Enjoy the Show

Friday night was opening night of the Nutcracker.
This was Rose's fourth year performing.
Our whole family stood in line an hour before curtain and finally got seated in the middle, five rows from the front. 
The first half was flawless and intermission came with only minimal suffering for the brothers. 
The first number of the second half the stomach flu hit. Literally. It hit the floor of the stage and froze the dancers mid move. The curtain closed quickly and Dave and I exchanged amused glances over the heads of our children who were seated in between us. A man behind me muttered about "low income productions" (I wonder how a bigger budget could have kept her from vomiting?). Someone in front of me suggested just dancing over it.
My friend Amy, sitting across the aisle, hopped over to me and we started to laugh. 
After all, it wasn't our kid. 
But I'm pretty sure the director wasn't laughing. The stage was cleaned, ballet shoes were disinfected, and before you knew it, the dance went on.

When my head hit the pillow that night I thought, raising adult children is exactly like that.
For almost 20 years, I've been the stage director. I absolutely take my cues from God, but more or less, I'm in charge of the daily decisions. I've scheduled dentist appointments, trimmed toe nails, flashed biology termed flash cards. The foods they eat, the type of bedding they sleep on, the kind of deodorant they use, and whether or not they have clean socks have largely depended on me. I've given my life to this job of mothering. I've researched everything from allergies to cat litter. I've felt the weight of the responsibility of my choices. I've prayed. And prayed some more.
But now I have two adult children and my role is changing. I've done my job well and they know what they're about. They want to see me in the audience cheering them on, watching with wonder and delight as they dance through their lives. I know there will be moments of vomit on the stage, moments when catastrophe comes and the dance freezes mid move. And I can trust that the director has it under control and that the dance will go on. God is the one who has always been in charge, and now, it's just that much more obvious.
It is a hard transition from backstage to audience, a transition I am still maneuvering. But I have hope and a God who loves to teach me and stretch me in new ways. There are days when the enormity of this change engulfs me and I thrash about in fear. Fear for my children (it's a scary world out there) and fear for myself (will I still exist without children depending on me???) But God reminds me again, what I often forget, I haven't given my life to this job of mothering, I've given my life to HIM. That won't change no matter if I'm sitting behind or in front of the curtain. 
And after all that work, I have every intention of enjoying the show. 

My Pumpkin Baby Turns 14

My belly and the garden squash grew round together. 

Rowan was dubbed "my little pumpkin" and came in October like a good autumn baby should. 

He was a deceitfully quiet and sweet baby, saving up all the talking, debating, and story-telling for later years. 

At 2, he was a terror, the pumpkin became a jack-o-lantern and gave us many scares. He caused me to be on a first name basis with the poison control center. 

To sum up in one word the first few years of his life....SCARY.

 Every year at his birthday, he asks for the implements for his latest obsession. We've been through wood-cutting, hide tanning, carpentry, photography, drones, coin collecting, and so much more. 

This year he asked for a motor to make an air glider or a glass bottom boat.

I.said.no.

I suggested a cupboard for the garage to organize all his past hobby paraphernalia in.

He said no thanks.

He has been in a bee keeping class for a year now and asked if he could have bee keeping accessories instead.

We said yes, because at least we'll be able to eat the honey.

He's still kind of disappointed about the engine. I told him he can get one after he gets married. 

Rowan is the most like me in the sense that he turns everything that happens to him into a story. We can't help it anymore than a spider can help spinning a web. It's just the way we're made. I coach him through it, telling him what to cut out and how to make the most of the climax. I tell him how to be aware of when he's losing his audience, and then I demonstrate, repeatedly.

He sees the humor in everything and gloats over it, finding joy in the people and situations around him. 

He is full of dreams and plans and ideas. The majority of which are extremely expensive. 

Sometimes I'm utterly surprised to realize how much I love him. He exhausts me and delights me and tolerates me by turns.

We will never be bored as long as Rowan lives with us. This summer he raised pumpkins. He planted this field with 100 seeds and then marveled in the drama of raising crops. Who knew a pumpkin field could yield such stories?

Rowan, we love you. You are an original, one-of-a-kind gift from God. We know that whatever you do for the Lord, you will do whole heartedly. And then you'll tell a story about it (making sure that everyone is maintaining eye contact). Because that is just who you are. 

And we love it.
Most of the time.

This Normal Life

I once waxed eloquent on encouraging my children's passions. This was fairly easy when their passions were music and frogs. Avonlea and Grant broke me in gracefully and allowed me to set a standard that Rowan and Rose take full advantage of. Rowan sports an ATV around our property and Rose has started 4-H on her way to becoming a dairy cow owner.

My first 4-H meeting was a shock. These dairy farm people spoke in words I had no working knowledge of. They wore clothing brands I had only heard of in western books. They unconcernedly walked their heeled cowboy boots through what I knew was NOT mud. I was officially out of my depth. Yet for Rose's sake, I persisted. I actually asked for definitions, "Could you define, 'project'?" I tried not to look down when I walked the barns. I held in the up rise of vomit when they talked about listening to your cows stomach to make sure its food was always processing. I tried and I am trying because I love this girl.

Rose turned 12 last Saturday. I told her, analogically, that she was born in a field and every year of her childhood she takes a step closer to the river she must cross to become an adult. I told her, at twelve, she was standing on the edge of the water, feeling the cool waves on her feet. I explained that Avonlea is out of the river, walking steadfastly into maturity and independence. Grant is in the shallows on the other side (Rose inserts: "Slipping on the rocks a bit.") Rowan is about to his knees, just starting to feel the current's claim.

Parenting teenagers has been one of the hardest things I've ever done. To train my children to walk against the current and to swim when necessary takes all my concentration. As in actually teaching children to swim, as much as I can explain it, I can't do it for them. Only they are capable of keeping themselves afloat.

This year, Easter didn't come as a huge celebration. I realized that as I've gotten older I celebrate Easter every day. I absolutely need the resurrection power of Jesus in my life on an hourly basis. His example, His kindness, His light are the only things that keep me walking forward in hope. There is hope because He lives. He is who I hold on to when I start to sink and His is the Hand that I repeatedly put my children's hands into.

The first time I went to Hawaii, I was shameless about wearing a life jacket over my bikini in the ocean. Dave tried to point out that I was only in up to my thighs, but I pointed back that there were WAVES that I couldn't control or predict. I wanted to live. I still feel this way, so I shamelessly put on Jesus every day, knowing that even when life seems normal, waves come. I want to live. I want my kids to live, to take hold of the life that is truly life.

So I'll keep praying with them and for them. I'll ask for definitions and I'll try not to mind the poop. I'll listen to stomachs and I'll staunch the vomit and I'll give my all to what's in front of me. I'll live the daily Easter celebration in my life jacket, enjoying the ocean and never fearing the waves, day in and day out. Because this is normal life.

The Great Escape

I spent this weekend at a women's retreat up in the middle of nowhere.
It was a special weekend because my friend Dayna came from North Dakota to speak at the retreat. She spoke on Psalm 23. She is a lovely woman with a heart that yearns for God and so her words were both inciting and beautiful.
On Sunday, when it was time to leave, I was feeling particularly relaxed. The retreat ended officially at 2pm but brunch was done by 12:30 so we were pretty much packed and ready to go by 1pm. I was driving my friends Julianna and Dayna home and we decided to take a quick jaunt to the waterfall before heading back. We let someone know we were leaving to walk, so no one would worry about an empty car, and we sprung joyfully away.

We look like three cute girls, but we are actually something of a Bermuda Triangle.

It was a mossy walk with the background music of water and the freshness of ferns. Truly good for the soul. When we got back to the main camp all the cars were gone. We jumped in my van and pulled out to the main road of the camp. As we got to the gate of the camp we were a little alarmed to find it locked. It was secured with a chain and padlock. Just a little setback, we hadn't been gone that long, surely someone was around. It's all fun and games until someone gets locked in the retreat center.

It was a little difficult for my husband to wrap his brain around that text.

It took us about 20 minutes to find that every building was locked and there was no.one.there.
As previously stated, we were in the middle of nowhere, so our options were limited. Julianna started to call people to try to get help, Dayna jumped the fence to find if anyone was home at the house we could see, and I rummaged the shed to find a pick-axe and a metal cable to try and break the lock. Julianna suggested calling 911 but I was pretty sure we'd end up in the news. Who gets locked in a retreat center?

Isn't Dayna cute? 

Thank God I didn't injure myself with that pick-ax!

Right about now I was wishing I'd watched Macgyver with the boys.

The neighbor couldn't/wouldn't help us. The less said about me wielding the pick-ax the better. I hooked the chain up to the bumper of the car with a tow rope and was in danger of taking out the whole gate so I stopped (but it was really fun while it lasted). Finally Julianna got a hold of a relative who lived only 45 minutes away and had a metal cutter (or something like that) and he agreed to come spring us from lock down.
We put our coats down in a green pasture in between two bodies of still water, where we could still see the gate, and we had a picnic.

Julianna and Dayna talked and I thought about where we were.
I had never been locked in anywhere before. Or had I?
My brother and sister were allowed to babysit me when I was very young and they, not much older. I was a naughty child and one method they had of watching me was of locking me in a cupboard. The panic I felt in that cupboard led me to become a claustrophobic adult.
The retreat center is large and lovely and even contains a waterfall, but it was still a prison that I couldn't get out of. All kinds of resources were there, food, drinks, beds, but they were also locked to us. It wasn't a cupboard that I was cramped into, but it was still a prison. Our prisons aren't always stifling, sometimes we don't even know we're in one; until we try to get out.

As we sat waiting, and I worked to fight my claustrophobic panic, I remembered God's faithfulness of getting me out of the prison of myself. Jesus was the key to the gate of my own life as I was trapped in the retreat center of my sin. He not only opened the gate and gave me glorious freedom, but he unlocked all the resources and allowed me to truly use them, to live well within myself. To welcome people in through the gate of Himself, that He opened, or to go out of myself and into the big wide world of lonely, lost people.
I am so grateful.

I'll never forget Julianna on the phone, "Hi! Are you at home? Do you happen to have a lock cutter?"
This is what family is for. 

And as a truck pulled into view and we gathered our picnic food, I was grateful again. Grateful for a way out. Grateful for freedom in Christ. Grateful for friends that come in and out of the gate with us. Grateful for the reminder that there are still many people locked in themselves and their sin, and searching for a key to get out, and I can help them, because I know Who the key is.
As we drove off into the big, wide world with the exhileration of freedom, I had to laugh.
God finds such creative ways to restore my soul.

We to Me

My daughter comes home in 23 hours. I have not been in her presence for 5 long months (22 weeks to be exact). Seasons have come and gone and there's been an ache that runs through all their beauty.
I always cut my I-teeth on Avonlea.
We've been preparing for her arrival home, planning surprises and Rowan looks at me and says, "You know that by the time I come home from college, you'll probably forget to pick me up at the airport." I exclaim that I'll be just as excited over him and make a mental note to carefully write down his flight times, because he has a point.
But there was 18 years with Avonlea, all chock full of her quirkiness and laughter. There's just no one like her in the world.
She had a wonderful semester in New Zealand. She said "yes" to whatever people invited her to do (thank God she was at a Bible College!). She ran a 4K (in jeans), learned to ride a unicycle, learned to play volleyball and basketball, led English Country dances, and wrote amazing papers. She met all kinds of interesting people and grew so much in her faith. I am so proud of her.
She entered the tunnel of "we" becoming "me". When she left, she thought in terms of "we". She was a portion of a whole, the "whole" being our family. When she got to school and people asked her questions about what kind of movies she liked, etc. she'd reply, "We like...". Inevitably that got weird and it slowly changed. Of course she's still a beloved part of our family, but she is forming her own independent me-ness, and it's good. We're certainly not about to ride unicycles as a family unit, however, her me-ness expands our family not contracts it.
When I got into bed tonight I said to Dave, "I don't think I can sleep, Avonlea is coming!"
I realized later that I had said those same words 18 1/2 years ago when I was trying to get some rest as my labor was starting. We give birth to the same child several times over in our life. We feel the labor pains and we disregard them in the joy of creation. Our lives adjust to the child's arrival, their growth, their challenges, their passions. Various internal parts of us grow pregnantly round and stretch taut. Our children metamorphosis and change utterly and end up almost unrecognizable. Almost.
Today a poem that I wrote when she was born came into my mind.

Her cry broke the silence
a thousand years thick
Time fell like rain
frenzied and quick
A life wound up tight
has now been let go
What direction will it jettison
is what we none know

Well now I know. She jettisoned toward truth and beauty and music and nature and ultimately toward her creator God. She is a blessing, and I would go through the birth process again for her in a minute. And I probably will.

My daughter comes home in 22 hours.
I always cut my I-teeth on Avonlea.
There's just no one like her.

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

A Story and a Dream

The story goes....

One summer we felt the need to forgo traditional church and spend Sunday mornings with the kids in the woods. We'd pack a lunch, hike a trail, park our bottoms on some rock outcropping or next to a waterfall and do a devotion and pray. It was 2011 and our kids were 4, 5, 9 and 11. By the end of that summer two things were clear: our family needed more time together and we all absolutely loved the Columbia Gorge wilderness.

So we started dreaming. Like most dreams ours started with a "what if". What if we could find a house in the woods somewhere were we could vacation? What if we could find something small and low maintance with a creek and a mountain view? What if....?

So we looked and we found something that changed our lives....

I loved the cottage and the view and the creek....but it came with something I didn't anticipate but something I loved more than the other three put together.

An orchard...

I had never been in an orchard before and there was something so symbolic and beautiful and mysterious about it that I fell hard. I can't count the amount of times I've walked those rows praying my children and friends through mission trips and heartache, knowing that my prayers would bear fruit, heavy boughs of ripe God goodness.

Avonlea was 11 when we bought the cottage. She had never been in the woods for a prolonged period before, the cottage changed her life. During the last 7 years she has become an avid birder, animal tracker, mushroom hunter, and outdoor enthusiast. It's not unusual to wake up at the cottage and find her bed empty. She gets up early and stays outside in her camo with binoculars around her neck for hours. The peace and beauty of nature has become part of who she is.

Grant and Rowan slept in a tiny room together at the cottage. They stayed up late scratching backs and telling stories. The spent the days exploring with BB guns, machetes, and knives. They tried every kind of weapon they could get their grubby mitts on and they grew together tied by the bonds of a million adventures. They built forts and went sledding. The adventure and wonder of nature became part of who they are.

Rose was four when we bought the cottage. We would race down the long avenues of pear trees. She played Barbies in her room while the older kids were skiing. She'd come downstairs and ask me to make cookies and tea with her and I delighted in our quiet time together. She grew bolder as she grew older and learned to cross country ski, snow shoe, and sled (which one fateful Thanksgiving landed her in the emergency room). She grew up outside under the trees, under the stars. The joy and excitement of nature became part of who she is.

And so the story goes...

Avonlea's adventurous heart led her to New Zealand where she is thriving in Bible school and learning to unicycle. Every time she face times us she is outside with the blue sky over her head.

Grant starts community college this fall, on top of a part-time job, where his love of exploration will land him (in two years) with a high school diploma, AA degree, and his limited electrician's licence.
Rowan starts 8th grade next week. The curiosity and perseverance he learned in nature inspired him to write a documentary about iPhone usage and kids ("they need to get out and explore!"). He's interviewed professional doctors, psychiatrists, and brain experts. He will take bee keeping classes and raise a pig for the fair.

Rose starts ballet four days a week this September. Her love of the outdoors keeps her in the woods at our house when she's not dancing. The joy of nature has led her to love animals and she is currently saving up for a milk cow.

This weekend we said good bye to the cottage. We signed the papers, washed the floors, had a garage sale and drove away. Another family is coming there to grow and farm and fall in love with the woods. And we are glad. Mostly.

I stood in the orchard with Rowan on one side of me and Rose on the other. I told them this is my favorite view in the whole world. We see these trees pruned in February, small, reduced, and dead looking. We see them bloom into color in April. We see the elongation of limbs and the heavy fruit that grows in the summer, and I tell them, this is what will always happen when God prunes us. He cuts us back so that we can grow more fruit. Every.Single.Time. He is faithful.

For us, it always starts with listening and obeying in the every day. That's the foundation for our dreams, then we ask "what if..." and then we watch God change our lives.
Because He is always Faithful.