Frogs and Falling

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Frogs and Falling

There’s a cruel and inescapable phenomenon in which the universe heaps embarrassment on people who are not safely surrounded by the friends who know them well enough to laugh together about it. This is very uncool, Universe, and for the record, we don't love it. NO WE DO NOT.

How many of us have fallen on our faces when we are surrounded by people but NOT ANY PEOPLE WE KNOW? Have mercy, this is a cruel world.

See, Adelaide has a bath toy that's a frog who is wearing a crown. A frog king, one might say. And it's innocent enough, to call a frog with a crown a "frog king," except when that person is three and drops her Rs. Just pause for a moment and run that one through the ol’ noggin again. 

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No Mom Guilt

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No Mom Guilt

I just decided two things: 1. I am not going to fold that pile of laundry over there even though it is glaring at me, and 2. I am banning the phrases “mom guilt” and “mom fail” from my life. Both the laundry and the words have been oppressing me, and I am not interested in being oppressed by anything, especially an inanimate pile of clothes and an inanimate pile of letters. 

When I was a teacher, I did not suffer under “teacher guilt” or say something was a “teacher fail.” When I was a student, I did not have “student guilt” or say something was a “student fail.” I have never said the phrases “wife guilt” or called something a “wife fail,” and I don’t think I’ve ever heard my husband say “dad guilt” or “dad fail.” Maybe it’s just an issue of semantics (although the words we use matter, don’t they?), or maybe it’s something a lot deeper. Maybe the mom role is uniquely guilt-laden.

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Why the Resurrection Matters

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Why the Resurrection Matters

It’s another terrifying story of a mother’s worst nightmare, and it makes my heart stop. “God, NO. This is enough. Please let there never be another story like this one!” I bang my fists on the counter, looking at my own children and cannot fathom how I could ever endure the loss of them. Sometimes the fear smothers me. My faithless heart screams, “God, you say you are the Comforter, but how could there ever be enough comfort for this? How will you ever comfort her?” My kids scream for more juice, and I find myself grateful for their screams, desperate for them to always be around to scream.

I’ve never been in a place where my faith has to hold up under the weight of something this heavy, but oh, how I have railed at God on behalf of those who have.

Just the night before, a dear friend of mine was in an unusual position, watching her brother play the part of Jesus in a local Passion Play. She said it was startling, overwhelming, to watch someone you know and love, someone you laugh with, be beaten, nailed to a cross. It was a reenactment of course, but a powerful one, and my friend noted, “It’s just so crazy to remember that it actually happened.”

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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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