A guy from staff carpet came to measure the basement floor. I was hoping to have that done before Ethan and Laura moved back, but in my inexperience with home renovations, I didn’t realize that carpet people are usually booked 6-8 weeks out for installation. So that’s not going to happen until the end of June at the soonest. I did go visit them sometime last week thinking maybe it could happen in 2-3 weeks. So that was an adjustment but I’m just glad to be on track for new carpet.

My hip has been hurting me for a couple of months. It had been intermittent but lately the past month or so it has been almost constant. It effects my sleep to where there is no position or side that I can lay on where I feel relief. I had googled this at one point and found a funny name with several therapy exercises involving your leg. For a while it went away. But now it is back so I googled it over again to try and find the funny name. 9 out of 10 cases can be relieved with wearing looser clothing around the waist and with weight loss.

I have had trouble with this hip for a long time, the earliest memory being the popping sound when we’d walk to the track for PE. Then it was the numb spot the size of a quarter that appeared on the side of my leg in my 20’s. It takes up most of the side of my leg now. I would have burning in that leg at times while standing at the med card, which is when I had started googling the first time. It’s one of those thing that’s forcing me to find something, to get moving again because I really need to now.

We were back at PORTA for the last regular season track meet. These seasons go so fast that I wouldn’t mind a couple more meets. Sectionals isn’t this week but is next week for the boys. Their 4×4 team still has not run the qualifying time but came within a second or so tonight and beat the favored home team in quite the upset. I actually felt bad for the other team’s anchor who stayed with our anchor the entire time until the final stretch. He gave it everything he had to stay with him.

Miles rode with us along with Elianna and our youngest. I walked from the bathroom to our room in a bathrobe and saw that he was outside the house by the raised beds. He was there in the morning to help Elianna in the camp kitchen. She was cooking lunch for a school group. I wish our house was cleaner but it was it is with him and our house I feel at this point. The other evening when Elianna was here for I asked if they had any kind of timeline they are talking about as far as marriage goes.

They’ve been together for over three years, and when you come from a family like ours, marriage when you’re 19 or 20 is just something you start to talk about. When it gets to be that long too you start to want to have some kind of assurance that they’re on some kind of path and my daughter isn’t wasting her time or life. I guess they have talked about it but are not necessarily in any rush. They had talked about this summer but married student housing has a waiting list two years long.

“Come here”,” he said. I wasn’t really wanting to make a fuss or wake either one of us up anymore than I already was. I’d woken up and first thing I did was look at the clock. 12:30. Immediately I was hit with the agony of there still being 1 1/2 hours of after prom left. Why they make us do this or why they put us through this…no one has ever asked me to be on an after prom committee and this is my third time having a junior student in this school. Not that I would actually want to be on one.

He was out on the couch so he could wait up for our son. He scooted back to make room for me. I finally gave in and went over there after standing lost in the living room, not knowing if I wanted a drink or someone to hear me or if I would even be able to go back to sleep knowing he was out there somewhere, with the bounce houses and basketball tournaments and whatever else they were supposed to be doing less than fifteen minutes away at the rented venue called The Gym.

“What would you say to your clients if they were you?” I’d already been thinking about that and chapter 5 in the book Codependent No More titled “Detachment”. Obviously I was letting my psychological and emotional state be way too determined by something that was completely out of my control, namely, the physical safety of another person who I was no longer responsible for watching over in the same way. I didn’t say that. “I’m having this flashback to some school event back in Hoyleton.”

I was standing with Karis in the hallway between the locker rooms and the cafeteria. We were there volunteering for a school function, without our babies. But it had been a couple of hours, and that had been long enough. Our bodies felt the separation. “Don’t you think this is the way God meant it to be?”, she asked. I knew exactly what she meant. She was talking about the need to be with them and the desire to not be away from them for too long. I said all of this instead of the chapter thing.

And the tears and the sniffles came. They’re coming now again as I’m typing this out. I reached out my hand and pet the cat who was sleeping on the ottoman next to me. The words of another son’s poem came to mind, “Oreo, I love him so” before we knew Oreo wasn’t a boy. I don’t remember how long I laid there. By the time I went back to bed I think the clock said at least 1:08AM and I felt that at least felt more endurable, like I could go back to sleep now. I barely, just barely, heard him come in.

It’s been a day of continuing to get things ready for the later half of the month when kids are scheduled to move back in. Dad led the charge of telling all the boys what to do and assigning tasks for the morning. They all participated in taking apart a bunk bed and moving mattresses up the stairs and into the now boys room. I’m a little nervous to give up my overflow sleeping room that I use sometimes in the middle of the nights when I cannot fall back to sleep. Sleep is so important these days.

When I wasn’t helping or doing laundry, I spent the other parts of the day rereading one of my top five reads of 2021 called Trauma-Sensitive Yoga in Therapy: Bringing the Body into Treatment. I truly loved this book and reading it again is reminding me of where so much of my inspiration and ideas came from in this regard. This was one of the sources that discouraged any touch between the therapist and client because of the risk of re-traumatization.

But you’re supposed to do the movements together, some as simple as sitting in a chair and moving your head from side to side and noticing if and where you feel any sensations. Or noticing what it feels like to have your feet on the ground. Some of those I don’t like as much. Sometimes the idea is to tolerate discomfort and sit with it longer to know it is possible and does not need to frighten you. Other times it’s to notice discomfort and foster the internal sense and ability to adjust and change it.

My friend and I met for dinner at McAllister’s to continue with our Unwanted book study. It’s been over a month since we’ve met in person and the last chapter we had to do via email. In my experience I have learned that it can be useful to try to better understand yourself and your personal history. When you’ve done that over and over it can even still be useful. It’s kind of like the Bible where you think you know it fairly well but there is always something new you can learn.

One of the workbook prompts was, “Reflect on moments when shame has been most pronounced in your sexual struggles”. Again, I have not been over thinking this and am just writing what comes to mind to me first. All I wrote was, “That I could not move beyond my __________ __________ for so long.” Even when I wrote it I thought, “Ugh, please stop” and imagined the blank stare from my friend and her thinking on the inside, “Seriously, why was this such a big deal, this brief thing?”

But I talked about how I finally just had to go into it and say, “Okay, I need to somehow deal with this and find some healing and relief and a way back to my life”. It had taken so many years of my life in the form of mind space. I learned that psychologically you cannot push things under the rug or just expect time to heal something so persistent that isn’t going away. It has to be actively dealt with. Sometimes I think that God afflicted me with something so that I could have the time to go into it.

And other times I feel like the affliction was the result of me not going into it sooner which caused other things to fester, evolve, and grow into something completely unmanageable and destructive, with that destructive aspect manifesting in me and my bodily state. However it happened, I could see how God used it all for my good. She said that as I was sharing that it was helping her too, because she’s had the same feelings of frustration over her slowness to be ready to heal more.

Because hers has been slow too, and it has. Another question which I didn’t have finished was “Consider how self-compassion might counteract shame. In what ways can you practice self-compassion as you address your sexual brokenness?” All I could say was that this was the turning point for me. That self-compassion was the pivotal key to one of the greatest things I was meant to learn. I don’t know if I could’ve ever learned it otherwise. It wouldn’t have been as lasting for sure.

Sometimes I wish I would’ve documented more of our homeschool era. I had an instagram account before this current one where I would occasionally post pictures of our life that included the kids. I could’ve posted so many more. We had all of the things that an instagram homeschool account could’ve offered. The nature. The colorful and stimulating schoolroom that was also cozy and ordered. The number of children that kept the pictures and our day to day lives full and busy.

At some point I started to feel like posting pictures of my kids was an invasion of their privacy, or was an exploitation of their lives. They had not asked to be cute fodder for my pretty squares. And honestly I don’t remember ever intentionally using them as such, or even trying to have pretty squares. I was simply sharing what was beautiful at a time when left and right I was surrounded by beauty and purpose and joy and deep fulfillment. I knew it wouldn’t last but for a long time it did.

So I am grateful for that. I never felt it was my place to be teaching moms how to do it. My only academic standard was to stay on par with grade level in case I ever died or for some unforeseen reason they would need to go back to school. That was never voiced to them. For most of them this worked well. I did have one who struggled more and learned to read when he was older. I made him do his work when he should’ve been in the story corner with me. I would change that if I could.

Today was a good day at Hope. I really do just find these people and their situations so interesting. The two individual sessions I had today are only coming for monthly check-ins. These are the people who aren’t really wanting solutions or suggestions they are mostly just coming to have someone to process with and be supportive without judging. Judging doesn’t mean you do not tell them what you’re seeing or what is sparking thoughts. It means you don’t think less of them for whatever it is.

I’m still a little lost when I think about how we are already almost a week into May. I like my schedule that allows me to work three days and then have four days off to mostly spend how I want. I am wondering if part of the speed of time has to do with having a more regular routine and schedule. The three days I am working do bleed together and there isn’t much else I’m doing or thinking about on those days. I am so glad I did not spend my past 20 years being away like this every single day.

If that previous section doesn’t make sense it’d because I’m too tired to think straight. Since the boys only have practice most of this week we’ve all been home for supper which has been nice. These evening we even hung out in the living room and talked for a while. It was fun. We had 30 minutes of working downstairs in the boys’ room to continue getting things ready for the summer guests to move back. I packed up a bag of boys’ dress pants and sweaters to pass along to my younger sister.

This time of year it’s like a spell comes over the land. I don’t think it’s as bad as previous years, but I am currently in the throes of my springtime sleepiness that truly makes me feel like I could sleep for eons and then wake up in a story. I wonder sometimes if it’s my version of allergies.

This morning I was at Thrive and saw two patients. The supervisor is in Florida for a week so he wasn’t there to do anything except leave behind his feel like a settled mist. I went up into the emptier office to take pictures but like everything else related to there, we will see.

College kids are starting to come home from school already. We have reached the point in the season where there are only two track meets left with a bonus one if state finds its way. We did laundry and made soup and corn bread and moved furniture around in the bedrooms.

This evening we had a meeting at work to discuss things that have happened lately with people leaving. The three counselors who left have started a private practice together and today was the first day of them launching their business. It seems like there are so many therapists in our area I don’t know how people stay full or how there are this many people needing therapy. But pretty much every private practice therapist has their patients and don’t have trouble staying full.

They introduced the new clinical director who is coming back after leaving the agency a little less than two years ago. He seems young which I know doesn’t disqualify people but at the same time does make you wonder about their experience. He seems to have a decent amount and definitely more than I have had at this time. It was one of those buddy buddy reunions that felt exclusive since I was not in on the group that had been there while he was previously there. It’s really fine.

For the most part I just feel like I am there to do my job, do it the best that I am able, and be polite and appreciative to staff and coworkers. It was brought up in the meeting that the board needs to consider raising the salary of the counselors. This was a big reason behind the other counselors leaving and the person who spoke up thought it was only inevitable that more people would leave if the situation was not remedied. Right now it works for me but I have ideas for future options.

Honestly though I am just happy where I am. Leaving the nursing has been a huge relief and I was thinking today of making that into a question for someone I am seeing next week. What in your life would feel like the biggest relief to let go of? I have a feeling I know what she’d say but I’ll wait and see what she does. I am basically at full capacity with my schedule with room for maybe two or three more. I haven’t talked to the interim supervisor yet but I am not planning to see that lady anymore.

As of last week there were five on the marriage waitlist. I do feel bad for them but what you don’t want to do is take people on to where there are too many that you can only book them every 3-4 weeks. People usually want appointments more often than that. I guess their leaving bothered me more than I was letting on, but it wasn’t because they left, it was more the reminder that things are impermanent. But even so, you try to still settle into a place and build those new relationships.

It’s been a long weekend of travel and confirmation parties. Yesterday we drove to St. Louis for my nieces confirmation party at my sister-in-law’s house. It was one of those things that we definitely needed to be there for. It was a nice time and we stayed for a while after everyone had left. This morning my son had a church visit assignment so he and I went to major megachurch in town. It really is an enormous church. The pastor preached on patience and how God develops it in us.

After that we came and waited for the others to be home as well. I stayed in bed until it was time to go to another party which we also would not have missed. We didn’t plan to stay too long but the boys got playing and the two of us got talking to various people at the party. One was a pastor’s wife who I used to be friends with. I have nothing against her now but our lives kind of took different turns when I was sick and no longer had the ability to hang out. It took too long to get better.

Once we came home I spent most of the day in bed resting. I’ve been thinking a lot about Thrive and whether or not I am meant to work there. During the meeting last week the action step for me was to write a bio and a more detailed website explanation. It’s taking a long time to write because I don’t even know myself all that I am wanting to do with this. I think the worst part is being afraid of putting myself out there and risking failure. I really would just have to have no strings attached.

I don’t know if I have ever gone this far into a desire that has required something more of me. At least in this way. I am having to grow toward something that is unclear in my mind. I am also being forced to actualize my ideas into a seeable place which requires me to apply myself in a way I’m not used to because it moves me beyond the “could be” point into actual risk. I could’ve been a piano player. I could’ve been a better runner in high school. I could’ve been more developed in writing.

Well anyway I feel like I at least need to try and do that. If it doesn’t work out it doesn’t work out and I will know at least that I followed through and didn’t leave it as one of those incomplete things.