Reprocussions for the Things

Trever and I close escrow tomorrow.  I forgot how stressful it can be buying a house.  All the loan documents and paperwork is nightmarish for both Trever and my personalities.  Then of course the moving bit has its own unsettling effect.  I woke up in the middle of the night last night and did yoga in my kitchen, which is the only open space in my house, just to ease some tension of living in the aftermath of an explosion of things! We have too many things. I ended up waking up this morning and cleaning my house, which felt like wiping a bit of mud off a pig.  I pushed boxes into corners and made my kitchen and bedroom the safe zones.  I mopped the floors and cleaned the bathrooms, all of which had cycled out of control once the first frame came off the wall, and then I took a nap. 

I need naps recently.  I missed the tired portion of first trimester pregnancy and so I felt like I bypassed the fatigue and pregnancy wouldn’t get me down.  I know all the mothers are internally patronizing me for my adorable ignorance, because of course I now feel like I returned from another time zone only yesterday and just cannot beat this jet lag.  I’ll be in a meeting around 3:00 and could literally close my eyes mid sentence and likely fall quickly asleep.  I have to avoid people with calming and slow voices during that part of my day.

This fatigue however, could also be due to our current diet.  We went to Trader Joes this weekend and bought a bunch of frozen no cook meals for the week in anticipation of the chaos and a boxed up kitchen.  On Monday night I heard the beep of my microwave, peeled back the plastic cover from a plastic plate full of Veggie Korma and placed it in front of Trever.  My granola self looked upon what I had become that night and shamed me for my decisions.  Trever on the other hand was rather happy, like so happy that he told me I was going to have a hard time convincing him to go back to eating the way we normally do. He's noted that lucky for us these frozen sodium packets are low in calories which is an added benefit to death by preservatives.  You see, it might be important to know Trever is kind of ironic by nature.  I was talking to my friend Kayla about this, how right in the center of all his good taste, fashion industry work, fine art degree and general hipness, he’s still from Hemet and would honestly prefer Del Taco and PBR to a client meeting at Nobu. Truth is though, this is actually one of my favorite things about him, shitty towns make good people, sucks the life right out of any pretentiousness.

So, I ate my sodium rich indian food and was grateful in the middle of the craziest season of life we’ve had to date.  Houses are just houses and in the midst of chaos we kind of have to laugh at all that’s happening.  I clutch my round belly in gratitude for a tiny life that has already changed me in ways I could never have understood before.  I pray for her incessantly and can’t wait to make her a home that’s simply walls and a garden but really a place that she’ll feel loved.

I know she already is so loved.  My friends and family have been so kind and gracious and grieved and celebrated with us like she was their own. And to all of you who have been following along with me, I wanted to say thank you for your love.  The grace with which you have responded to me, my writing, and my family has overwhelmed me.  Your continual offerings of encouragement and prayer has been an honest source of support for Trever and I.  It’s been a difficult season and yet there has been comfort knowing the amount of people who have been crying over, praying for and celebrating Colette.  It’s humbling to be the recipient of your love.  So thank you, with all of my heart, thank you. 

And that's a wrap, off to the boxes again. 

The Ballet

No one can tell you what life and love are like.  There are so many things that are simply notions of our minds until we experience them ourselves.  I suppose it’s the limits of empathy, we can never completely put ourselves in someone else’s place, because at some point our imaginations are limited to what they know. 

I’ve learned this about knowing grief.  There are profound experiences I understand via pain that have taught me more than I care to know.  But my capacity for empathy has expanded and thus my capacity to love has as well.   

The same is true of knowing love. Today is Valentines Day. Trever and I don’t make a thing of it, we usually celebrate later in the week when the crowds have dissipated and so have the prices. 

But 13 years ago was our first Valentines Day and our first real date, I was 16 and he picked me up at my dad’s house in Anaheim Hills wearing a suit that was likely two sizes too big. I was wearing a choker necklace representative of the circle of life, or the circle of fashion, as it were.  We had been together for close to a year at that point but because of my age, or more likely because of his (20), we had to wait to officially date. But finally on February 14th, 2004 he took me to the ballet and after we drove to the beach blaring Deathcab. 

I look back at us and what we were, and as beautiful as it was I’m amazed at the distance we’ve come, amazed at the life we’ve lived.  Somewhere along the way we learned to love, which has a lot to do with choosing. But I think more than that we became capable of love as we knew it from each other, it seems that I had to be loved to be able to love in return.

And then to motherhood. I’ve watched so many of my friends melt into puddles when they became mothers and I could not seem to attain a sense of comprehension for what looked like a loss of self from my view.  And yet now there is a scary love growing within me, a love for one who never could have loved me first. Tiny arms and legs keep kicking me all day and every time it happens I am nothing but a mother.  

I can only assume there are unknowable depths of love as we live life. I find it interesting that this one word holds so much.  Something that swirls itself in and through our beings and lives and attaches us to those around us.  As it intertwines itself and unites us to others our beings become less and less singular and more and more a piece of connection, and ultimately the connection itself is what we’re made of.

My dad wrote me a letter today.  He outlined bits of my life and like a poem ended each stanza with, “and then I loved you more.” I sobbed. I’ve always known he loved me and yet only now do I know that I never ever came close to really knowing his love. I’ve expanded a bit and can now begin to grasp a little more of what I thought I always knew.

I hope this is true of the divine, that we are incapable of understanding the depths of love One has for us. As we grow in love through friendship, family and marriage, I can only assume that by the slow growth of love over time can we come close to comprehension and even then fall extraordinarily short. 

Happy Valentines Day. 

Holding an Illusion

I was in church the other day and the teacher was talking about adoption and drawing the parallels to us as Christians being adopted into the family of God.  He and his wife had decided to adopt their children rather than have biological children so he had a lot of personal stories and experience related to the concept (note: I'm pretty sure no matter how narrow the pearly gates he'll get in, I bet he sleeps really well at night knowing that).  

I was sort of keeping up but I was also distracted by the notion of adoption in general.  It has suddenly become a very personal topic for us as it could potentially be the way in which we have children.  It used to bring me a lot of peace, the idea of adoption as a really amazing way to have a family, but as we have been pursuing fertility treatment my fists have slowing and unconsciously closed tightly around having biological children.  I am holding my breath while aggressively white knuckling our future biological children, staring at their potential as it slips from my fingers.  I can’t seem to look around me and find peace in other places because I can’t be distracted from my death grip on my hopes, forgetting that the grip itself is actually just an illusion.

Every time I think about the release of my expectation and future hopes I get so nervous, I want to keep repeating, “no no no no that’s not what I want” so God and fate and biology won’t stop trying to give us children because the incessant noise of my tantrum will remind them. I wonder if my tactics are working, or if they’re just making my muscles ache for nothing because the control I’m wanting will never be mine.

In this service I looked ahead at some of the families sitting in front of me: one couple who adopted all their children from the foster care system because of compassion not necessity, a family who has two biological children and is currently fostering a third in hopes of adopting, a family that struggled for years with infertility and finally had biological children but will never forget the searing pain of grief, and a family who adopted because of infertility and discovered all the hopes of family fulfilled in their child. For a split second I didn’t feel alone. Suddenly our future, no matter its outcome, seemed ok.

I pealed my own cramping fingers back from my plan for children and the softening instantly brought an alleviation of angst.  It was a lesson in releasing hold of things we can’t actually hold, which silences the lie of anxiety that our future is to be feared and controlled, and it releases the constricting grip on our hearts so we can once again breathe in peace. 

A Field of Wisdom

My father-in-law passed away a couple of months ago.  It’s a very complicated grief because Trever’s father was very loving, but also had some self-destructive behaviors that led to a later divorce from his wife, and a distant relationship with his sons.  It was a sudden death and really quite a tragic one.

After we got the news, we headed out to his small town and walked into an empty home that was still thick with the presence of life.  Glasses left out on the table, some fresh eggs in the fridge, sandals sitting by the front door, an unmade bed, and picture frames of his family scattered on tables - the very normal things of his father’s day to day life. 

We were there to clean it out, to take the only tangible piece of this world still reflecting his life, and throw it away.  We spent hours putting shirts into bags for goodwill, putting frames in boxes, towels in piles for trash with tears streaming down our faces.  The reality of his gone-ness was so clear, none of the stuff mattered anymore but it was once his everyday everything.

We left and drove out to an open field to find silence and smoke some cigarettes, simultaneously alert and foggy we stared at the remaining orange glow from the sun falling behind the distant mountains. We wearily rested in the fields Trever knew so well when his father was a center point to his life, the smell of cigarette smoke lingering on his dad’s clothes, the hours watching planes pass by, the days spent on bikes while the same sun set behind the same mountains.  I laid on the roof of my car looking at the profile of Trever outlined by the fading light and I was overcome by a helpless grief, because all I could do is be there, while we lived out a very significant scene in our life movie, one that would make the final cut of remembering.

We laid there for half an hour in complete silence because it’s all we had left, breathing and thoughtlessness and smoking.  The stars reflected the vastness of eternity forcing into our ticking space and time the shear blunt truth of passing time, of lives come and gone, of the perpetual movement forward that we can’t control and hardly ever notice.  Smoking cigarettes in the field of his childhood and moving forward into a life without his dad.

I looked up at the stars undimmed by artificial light and I thought of eternity.  I was momentarily fully aware of how much it matters and how unavoidable and unknown it is.  So many people comforted us with words of heaven and of his father as being in a better place.  That wasn’t comforting to me. It should have been but it wasn’t. I don’t know that I have a concrete idea of afterlife right now, and I’m certainly not sure how we all get there, so some ethereal dimension was just child’s play to me, a cozy blanket for the ones that needed the comfort of hope. 

I did find comfort though, in the fact that my father-in-law's legacy lived on in his sons.  As he fought hard to keep back the demons of his past, he made space for his sons to be raised well.  They were able to live a peaceful childhood as he stood, arms outstretched, holding back a lineage of abuse and addiction to allow excellence to grow in his boys.  The burden was heavy and he fell under the weight of it, but his sons moved forward relatively unscathed by his afflictions and the world is forever indebted to him for that.

I wanted to find my peace in the now, determined to keep the unknown out, any false hope or positive Christian rhetoric felt like a cover-up for the real pain and the real peace… and then I kept staring at the stars.  The millions I could see, the tiny snap shot into the huge expanse of the universe, so much larger than my mind or our numbers can grasp.  I just kept staring and my prosaic heart softened, defeated by the ordinary view of an unexplored sky. The expanse of the universe battled my arrogant dust-made mind and forced me from my unbelief.  I found in the light of the stars that I was comforted by God, even when I was pushing Him aside while clawing around our literature to define Him.  My mind’s struggle aside, the sky held a wealth of wisdom and for once, I listened.

7 years

Seven years ago today Trever and I got married.  I was a week into being 21, going into my senior year of college and marrying the only person I had ever dated.  We met when I was 15, I had gone to stay with my sister for spring break and met him there at her college…he was 19 (so many jokes in your mind, I know).  We were friends for a couple of months and then started dating, I got a drivers license, graduated highschool, started college, grew up, changed a lot and we stayed together for 6 years until getting married in 2008.  We’ve been together for 13 years and married for 7 and in one sense it seems like a lifetime ago, and in some other ways it feels like our wedding was yesterday. 

I was writing about love the other day, how it changes over time.  How you think it’s supposed to be one thing, and then you think it fails you because it’s something else. Love is funny that way, it can be so fluid, because suddenly it will flourish and become the fulfillment of everything, the completion, the water that blurs the paint between the two and makes it a masterpiece.

Marriage was really hard for us at first and I thought that was going to be our reality forever, just a lot of really hard work.  But it turns out that each year gets better, we become kinder to each other, we learn to love the same things because we love each other, we expect less of each other, we understand each other, we become more secure, we give more, we forgive more, we love more.  When people talk about different kinds of love it seems everyone is chasing after movie love, the romantic sappy new puppy kind of love.  But that’s not the good stuff.  The good stuff comes with time, with hard work, with knowing one another in really deep ways and loving one another all the same.  And we’re only 7 years in, I can only imagine what’s to come.

I had a friend ask me the other day if marriage was worth it.  It fails so often and can be so tragic when it does. I babbled on about why it was, giving her all these details and thoughts about it, but really all I was saying to her was, “yes, of course it is”.