Motivation

I hear things when I wake in the night.
Sometimes it's the ice maker.
Sometimes it's a little foster girl yelling, "I have to go to the bathroom!"
Sometimes it's the refrigerator's hum.
Sometimes it's the howl of a coyote.

When Avonlea ran back out of the security line at the airport and gave us one last impulsive kiss I heard something. It was as if I woke up into silence and heard a clock ticking. Her curly head disappeared into a mass of people and I realized afresh my time with these children, this husband, on this planet, was finite. Like the ice maker and the fridge, I can hear the ticking now in the noise, because I first heard it in the quiet. Because this realization came fresh and loud into my sadness it made a deep impression and caused me to do things like swim and play volleyball. Meaning, the things I didn't want to do with my children, I now try to do when they ask, because the clock is ticking.

We sold the cottage and Grant bought a car and Rowan turned 13 and is plotting new adventures. Rose has Nutcracker rehearsals and school has to be done and animals fed and groceries bought. And under all these big kid things is the same force that held us all together when they were little kids.

Love.

And love is exhausting. Love is a constant pouring out and refilling and sometimes running dry. Love is grieving and rejoicing in growth all at the same time. Love is the muscle that stretches long and the muscle that flexes. Love motivates us to clean the bathrooms and snuggle on the coach and invite people into our home.

That's what the ticking tells me, in the quiet and in the noise, that the foundation of all of this is love. If I don't get the love part right, I'm in big trouble. And so are they. So I seek to love Jesus more because His love enables me to love them, even in exhaustion. I try to form loving habits that kick in when emotions kick back. I flail and flounder and my love is more like a glaze than true frosting but I keep on loving because that clock is a type of tinnitus that keeps me going and keeps me true to God and those He's entrusted to me.

I've been a mom for 18 years. I still have 3 children and a husband in my home who require a lot of love. There are nights I fall into bed so exhausted emotionally that I can't sleep. So I listen. I hear the house sounds emboldened in the silence, I hear the ticking which urges me to pray, and I hear the words of God, "Love is patient, love is kind......love never fails." (I Cor 13) And His love never will.

His love is the foundation that everything is built on.
His love is the ultimate motivation.

Pa Jim helped Grant find his car!

Going to a dance together! 

On top of Mt Adams! 12,300 feet

Living the Contradiction

"So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it."

-Wendell Berry
taken from Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

I thought of this poem many times in the last month. I've loved it for a long time. Loved the idea that we are not computers, that the very ability to do something that doesn't compute or make sense, is the very thing that makes us human. That our life can be a great big contradiction of sorts. A parable. 

So for years I've done things that don't make sense (I envision many nodding heads here). I filled my house with animals. I ran through every field I could. I danced when my feet hit sand. I drank out of china tea cups with four small children playing tag through my legs. You can fill in the rest.

But this year I took it to a new level. Our family signed up for foster care. I didn't feel like I could do much more than respite while homeschooling the kids so I thought I'd just get my feet wet. There is no such thing in foster care. Our first child came in November and was difficult and turned our family life on it's head. He was brutish and I decided we needed a girl next. 

So last month a little five year old skipped up my walk and threw her arms around me. 
Ahhh this is more like it, I thought. 

I wasn't thinking that the next day when she threw a peanut butter and jelly sandwhich at me. I wasn't thinking it when a water bottle brushed my head and she proclaimed, "I am little but I can throw hard." I wasn't thinking it when she screamed and spat and called me something to do with a donkey's anatomy. Nor when she laid her head on my counter and said in a little tearless voice, "My mommy hates me." Nor when I spent my nights stretched across the doorway into her bedroom so that Jason, Freddie, and Annabelle the murdering doll didn't get her. 

I was thinking, What am I doing? This was living a life that didn't compute with a vengence. Why would I bring this out of control, raging, terrified little child into my home? I have no experience with this. I have four children of my own. The only word that echoed in my exhausted brain when I asked these questions was "Jesus". The romance of living a poem worked very well when running through fields, but Jesus takes our gift of humanity, of non-computing, way further. I danced on the sand and Jesus walked on the water and that was the difference I was experiencing. 

The first 10 days she was here were long and hard for the whole family. But we all loved hard and gave generously and forgave quickly and we saw amazing fruits come from our little sacrifices. She started to speak the words that we were speaking. She joined in morning prayers with us, even asking if she could talk to God. She wouldn't let me out of her room at night without a Bible story. She hugged each of us many times a day (Rowan counted eight hugs one day, "And that's not including group hugs.") and told us she loved us. After 8 days the nightmares went away and I could sleep through the night in my bed again. She woke up on the ninth morning and said, "Last night when I was going to sleep an angel came in my room and hugged me and told me I wouldn't have anymore bad dreams." And she didn't. 

I don't naively think that we changed her life. Our home was a merely a stepping stone and she has many years of trials and healing yet to come. But we introduced her to God and His Son Jesus. We showed her what a life looks like that's been transformed by His goodness. We showed her ways to live that don't make sense. God goes with her where we can't. He is the parent that will never fail or abuse her. My prayers wrap round her instead of my arms now, and that's even better.

We don't always realize that each step in life is preparation for the next step. Running through fields and loving the children in my home and caring for others faithfully enabled me to love someone who, at first at least, was not very lovable. Years of chasing after God can land us in some interesting places, but it will always land us closer to God. 

She's living in a different foster home now with her two sisters. I miss her but know that she's where she needs to be. And I'm where I need to be, right here, preparing for the next thing God brings that doesn't make sense. In this world anyway.....

Gliding and Sliding into Winter

It's been snowing intermittently for two days.
Dave's home from work and public school children throng the streets.
It's the perfect opportunity for me to post the pictures of us sliding and gliding into winter.

Dave bought us all kayaks this summer to use on the lake up near the cottage. We had several family adventures on them in the glorious days of fall.

A month later when we went up to the cottage we traded our kayaks for ice skates!

And today, the sleds go whizzing past on the white streets.
To my husband, this kinetic energy is what winter is all about.
To me, all this movement is part of the great dance of seasons. A rollicking, infectious performance choreographed by our artistic God. Whether I'm kayaking or ice skating or sipping tea in front of the fire, I am thoroughly entertained.

Growing Real

It's a flower from a ballerina's wreath. Pink, so that would be Amelia's.
I don't recognize it for what it is at first. I'm drawn to it's perfect examples of pistils and stamen. I lure the kids near, eager to illustrate their book learning. Again.
They lean in and Grant's eyes narrow. "It's not real."
Oh.
He's right, it's a fraud, plastic pistils and all.
"How did you know?" I'm supposed to be the adult, the one who's got this botany thing down.
"It's too perfect. Perfect things are never real. It doesn't even smell."
Rosy objects after a long inhale, "It does so smell! It smells like plastic!"
I remove flower from small nostril.

His voice, his words, play ring around the rosy all day in my mind.
"It's too perfect. Perfect things are never real."
I aim for perfection and lose some of my humanity, my realness, in the bargain.
I'm reminded once again, that God doesn't want my perfection.
That His voice will shatter my illusions when I think I've got this Christianity thing down.
That the fragrance of God is Christ, realer than real, not plastic. I don't want to reek of imitation.

So I go outside and sit in the sun. Soak in it's healing warmth. And I grow real.

Two of my fairies at their ballet recital.

Cultivating Roses

Cultivating roses.
It sounds so romantic, but it's not.
It's work.
I can testify to this and if you drove past my house Saturday you would have seen me on all fours cultivating for all I was worth.
I'm used to my flowers blooming unassisted. But lately, I've been wondering if my yard could be more if I poured more time into it, if I cultivated it.
So yesterday, armed with fertilizer and a spade, I cleared a circle of space around my rose bushes so they could breathe. I added fertilizer and mixed it in well so they would bloom lush.
I don't have any pictures to offer you of this process because I wasn't thinking about blogging at all. I was thinking about the ball that I would be attending that night with my daughter. I was thinking about how much I've learned about her lately.
Last Saturday we had a disagreement regarding our cleaning time. I am rather dramatic. She is stoic. This can equal trouble in a mother/daughter conflict. The reality is, I want her to respond to me like me. I want her to apologize with sackcloth and gnashing of teeth. I want to see tears to know there's contrition. But she's her and not me. And she gives me a sorrowful look with her big brown eyes and closes herself up in silence in her room. That night I get a note on my bed that states that she loves me, but she is an Indian and keeps all her emotions inside and on the outside, is expressionless. Last I heard we were Germans, who are not known for suppression.
So God, in His kindness, brings me a friend who once upon a time was a quiet, reserved girl with a verbal, dramatic mother, and we talk. In sweetness and gentleness, she is able to show me that Avonlea is just Avonlea. She is a precious soul that God made, not for the express purpose of helping me clean, but to do His will and to glorify Him.
So the next day Avonlea and I talk. It's hard work. I clear a space around her, clear it of my ideals and ideas and give her some room to breathe. I reaffirm how much I love who God has made her and I talk with her about ways we can improve our communication. I get a glowing look from those big brown eyes and she hugs me and opens up her silence to let me in. I think she's German again.
We work on this all week. I give her space. I fertilize her with love and listen to what she's trying to say to me. And Saturday night I take her to a ball.
We go to an English Country dance in our best dresses and we dance with each other all night (except for 2 dances when she was claimed by a young gentleman).
Our brown eyes laugh joy into each others and we bloom lush.

Mommy and her Papoose

Holes

One of my first memories of a place, outside of my childhood home, is of my dance school.

I suppose the ballet room was fairly typical. One fully mirrored wall, barres on the other three walls, resin box in the corner, and a piano. But my first dance school boasted something that none of the following ones did, a wall of holes.

The idea was that a parent could watch their child without the child knowing it and therefore without being distracted. So, the studio directors cut out eye-sized holes all over the wall of the parent's waiting room. There were up high holes for tall daddies and medium height holes for mommys and a variety of lower holes for siblings. There were benches to help if you couldn't find quite the right height of hole.

Coming into the waiting room the first time I saw what looked like a bunch of people standing with their faces pressed to the wall. This was weird. Later, I was in my first class and I happened to glance at the wall, and I saw that it was covered in random eyes. This was terrifying. I have an older brother, so even at that tender age I knew all about cyclops. I was being watched by an army of them. I was paralysed with fear.

This week Grant had a scary experience for a child. The result was nightmares.

I held his hot shaking body on my lap and said, "Tell me a true thing Grant."

"God loves me."

"That is truth. What else?"

"He's always with me."

"Yes."

"Mommy loves me. Daddy loves me."

"That is true Grant. Keep them coming."

He comforted himself with truth and went back to bed.

The next night he came down again. He couldn't fall asleep, his mind raced with fearful thoughts.

I held out my arms and said, "Tell me a true thing Grant."

I waited for the truth that comforts, the truth that soothes, it didn't come.

Instead he looked me in the eye and said, "Mommy sometimes true things aren't happy things."

I stared at him in surprise.

He was absolutely right.

Truth isn't always happy.

Truth isn't always comforting.

My mind suddenly brought forward an array of truths that were anything but soothing.

They stared at me, a wall of cyclops eyes that followed my every move.

I sent Grant to bed and sat there in confusion.

If truth terrifies, what is there to trust?

And then I thought of the Truth who became man and taught us, "You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free."

The truth is that there is nothing to fear because the worst has already happened. Jesus was crucified. Death devoured Him instead of us. He submitted, He conquered, and He saved us.

The truth is that the Truth of Christ is so much more true than any fear we can imagine.

There are days, weeks, months, when the evil in this world winks at me through peep holes. When I see the sinful choices, unhealthy indulgences, and manifold consequences to myself and those I love, and I am paralysed. But I do what I did when I was a skinny thing in pink tights;

I remember the truth.

I experience the freedom from fear.

And I dance.