Changes

Friends…it’s time for a change.  To every thing there is a season, right?

And not just the new look, which I've pared down quite a bit from the fun Valentines theme. My sidebar has been moved to the bottom and now I have this nice large workspace to share from.  Woot!

I think part of the reason I’ve struggled to write anything lately, centers around some pain I’m feeling in my life.  I think we still call them “growing pains” even when we’re pushing forty. (meh)

I’ve been wrestling with some issues for years and they have finally hit the surface with a fierce bang.  So I’ll be blunt:  I’ve got some nastiness I need to purge out of my heart.  I’m seeing a deep need to line up what I believe with how I live out my life.  That includes the life I live out for you to see on this blog.  I struggle tremendously with negativity, a sense of unhappiness, and an overall feeling of discontent in my life.  As someone I am very close to recently put it: I am “perpetually unhappy no matter what goodness is taking place in {my} life”.  And I am here to tell you today, that I, (me…myself…you’re “looking” at her") I am the cause of so much of that – and I am ready to be set free of it.  I am ready to let it go and find peace. 

Part of that process for me is being able to articulate it through my writing.  Part of being able to write about the flawed nature of my heart, and the gunk in my life that needs cleaned up will be coming here and letting it spill out in much the same way I have discussed many things over the years.  Bare.  Honest.  And transparently.  Sometimes not so pretty.  Sometimes, well maybe a little pretty. 

But in order to write from the depths of my heart, I need to address something that has been bothering me and gnawing at me for some time.  Something that you probably would never even notice.  Mostly because I only hint at it here and there in this or that post, and that “hinting” needs to stop.  Maybe because I skirt around it, so as not to offend.  Maybe because it makes me feel vulnerable or exposed.  That also needs to stop.  So from the shadow to the light…

This is my faith:  I don’t want to leave any room for question.  I am a woman saved by the Grace and Love and Compassion of Jesus Christ.  I attend a Bible church.  I attend a weekly Bible study.  I am a sinner.  I love the Lord.  I love to sing worship and praise to my King and Creator!  It’s my favorite part of church – I admit it!  I cherish the HOPE that I have found in my faith in God and Christ’s sacrifice for me (and for you!) I’ve added a tab up on top called “My Faith” that spills out what I believe and why.  I urge you to read it!

My sweet friend Miss A recently told a group of ladies “I’m over what you think of me!  I just don’t care anymore!” Hear!  Hear!  I couldn’t agree more!  Too often we spend so much time trying to avoid stepping on the emotional toes of those around us, that we forget to stand up for what we know is right.  Forget to be who we have been called to be!  We worry so much what people might think of us…say about us…or heaven forbid – abandon us…that we silence ourselves.  Well, I’m over that, too!  I just don’t care anymore.  Or maybe I do…too much...and that’s why I’m ready to learn how to let that go.  For my sake.  And maybe even for yours!

I have been in church my entire life.  But in the core of my soul, I have behaved as if I was waiting for God to transform me into some beautiful swan…waiting for Him to do that good, good work in me…and you know what?  He would love to.  But I’ve laid down on the operating table, as Andrea Wells Miller put it so well, and I’ve got the ether mask on and I’m ready to go to sleep and be painlessly and effortlessly transformed.  Well, it ain’t that simple, honey.  Change requires work.  God would love to use me – but I believe He can’t use me to the potential that I have, because I’ve got too much crud in my heart and I’m not doing any work.  Time to get busy!

I’m so tired of apologizing for my belief system.  Gah.  So tired of it.  So tired about potentially offending the masses.  So tired readers might not want to hear what I have to say anymore if my relationship with my Savior is the focus of it.  I've done it to myself.  It's not you - IT'S ME!  Well, I’m OVER IT. (over myself, apparently!)

I love you guys, but I just don't care what you think about me any more.

I want to be a blessing through my writing.  I want to bless others  and share the Truth for those who want to hear!  I’m tired of living as if I’m still in chains, when I’ve been set FREE in Christ.  I don’t have to walk around unhappy, discontented, or finding the negative in every little thing.  I can release that and find healing – and that’s just what I plan to do.

What does that mean for my blog?  Well a couple things:

Six years after starting this blog, I have hundreds of daily readers.  (Hello! and I love you!!) I’ve built relationships with many of you and some of you lurkers or long-time silent readers.  I appreciate you!  I love that you have reached out to me over the years, just by showing up and hearing what I had to say.  I want you to stick around, but I know some of you will move on.  That’s ok!  I will miss you, but I know full well we sometimes have to agree to disagree. 

I have used this blog first as a place to cry on your shoulders about the long adoption wait, then about becoming a new mother, and then about becoming a new mother again.  About our journeys around the world.  About our children and parenting them.  I have grown and changed over these years…and I can see that reflected as I browse sometimes through my archives.   But as with all things – I’m entering a season of my life that calls for change.  I will still be writing about being a wife, a mother, and about my kids – but I am no longer going to censor myself. 

In order to do that I realize I have to let something go…something that is “anti” blogging, if you will.  I’m letting go of comments, starting with this post.  I think, as much as I love them:

1.  I don’t want to need them.  And sometimes I do.  Sometimes I’m hanging on for your thoughts.  And frankly, sometimes I might have put a lot of effort into a particular post and maybe no one has anything to say about it.  Well, I admit it - that hurts.  (sensitive, I know...I'm working on it)  Other times, I’m so worried about what I say that I hold back.  Sometimes I’m so concerned about offending, that I withhold what I really “mean” and skirt around it - losing my point in the process.  What a lot of work all of that is!  Makes me tired just thinking about it.  I’d rather just write what’s on my heart, have you read it, and let’s leave it there.

2.  I don’t want you to feel obligated to be “nice” or feel you have to be “courteous” and take the trouble to leave a comment when you and I both know we’re too busy most days.  I read over a hundred blogs – probably yours!  But I simply do not have the time to comment.  I love following your lives, but I cannot take the added time to leave words for each of you.  It’s too cumbersome with a house to run, a job, and two little ones.  And I don’t want you to feel that way about my blog either! For heaven’s sake, I want you to receive.  That’s all.  I want you to be able to come here, read what I have to say, and move on with your day.  I don’t want you to be obligated to me.  I want you to be blessed!

3.  I don’t want to publish disparaging comments for the whole of my readers to see.  I don’t want this blog to be argumentative, and I know that often with spiritual sentiment, things can become heated for those who disagree with each other.   If you are my family or my friend – and you were to write a comment that does not line up with my heart – I would still feel obligated to publish it.  And I’m not going to do that to myself.  I don’t want to.  I love you, but this is not the place for that.

4.  I’m not gone completely – I love hearing from you!  So many times I have been so encouraged by your thoughts and kind words.  If you want to contact me or if a post really speaks to your heart or ministers to where you are in your own life, please e-mail me!  

The Bottom Line:  This isn’t about you.  It’s really not.  This blog is not about you.  It’s about me.  It’s about me and my life and a place for me to be the woman God created me to be using the gifts He gave me to use.  So I can’t censor myself anymore (again, doing that to myself!) on what my readers may or may not think.  I just can’t.  It’s too exhausting.  I like to plunge deep and tear up the low ground and pull up the weeds and clear away the mud and wipe away the muck to get to the beauty.  That’s what I want to write about and that’s what I want you to read.  That’s what I hope you’ll stick around for...and that’s what I deeply desire will keep you coming back.

But if not, I’ve so appreciated having you…just by reading, you have blessed me.  And my family.  So thank you for that – really and truly.  This little corner of the web has become so much more than I ever thought it would - back when I started just by talking about my life and my adoptions.  So much more...

I’ll end this post with a perfect summation of my feelings, eloquently stated by the lovely Joanna Weaver in her book “Having a Mary Spirit”…

“My deepest fear is waking up twenty years from now still the same woman I am today.  With the same annoying habits and petty attitudes; with the same besetting sins and false beliefs.  I can’t imagine anything more terrible than getting to the end of my life only to discover God had so much more in mind for me – more freedom, more joy, more peace, more true effectiveness.  And I had missed it all, simply because I refused to change".”

I am moving forward and ready to love better, connect more deeply, live richly and contentedly, see the good, reach out to others, and find peace in my life. 

As my dear pastor says often….and may that make all the difference.

BE BLESSED LADIES!  Be a blessing to others and be blessed…

Grandparents

What a blessing!

 

A Letter to My Son’s Mother

Dearest,

I was thinking of you today.  I usually try not to.  Not that I try to avoid thinking of you.  But since we’ve never met, and truth be told - I don’t even know if you’re alive, I can’t conceive of you really.  I can’t picture you.  Not in a tangible way.  I think of you in the abstract.  Here but not.  A part of us, but not.  Certainly a part of him…but then sometimes, not.  We are living life and the motion of it carries us forward – onward…away from those days in Ethiopia.   This makes me both sad and happy.  Happy because he is so wonderful…such a joy in our lives.  Sad, because I often get a pang when I think of you – of great loss.  Not just for him.  For us too.  That we couldn’t put our arms around you, hug you, comfort you in some way.  Show you how much he is loved.

I like to think you were pretty.  If you could see your son today, you would know why I think this way.  I like to think you had no choice.  I pray that was it.  I hear rumblings of infant thieves who take the young from their mothers and sell them to the highest bidder in places like the one you surely lived in.  I hear stories of those who discard their young because of presumed curses on the babies.  I hear this and I think to myself – please when it is all said and done – don’t let these things be true for him.  Let it be that you, his mother, truly had no choice.  That you left him somewhere you knew he would be found.  That you wanted him.  That you loved him.  That you still do.  I want that so badly for him.  So badly for me…

I’ve been trying to picture you in a tangible way – not in the abstract.  But as a mother who could not, for many reasons, care for him.  And in that, you gave him unknowingly into my care when you left him that day.  I like to think of you hugging him…kissing him…crying over his little body.  Telling him that you love him so.  That you would never forget him.  You had him for two months.  Two months in mother-speak is practically a lifetime.  Certainly enough time to fall completely in love.  I know for me, it took only a moment…a look…holding him in my arms – and I was in love permanently.  I like to imagine you felt the same way when you gazed into those beautiful chocolate colored eyes and held those gorgeous fingers and toes in your hands.

I want to confess that sometimes I feel incredulous that you could walk away from him.  How could you, I think to myself.  He’s so amazing!  He’s so much that words aren’t enough….  Then I feel so very sad that you had to do that...walk away from him.  Then I feel angry that you left him there.  What if he had died?  Then I feel broken that you were in a position to have had to leave him there to begin with.  I feel sad that he’ll never know you again.  He had you...he had you and your arms and your heart...even for a little bit...and then he didn’t.  And as grateful as I will forever be – I am always filled with such grief that he won’t know you.  He won’t be in your arms again.  He won’t know why you did what you did.  He won’t understand in this lifetime.  And I’m sad and incredulous and angry and broken all over again.  For him.  For me too I guess…

Are you still thinking of him?  Do you love and miss him as much as I like to think you do?  He’s so tall.  Handsome and bright.  Funny and loving.  He’s affectionate and kind and full of energy for life.  He has a smile that would melt every sad place inside of you, and a laugh that makes you come undone.  He loves to hug and kiss and doles out generous pats on the back.  He loves to chatter and sing and dance and play.  He loves to climb and roll and do summersaults.  His eyes are big and beautiful and his fingers and toes are still gorgeous. 

He’ll be four this year.  Growing up so fast and changing so much.  I wish you could see him, hug him…let him give you one of his incredible kisses.  He would hold your face in his hands and he would kiss you soundly on the lips.  Then he would kiss each cheek.  You would dissolve into the ground, just like we do.

I wish you could pull him onto your lap and tell him something wonderful in Amharic.  I wish you could tell him about his grandparents, about his father, about his siblings…

I wish so many things for you, Dearest Mother of my son…and I wish so many things for him.  Our son.  Yours and mine. 

I like to think we are alike.  That we would both do anything for him.  You would give him up to save him.  I would raise him up to save him.  I like to think this way, because it helps my heart to think that you love him as much as I do.  Even though I’ll never know all the answers my heart wants, I still like to think that you might be, at this very moment, on the other side of the world with a heart full of questions too.  Was he found?  Is he alive?  Is he growing up?  What does he look like now?  Is he cared for?  Does he have food to eat?  Is he well?

Is he loved?

Yes, dearest…he is loved.  So, so much.  Some day, on the other side of heaven, I’ll show you…

~ Your Son’s Mother

Love

It’s not a question of love. 

There is no shortage of love over here.

I love them – add infinity – add infinity.

But loving another person the way I love them – good grief…

the vulnerability is alarming.

Scary.

Overwhelming.

I can’t even put it into words how nuts they make me.

Day in and day out.

Like they were born to push my every button

and smile while doing it.

Making me gray and crazy and feeling like I’m drowning.

Who are we kidding, I was gray before they came along.

And other days?  Just joy.  Tired, yes.  Exhausted really.

But joy.  Deep down.  A feeling of total privilege.

That I get to be their mom.

Total abandon to let them have all of me.

Totally vulnerable to their love.

Living for it, some days.

Some days, I just want to shout “freeze” to the clock

that keeps ticking in life. 

Hold it!

Stop right there.

Slipping…slipping away…

So sweet.  So tender.

Don’t take them with you, time.

Please?

But we’re usually a temper tantrum away from

wishing those thoughts away.

Wondering if tomorrow will ever come.

Wondering if it intends to leave me here forever.

Haggling over uneaten meals, routines,

scattered toys and too much laundry.

Wondering if this is my life.

Thankfully, it is my life.

Thankfully, the Love always wins.

Always

Love trumps all.

Their Love.  And the Love I bear them.

Love endures even when I feel I can’t.

Love never fails.