Adjusting

Its Thanksgiving. I've been more of a whiner than a gratitude monger the last couple of years. Oh heck, I'll say it, I've been a big, grumbly baby.  Last week, we got some news that fell into the same category that so much news the last few years has: unsurprising, but still disappointing and terribly depressing.  In my less charitable moments, absolutely infuriating.  I'm tired of being unsurprised by disappointment.

So as I tried to refocus myself on what I'm grateful for (because it is an exceedingly long list), it seemed ironic to me that the first thing that came to mind was one of my own biggest personal frustrations the last couple of years (all of which are pathetically small compared to what my loved ones have dealt/are dealing with).

I love language. My mom made a comment about some of my schooling choices initially being surprising to her because "I've always thought of you as so language-driven".  I learned to read early and was almost instantly a voracious reader, gobbling up just about everything I could.  And even more, the things I've read cover a rather broad variety of subjects.  Consequently, I have a rather extensive vocabulary, and a fairly easy command of language (for a lay person).  Because of the diversity of social environments in which I've spent my life, I, more intuitively than consciously anymore, modify my vocabulary to my surroundings.  There are certainly individuals and groups where I find myself more comfortable (we'll not delve into my social anxieties today), but its exceedingly rare that I struggle to communicate with anyone.

Last year, I faced a period of time where all of that went away.  I struggled to communicate, to express myself.  I was jumbled and inarticulate.  I lost my words.  I've thought of myself as a writer since I was 10-years-old.  I knew I loved the world of language.  But until that moment, even I didn't know how much a part of my self-conception those abilities were. I hoped (and had good reason to hope) that it was temporary, but I had no way to know for sure that it would be--no one offered any guarantees that my words would come back to me.  It was immensely frustrating.  And a little terrifying.  I was depressed and demotivated.  I had to face the reality that I might no longer even be capable of being who I thought I was.

We have moments in life, large and small, that force us to face our definitions and conceptions of ourselves. And its scary when we find that we're not who we thought we were.  As I struggled to figure out who I was without one particular thing I thought essential to myself, I realized that I had always known.  I am a child of God, loved by the Lord, frailties, insecurities, cluelessness and all.  I long ago stopped caring very much at all what anyone else thought of me, my beliefs, my abilities or lack thereof, because the Lord's acceptance is so much more important and meaningful to me than anyone else's rejection.  While I care very much how I make others feel, these days I sincerely rarely even think about what they think of me, much less let it affect how I feel.  But I realized last year that sometimes I still let what I think of me get in the way of my relationship with the Lord and my personal progress.  I still invest too much pride in strengths that aren't mine to boast of, in weaknesses that aren't mine to fear.  Whatever comes, the Lord will empower me to do good things in whatever way he knows is best, and I need to better trust his judgment and his love.

I have many really wonderful people in my life, and I am grateful to my Father in Heaven for putting those people in my life, or me in theirs.  But more than anything, as I reflect on the last few years, I am grateful for his wisdom in placing one really big, obvious-to-me hurdle and weakness in my life, to draw my attention to others that I have been turning a blind eye to.  I'm grateful that, through the Atonement, I have the opportunity to repent and improve, all the while feeling the supernal love the Lord has for me.  I'm grateful that through the Spirit, I can know how to move forward and be better today than I was yesterday.

I'm thankful for progress, however small and incremental.

Love, such as it is

For as long as I can remember, I regularly had episodes of strong deja vu.  I chose to interpret this as a small evidence that life was going the way it was supposed to.  Turns out, my brain was malfunctioning on a regular basis, and it hasn't happened since I started taking medication. But, hey, if you want optimism, I'm your girl.

I have a lot of reasons for optimism.  I have been well-loved by good people, and life has been mostly good to me. I have faith in things much bigger and more beautiful than human foibles and squabbles, things that make the hard stuff and the mistakes less painful and easier to endure.

I made a sort of critical comment the other day, and Doug said, "Wow, you don't have much faith in humanity, do you?"  I laughed and said, "Of course not. Tremendous love for, yes, but faith in? No, no I don't.  I've been told not to put my faith in the arm of flesh, and I've found that life goes better when I don't.  My faith's in bigger things."  Love the people around you, and put your faith in God. Its a pretty happy way to live.

I do have faith in individual persons, to a degree.  I may misread someone's face now and then, but I almost never misread a person's countenance. I am rarely surprised by people.  But Doug has accused me of occasionally having too rosy a view of some people. He's usually been right, and when that happens, it annoys the heck out of me.  I've found that if you believe the best of people, and treat them as though that's who they are, they will mostly live up to it. And when they don't, well, I'm not so hot, either, so maybe we can all just be a little kinder and more forgiving of each other, and we'll try again tomorrow.

But there are some cuts that go a little deeper, some disappointments that sting a bit more.  And once in a while you realize that someone just isn't, and is not going to be, the person you wish they were, and maybe they aren't even capable of it. Not necessarily who they need to be or should be, but who you want them to be, for you.  And maybe that does coincide with who they should be.  You can't argue or lecture or shame or cajole or even necessarily persuade someone to be a different person, especially if you are the one hurt by who they're not. No matter how much it may hurt at first, sometimes you just have to accept that they are what they are, and, with the Lord in your life, you don't need anyone else to be anything for you, as desperately as you may desire it, and even as much as they should be.  You simply need to forgive them for being mortal and love them as they are, with no other expectations.  That may be the only way to have peace, and to love them as much as we should.

I've found that when you do that, suddenly you can see the good things about them a little more clearly, and love those things a little bit more. Resentment can melt into affection, even gratitude.  That person who caused you so much hurt and anger can become someone you adore.  They won't become the person you had wished they were, but forgiveness and letting go of those old expectations can transform you.  You learn to not only love, but like the person they are, instead of resenting them for the person they aren't.

There may be moments when you see something that resembles the relationship you think you want, or should have, or deserve. And it might spark a moment of jealousy, anger, frustration, and/or hurt. Take a step back, take a deep breath and remember that the Savior loves you completely. And that person probably loves you the only way they know how.  That needs to be enough sometimes, and peace only comes when you let the rest go.

Moments of Grace

We needed to run some errands today, so we did something we almost never do and went to multiple non-grocery stores.

At Lowe's, the Christmas stuff is already out.  I used to be one of those Christmas-season-doesn't-start-til-the-weekend-after-Thanksgiving people.  As years with my small children fly by, I've come to realize that stretching out the season that "engages the whole world in a conspiracy of kindness" is something I quite like. Christmas carols are totally an option by November first. We've never done big Christmases, toy and present wise, but we've alway decorated as much as our meager budget would allow, and spent a lot of time making little crafts and decorations, and doing seasonal activities together. As they've grown, I've just realized that the years with my little ones go by so fast, and there are so few of them, that I don't mind at all stretching that special time into two months instead of one.  So, even though the Christmas stuff showing up immediately after back to school sales makes me a bit crazy (craven commercialism much?), by late October it just starts to light me up inside.

The kids were excited when they saw all the Christmas stuff, and spent more than half an hour exploring it. I came across a 2ft tall resin Santa, and was instantly, painfully, dreadfully homesick. Though it really looked nothing like hers, my grandma used to have an old Santa like that that she would sit on a table next to her front door inside her porch, so that he greeted all her Christmas time visitors.  Michael and I helped grandma decorate her house for Christmas every year of our childhood, and when we were little, she had to haul that heavy statue in because we weren't strong enough. By the time we hit middle school, the roles had reversed, and one of us had to carry it in for her.  We spent nearly as much of our lives with her as we did at home, and decorating for Christmas was our job.  She didn't put up a tree or a decoration until we came up to do so with her.  I know a lot of people who think the Elf on a Shelf thing is stupid (which I totally get, and respect), but those two little elves floating around my house make missing her a little less painful at Christmas time. She had a whole collection of elves of various sizes and appearances that she had had since some of her children were at home, and we'd pin them up on the drapes all around her living room.  So I sent a pic of the statue to my brother and told him I was tempted to drop $80 on this stupid Santa to put by my front door, just because I knew I'd think of Grandma and smile every time I saw him.  Christmas is always magical, but there is nothing that will ever compare to childhood Christmases with Grandma.  Until I got married and had kids, I didn't believe I'd ever love anyone as much and I loved Mom, Grandma, and Michael, and, though I adore my entire family, many of my happiest memories are just Michael and I and Grandma, at Christmas time, in her cozy little trailer.

As I stood there, feeling terribly stupid that I was almost in tears over a 2 ft Santa statue, I realized that that is probably how my kids, and all my nieces and nephews, feel about my mom and her house.  My mom is so good to her grandkids, and I honestly don't know another grandparent that invests that much time in that many different grandchildren.  And as I stood there missing my grandma with a horrible ache that waxes and wanes but never quite goes away, I realized that, despite the fact that in a few weeks she will have been gone for 12 years, she is still very present in all our thoughts.  Our children know her.  And she is very much alive in my mother, in her affection and attention to her children and grandchildren.

And I was reminded again (as I have been, often, in the last few years), that I am incredibly fortunate to have been raised by strong women who always put their families first.  I am so grateful to my mom and my grandmas for nurturing me when I was a child, and through my young adulthood.  I am continually grateful for the way they have taught me to be a mom, and the wonderful examples they've set for one day being a grandma.  I am so grateful for the presence they have in my children's lives, my grandmothers indirectly, and my mom directly.

The last few years have been challenging.  There's been more than enough heartbreak and hurt to go around.  I have, at times, given into to pessimism or frustration.  But that flood of warm, quiet memories burst open a piece of my heart in the middle of a hardware store, and reminded me that things can work out.  It reminded me of the examples that have been modeled to me throughout my life of how I can love the people in my life a little better.

A weary world rejoices.  Sometimes, the spark of hope for a weary soul comes in unexpected moments and places.  For that, I am tremendously thankful to the Lord, and to the people he has bound me to. 

"We are probably those referred to as 'our brother's keepers,' possessed of one of the oldest and possibly one of the most futile and certainly one of the most haunting instincts. It will not let us go.”  
~Norman Maclean

I read A River Runs Through It for the first time when I was 16. Because of where I was at in my life at the time, and what was going on around me, I fell in love with it and it became a favorite. 

There are battles that aren't entirely ours to fight, but that we can't quite walk away from either.  "Strengthen thy brethren" is an exhortation that's very close to my heart, but figuring out what it means in specific situations or relationships can be challenging. 

When it was time to go back to school, the reason I chose nursing is that I hate just standing by when someone is hurt. I need to do something.  If I can fix it, or at least help ease the burden, I feel like maybe things will be OK. I've gotten better at accepting that sometimes all you can do is hold someone's hand and acknowledge the painful reality that they hurt and it can't be fixed, at least right now, and not shrink from that.  But when it comes to spiritual pain, I still struggle to accept when the answer is simply "Watch and pray". 

I forget that that is doing something. You can't give someone your faith. You can bear your testimony, but you can't control whether or not they receive a witness.  You can't take away their doubts or their fears or their sins. You can do everything you can think of to give them love, but you can't make them feel loved. 

When my most important people are broken, lost, hurting or angry, I want to scoop all the little pieces of their broken hearts into my hands and mend them back together. But I can't do that--that is the domain of the Savior, and the Savior alone.  I have seen so much heart crushing of late, and a crushed heart is a deeply difficult thing to hand over, because the very nature of the injury makes it difficult to believe that there is a remedy. So we cover it over with cynicism or anger or bitterness or doubt.  At the exact moment in our lives when we need so desperately to turn towards the things of eternity, we turn ourselves farther away from them.  

When someone we love is facing away from the light of joy, we can't turn them around. All that we can do is be kind, try to exercise love and patience and kindness, do all we can to be one of the lights along the shore, so that when they're ready to come home, there is a familiar face to walk with them.

Brain Quirks

A Facebook friend shared a post about left brain/right brain functions and cooperation, which was more about the true physical and functional differences than just the usual pop culture version of those ideas. Some of the emphasis was on how much one side needs the other for proper function, and some of the problems that result when one side becomes too dominant.

I always had trouble with the left brained/right brained personality type ideas. I've always thought of myself as very right-brained in some ways, preferring stories and ideas to details and facts. I've always been fairly feelings-driven, and enjoyed the freedom to be creative. On the other hand, I have always lived in language, being in love with reading and writing for literally as long as I can remember. I've always had a deep need for order to feel comfortable. So I assumed I must be fairly right/left brain "balanced", if you will, but on little self-assessments over the years for various classes and such, I always tested as much more "left-brained".

When I was diagnosed with epilepsy last year, my neurologist told me that, based on where the pathological activity manifested in my brain, and the symptoms that I experienced before, during, and after seizures, it was likely that my Broca's area (the primary area responsible for processing language into speech, usually in the left frontal lobe), and possibly Wernicke's area (where, we think, our understanding of both written and spoken language is processed) are on the right side of my brain, rather than the left. That's not unheard of, but it does tend to mean that not all of my neural activity fits neatly into the normal dichotomy, or its related cooperative functions.

So I'm not crazy. My brain just has atypical structure.

Wait. . . .

And now, for something completely different

At some point in the next week or two, I will finally be replacing my long-finicky computer, and will thus have somewhere to upload pictures, so I'll post about the kids' 4H fair. In the mean time. . .

Doug left his job at the city in late June.  We haven't missed it. We took off on our two week Utah-California-Nevada-Utah-again adventure, with no work or school hanging over anyone's head. It was fabulous. I took my NCLEX the day we left (we drove up to Helena, I spent a little over a half an hour in front of a computerized test, we made a quick stop to feed everyone, and then drove straight down to the Tanners' house in Pleasant Grove), and then I started work two days after I got home.

School started for me on Monday. So now Doug is taking apart chairs and car seats and whatever else and putting it all back together again completely new, learning the ropes of business, and looking at long term expansion/absorption plans, while I work full time nights on the main floor at the hospital, and now add 18 credits of mostly research and writing courses. The kids start school just after Labor Day. I'll be home from work in time to fix hair and make sure teeth are brushed and get everyone off to school, then go to bed, and will wake up just in time for them to get home from school. On the nights I don't work, I can do homework while my whole house sleeps.  Most weeks days this summer, Doug has taken one or two kids at a time to his shop with him. When school starts, though the kids will be at three different school buildings, all four of them will be within walking distance of both the house and the shop. The little girls will be three blocks up from Doug's shop. Keilana will be one block from home. Dylan will be in the middle.

It's a completely new lifestyle. Both parents working. But both of us with enough flexibility that one or both of us is available pretty much at all times. It's almost certain that, though neither of us intended to be, we will be in Anaconda for at least 5-10 years, and I like the idea more than I thought I would. We're making the adjustments, and we're happy.  All of this has happened very differently, and in some respects so much more rapidly, than we had imagined, but we have seen the Lord's hand blessing and guiding our life.  He had provided avenues we never could have known even existed, much less were an option. We are grateful and busy and satisfied and overwhelmed all at the same time. 

On Shells

I came into the world shy, insecure, and introverted. I worked hard on overcoming the first two. When I was in third grade, I found out that a classmate thought I didn't like him because I never talked to him, and I was so sad that I had made him feel unliked. So I went about making an effort to be friendly and outgoing. Not just to him, but to everyone. As a small child, if my and my big sister's memories are correct, I didn't make a lot of noise or talk much outside a small circle of the people I was very closest to. In most places outside my home, I hid behind my mom, my grandma, or my twin brother. At school, I developed a small circle of close friends and only interacted with anyone outside that circle when absolutely necessary. I thought of myself as a nice person, so it didn't occur to me until that moment that my challenges affected anyone else.

And so I gradually became outgoing and friendly--in the context of my tiny school (there were 150 students in my entire high school, and I'd known the vast majority of them since I was 5, if not longer). Outside the comfortable familiarity of home, church, and school, I was still quite reserved and quiet. I took jobs in high school specifically because of how they would challenge me to step outside myself. I didn't want to miss anything or anyone I might love because I allowed myself to be hampered by innate shyness.

But introversion can't be trained away. I loved going to school every day. But after six hours of school and an hour of seminary, I was done.  I played one sport a year because I loved the physical activity and being part of a team, but I played only one sport a year because I couldn't bear the thought of spending an extra 2-4 hours every weekday, and more hours on Saturday, peopleing for any more months. Most week days after school, I went home to an empty house. If it wasn't empty, I often went for a drive, or holed up in my room, or found an empty spot in our blessedly ginormous yard. I didn't often do friends during the week. Two weekend days a month, I might go to Missoula to go to a movie or out to eat with friends. But I usually took a weekend off in between. I didn't do parties at all really--outside of school, my socializing was usually 1 or 2 friends at a time and that was plenty. I spent evenings and weekends filling up notebooks with writing and spending very little time talking to anyone, except maybe my mom.

I was very active in my church, and I loved going on Sundays and to Wednesday night activities. But stake dances were not something I participated in. I went to one, the week I turned 14, with my brother and my dad. It was fun. I had no interest in doing it again.  The only other dances I attended were the ones that were an obligatory part of seminary and EFY conferences. I left the dark, loud, crowded gym that felt like an assault on my senses, and spent the evening out in the sunshine having wholesome conversation with some like-minded souls. And I loved that. The only school dances I attended were proms, and I usually ended up spending most of those out in the hall in the light chatting with a couple of friends. Loud, dark, and crowded doesn't work for my nervous system.

I can be insanely chatty with people I am comfortable with, but the vast majority of the time, even in places where I'm very at home (such as with my brothers and sisters), once the conversation involves more than 2 or 3 people, I end up hanging out on the edge, listening more than talking. I didn't often share my writing when I was younger, but when I did, I grew accostumed to the somewhat dumbstruck look that would appear on people's faces when they read it. The comment that I remember most clearly, from a YW president who read some writing I had compiled for a Laurel project, was "I had no idea there was that much going on up there." It was a compliment, and I took it that way, but at the time it almost felt backhanded. I had to stop and remind myself that I didn't share much, that when I did talk it was often too quickly (a combination of nerves and genes--sometimes I have my Grandma Umphrey's rapid, lazy tongue), and my conversation was usually littered with defensive sarcasm and inappropriate giggling.

But in my mind, the person I was in my writing was me. This is who I really am, who I see myself as. All that other nonsense was just a superficial set of half-developed tools used to make my way through unfamiliar territory, and I sometimes forgot that the person in my mind didn't entirely match the person I appeared to others to be. Not because of any deception, but merely because of a difference in elements and abilities. It took me some time to realize that that was why I loved turtles so much: the me I was when trying to communicate outside my safe little circle, the attempts to be "social" in the ways an extroverted world (especially extrovert-loving school systems, where I wanted so desperately to please adults that I respected) expected me to, was the poor out-of-her-element turtle, lugging that heavy shell around, slowly and awkwardly. I knew instinctively that, as difficult as it could make locomotion in those less natural environments, that shell was absolutely necessary for health and survival. I can peek out, I can lumber around, but I need that shell. And I got that, even if sometimes it felt like the rest of the world didn't. Writing has, for pretty much as long as I can remember, been my water. The shell is still there, but here I can move swiftly and agily, I can navigate without the awkwardness, I can safely and happily stretch out my neck and legs.

As I came to understand that, I learned to embrace that shell. I came to consciously realize how necessary a part of myself it was. People who don't have shells don't always understand that. Sometimes it really bothers them. People who thrive on social interaction sometimes believe that you are somehow not enjoying life or not getting as much out of it or you need to be fixed, because you'd rather sit outside alone than participate in the group activity. I may have spent much of my time intentionally alone, but I have a lot of very deep and meaningful relationships. I try very hard to be outgoing and accommodating to the people in my life. But there's nothing wrong with me. There's nothing wrong with having a sturdy shell. And if you have a shell, or your kid has a shell, don't let someone convince you that that's something that needs to be fixed. Yep, you need to be willing to pop your head out and have a look around. You need to be willing to haul that heavy awkward thing across the sand to live a full life. But don't ever let anyone tell you you have to get rid of it. It protects a sensitive, tender body, and that's OK.