Category Archives: writing

March 21, 2013 · 11:50 am

The Fear

35weeksBW

Last Friday, I made a list of things people have said to me recently about my pregnancy.  Most of them were about my size, but one was just this:

“Come out, Baby Dwight!”

Before this past weekend, my response to that was a (sometimes aggressive) “No! Don’t!”

I thought it was because I had such a long to-do list of pre-baby practicalities staring me in the face, but over the weekend, something became clear to me: it was because of The Fear.

Saturday night, I got into bed and pulled out the little journal where I write letters to Adlai: things I want him to know when he’s older, things I want to remember myself.  I felt heavy as I wrote, and before I knew it, I was telling him I was scared.  And I was sad.  And I was mourning the end of this season of him and me.

Simon walked in to me scribbling hard and crying harder, and he asked what was wrong, and that was it.

It all came out.  Stuff I didn’t even know I felt, fears I’d been walking around with, holding onto, afraid to name.

I was scared.

Scared of how I’m going to cope with two small children.  Scared Adlai will feel abandoned.  Scared I won’t have what it takes.

Scared of having a horrendous labour.  Scared this baby will be sick, like Adlai was, and will have to go to the neo-natal unit and I will have to worry and cry over him, like I did for Adlai.

I was scared that the good God had done in Adlai’s first year of life – the healing He did in our marriage through us walking through the fire of sleepless nights and not communicating and learning to love each other and Adlai all at once – that it would be undone.

I was scared that the good God had done in my heart – the healing He did through my feeling like an outsider everywhere I went, through my sitting on the fringes, having to leave parties and church for feedings, feeling like a spectator – that it would all be undone.  That I would have to start from scratch.

All of it poured out there, tears on the pages of Adlai’s little journals, snot running down my face, great heaving sobs pouring out of me uncontrollably at 11:30pm, while I tried not to cry so loud I would wake Adlai in the next room.

Simon sat there on the bed and listened.  He got me a tissue.  And when I was done, I laid down, and he held my hand and prayed.  I fell asleep soon after, spent from being 39 weeks pregnant and from pouring myself out.

It took a little while on Sunday for it to sink in.  For me to realize the difference.  But I felt it.  The Lightness.  The Readiness.  And when someone at church said, “When’s he coming?” I said, “Soon, I hope.” And I meant it.

Often, great healing can take weeks, months, years.

But sometimes all it takes is one night.  One night of pouring your heart out, then resting, and waking to find the burden has been lifted.

The Fear is gone.

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March 14, 2013 · 4:30 pm

Answering the call of the quiet buffalo

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It was never my intention to not write for two weeks, but these last few weeks of pregnancy have done something strange to me: they have turned me into an introvert.

A friend of mine in her final stages of pregnancy wrote a few months ago about this same phenomenon, this intense desire to be around close friends, coupled with a strong realization that she needed time alone.  She likened herself to a quiet buffalo.

At the time, I had just emerged from my glowy second trimester.  I was full of energy and my hair looked great and I felt like a fertility goddess.

Now?  Not so much.

I have heard the call of the quiet buffalo, and I am answering.

It takes all I have in me to text a friend back at the moment, much less write three blog posts a week.  I have big plans for every naptime and bedtime, but when it comes down to it, all I can do is climb into bed and go to sleep, or curl up on the couch with a big glass of ice (Sweet Jesus, I have never loved ice so much as I do now) and an episode or two of Parenthood. 

I want to be alone.  I’m not sad or depressed, and I don’t hate everyone (although if one more person asks me if I’m sure I’m only having one baby, I might lose it).  I just feel a deep, primal urge to be by myself, to rest, to be quiet and still and solitary.  That same friend said her sister pointed out that many animals do this – that they go off by themselves to give birth.

So I’m going to try and do better, but I can’t make any guarantees for the next couple of weeks.  I had Adlai at 38.5 weeks, and as of yesterday, I’m 38 weeks pregnant.  I don’t plan to have this baby this weekend, but who knows?  Until he comes, I’ll do my best.  I’ll write when I feel like I can, but I’ll mostly be napping, and turning my room from a campsite into a baby-friendly haven, and just staring at my husband and my firstborn son.

And when this new one comes, well, I don’t know what life will look like then.  But I feel confident this buffalo will, at some point, make way for the extrovert to return.

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February 4, 2013 · 9:36 am

Full

All day Saturday I felt this baby boy moving inside of me.  And I mean all. day.

I pointed it out to Simon, who watched from across the room as my belly pulsed and rolled, and I put Adlai’s hand on my tummy at bedtime, to let him feel his little brother kick and wiggle.  He says, “yeah Mama,” when I ask him if he wants to touch the baby, but he struggles to be still long enough to feel anything.

Me, I cherish the brief, quiet moments when it is just me and this new one, when he reminds me he’s coming.

Now, it’s 1pm, and Adlai is sleeping. We were at playgroup this morning, which is always fun and noisy and exhausting, and I have work to do this afternoon – laundry and sending invoices and copywriting. But I am sitting down now, because I am tired. And because I want one little moment with my littlest one.

I can feel something hard at the top of my belly, and I’m pretty sure it’s his bottom. So I push it, and I feel his hands or his head press against the other end of my abdomen.

Soon he’ll be out here with us.

“Baby comin’,” Adlai says. “To Ah-gai’s house.”

Soon he will kick and wiggle on a blanket on the floor. My belly will be empty, but my house will be full.

Full of stinky toddler diapers and stinky newborn diapers. Full of breast pads and juice boxes and rattles and bikes. Full of hysterical, tickle-induced laughter, and frantic feed-me-now cries.

Full of little pieces of my heart, moving around outside my body.

Full of my family.

Full of my boys.

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December 18, 2012 · 10:39 am

On Newtown and This Tension

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A good friend and former co-worker of mine lost his 20-year-old son three years ago.  I am ashamed to say how long it took me to email him, to say that I’d heard, that I was so sorry.  When I finally did, I apologized profusely, and told him that I’d been delayed by the weight of the situation, by the fear of saying the wrong thing.  He was gracious, of course, because that’s the kind of man he is, but I know that my silence was the exact wrong thing I was so afraid of.

After Friday’s events at Sandy Hook Elementary School, I have that same feeling. I don’t know the residents of Newtown personally, or the parents of those sweet children, or the husbands/families/friends of those brave teachers, but just the same, I don’t want to wait a year before I say that I heard.  That I’m so sorry.  That I am 3,000 miles away and it is not just a headline.  My heart is broken.  My life is changed.

The morning after, I woke up early, before my two-year-old, even, which doesn’t happen often.  My mind immediately went to those parents.  My house was quiet because I’m pregnant and I can’t sleep anymore.  Their houses are quiet because their children are absent.  I laid in bed and shed tears over what that must feel like, over that morning-after moment when they woke up and realized it wasn’t all a bad dream.

On Twitter over the weekend, I saw a British person (only one, mind you) complaining at how much the BBC was covering the Newtown tragedy.  He wanted to know if it was really necessary, and “how much [Britons] were really affected.”

This isn’t Newtown’s crisis.  It isn’t even America’s crisis.  It belongs to this world, to this human race.

This place is broken, and though I don’t think I’ll ever not be shocked by crimes like this, I’ll never truly be shocked by our brokenness.

It was broken all along, and things like the untimely death of a friend’s young son, like the massacre of 26 people, like our quickness to point fingers and blame you and you and you and everyone but myself – they are a reminder that the Kingdom is here but not yet.  That we live in the tension between beauty and sorrow, between the now and the waiting.

I realize I haven’t given any answers here, and it wasn’t my intention to.  Only to break my silence, so that you, and they, know that I heard, and that I’m so sorry.

“Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.  For behold, darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples; but the Lord will arise upon you and his glory will be seen upon you.  And nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your rising.

Lift up your eyes all around, and see; they all gather together, they come to you; your sons shall come from afar, and your daughters shall be carried on the hip.  Then you shall see and be radiant; your heart shall thrill and exult…”

Isaiah 60:1-5

Some people who have kind and courageous words for this time:

Emily Freeman

Rachel Held Evans

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November 28, 2012 · 8:25 am

How a Man Smells

During the summers in college, I worked at an all-girls’ camp.  My friend Molly had a Bath & Body Works air freshener hanging from the ceiling fan in her room.  It was Moonlight Path.  And she said she liked it because it smelled like a man.  Go ahead and laugh if you want – I know what she meant.

This morning, my friend Amaris sent me a message to say she was up (in America) in the middle of the night, working.  But, she said, it wasn’t that bad, because she was accompanied by the lingering smell of a man who’d been helping her earlier.

Le Male. In a man-shaped bottle and everything.

When Simon and I first started dating, he wore Jean Paul Gaultier’s Le Male.  It comes in a man-shaped bottle and everything.  He hasn’t worn it much the last few years, and now, every time I walk by a man who’s wearing it, or smell it in a department store, I am 21 and it is Autumn and I have butterflies in my stomach.

(On a negative note, I occasionally smell my ex-boyfriend’s Hugo Boss and I am 18 and it is summer and I am depressed.)

The smell of a man’s cologne is a powerful thing. For me, it is the smell of sweet memories. For Molly and Amaris, it was the smell of possibility.

How about you?  What colognes (or perfumes) make you feel, hope, remember?

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November 8, 2012 · 10:43 am

To Go Beyond the Fences

I became a Christian at a Billy Graham crusade when I was five years old.  At the end of Mr. Graham’s sermon, he called for anyone who wanted to know Jesus to come to the front of the stadium.  Thousands of people poured from their seats and down the aisles, and I told my dad, a preacher, that I wanted to go too.

Understandably, my dad held me back for a moment, asking me if I knew what I was doing, what it all meant.  When I felt like he wasn’t going to let me go, my little heart began to panic.  I burst into tears and cried, “I want to go!  I want to know Jesus!”

With all eyes on him and his five-year-old begging to become a Christian, my dad gave in and took me down to the middle of the football field, where I asked Jesus to come into my heart.

It’s a story I am hesitant to tell, because it is not dramatic.  I wasn’t a 25-year-old drug addict who was miraculously transformed.  I wasn’t an 18-year-old atheist who had a Damascus road experience.  I was just a little girl who knew God was real and wanted to know Him.

Over the years, He has rescued me from disasters of my own – bouts of depression, dangerous relationships, being a naive 21-year-old traveling through Europe and making stupid, unsafe decisions.  And there have been milestones for me, ones I’ve talked about here and a few I haven’t, where I heard Him, I knew Him closer than ever.

But there is something unique to a person who meets Jesus as a child, who knows Him her whole life.  Knowing him becomes second nature and, if she’s not careful, habit.  It’s easy to coast when you know the lingo and the songs, from It Is Well to Better is One Day to How He Loves Us. To feel so familiar with Him that you forget to know Him, to really know Him.  To find Him in the place His glory dwells.

That’s where I am now.  I talked to my friend Kezia about it the other day, about how I coast.  She has known Him her whole life, too, and she knew, and that felt comforting.  She is an artist and creates beautiful pictures, even with her words.

Sometimes, she told me, He leads us into big pastures where we find freedom and comfort and we know Him better, and we think we’ll never get tired of being there, there’s so much to see and do and discover.  But sooner or later we reach the fence, and we feel we’ve reached the end.  We feel dissatisfied.  We want more.

I’m standing at the fence now.  Dissatisfied.  Aching to know what I have never known before.  To discover Truth in a way I haven’t seen it before.  I feel so desperate I can only describe it as thirsty, though I know it’s a cliché.  It’s like seeing a river in the distance and running and running but never reaching it.

I read in a magazine the other day about an experiment that a group of atheists were doing, where they planned to pray for three minutes a day for 40 days and to document their experiences, whether miraculous or nothing at all.  And something in it inspired me, because I really believe that if you seek Him you will find Him, just like He said, but it’s a Truth I’ve often believed for everyone but myself.

I’m taking it for myself now.  Saying, “This is it.  I want to find You.” I started on October 31st, making room in my busy days – the days I can fill with the meaningful and the meaningless, the ones where excuses are plenty and time is short – to talk to Him.  To say, “I really, really want to know You.” I jokingly referred to it as “Know-vember” to my friend Sarah, because I like to name things.

I know it’s November 8th now, but if you’re like me, and you’re coasting; or you’ve never known Him but you’ve wanted to; or you’re just curious, I want to invite you join me.  To tell Him you want to know Him.  To ask Him to show Himself to you, however He likes.  And if He does, I want you to tell us here.  And if He doesn’t, you can tell us that, too.

Meanwhile, every time I squeeze in my few minutes a day, I will leave one at the end to ask for you, on your behalf.  I’ll pray He takes us beyond the fences, that He shows us how He loves us.

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October 24, 2012 · 10:12 am

Saying No When I’ve Already Said Yes

My sister Sarah is 20 months older than me, and when we were kids, she was my translator.  For a while, my mom was a little worried I wasn’t talking more, but when she asked our pediatrician about it, he told her I wasn’t talking because I didn’t have to; Sarah talked for me.

One of the stories my dad tells a lot is about me answering every question with a “no,” only for Sarah to pipe in: “She says no, but she means yes.”

…

Then, my nos were often yeses.  These days, my yeses are more often nos.

I’m one of those people who says yes to a lot of things – to too many things – because I sincerely, truly, want to do everything.  I want to make people happy.  To use all my gifts.  To do a good job.  To do everything anyone asks me to do.  And if you ask me to do something, and tell me how good you think I’ll be at it?  If you tell me you’re asking me because you’ve thought about it and no one could do it like I can?  Well, heck.  You’ve said the magic words.  That’ll be a yes.

And it is my greatest, purest intention for my yeses to be yeses.  Because I want to fulfill what you’ve envisioned.  I want to pour myself out the way I know I can, to see all my vision and passion and fire become real.  But what I’ve found lately, is that if I say too many yeses, some of those yeses can only turn into nos.

Six months ago, I was asked to take over the leadership of a website for women who are moms and wives and Christians and entrepreneurs.  And I said yes, because I believed in it, because I saw what it could be and that excited me, and because, if I’m honest, I was flattered.

But before that yes had come other yeses: yes to Simon and Adlai, yes to a photography business, yes to writing and editing contracts, yes to this blog.

And so, within a few months, the weight of this Yes was too much to bear.  And I had to step back.  To say no.  It was no one’s fault but my own, for being carried away with the idea of what it could be, what I could make it.  And, truthfully, carried away with a little bit of self-importance and an inflated ego.

I want my yes to be yes, but sometimes when I make a mistake, when I say the wrong yeses, my yes must become a no.  And then I must bear the consequences: disappointed friends, a bruised ego, even broken professional ties.

It’s a lesson I’ve put off learning for too long, and I’m saying yes to it now.

Yes to knowing that no is better than disappointment down the line.

Yes to becoming the dependable woman I want my friends to know.

Yes to saying no when it’s hard, so I don’t have to say no when it’s harder.

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September 10, 2012 · 3:32 pm

What I Know

There are things I don’t know.

I don’t know why there are children starving in Africa, and in this country too.

I don’t know why I’ve seen blind people see again, deaf people hear, while a girl from my high school died of cancer just a couple of months after giving birth to her baby girl.

I don’t know why other babies are born to parents who will hurt them.

 

There are other things I do know.

I do know that I heard a voice, loud and clear, say that I would be Simon’s wife three years before he asked me.

I do know that my son spent his first week of life in the hospital on antibiotics, feeding through a nose tube, only for all his tests to come back clear and healthy.

I do know that, on numerous occasions, we have silently, fervently asked God to fill in the holes of our finances, only to find hundred-pound-notes slipped through our mail slot the next day.

I do know that I have seen drug addicts and violent offenders on their knees, tears streaming down their faces, hands raised in worship.

 

I used to be afraid to say “I don’t know.”  As if I needed all the answers to prove that He’s real.  I don’t have all the answers, and I only know a few things for sure, but those are my stones in the desert.  They’re the things I look back on when the I-don’t-knows come thick and fast.

I don’t know a lot of things, but I know Him, and for today, that’s enough.

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September 3, 2012 · 9:05 am

His Little Wife

He calls me his little wife, but there is nothing little about me.

I am 5’10″ and 160 pounds of belly laugh and Southern drawl and running into door frames.

Out of three sisters, I was the one with the strong back.  The one who drove the tractor on the weekends and shifted furniture and dog houses and wooden sheds.

My strong back is splintered now.  Some days it can barely carry the weight of me.

When I walk beside him, I am too tall.  His arm around me is uncomfortable, because my shoulders are just this much too high.

But at night, in bed, I scoot myself down till my feet touch the footboard, and my head fits perfectly there, in the crook of his arm, on the curve of his chest.

I am little then, and little has never felt so good.

 

*photo by Ashley Perry Blevins Photography

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August 20, 2012 · 8:17 am

Always Be My Baby

 

At 21 months old, my little boy is certainly not a baby anymore.

He can run and spin and climb just about anything.  He’s a got a vocabulary that grows exponentially by the day.  He brushes his teeth, and drinks from a real cup, and eats with a fork.

At the park, he sometimes walks off and never looks back, and I feel sure that if I didn’t chase him down, he’d just keep on walking as far as his little legs would take him.

But at bedtime, I sing him “Jesus Loves Me”, and his little head still rests perfectly right on my chest.

And later, when he wakes up crying from a bad dream or a toothache or one of his bears falling out of the crib, he still finds comfort in my hand on his tummy.

I know he won’t always be my baby, but I’ll treat him like he is just as long as he’ll let me.

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