myself to the tasks Jesus has called me to, I must know what the other things are, too. I must know the things that are for later, for when the kids are older, for a time when I'm not up at night feeding the baby and teaching two classes on top of (still) getting used to being a mother of two.

***

There's enough time in a day for everything I'm legitimately called to. I don't believe God calls us to more than will fit into our days, if we're faithful to spend our time well. That includes rest, by the way. And so I trust him with my heart, trust that he'll make time for me when I don't see a way.

***

She's still talking, by the way, happy as a little bird. I'll get her, now, and know that this time was a gift straight from his heart to mine


* There should be a word for that. Wife-ing? Maybe there is one and I don't know what it is. That's entirely possible.

Betraying Ourselves

But it was not your fault but mine,

And it was your heart on the line.

I really f***** it up this time,

Didn't I, my dear?

-Little Lion Man, by Mumford & Sons

She'd been away from home for a long time, this girl, and had returned largely against her will. Upon coming back, she found out that her most beloved brother had, years ago, been involved in something large, dark, and awful. Just in case that wasn't bad enough, she had become a victim of this awful darkness, though neither she nor her brother knew of the other's involvement. 

Several days after the horrifically awkward situation where they found this out, he managed to catch her alone. "What must you think of me?" he asked. He had to know.

She ponderd her tea for a minute. Old anger and rage filled her, but she knew her brother. He gotten carried away by rhetoric and let other people tell him what greatness was. Like her, he'd spent years forgetting the person he was and trying to replace him with someone a bit more dazzling. She could not hate him.

"I think," she said, then paused for a moment. "I think we all make choices, sometimes, that betray ourselves and the people who love us. And it's not about whether we make them, because we all do, but about what we do afterwards that counts."

***

I wrote that, a couple of weeks ago, and stopped. Her sentences, there, are what my book is about. I thought it was about leaving and coming home, and reconciliation, and joining together to fight something bad. And it is about all of those things, but they're all responses to the self-betrayal that she mentions here. They're all part of the "what we do afterwards."

I stopped because I'm in awe of those sentences. I can't quite believe that I wrote them, in fact. Times like this, I know that I don't write alone, because I don't think like that. I don't usually manage to sum life up in phrases that actually make sense. 

***

Self-betrayal and what we do with it isn't just what my book is about, but what life is about. If we were originally made in God's image, after all, then all sin is self-betrayal. It's something that takes us away from the beings we were created to be, something that keeps us from becoming the people we could be.

It's also endemic. We all sin, we all betray ourselves. But afterwards, we have choices. Whether the betrayal is big or small, we can run from it or we can face it. We can't always undo it or undo the damage done, but we can choose how we move forward. Denial or acceptance, defensiveness or repentance, trying to ignore it or struggling through the truth, there are always choices.

It's hard to come to terms with the evil that we've done, especially when the sin is large and guilt and shame are competing for prominence in what we feel towards ourselves and our actions. Sometimes it takes years to pick up the pieces of the actions we've chosen and move on, to figure out which direction is actually forward and to choose to move that way. 

***

It's especially hard to come to terms with the evil in ourselves when we've hurt ourselves along the way. It's hard to say, "I would be hurting like this if I hadn't made particular choices," or "I was a bright-eyed little child with so many ideals and I'll never live up to them because of the choices I've made." 

I don't think this is hard because we can't see or feel our own pain, but because it's so hard to hold the fact that we can be both a victim and a perpetrator in the same action, at the same time. That's what my character sees, though, when she sees her brother. She sees the pain he's felt at his own choices, and she chooses compassion for the wounded brother rather than vengeance on the stupid one. 

Of course, the only reason she can see all of this is because she's experienced it in and of herself (she's a perceptive one, that girl). And maybe that's one of the most important reasons we need to face our sin, acknowledge all of the victims including ourselves, and choose truth as we move forward. If we don't, we can't choose compassion on other sinners, either. 

***

My characters aren't all happy in the end. They aren't all living the lives they'd have lived if they hadn't made the choices they made. And, though I think they'll do it eventually, they haven't all chosen to look truth in the eye, to choose to walk in who they really are and not who they want to be.

I think that's real. I don't know that seeing sin for what it is is something that everyone can do, though I do know that many capable of doing it won't choose that. But I do know that seeing the truth is the best way. And asking our own forgiveness may seem like it's only something that sentimental musicians do in popular songs, but I think it can take us far. 

Shhhh . . .

***I wrote this whole post the other night, only to lose it to a stupid human-computer communication error. I hate it when that happens, because I can't recreate the post I wrote, only write a whole new one on the same topic.***

I have a secret, if you won't tell.

Promise?

Double-pinky promise?

Ok, then.

I'm writing fiction again.

I know, I know, I do that a lot. And I have a whole novel in desperate need of revision, but I don't know where to start. I've even written on the current one before, 50,000 in November for NaNo, even though I knew halfway through that I wanted to make some serious changes to it.

But every time I start again, it feels like a secret, like springtime is coming and colors are popping up everywhere and the bunnies are getting busy behind the bushes and I blush to look at them but I celebrate them, too. New life is always worthy of celebration, right? And that's what this feels like to me.

I love the first-draft stage, the infatuation stage. I love it when my characters pop up in my day, because they have something to say, something they're sure I need to know so that I can write them well. I love waking up in the middle of the night with their stories in my mind, working out the details even as I sleep. And I love putting the words on paper, giving them life, making them walk around and talk and see their world and enjoy it.

But the more time I spend writing, the more efforts I make at putting these people on paper, the more I shy away from it, too. As close as I come to describing the scenes in my head, they're never perfect, and my method of revising seems to be more like rewriting, like finding the places where the story goes awry and starting over from there.

It's not that I'm a bad writer, but I'm a terrible reviser, mostly because I can't ever stop wondering what would happen if . . . what if I started at a different point? what if someone reacted differently in a key place? what if something changed and the main character could fall in love after all?

And then I have to explore the possibilities, have to write out many different versions of scenes, even different versions of the whole story. I get overwhelmed by all those words, and I can't keep them straight for anything, so I quit, I walk away, I take my space.

That's why starting again feels like such a delectable a secret, I think, because it means I've become brave enough to jump back into that world again. It means I'm trying to tolerate the ambiguity, then inherent imperfection that comes when putting image on paper. And I'm trying again, starting again, taking that deep breath and trying again.

It's like trying to see again, not discerning shapes amidst darkness but finding the thread in a jumble of chaos. Writing is like a giant game of Where's Waldo?, where my job is to find and follow Waldo and only Waldo, not getting distracted by all of the places he could be but finding where he is and sticking with him.

All of the writing books I've read stress making the right decisions, about characters, about plot, about the words on the page. But sometimes I wonder if stories aren't more like real life - a little ambiguous. You make a choice and it changes everything, but it really could have been different. I feel a little like God must feel, when He looks down and watches us. Yes, we DO only one thing, but He sees all the possibility, all the could-have-beens, both good and bad.

I wonder, sometimes, what it takes for him not to jump in and change a story so it becomes something better. Because that's what I do, I think. I forget to listen to my characters, forget to stop and see what they do, and so I make them and their stories into something else. So revising is learning to listen, learning to hear them more clearly and follow their threads amidst the noise that surrounds them.

I feel tentative about starting again, because I wonder if I won't finish, just like I haven't finished before. The things is, a good story is worth figuring out how to revise. I love this story. I love it more than I loved the last one I wrote. And so I let the new life in, because trying and failing to tell this story is better than not trying at all. I don't think I could live with that.