Category Archives: Childhood

Not Finished with Me Yet

03 Thursday Oct 2019

Posted by in Asthma, Childhood, Recovery journey, Tragedies

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Last Thursday I almost died.

Literally.

I’m still gathering all the pieces of why I didn’t, and I want to capture for you my perspective on what I hope is a one-time occurrence.

(For some background you could check out my post “Inspiration” from August 8, 2019.)

I’m really big on gaining knowledge and understanding. So when my asthma and allergies (still unnamed) started ramping up and causing attacks, I went into research mode. I made an appointment with a pulmonologist, but it was almost two months away. So I responded to a Facebook post about an asthma clinical trial, and found my asthma and allergy doctors instead.

Since then I’ve participated in two clinical trials designed to test generics of an effective asthma drug that makes it more affordable to do what should come naturally.

Breathe.

So in a two week time I had already had two serious asthma attacks: one after visiting a very musty used-book store, another that woke me up coughing and choking in the wee hours of the morning.

That second one got me thinking that I needed a better strategy of how to communicate that I was having trouble. I was alone in the family room to use my nebulizer for an albuterol treatment at 4am, taking my phone in case the distress didn’t let up. But my husband’s phone charges overnight in that room, so it would be down to my teenagers or 911 if I couldn’t walk and breathe at the same time to get help.

I freely admit I have control issues. Four and a half years of Celebrate Recovery have gotten me to the point where I can clearly see my problems, but I still don’t want to admit that I need help.

I don’t want to be powerless.

Seriously, I have been in places where I had no control over what was being done to me, and as a girl I decided I would do my best to control everything I could to make sure nothing bad happened to me again.

Yet Thursday night I had almost no control over what was happening to me.

Just the day before my third attack in two weeks, I met with my mentor, who I hadn’t seen for a month, and we talked about my need to have a written and easily communicated way to let my family know what I needed. So while working Thursday, my mind was on doing this, making a list from the most drastic to least invasive things to do for me or ask me about.

In my controlling mind I never wanted to entertain the idea of needing to call 911. That was for people who couldn’t analyze their own situation and be proactive about doing for themselves all they could.

Joke’s on me.

My niece, a firefighter and EMT, will give me a look next time I see her, but on my list was to ask her what to expect if I ever needed to call for emergency help. Because I like to work it out in my head before it ever happens.

Someone else was doing the working out, way better than I ever could.

Simple things like me feeling inspired to clean the garage. Okay, boss the teenagers around to get the garage cleaned. This happened a few weeks ago after moving Middle Son into college, when I was feeling the need to clear out the staging area in the house, and do the every-ten-year garage purging. It wasn’t completely cleared, but in organized piles at least.

I just want to park inside it this winter.

And getting stocked up on my regular asthma meds for when the current trial ended, something I would normally wait to spend the money on.

Way farther back, two and half years ago, Baby Girl had taken the classes and gotten certified for adult and infant CPR training. Though she had never had occasion to use it, she wanted the knowledge and confidence it gave her to work with young children in many areas of her life.

Let’s go farther, to 8-year old me, who was learning to use a riding mower and wanted to hear herself sing over the noise. And who was almost drowned by a neighbor boy in our pool, so I decided to learn to breathe deeply and be able to hold my breath for long periods calmly. Who loved to be onstage and belt out lines or songs, no cheating with microphones. Who toughed out labor every time with no help from drugs.

Just breathing deeply.

So when very suddenly Thursday evening I went from laughing over pictures of a cake I’d had delivered to Middle Son at school, to not feeling right, to labored breathing, sweating, feeling a little nauseated, all the pieces (much more than I could ever list) from my whole life’s story came together in some of the hardest words I’ve ever said.

I need help. Call an ambulance.

I guess I’m not shocked this didn’t register. After all, I’m the one who handles these kinds of things. Because nobody else can (Ha! My deluded mind talking again.)

But as I stumbled back into the chair by my nebulizer and with shaking hands broke open a vial and poured it in, I heard my husband making the call.

My ears quit working. I couldn’t make out all the words. I could see my younger daughter trying to catch my eye, saying something I couldn’t understand. I barked out a few one-word orders on the exhales, but I couldn’t stand not having the little push of air helping with my feeble inspirations.

I was hardly breathing. In only a couple of minutes.

And several more passing while the ambulance rushed from five miles straight up the road.

There was no white light at the end of a tunnel. My whole life didn’t “flash before my eyes”. I don’t think I was that close to death. But then again, what do I know? Why do I try to minimize the seriousness of those moments?

The reality is, if the EMT’s hadn’t gotten there quickly, I probably wouldn’t be writing this.

There was a lot of activity going on around me. Kids rushing out to make sure the garage was wide open and shoving those piles farther out of the way. Moving one of the cars so vehicles could pull close to the house. Clearing laundry baskets and shoes out of the floor and away from the door so there was clear access.

Me begging wordlessly for another vial of albuterol, frustrated at how long it took me to communicate what I needed. (Should have gotten that plan down in writing.)

And the overriding need to breathe.

Out is possible. It’s a relaxing, a release, as little as it may be it didn’t take much effort.

But inspiration…

I didn’t fully understand what I was talking about until Thursday night, when every thought, every bit of my will was focused on moving that magnificent muscle, my well-developed diaphragm, and feeling a pitifully small whiff of air making it’s way into my wheezing, mucus-filled, inflamed, closed-up lungs.

There were suddenly strangers, one kneeling beside my chair talking in my ear, others carrying things, holding things up, putting things on my face and in my veins, asking questions I couldn’t answer.

The voice by my ear telling me to hold just a quick second before breathing out, to get the medicine in.

I’m just as sure as I can be that it’s like Luke described it: “Suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God…”

Not the people, don’t misunderstand me. There was a battle going on in that room that was far beyond the working of my labored lungs. There was an eternal question that was being answered:

Who is in control here?

It wasn’t me.

In fact, I fought some of the things they wanted to do. I couldn’t stand the mask (they said it was like a CPAP, so that’s out for me in the future), but I wanted the oxygen and aerosol drugs it was providing so they let me hold it as close as I could. When they couldn’t get a clear oxygen reading, I heard something like 84%, they talked about intubating, and I motioned the kids to leave the room for a bit. Thankfully they didn’t need to do that.

The hardest part was hearing them ask questions I knew the answers to, but couldn’t speak.

Yet within an hour and a half of getting to the hospital I was talking to everyone and walking out on my own two feet.

Two days later Baby Girl (who is 16 and my hero right now) shared what she had been trying to tell me. She had her CPR manual out and was preparing herself mentally to be able to break her mother’s ribs if I went unconscious before the ambulance arrived and she needed to keep my heart beating. Because she is the only one in the house trained to do that.

And in the emergency room I learned that the EMT who took charge of me is also a nurse at the hospital we wanted to go to. He knew exactly what they would do, and did all he could ahead to avoid any delays in my care.

My family rushed madly to gather things I might need if I were admitted, let our grown kids know the situation, reached out to our church, got there quickly to be with me, though I was pretty unaware of my surroundings for a while.

The next day I canceled work and appointments, let myself be chauffeured to get more meds and run necessary errands, and was able to go to Celebrate Recovery.

I got there late because I’d run off without my phone and had to turn back. Got caught by a train, and after arriving during worship had three people I needed to talk to before I paid attention to the song.

And then I looked up to the screen and I got my answer.

“From life’s first cry, til final breath, Jesus commands my destiny.”

Thank you, Jesus, that you have not yet let me reach my final breath!

Getting Justice

26 Thursday Sep 2019

Posted by in Childhood, Recovery journey, Redemption, Relationships

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I’m a person who really likes justice.

Seeing someone who has been wronged restored, and the person responsible held accountable for their harmful actions.

Someone working hard all their life and finally receiving recognition and gratitude for their efforts.

I like it when good triumphs over evil.

Especially when I’m the one receiving justice.

It was a sweet day a few months ago when Words with Friends started giving recognition for all kinds of achievements. Milestones based on numbers of times doing all kinds of things.

All of a sudden the 7 years of otherwise wasted time I had invested in playing Words with Friends were vindicated by my sudden designation as “achievement level 8” with more obscure statistics racked up than a baseball player!

Who knew someone was keeping records?

All those little victories were being counted up, kept track of, and finally revealed for the whole world to see. Well, ok, probably just the handful of people I play. If they had absolutely nothing better to do with their time than look up my achievements.

I guess if I want to someday look through them all…then at least one person will know how great I am at spelling words.

Back to justice.

Statistics are impersonal. They count quantity, but don’t define quality.

Before I got into recovery I wanted certain people to pay for what they had done to me. I wanted to help identify them as abusers, lead the investigation into who else they may have victimized, round them up and let us all have our day in court to testify or defend, and let the facts be heard and acknowledged and above all else, let justice be done.

For little girl me who didn’t have a voice or words to tell.

Because wouldn’t me getting justice make up for all those years of denial and shame and guilt and self-protection?

I considered becoming a lawyer for several years so that I could bring about justice for others. And in doing so I know I would have been trying to somehow bring restitution to myself.

But do I apply that same zeal to the people I have wronged? When I realize I’ve done something that hurt someone else in some way, am I eager to apologize and make amends as quickly as possible?

And what about those long ago sins against others that I would rather forget, but that maybe they have never been able to? How could I ever bring the same justice to each of them?

Do I want the same brand of justice that I would measure out to others applied to me?

Because if you were to number the things I’ve done wrong, keep the statistics of the nasty attitudes, the condescension, the biting words, betrayals and lies and manipulations, that would be a list I wouldn’t want anyone to ever see.

But the thing is, God knows all of it. All of me. The tiny bit of good that makes it through the selfish and evil parts. And amongst the good he knows the secret delight of the occasional selfless, loving act.

Mercy undoes me. When I started to face my own guilt, truly deserved guilt, and saw the mercy God has shown me, it changed me.

One of the hardest things I’ve ever done was to forgive my abusers.

And there is no way I could have fully done that on my own. Because in my mind, I would never get the justice I deserved if I gave them forgiveness they never admitted they needed.

There’s a verse that undoes me every time I really take it in.

Romans 5:8: 8 but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

Where is the justice in that? That even when I had no clue that I needed to be rescued, that I needed forgiveness, Jesus paid for my sin.

If God pursues me like this, if he forgives me and decides that because of Jesus’ death on the cross, I don’t have to make restitution, I don’t have to pay for my crimes, then what does that mean for me?

How can I demand justice from other people?

Because when I look only at the cold hard facts, my abusers may deserve to suffer the consequences of their sins against me. But when I turn it around on myself, I would want mercy.

I came to a place a year or so into recovery where not only had I been able to forgive them, God gave me the desire to pray for their healing and salvation.

It had been impossible for me to take that step on my own. I had genuinely forgiven, which to me meant that I no longer wanted to see them suffer for what they had done to me. But was I willing for them to ever feel the same joy and peace I have in my relationship with Jesus?

Could I really, truly, let them off the hook?

Not long after that I had occasion to see several of my abusers all together. They were, each and every one of them, broken, depressed, anxious, hopeless.

And I realized that was the justice I had dreamed of for all those years.

I no longer felt the need to pursue it. Not for me. Because of how much they seemed to have paid for it throughout their lives.

I was so thankful God had replaced my heart of stone with a heart of flesh that could feel compassion for these people.

Just the other day a dear friend, a brother to me truly, gave me the gift of a few minutes conversation, just catching up. Warm hugs, true love felt and expressed.

The thing is, he knew me when. When I was not interested in God’s plans for my life. When I was living for my own pleasure and plans, selfishly pursuing what I wanted.

And he’s known me ever since. And he still loves me.

If a friend can choose to forget and move beyond the bad they know we are capable of, how much more gracious is God when he throws our sins as far as the east is from the west?

So I do love justice. But not my kind. God’s kind.

Someday in heaven I may meet my abusers.

Because God doesn’t want anyone to perish. He’d rather everyone came to repentance.

And that’s the justice I pray for them now.

Willow Summer

19 Thursday Sep 2019

Posted by in Childhood

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I’ve been hibernating inside air conditioned buildings for most of this summer, because I’ve found the heat and humidity are triggers for my asthma. Even walking from car to building can put me in distress.

Sitting out on our deck has not been possible on very many days, and in just a few more, summer will officially be over, another year we never got the tiki torches lit so we could laze into the night relatively bug free.

As a girl there was a birch tree in our yard that I loved to climb, mainly because it was the only one I could, and I spent hours wedged against the trunk, peeling the bark and watching the bugs busily doing whatever bugs do all day.

In the evenings we would catch lightning bugs, and yes, put them in jars to make our own night lights. We had no qualms about squishing their lit ends around our wrists and fingers to make glowing bracelets and rings. Our own primitive version of glow sticks.

We had lots of trees in our yards, and I had learned how to mow using a push mower for trimming and the riding mower for the biggest part of the lawn. We had front, back, middle and barn yards, and odds and ends of patches that connected them all to maintain every week. They each had their own feel, their distinct character, and I’m sure we all had our favorites to mow over the years.

Mine was the middle yard. It was the only one with no building to work around, although there were lots of trees, bushes around the bottom of our U-shaped driveway, and peonies lining the edge of the paved half.

I had claimed the birch tree as my own, but secretly my desire was to someday climb the huge weeping willow and sit inside its hairlike strings of leaves.

I don’t know much about willow trees, but ours was always getting struck by lightning. It was located close to the road, lower than the pavement that was reach up a steep ditch bank. The poles for the power lines were spaced out across our property parallel to the road, and the branches of some of the trees had grown up among the dipping lengths of wire.

I didn’t know much about electricity, but I knew it was a big deal the weekend my dad and most of the men in our neighborhood decided it was time to cut down the huge willow before it fell in a storm and took out the power lines that supplied the whole neighborhood. Lightning had left long scars from top to bottom, killing some limbs, knocking others to the ground over the years.

So armed with coils of rope, ladders, a few helmets, heavy gloves and work boots, they divided the tasks and went to work tying ropes to branches and then a whole gang pulling on the ropes as the saw bit through a branch, the wielder himself secured to the trunk.

We watched in excitement as one by one those huge branches were cut free of the trunk, and with loud and somewhat panicked yells the crew on the ground would lean into their ropes to pull the cracking, falling limbs free of the electric lines, warning all to look out and get out of the way.

The deconstruction of a tree that had probably been there for over a hundred years took only days. The big drama of the curtains of leaves dropping to ground they had just been shading happened within a few hours.

And then our fun began.

Because even though we could see there would be lots of work for us ahead, we knew we had days, maybe weeks, that those huge branches would lay in piles covering much of the middle yard.

I remember spending as much time as I could among those reclining limbs. I was a pioneer finding raw materials to make my own shelter, weaving lengths of willow leaves together to make baskets or clothes. I had all the sticks I could want to stand up in long fence lines, defining my territory. My siblings were sent out to play in the debris as well I’m sure, but I remember loving the times I spent alone letting my imagination take me back in time and across the world to places I’d only read about.

There were miniature quarries where the dirt was chunked out, sod and all, as a branch had dug into the ground when it hit. The blocks of clay-like soil became cups and bowls to use in my makeshift hut or teepee or cabin, depending upon what character I wanted to be that day.

I remember the smell of the newly cut willow. The closest I could come to describing it was that it reminded me of the smell of a watermelon rind. A clean, green smell that was very pleasing to me. I could sit for hours just smelling the dampness in the center of the branches, reading a book or writing a story about all the adventures I could see myself having.

It was probably weeks I had to be Robinson Crusoe, or more likely Swiss Family Robinson, and even the boy who lived on his own in My Side of the Mountain. I played out adventures to my heart’s content as summer calmed down into fall. I took bigger branches and rode them around like horses or motorcycles or airplanes.

I could never understand why everyone didn’t like sitting in the grass letting their mind take them to fantastic places.

The day came when Dad began to instruct us on where he wanted us to drag the smaller branches. He was taking another weekend to cut them apart a little, and we would need to drag them back to his chopping block to get cut into firewood. The leaves had finally died, the great bulk of their tangled strands reduced to crumbling whips.

Slowly my hidey holes were uncovered, one by one. The rooms in my many dwellings exposed as we pulled one long wall after another over by the chicken barn where the logs would be stored for coming winters.

And finally the tedious job we normally did after any windy or stormy day: picking up the sticks that would damage the mower blades. And I was brought back through time to the present, the reality that I didn’t want to mow over sticks taking over the storyline in my mind.

But in the winter evenings that followed, when I would go out to have my arms stacked high with split lengths of wood, I would bury my nose in them the whole way to the fireplace, getting a whiff of that clean summer watery smell, once again a pioneer intent on holding off the cold for one more night.

Finding nourishment

05 Thursday Sep 2019

Posted by in Childhood, Recovery journey, Redemption, Relationships

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Did you ever have a hero as a child?

A real person you aspired to be like?

I did.

I think about her often. In fact, I was just telling my younger daughter about her very recently, because hers is the standard to which I compare every female voice. Then this weekend, at family camp, the speaker mentioned my hero.

As a girl, singing or listening to music made chores easier. Like mowing the lawn.

I enjoyed this task, because I tried to sing louder than the trucks on our busy road to hear myself while riding the mower. I learned to project my voice and sing loudly by 10 or 11 years old. My favorite go-to songs were by Karen Carpenter.

In my family we all sang, both in church and at gospel “sings” in our area, where Dad brought in southern gospel quartets.

My older sister sang soprano, and I took the alto part. But I loved belting out the lead when I could, and I gravitated toward songs sung in a lower voice.

That’s where Karen Carpenter excelled.

If you have never listened to her voice, please do. She and her brother Richard were a duo, The Carpenters, and she was also the drummer.

Man! Another reason to admire her.

In fifth grade I was offered free drum lessons and a drum kit to practice on. I was excited to tell my parents about the offer, but they said no. Band concerts were on Wednesdays, and we couldn’t miss prayer meeting. So no. With no discussion.

I could have been just like Karen Carpenter – drumming and singing.

And when the lawn was covered with ice and snow, I slide around on the frozen “lake” in our middle yard, singing “Close to You” or “We’ve Only Just Begun” while imagining I was Peggy Fleming skating in the winter Olympics.

The thing I loved the most about Karen’s voice was how rich it sounded. It was low, like mine, and I could easily follow along. In fact, it helped me develop the lower parts of my vocal range because I wanted my voice to be as full and expressive as hers.

She could hold notes out with such feeling and purity. I wanted to sound just like her.

Because to me she was sure and confident. Her songs spoke of love and longing and fulfillment.

Of course I cannot know the whole truth about Karen’s story. She isn’t around to tell it. And there are different versions depending on the source.

But it is a fact that her life ended way too early. It was February 4, 1983 when her heart gave out after struggling for years with a disease that no one knew much about at that time.

Anorexia nervosa.

I remember learning of it when it happened. Outside of deaths of family members and friends, her passing probably affected me more than anyone else’s up to that time in my life.

I struggled to understand how it could have happened, how a woman who seemed so beautiful in all she did in her public career could have ever thought she was not good enough as she was.

And the hard part was that there was little known about eating disorders at that time. But it did prompt people to learn, and learn quickly, much more about it.

Soon after her death there was an attempt to educate the public about these new threats to the health of young people, anorexia and bulimia.

Except it isn’t always the young. Men as well as women are affected. And like many things that used to be hushed and covered over, it turns out there are way more people with eating disorders than I ever would have believed, living through those days of first learning it existed.

I’ve read things about Karen Carpenter since then, and while I can’t say with any certainty what led to her obsession with her body image, it seems there was something lacking in her life, something she was looking for. Some say she was seeking love and acceptance.

When she died in 1983, I was 21 years old and seeking love and acceptance myself. It was one of the worst periods of my life. A deep pit I had dug for myself, living a life I chose, making a mess of my friendships and family relationships, refusing to listen to guidance, existing only for my own pleasure and plans.

When I heard Karen Carpenter had died I was devastated.

Her songs gave me hope that the relationship I was in could someday be “it”, while my heart knew all along that it wasn’t. My musical tastes had become much more turbulent than her ballads, but I wanted to believe her fairy tale stories of true love.

At family camp last weekend, our speaker talked about Karen’s struggles right before he dove in to a part of scripture that tells us to devour God’s word, to consume it and be nourished by it and take it in and get everything you can out of it.

Just like food.

When Karen Carpenter died, she was 32 years old. She had developed heart problems that resulted from being severely malnourished.

She had lost the ability to take in and get nourishment from food.

I don’t pretend to understand what went through her mind. I’m reading a book right now that is helping me explore it, Overthrow by Jennene Eklund.

I can tell you that at the time she died, I was in a spiritual state similar to her physical state. I was unwilling and unable to take in anything nourishing from God during that dark time. I was not living the faith I had once claimed, in fact I had turned my back on much of it. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was at a crisis point of my own.

Over the next year or so, I knew of several young women who were struggling with anorexia or bulimia. And the boyfriend I thought might be “it” broke up with me. I was devastated.

And suddenly not eating seemed the way to become whatever it was he thought I was missing.

I went on a starvation diet and lost about 50 pounds in a few weeks time. I knew I was in trouble when I found myself retching up water outside of church one Sunday morning, because that was all I’d had for days, yet my stomach wouldn’t keep it down.

Thankfully my parents were able to coax me to start eating again, even though I would only agree to broiled fish with mustard since it had almost no calories, and an occasional poached egg cooked with no fat.

And in my spiritual life, as I got over the loss of the relationship, I saw that the “it” I really needed was a better love, a fuller acceptance than I could ever get from another person.

I needed the love of God.

I cried out to him, and he answered, right away, with no hesitation.

I wish, I so deeply hope, that Karen did the same, and that she was able to find the love of God that answers every plea for help.

Summer Memories

29 Thursday Aug 2019

Posted by in Childhood, Relationships

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It’s the night before I usually post and I haven’t written anything yet. And I’m tired. So no deep thoughts, just highlights from summer vacations through the years.

As a girl I could count on going to North Carolina for about a week every summer. All our extended family was centered there, and it was usually the only time we got to see them. We packed in visiting as many of them as possible, ate lots of good food, created our own versions of a southern accent, and played with our cousins from dawn til dusk.

Far fewer were the actual family vacations we ever took.

Just like in my childhood, we have taken the occasional special trip for a long weekend, but grander plans are few and far between.

I have jumbled memories as a child of going on three big family vacations. In no particular order, the first of the big three that I always think of was a trip to Mackinac Island. I had no idea until many years later how far from home we traveled – half the distance of going to North Carolina!

If I’m connecting the right memories with this trip, we started driving north and stopped for the night at one of those drive up to the door motor inns. There was an old metal swing set, like in our backyard, and a sandbox in the courtyard surrounded by the u-shaped drive. We played outside until dark, and then we went down the road to a drive-in theater and watched movies late into the night for the first time.

The next day we must have driven over the famous bridge, though I don’t remember that part. We took a ferry to Mackinac. There were no cars allowed. They had horses and buggies and bikes.

We walked all over the place, and rented bikes for a while. I remember my older sister going ahead of me down a long hill that ended at the water of the great lakes, and I thought for sure she was going so fast she was going to sail right off the dock into the cold waves.

I’m sure we ate at least one meal on the island, and got taffy and fudge, but I don’t remember if we slept there or took the ferry back at night. There would have been at least one more night on the road, no reservations, just stopping when Dad got tired and there was a flashing vacancy sign.

I’ve held onto the free feeling of that trip my whole life. For once there weren’t meetings or church services to plan around. We could go where we liked. Dad could smoke openly. We could be filthy dirty and not worry about being clean before we climbed into bed, our head full of the adventures of the day.

Even now I love the days we can be aimless like that. Countless times we’ve set off just to be together, the kids demanding to know what we had planned, and my answer: we’re going wherever the wind blows us.

They don’t seem to like it, to crave it like I do.

A second vacation we took to Myrtle Beach. This one had to be planned a little farther in advance to secure a room in a hotel on the beach. We stayed high up in a suite that seemed bigger than the downstairs of our house.

We swam and dove into the waves of the Atlantic, not even conscious of any danger other than the undertow. This was before “Jaws”. I loved collecting shells and pretty rocks, and I could spend hours in the sand and water. I couldn’t get enough of the waves knocking me around.

One of my favorite parts was the outdoor shower at the top of the beach. I’d rinse off as much of the ocean and beach as I could, then go through a gate to the pool for more water time. I was always the first in and the last to get drug back up to the room.

I don’t remember how old I was, but I was young enough to not be embarrassed carrying my shell collection around the hotel in a personal hygiene bag from the bathroom.

There was some sort of carnival going on, maybe it was seasonal for the summer, and we walked around it at night when we couldn’t be on the beach, swooping up and over the ferris wheel, glimpsing the lights reflecting off the waves beyond the buildings.

We ate seafood and lazed around the room at night, everyone reading books or watching tv, feeling like millionaires at the top of the world.

That trip didn’t create my love for the sound of water, the feel of moving in it, salt or fresh, but it cemented it as one of my favorite things to do.

The third adventure was when I was a teenager, and the highlight was visiting Williamsburg, VA. There we really enjoyed the seafood! We toured some restored settlements, and since I loved history and stories, my imagination was filled with the sights and sounds.

Historic Williamsburg made me wonder where exactly my ancestors landed, and whether I had any native American blood in me as I always suspected. In the role playing that went on all around us, I could imagine myself as many of the characters, and I felt I would have loved living in those long ago days.

To this day I still want a fireplace I could stand in, with swinging arms to move huge cast iron pots over and off of the wood fire, cooking gallons of stew for whoever the wind blows in through the hand hewn door of the cabin.

It occurs to me that each of these vacations were to places people thought were worth visiting. But I can’t give you many facts about them.

I’d much rather remember the feelings of sharing the experience with the people I loved most.

Freedom to and from

22 Thursday Aug 2019

Posted by in Childhood, faceliftbook journey, Recovery journey

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When I hear the same thing from several directions in my life my ears perk up, because it’s often God trying to get through to me.

Today it’s the concept of freedom.

I have been working through the things my therapist and I have brought to light, because I have to analyze things in several ways to really get it.

I’ve always been a very tactile person, and visual. And aural. And vocal. I suppose if I could smell and taste an idea that would be perfect

Ideally I would be able to fully see and hear, while at the same time restating out loud and writing down complete thoughts as they come to me. And drawing beautiful pictures to illustrate. (That part is in my dreams.) The result would be both a complete restating of what I got out of the experience, as well as an impression of what it all meant that I am willing to alter as I gain more understanding of the facts.

Free thinking.

I guess that would be one way to define the way my mind works. I let my thoughts go in different directions, and try to glean from them the best ideas, leaving the inferior ones behind. Free to pick and choose the ones that best support whatever I am coming to think about any topic.

So the topic of freedom keeps coming up.

The first condition I’ve uncovered in my therapy is that I have lived in a state of persistent paralysis. One way to describe this is that it’s like the common dream where you are in a situation and helpless to do whatever it is you need to do: scream, fight, run, whatever would get you out of the conflict you are in to safety.

Years ago when Switchfoot released “Dare You to Move” it resonated with me, though at the time I didn’t connect how paralyzed I really felt. In many many areas of my life there were so many things I longed to do that I could imagine in intricate detail, but when it came time to step out and do, well, I was stuck.

I’m still in the process of working through this, and true to who I am, I am examining this revelation in lots of ways. One of them is to search out what the Bible has to say about being paralyzed. One passage that came up doesn’t use the word, but encompasses the idea:

For there is a root of sinful self-interest in us that is at odds with a free spirit, just as the free spirit is incompatible with selfishness. These two ways of life are antithetical, so that you cannot live at times one way and at times another way according to how you feel on any given day. Galatians 5:14 (The Message)

Self-interest vs. free spirit.

If there are any two words I would have used to describe myself for most of my life, it would be those: free spirit.

By which I would mean not tied down to any one activity or course of action, versatile and able to go with the flow of life, willing to change things up to suit the current circumstances.

In my mind I am this free spirit. But the reason I think of myself this way is because by allowing myself an out, I am able to protect myself from situations that are threatening or uncomfortable.

In other words, I’m free to walk away whenever I feel like it. Which is another way of saying, I’ve really been about keeping myself safe for most of my life.

And that doesn’t feel like freedom to me, because for many years I’ve been on guard, waiting for the times I’ll need to walk away to keep from getting hurt.

Galatians says my self-interest is in direct opposition to the free spirit. So what does that mean?

So another source I look to for help in figuring things out is The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis. I regularly read through this, taking about a year, as I often have to reread one sentence a dozen times to let it sink in.

And today I read a passage about how the enemy can’t always use bad circumstances to draw us away from God, because God often does his most important work in us while we are going through trials. In this paragraph is this:

” One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself – creatures whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His.”

(That was two sentences. See what I mean?)

If I’m reading this correctly, Lewis is saying that service to God is perfect freedom, because the person’s will freely conforms to God’s will for them.

In this sense, freedom means a giving up of my own self-determination to let God decide what is best for me. And by giving up my rights to myself, God gives me life full and overflowing with his love and goodness.

So back to Galatians. A free spirit (and I still love that phrase, love that it’s in the Bible!) really means a person who is so sure that God is able to do beyond what they can ask or imagine, that they live giving up their own plans daily to let God work out his plan through them.

What I’m starting to see, with the persistent paralysis of my life, is a woman who has been anything but free. And as my impotence is falling away from me, I’m finding I don’t have to stay stuck in old patterns of thinking.

There is a truly free spirit inside of me that has been biding her time, waiting to be allowed the luxury of resting in the knowledge that God has a good plan for me, and I need to let him bring it about.

I don’t have to do this on my own.

Tears in the Night

04 Thursday Jul 2019

Posted by in Childhood, Grandparenting, Relationships

≈ 1 Comment

It was 1990 and I was pregnant with my second child. My father-in-law had passed away on March 16 of that year, and we were still grieving and picking up the pieces of keeping the family business going just a year and a half after we had taken it over.

A member of my husband’s graduating class threw an impromptu “reunion picnic” at her parent’s house next door to my mother-in-law. That worked good for me, because being six months pregnant and having a 20-month old to chase around, I was badly in need of a nap by mid-afternoon, and was able to crash in a spare bedroom next door while my husband caught up with his classmates.

But those weren’t the only reasons I was tired.

The night before I couldn’t sleep.

It wasn’t my normal “night person” wakefulness, but a feeling that I wouldn’t be able to sleep if I tried, so I stayed awake. I think I was knitting, of all things to do in a house with no air conditioning in July, and kept at it long into the night.

I just couldn’t seem to settle down. But with the picnic coming up the next day, on July 4, I knew I should get some sleep.

So around 3:30am I turned the light out. And I was overcome with the need to cry.

I didn’t know why. I wasn’t sad about anything. My husband and I weren’t in a fight. I briefly wondered if something was wrong with the baby, but from the kicking and punching that was going on, I felt that wasn’t it.

Nevertheless, I couldn’t stop the tears. For about an hour.

And then I fell into a deep, hard sleep. But way too soon it was interrupted by the phone ringing.

I just have to mention that this was a new thing for us, the phone ringing. When we built our home during our six-month engagement, we found it would be long distance from all our family, friends, and any kind of business we wanted to deal with. So we didn’t have a phone on principle. For about three years.

But then my father-in-law got a new thing – car phones – and my husband’s uncle rigged up a jack for the house, so we could unplug it from the work truck and bring it in at night, in case of an emergency, when we were expecting our first child. By the time he was born we broke down and had a landline installed, but we hardly ever used it. We still drove up the road to one of our parents’ houses to make calls local from them.

Since we hardly ever used the phone, my first thought was something was wrong when it rang about 6:30 that morning.

It was my mom. And she was crying. “Becky, I have some bad news to tell you. Momma died this morning. Aunt Violet just called to tell me.”

Her mom, my Grandma Belvie, was at that time living in a nursing home, where she could be cared for. The last time I had seen her was earlier that year, when we had been down for my other grandma, Mamaw’s, birthday celebration in the spring.

Grandma Belvie had suffered with pneumonia many times over the years, and it contributed to her declining health, but I remember her staying pretty sharp even in her last years.

She was fiercely independent. She could make due with less. She lived on the principle that she wouldn’t spend money on things she didn’t truly need. Like a phone. She never had one during my childhood. It was only in her last years that an uncle had one put in, so family could check on her. But Grandma didn’t like to use it. My mom inherited those penny-pinching ways, and I came by them honestly as well.

Grandma grew the tallest corn, the biggest tomatoes, the prettiest flowers. She cooked and used everything she grew, and her freezer and cupboards were full of the evidence.

I remember when changes happened in her town, and the city was making everyone on her dead-end street go off their wells and use city water. And charging them. So Grandma unscrewed lots of pipes and caught her brown water from the sinks and washing machine to use for flushing the toilet or watering her gardens.

I loved pitching in and scooping a bucketful out of our used bath water in the tub to force flush the toilet. I felt just like the pioneer woman I always saw in my Grandma Belvie.

So that early morning on the 4th of July, I wasn’t really surprised. I had known something was up all night, especially that hour of crying that I couldn’t explain.

But just to confirm, I asked my mom, “Do you know what time Grandma died?”

“They said someone had checked her at 3:30 and she was breathing, but when they came in at 4:30 she had passed. So somewhere in there.”

And I told her how I was crying in that exact time.

I don’t know why God allows us to feel things we don’t understand. In this case at least I got an explanation, but what about all the times when we don’t? When we go through hard things that make no sense, when we can’t imagine the reason for our discontent, when just plain bad things happen to us.

But we don’t have the full picture.

On that deep night of sorrow, I knew I was crying for someone else. I just didn’t know who.

And over 600 miles away my sweet grandma lay alone, like she had been for almost my whole life, yet not.

In my heart I hope that while God was letting me feel sadness and loss that I couldn’t understand, he was letting her feel that she was loved, even though her family wasn’t by her side.

Because for God, the distance between us doesn’t limit his ability to draw us close to each other. Close to himself. Even when we don’t understand it.

Lost

20 Thursday Jun 2019

Posted by in Childhood

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(This is a little something for my younger sister. Of course I couldn’t really know the dialogue and the details, but from the stories my parents told ever after, this event could have happened something like this. I hope you enjoy this story from a long-ago summer.)

The breeze through the screen door chased a chill across the sweat on the back of my neck. The rooms at the motor court had no air conditioning. Not in 1970, even in Nashville.

About twenty people from Toledo had returned from a busy morning in sessions at our denomination’s annual convention. Dad had let us kids jump in the pool to cool off and tire us out. He needed a rest. And Mom and some of the women wanted to go shopping, while Dad got my baby brother and little sister down for naps.

They were next to the room my older sister and I shared with a grandmotherly woman willing to chaperone two preteen girls. The dark cave-like space the drawn shades created lulled us into sleep, while tree-shaded air off the pool rocked the screen door in and out to the limits of the hook high on the doorframe.

But Dad hadn’t secured the screen door where he, the toddler and the five year-old rested up for the evening’s activities.

As a busy pastor’s wife, Mom didn’t get much free time with other women. After driving past many unique stores on the busy streets of Nashville she was eager to window-shop, free from little hands to hold, tired bodies to carry. When they returned an hour later, leaving the traffic behind on the main street beyond our drive-up motel, the inviting shade around the pool and courtyard welcomed them for a mini-siesta before dinner.

Until Mom saw a police officer talking to Dad, baby in his arms. But where was my five-year-old sister?

A year or two before, my older sister and I had flown to St. Louis with Dad for this annual convention, staying in a downtown hotel suite in blistering July with no pool, but at least there was air conditioning. And while Dad had his afternoon nap, we girls and a friend staying in the same hotel grabbed swimsuits and “swam” in the biggest shower we had ever seen for hours.

A year or two after this convention in Nashville we’d attend one in Macon, Georgia, older and wiser. But this was my little sister’s first time.

Coming just weeks before she would step onto the school bus and ride a half mile down the road to kindergarten.

About a mile down the congested street from the motor court, a used-car salesman stood in the open doorway of a glass-enclosed sales hut, waiting for the next customer. In the middle of the afternoon, in the music capital of the world, there was always the chance of someone famous passing on the sidewalk.

More unlikely was seeing a barefoot child wandering aimlessly.

“Little girl, where are your mommy and daddy?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you lost?” he asked as he knelt down to her level.

“My mommy went down the street,” my sister answered, looking around her on the sidewalk.

“Down this street? It’s a pretty busy one. Do you live around here?” he asked, though the whole street for miles was lined with businesses of all kinds, and the neighborhoods were a few blocks down the side streets.

Where had this child come from?

“I live in the country with the barns.”

The salesman didn’t hear a hint of a drawl in her voice. He doubted she was a local. “Are you staying in a hotel?”

“We have a pool. And my baby and my daddy are sleeping.”

“How big is your pool? Is it a little bitty wading pool?”

“It’s blue. My daddy threw me in. Where’s my mommy?”

“I don’t know, honey, but let me see if I can help you.”

Our church group gathered under the trees in front of the line of train-car-like rooms planted side by side, some praying, others whispering about how much trouble Preacher was in for letting his daughter walk right out the door, and now who knows where she is?

The policeman had voiced assurances that she would be found, but this was a strange city and it didn’t keep my mom from crying helplessly.

Several of the adults spread out walking away from the motel, while my mom and dad stayed where they could be found easily. With no phones inside our rooms, just a pay phone outside the office cubicle, we were decades away from instant information. We could only wait.

So when the police radio squawked to life, we held our breaths while the officer turned his back and picked up his receiver.

Six blocks down a squad car pulled up, lights still, siren silent, scared child shaking on the sidewalk.

Lost.

“I can’t get much information out of her, officer, but I think her parents may be staying at a motel nearby. She says there’s a pool, and that she just walked out the door. Maybe one of those pull-up places?” The salesman had tried to get names and descriptions, but nothing my sister added helped identify where she had come from.

“Let me get on the radio and see if there are any lost child reports coming in to dispatch,” the officer said to the man, and to the little girl, “Don’t you cry now, we’ll find your momma and daddy.”

Long before Code Adam and Amber Alerts, my sister got lost in the heart of Nashville, Tennessee. Bad things did happen to little kids in the 70’s, but thankfully there was a sense of community at that time that went beyond the neighbor you knew to the person in need who walks down your sidewalk.

It’s something we’ve lost, people looking to the people around them to find answers instead of an anonymous screen in their hands.

Shortly after the officer at the motor court put his radio back into its mounting, the second cruiser pulled into the oval drive. The patrolman parked, turned to my sister and said, “Is this your momma?”

And she was found.

66 years

06 Thursday Jun 2019

Posted by in Childhood, Relationships

≈ 1 Comment

Today, June 6, 2019, would have been my parents 66th wedding anniversary.

Over the years there were lots of stories told about their lives as children and teens, school and chores and their families.  Dad was a storyteller and Mom was a talker.  So we grew up knowing a lot about their lives.

I especially loved hearing the story of their wedding.

It was June 6, 1953.  Both 21, Dad had served in the Air Force in Korea during the Korean War, and after he got home to Marion, North Carolina he moved up to Toledo, Ohio to work with his uncle, Wayne Lovingood.  Dad had trained as a boiler engineer and also worked on radar in the Air Force, and he found a job working for Toledo Public Schools as a boiler engineer.

So like every other Friday, he worked his hours that week and then headed down to Marion to marry Mom.  He made it there by Saturday morning, where I hope he at least had a chance to clean up and put on a suit.  The ceremony was early in the day, followed by a cake and punch reception in the church fellowship hall.  They changed clothes and packed Mom’s bags into Dad’s car and headed north.

This was long before I-75 was built, before there were chain restaurants in every town and along every highway.  And in the mountains, the roads wound and twisted and were built for the purpose of getting from one place to another.  Being fed and entertained weren’t high priorities.  Even gas stations were few and far between.  It was a time when they didn’t think to call long distance to make a reservation for the night, and the kind of drive-up roadside motels they would come across didn’t need them.

So Dad’s mom, my Mamaw, packed them up ham biscuits wrapped up in a paper bag.  They hit the old Route 25, and by evening they stopped at a roadside stand for milkshakes to drink with their sandwiches.  That was their wedding supper.  They stayed the night at a motel on Saturday night, and Sunday they finished the trip to Toledo, where Dad went right back to work on Monday.

They lived in a couple different apartments, then bought their first house before my older sister was born.  A younger sister was born there also, and the summer Mom was pregnant with our younger brother we moved out to the country.  I remember driving on the highway, I-75 had been built south of us by then, but the bypass I-475 was just being built as we drove around town looking at all kinds of houses.

They settled on one that the radio station Dad worked at part time had bought to convert into a recording studio, and then decided it was too big  a project.  I remember visiting it several times before we moved, Mom up on ladders painting, us kids rummaging through boxes of treasures in the basement and attic, workmen knocking back out an archway they had filled it to make the studio in what was really the dining room of the house.

We moved into that house in July, and my brother was born in August, and I lived there until I got married.   

It was many years before us kids realized what a wedding anniversary was, much less knew the date our parents got married.  Eventually we caught on and started buying them a card and urging them to take us all out to dinner to celebrate.  

But really the day was theirs to mark however they wanted.

When I was growing up it really was a different world.  It was a rare thing for anyone I knew to be divorced.  Marriage was something I looked at as a lifelong commitment, and through the sixties, in my community, it was.

Then things started to change in society and relationships.  I won’t go into my ideas on what started the ball rolling, but roll it did, and in the seventies things changed in the world, and divorce became more and more accepted.

So every year when we celebrated Mom and Dad, I was more thankful that their marriage was still something I could count on.

Not that they didn’t have their disagreements, times of distance and preoccupation with all the details of life.  I remember there was a popular song playing on the radio one day that I liked, and I was surprised to see my mom trying not to cry listening to it.  It was “Torn Between Two Lovers”.  

As you might think, the song is about a woman who loved two different men.  So my mind went wild trying to figure out which of my parents’ friends my mom might possibly be interested in.

Thankfully she was just touched by the song, maybe an old memory, though she never explained it.  And even though I wondered for years, there was never any reason to believe there were any serious problems in their marriage.

After seeing a number of people around me go through divorces, especially young couples, I resolved that I wouldn’t get married unless I would be willing to commit to never walking away.

That could be a very naive thing to do.  From the perspective of my early 20’s I couldn’t foresee what kind of man I might get involved with.  And I wouldn’t be in control of the things he may choose to do that could harm me, things I might need to walk away from.  

I could, however, choose to be careful and thoughtful about who I would get involved with.  And after I failed miserably in my choices time and time again, I turned the whole thing over to God, and he did a great job of bringing the right man into my life, the one I could stay married to for as many years as we live.

So this year, this day, would have been Mom and Dad’s 66th, and last fall my husband and I celebrated our 33rd.  And Dad died a week after their 40th anniversary, Mom a few weeks after their 63rd.  She never remarried.

All those numbers.  Big ones.  Significant ones.  Because it is possible for love to not only last, but to grow and nourish us, even after the ones we love are gone from this earth.  

And especially while we’re walking through this life together.

Putting One Foot in Front of the Other

23 Thursday May 2019

Posted by in Childhood, Recovery journey, Relationships

≈ 1 Comment

I’ve had the privilege over the last few weeks to attend two Celebrate Recovery programs in cities I was visiting.  The differences in the way each place presents their large program and open share groups was refreshing to see.  I learned there are lots of ways to approach how we encourage each other in recovery.

At each location I felt the freedom to talk about my own issues, my recovery journey, in an honest and open way.   The regular attenders and newcomers at each place also seemed open to sharing in the presence of a stranger.

I really cannot explain this phenomena any other way than to say that when you get involved with CR you discover a forever family.

Four years ago when I started coming to CR, I instantly felt a connection to other women who had been through some of the same things I had.  When someone can understand your point of view without having to explain everything that happened to you, that creates a deep bond, a connection that I don’t think can be broken.

I will always know these women and they will know me in deeper ways than my family of origin knows me.

One of my ongoing problems is that I have trouble trusting women, making friends with women.  The exception is at a CR meeting, when I am not afraid to expose the real me.

I think  I’ll know I am healed of this issue when I’m able to be as transparent with women outside CR as I can be at a meeting.  God continues to show me how to get rid of the things that keep me from being open and loving with other women,  and I look forward to making more true friends.

It’s like peeling back an onion, going deeper into why I isolate or set up walls between me and other women.  The oldest and most obvious layer to me is that I was abused by older teenage girls when I was young.

It’s been a long road, facing and naming the experiences that had such a deep impact on me, but it has also been freeing, as I’ve been able to let go of any desire to see them receive justice for the things done to me.  Instead I’ve found it necessary and possible to forgive.  And I have.

The layer I’m working on right now has been harder.  It’s one that has nagged at me for much of my life, that I haven’t wanted to explore.  But God tells me I’m ready, so I’ve been stepping out with faith in where he’s leading me.

Following last week’s post about Mother’s Day, I have a confession. Though my mom died almost three years ago, I don’t miss her.

And I must say clearly that I love my mom and she loved me.  No question.

Mom lived a good long life.  She did the things she wanted to do.  She shared Jesus with lots of people, traveled around the world, stayed active with her church and volunteer work as long as she could.

These are reasons I have given myself for not missing her.  She was ready to go when God took her home.

At first I was situationally depressed, after the constant time spent at the nursing home those last weeks, talking and caring for her, singing and praying with her, remembering lots of our stories.  I still have no desire to step foot in a nursing home or hospice.

Then after a little rebound time my life was plunged into the new adventure of grandfostering when my daughter began her foster adventure.  So I put aside the thoughts I’d had, wondering why I never thought about my mom, though I think about my dad every day, even after almost twenty-six years that he’s been gone.

When Mom died, I had completed a Step Study, working my way through the twelve steps and eight principles of Celebrate Recovery.  I had worked on the issues that God brought to mind over the nine months of the study, mainly my childhood abuse, and I was continuing to work on issues as they came to mind.

The only thing I felt I couldn’t finish about my Step Study was discussing it with my mom.  By that time her dementia was getting worse.  She always knew me, but she was easily confused about what was happening around her and would drift from the past to the present.

I wanted to ask her what she knew about my abuse, since I never admitted anything or told anyone.  I wanted to tell her about it, but I didn’t think it was fair to possibly hurt and confuse her with information she may no longer have been able to process.

So I was amazed when God took care of that for me.

One night my younger daughter and I were sleeping over at the home, and Mom started asking me questions.  Why weren’t we as close as she had always wanted us to be? Something had happened to me as a child.  What was it?  She wanted to know.

Here was my opportunity.  I made sure she was asking what I thought she was, and then I gave her a simplified, gentle description.  I almost forgot my daughter was there listening, but it was something I had told her before.

Mom’s response was tears and kisses, she held my hand and raised it to her lips to kiss over and over and we hugged and wept together over my lost innocence and her inability to do anything since she never knew what had happened.

But now I’m beginning to explore her first question, the one I answered with brief summaries of conflicts we’d had over the years. I’d assured her  that I didn’t hold anything against her.  But the distance between us was real.  My words reassured her, and placated me.

I realize now I was still holding things against her.  And I’m not beyond it yet.

Friday night you can find me at  CR, talking about whatever pieces of the puzzle that is me God has revealed to me that week, that day.

Recovery isn’t something that happens once and you’re all done.  And it doesn’t happen instantly.  It’s truly a journey.

So whether I’m at my local CR or visiting one in another city, I am eager to spend a little time speaking out loud how God is leading me down this path.

Because it speaks life against the death the enemy desires for me.

And it gives hope to the person who is just stepping foot on her own journey.