Today was the first day of another staycation. We’ve got a few things planned to do together but really it’s a week for getting more things done. Josh’s dad has been struggling the past couple of weeks with his health. They’ve been in and out of the ER two times in the past week and almost went again today. If something doesn’t show up on a scan they send you home, even if the pain is rated 15 out of 10.

The kids and I spent some of the day going through clothes. With camp over I wanted everyone to clean out their camp bags and put things way. All of them were supposed to go through their drawers, which is something we didn’t get to do thoroughly when we rearranged and cleaned up their rooms. The kids like their rooms and I feel pretty confident that things will be able to stay picked up for the most part.

I can’t remember if I summarized already what got done. We had the upstairs bedroom that had the carpet taken out and new floors put in. We repainted the walls with a fresh lighter shade. That room is now very open and tidy. The two downstairs boy bedrooms are now as well. I also deep cleaned our bedroom and closet, pantry, linen closet, pictures, parts of the kitchen and schoolroom, and scrubbed both tubs.

I’m feeling very tempted to go back and delete a bunch of these posts that I’ve written over the past several weeks. There was a while where I did not do any form of journaling and I’d be curious now to see the kinds of things I would have written. Some posts from the earlier days of blogging I have deleted. I couldn’t imagine my kids reading them and understanding.

This was prompted by a reel I saw on Instagram this evening. It was a woman saying how much she loved being a boy mom, but then realizing that meant she would have to be somebody’s mother-in-law someday. The gist was that she didn’t like that idea. The people in the comments were not approving. On other reels she had they were telling her to go to therapy, saying she herself was a giant red flag, and accusing her of emotional incest. It made me self-conscious.

Some of this pain that I’ve been going through with my son has made me wonder if this isn’t just some kind of screwed up dysfunction. It doesn’t really matter. Whatever it is, God is fixing it, purging me, whatever it is he does that hurts. I said it already, but I’ve not felt this kind of deep mothering work since the days when I was realizing I was actually selfish and not just a saint.

It’s like this entitlement I didn’t realize was there. For however many years now, these people are the ones I have chosen to spend my life with more than anyone else in the world. They have been my favorite people, the people I have wanted to be with. I want to be friends with them, and sometimes it hurts that they’d rather be friends with other people right now instead of being friends with me. I’m just going to say it. I’m just going to own that I still am learning what love is.

Because I wouldn’t actually want or think it was good for my kids to want to be with me all the time, or even three-fourths of the time, or even half of the time anymore at this point. I feel owed for what I have done for them, and I don’t want to feel that way. I loved them because I loved them and for no other reason. God built the commandment to honor our parents into the creation.

So I know my feelings aren’t completely out there. But I also know that the love of God involves more than simply keeping the commandments. We of all people know we cannot keep them perfectly, and neither will my kids be able to this for me. And they have not even wronged me right now as I write this, they just spent the day at camp again, and one wanted to spent the night there too. I’ve been waiting all summer for him to come home. I love you, son, wherever you are.

My sister is here visiting with nieces and nephews. She brought them down for the 1st-4th grade mini-week. Today was the last day of camp for the campers. The counselors have chores to do before they leave. They help to clean up the cabins and camp buildings and get things set-up to do for the homecoming this Saturday.

We went to see Barbie in the theater yesterday. My niece and two of the boys came with. Going to the movies and getting the overpriced popcorn and sodas for the kids was fun. As for the movie itself, I didn’t love it. The most annoying part of the movie for me was that Barbie was not in love with Ken and they did not end up together.

I’m kind of over thinking about all the feminism stuff. One time I tried to write an article about feminism. I’d interviewed a girl from my husband’s graduating high school class that I knew he’d had debates with on Facebook. She was a professor with a phD in philosophy and a graduate certificate in Women and Gender Studies.

Basically I wanted to hear her story and get her perspective on the definitions and histories of feminism. I’d told her I was interested in trying to help others understand each other better, this case, wanting to help the anti-feminism Christian women see more of the perspective of where pro-feminism women were coming from. I conducted the interview via email and with the interviewee’s permission, submitted the questions, answers, and introduction to a blog where I thought it would be an easy shoo-in.

She said it wasn’t the right home for that particular piece. I had told the girl I interviewed that I would let her know when the article was published. I never went back and told her that it hadn’t been published and the reason why. Most of the time I’ve forgotten about it, but when I do remember, like in this moment, it bothers me that I never wrote back and filled her in on what happened. She was actually a really nice person and if no one else learned anything, I still learned from the answers she gave.

I never had these kind of mental obsessions with my other kids. As I’ve been thinking about all this, it’s weird how certain memories come back. A recurring memory I’ve had regarding my first time being pregnant was when I was working at an assisted living facility in Seward, Nebraska. One time I ended up needing to stay over night for a shift. I didn’t have to work, I only needed to be in the building.

I slept on the floor in the conference room next to the front desk area but without any sleeping stuff. I laid there in the dark thinking I couldn’t believe I was treating my child like this. I had recently found out I was pregnant. From the moment I knew there was a shift in my mind. I remember standing at the dishwasher thinking about this person who was now a part of my life. I thought about him constantly.

There’s a tiny piece of paper my mom and I started when she was down in the few days after we were home from the hospital. Neither one of us had much experience with breastfeeding and were up in the middle of the night trying to figure it out. For approximately 48 hours I wrote down which side he nursed on and how long. L-20 min. R-15 min. L-20 min. And so on. You almost never fed with both sides.

At least not at first because there was too much milk there. He would choke on it at times when it came down fast, spraying him in the face, disrupting our latch, and causing us to have to start the latching on process all over again. Important parts were hard as rocks, sore and huge. How you were supposed to get your anatomy soft enough to form anything resembling a baby bottle was beyond me.

And they were supposed to get the hind milk, because if they didn’t, then they would only get the overly sugary milk and not gain enough weight. “How do you know if he’s getting enough?”, my mom would ask sometimes. I had no idea. You just check if he’s peeing. They say if he’s having 10-12 wet diapers a day then that’s good. He’s going to have to learn how to feed himself there but I’m hoping again we will figure it out.