Monsters

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Monsters

I live with at least two monsters. I am married to one monster, and I birthed the other. Their monstrosity is most evident when they are eating, a task that typically leaves onlookers bamboozled and slack-jawed. Husband Monster Luke's favorite thing to eat is a whole roasted chicken from the grocery store. About four seconds after arriving home with prized, newly-purchased chicken, Luke will plop it on the counter, still cocooned in the plastic bag, and eat it straight out of the container with his bare hands, shoveling one pile of chicken flesh after another into his mouth at astonishing speed. It's grotesque (bah, there’s chicken in his beard!) yet awe-inspiring (look at the determination in this man’s eyes!). Recently, he bought one of these roasted chickens for dinner, but since I was heading out the door for a girls' night, he quickly discovered that it's difficult to double fist chicken flesh with two screaming toddlers at one's feet. Much to his dismay, he had to surrender the completion of the chicken for another time. 

The next day, as he microwaved the remaining chicken, I noticed that he was standing about two inches from the microwave, watching it sizzle for a bit longer then seemed necessary, with a look in his eyes that I can only compare to the frizzy, maniacal, bloodthirsty intensity of Mel Gibson in that hatchet scene in The Patriot.

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Cardboard Boxes and Comfort and Courage

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Cardboard Boxes and Comfort and Courage

This is the room that would break me, I just knew it. 

I’d been packing up to move with relatively little emotion, but that was because I had not yet ventured upstairs.

If the walls could show you a montage of the life we’ve lived in their midst, you’d see a younger me, showing her friends the room just at the top of the stairs: “This will be a nursery someday!” 

Then you’d see me a little older, sitting in this same room, crying, broken, because “someday” wasn’t today or the million yesterdays before. “Someday” felt like it would never come. 

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God Is Not Intimidated by Your Personality

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God Is Not Intimidated by Your Personality

To put it mildly, my husband is decisive and strong-willed. To put it metaphorically, sometimes getting him to see things my way is like pushing over a very big tree, only your arms are made out of noodles and you can’t find them. (Hidden noodle arms, you know. That’s a thing.) My husband is never afraid to say what he’s thinking, even if it’s harsh, and sometimes he skips the whole thinking part entirely and just jumps right to the saying part, and I’m sure you can guess how that goes.

Here’s a story to back me up: I’m in labor with our first (I’m talking days and days of BIG, BRUTAL contractions, no sleep, and SO MUCH freaking out). On the way to the hospital, my husband said, with completely sincerity, “My stomach hurts.” I was too weak FROM SIX PLUS DAYS OF INTENSE PAIN to stab him or even tell him I wanted to stab him, but everyone should know that I mentally stabbed him. And here’s the thing about Luke: he still stands by this statement, like, “What?! My stomach DID hurt.” You’ll never be able to convince him the statement was a bad idea, although I welcome your attempts, as noodle-armed as they may be.

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Stillness in a World of Hustle

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Stillness in a World of Hustle

I saw it on Pinterest and had a visceral reaction: “Good things come to those who hustle.”

It’s the rallying cry of the perfectionist, the list-maker, the big ball of stress. I am all of these things by nature. I need an A from everyone, and I will sacrifice sleep and sanity to get it. If I know I can’t get an A, well then, I better make people like me. In moments when I’ve lost the most control, when I battle the most anxiety and fear, I find myself telling joke after joke and story after story, desperate for the comfort of approving laughter, until eventually I get home and collapse in exhaustion, like an overworked circus clown, forever juggling juggling juggling on a unicycle. Hustle, man. Sometimes it looks like a list, and sometimes it looks like a red nose and face paint.

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Dusty Old Tooth Baggies

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Dusty Old Tooth Baggies

When my siblings and I were little and we lost a tooth, we would excitedly place the tooth under our pillow and drift off to sleep with dreams of the BIG GIANT one dollar bill that would take its place. Oh but Tooth Fairy, aren’t you an unjust little thing, because don’t think we didn’t know that Claire and Abby down the street got FIVE DOLLARS per tooth. What, are their teeth better than ours? NO, they eat just as much candy as we do, and you are probably not as sparkly as people say you are, so chomp on that with your huge collection of tiny child teeth, which BY THE WAY, is a terrifying and alienating hobby, but we look forward to your TLC show.

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