I could feel bad

Glands in my neck are tender and swollen, and my ears feel funny.  My husband is in Haiti (an unstable country with a history of violence) until next week.  I have a fund-raiser that I (I–augghhhhh!) said I would organize that takes place tomorrow.  My nine year-old is lying on the couch, wearing pants that are too small for her, and her hair has not been combed since yesterday sometime; this  makes her look…like her mother is not taking care of her.  I could feel bad.

But everything is good!! 

My nine year-old is happy and healthy, and is halfway through a book that I’m glad she’s reading.  She’s wearing the too-small pants not because she doesn’t have any other ones, but because she likes them.  Her hair isn’t combed, but I have learned to take that in stride.  Yea!!

My husband is in Haiti because he’s following God.  I am not afraid for him or the other men who are there.  People love him are praying for the team.  And I can talk to him on a cell phone, which I have.  Yea!!

The fund-raiser is mostly organized; all I lack is actually being there and setting things up.  And everyone has been very nice and willing to help.  Yea!!

And I am not worried about being sick.  Just not worried.  Besides that, I don’t feel all that bad.

God is over all and He (I almost blush to say it) loves me.  This is really something.

Ahhhh… Good day.

 

This new morning

Two sick children live at my house.  Also, we have a part-time maniacal cat.  (He’s our cat all the time, but only part of the time does he act like a maniac.)  This morning the cat’s a maniac, sick child #1 is still in bed, and sick child #2 is watching cartoons on TV that set my teeth on edge. 

I’m tired.  I have more fear about sickness, especially in my kids, than any other thing.  Irrational fear, oftentimes.  Anyhow, having the maniac cat sharpening his claws on the couch and climbing on the organ while Sonic X and his anime friends exclaim in too-excited, nasaly voices through my den while I’m slightly worried about my kids…hhhhh…..

And I dropped the ball about something I was supposed to organize for the homeschool co-op, something that is scheduled to happen in less than a week.  It’ll get done.  But I sure will be glad when it’s over. 

Tired day. 

So.  I must resist.  I must frequently meditate on how good God has been to me.    And He has been.

My roof isn’t leaking.  Anna Laura doesn’t  have cancer.  Larry has work.  I have good friends who love me.  Jesus both forgave my sin and took the punishment it required because God loves me. 

We have water.  We’re not in trouble with the law, and neither are our children.  I think my living room is pretty.  Loewen, though he irritates me at times, is a joy to have in our home.  I am not sick.

My girls have boyfriends who we like, which is not something everyone can say.  My sisters love Jesus.  I have a lot of people who support me and care about my mental health.  My husband takes me out to eat.  He likes to be with me.

I have kids who like to cook.  I have kids who like to sing.  Jane (at the retirement home) really likes me and knows and cares that I’ve suffered with depression; she asks me pointedly every time we go there how I’m doing.  I have jasmine green tea in my kitchen.

My spirit is growing healthier.  My son has changed his mind about his life.  My kids love me.  The Andy Griffith show never fails to bring laughter to my home.  I have a special “Andy friends” in Wendel and Minnie Dalton. 

There is much that brings peace and contentment to my life.  God is challenging me to say hourly, “God will take care of my kids,” because He will.

Loewen is asleep on the floor behind me now, and Sonic X doesn’t seem so annoying as it did fifteen minutes ago.  Liesl is playing music in her room–not something a desperately sick and dying person would get out of bed to do!  I do feel better now than at the beginning of this entry–I’m smiling, in fact!

death penalty

I used to be absolutely, positively for the death penalty.  It’s what God laid out as the rule in the Old Testament, after all.  But then I read a book (a novel) that centered on a man’s path to death row and lethal injection, and it altered my thinking.  Now my opinion is “I don’t know”.  It’s a big deal, the death penalty–bigger than I had ever thought about.

Today the news came out that what’s his name was convicted of first-degree murder and some other charges in the deaths of Shannon Christian and Chris Newsom.  I’ve been hearing people cheering and very happy about it, and they all seem to want to see him burn in hell–after he is legally killed by the state of Tennessee in punishment of his crimes. 

I understand that we crave justice (especially for other people, and especially when their crimes are heinous), but it makes me cringe to listen to people be so hungry for…death.  I wonder how loudly they would cheer for the death penalty if it were their own brother or mother or best friend who deserved it.

As I said before, my opinion about it all is that I don’t know.  But I don’t think Jesus will clap His hands and cheer if the man is sentenced to death.

responsibility

 

I would like to be kidnapped.  (By someone nice.)

Retrain my brain

I saw a documentary recently about the brain, and in it they talked about how you can “train” your brain.  This is not the first time this idea has been presented to me.  Since it’s come back (the idea, to my attention) and since it rang so true each time it came, I am thinking that God brought it to me.

So.  Retrain. 

One of my false ways has been to live/think/act like I am alone.  Like nobody should be expected to help me, to accompany me, love me.  This is from some old, grievous wounds. 

So.  Retrain.  But not by myself. 

How, I wonder?  I want to just wait for the hot air balloon Pilot to pick me up and rearrange my brain as we drift over the countryside. 

Probably it would do a bit of retraining not to think about this so much.

Liesl’s belated birthday dinner

We celebrated Liesl’s birthday with the extended family the other night with 17 people in attendance.  It was, as always, good.

We had the Diverticulitis sufferers’ version of Poppy Seed Chicken, salad, corn, green beans, and homemade oatmeal bread.  Then for dessert we had the usual yellow cake (three layers) with white chocolate/peppermint frosting.  Rosa crushed peppermint candies and decorated the top of the cake and around the bottom and it was, of course, lovely.  Tasted pretty good, as well.

The room was pretty.  I used a bunch of acorn squash (home-grown by us) and a couple of small, orange and white ornamental pumpkins to decorate the tables; some were held on old wooden things–a very old drawer on the big table and an old offering plate on one of the small ones.  Liesl picked out orange plates and golden plates to use, and we had yellow and orange napkins to go with them.  It sounds kind of cheesey-looking, but it wasn’t.  It was pretty with the party favors wrapped in red tissue and tied with green and orange ribbon.  Oh–there were also pieces of candy corn and mellow creme pumpkins scattered on the tables amidst natural-colored raffia. 

All in all, it was right pretty. 

We played telephone pictionary and laughed hard.  All the sentences written had to be about Liesl; that made it more fun, I thought.  Liesl got money and gifts and a promise to be taken to get her nose pierced.  (She’s going tomorrow.)

I didn’t turn into a witch, either.  I think I was pretty nice all day.  But I guess you’d have to ask somebody besides me if that is true.

Reflections on motherhood (part 1)

The one and only time I ever fell asleep in the bathtub was in 1985, when I was the mother of a two-year old and an infant.  We lived in an old, cold house, which was not altogether pleasant in the winter.  But there was a bathroom upstairs on the opposite end of the living area of the house, and this bathroom, besides being far-removed from noise and other stress-producing things (you actually had to go through a door onto a screened-in porch and through another door to get to it) held a sixty-year old, claw-foot bathtub.  It was the most comfortable bathtub I’ve ever used.  The bathroom was blue and white, neat, and spacious.  Nice.

I used to get the water as hot as I could stand it, get in the tub, and recline.  Ahh…it was so nice.  During this time of my life, I was very often tired and…other stuff.  Taking a bath in this wonderful way was heaven.  I needed those bathtimes. 

Once when I was taking a bath, I woke up to find that I had slid into the water up to my mouth.  And the bathroom was still quiet, still, neat and blue, and the bath water was still luxuriously warm.  It made me smile.

This is to me sort of like the daffodils were to Wordsworth.

Interesting recent comments from Rosa

“Car alarms make me mad.”  (She also said this about Bradford pear trees.)

“But what you were saying wasn’t interesting.”  (Today, when Liesl complained that Rosa had interrupted her.)

Haaa haaa!  Sometimes being a mother is so entertaining and fun.

failed poem search

I looked for a poem online about anger, hoping to post it here as a catharsis for myself.  But mostly what I came upon as I googled poems, anger, Christian were things about not being angry. 

Not what I was looking for.

It seems to me, at this moment of my day, that I can get rid of the anger by suppressing it or by expressing it.  The choice I’ve almost always made in the past was suppression…though it always leaked out of its iron doors.  (Cell doors are useless against anything fluid.)

So that’s why I wanted to express it.  Get rid of it.  Be healed, perhaps, of it.  Now I’m too tired.

(Did you know that  a cathartic is a purgative–an agent for purging the bowels?  What a good picture.  I wanted something to flush out the anger I had, to rinse it out, get rid of it.  Cathartic.)

feeling sticky

BLEHHHH!!!

I am sticky, our air conditioning having been off for the past few days while it has been humid and, lately, rainy.  (I did turn the AC on for a few hours the other day, with only mild guilt, and felt like a somewhat normal person for awhile, but mostly it’s been off.)

I am grumpy, being sticky.

I feel guilty, being grumpy.

I feel irritated, having to go out and get everybody flu shots this morning.

I feel guilty, being irritated.

I feel sluggish and somewhat lazy, being sticky and guilty and grumpy.

I feel guilty, being sluggish and lazy.

So is the answer to my woes to turn the  air conditioning back on?  That would be a wonderfully comfortable band aid, I’m thinking. 

But the remedy is not to count my feelings as preeminent and believe things that God says instead.  This is my goal for today.

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Well it’s later on now, and on a scale of 1-10 I scored about a 3 on my goal for today.  It’s harder than it seems.