“Eternal Spirit of the living Christ, I know not how to ask or what to say;
I only know my need, as deep as life, And only You can teach me how to pray.”
~Eternal Spirit of the Living Christ, LSB 769~

For Sunday School we have a 10-15 minute music opening in the sanctuary with the kids. The pastor’s wife leads it. The two younger classes are there, so the preschool class and the K-5 class. The class I teach usually has 3-5 kids depending on which ones are there. I really enjoy the kids in my class. In the past I’ve taught junior high and high school, preschool, and 3rd-5th grade.

I’m finding the K-5 class to be an ideal age, at least for me right now. With older kids you have to be interesting enough to keep their attention. With the preschool kids you have to have a plan of things to keep them busy. With these middle kids, they are automatically interested, and have grown accustomed to sitting still. They like to learn, draw, read, ask questions, and act out the stories.

During the opening we sang the above verse and song. For some reason I got choked up while singing it. The tune was familiar, but I don’t recall ever seeing the words. Lately I just haven’t felt like myself, in that my heart is hurting but I don’t really know why, or can’t put words to it. I saw the words “as deep as life” and I knew that whatever it is it’s something, a comfort that only God can give.

We had a nice weekend. The kids were mostly home yesterday and today. During this most recent time when I was in bed more I’d texted my mom a list of my problems. She zeroed in on the part about the dryer being broken. I told her that when I felt well enough to go into town, I hadn’t had time, and when I did have time, I hadn’t felt well enough. I just hadn’t been able to get to it.

We ended up talking on the phone after that. For a tedious 45 minutes she got me to answer questions such as where camp typically gets its appliances, whether the dryer is gas or electric, what kind of plug is downstairs next to it. I listened while she called around to Lowe’s, Menards, Dick Van Dykes, getting information about their delivery availability, prices, and old dryer pick-up.

By the end of the call she had texted me a website, a phone number, instructions even on how far to scroll down to. I was going to run it by Josh just to make sure we were good on using camp information and money to buy it. The next day she texted me asking if there’d been any dryer progress. I thought to myself, “I have to do this. She basically just laid it all out there for me.”

The very next day they delivered a dryer. All I’d done was called, told them the number of the dryer I wanted, and given them the payment and address information. They could drive their truck around to the back so that way they wouldn’t have to deal with the stairs. It felt amazing to have a dryer again, and this weekend it was nice to have the laundry flow going and fold warm clothes.

We met Papa in town for lunch after church. We ate at MCL which is a place I like because you can just go through a line without having to sit down, order, and wait. By the time that church and Sunday School are over I’m usually feeling ready to go back home. Sometimes I do but today was alright. We had a good lunch together, then came home and enjoyed the rainy Sunday afternoon.

The big kids had a field trip at Six Flags today. Dad went along since he was one of the teachers. They left around 7 and came home a little past 8PM. After dropping off the boys at school I went to the Y to swim for a while. Before I went inside from the parking lot I talked to my sister on the phone for close to an hour. We didn’t mean to talk that long but sometimes that kind of thing just happens.

I can’t figure out people’s swimming schedules. Sometimes when I go the lap lanes are hardly being used at all. Most of the time there are at least two open. The past two times I’ve gone all the lanes have been full. People are pretty nice about sharing lanes when this happens. These past two times I’ve had to share a lane. You just make sure to stay off to your side and it works.

This afternoon the boys and I started cleaning up the front of the house. It’s that time of year when I feel the call to pay attention to what the outside of the house looks like. It really can get to be such a mess and I don’t even notice it or think anything of it. There’s more to be done but it looks a lot better now. I still need to get some colored pots with flowers, plus new welcome mats for the doors.

On the last day of school the teacher brought me a piano. He was getting rid of his unused instruments and asked if I’d have use for one. We have two pianos already, but I was happy to take it. It’s an electric one and used to be in the campus chapel before a student sat on it and bent one of the legs. You just have to prop up the leg on one side. We used to have an electric piano that the kids broke by hitting on the keys too hard.

The boys are doing a good job practicing on their own. As a mom you really get tired of the nagging and I don’t have it in me to be in charge of making sure they practice. Of all of us I’m the one who practices the least. I haven’t quite found my groove with it yet, but I will if I decide that’s what I want to do. I was actually practicing earlier this evening and one of the songs started playing a lot easier than I expected, like I could learn it.

It feels hard to talk about my family right now. You spend all these years trying to create a home for your family and doing what you can to provide them with a stable, nurturing, stimulating, and loving home life. It’s the most incredible work I’ve ever done or will do. These past couple of years have contributed to me missing out on key parts, held up somewhere in another dimension, while in the meantime time has continued to pass.

No pictures are good enough
No words are true enough
for me to come through
and let things go

No lines make sense enough
No rhymes with fence enough
for scenes to be real
enough to know

So pick up your mat
and walk God says
But I say, Lord
I can’t today

This woman I follow on Instagram went to a Taylor Swift concert last night with her daughter and posted like 18 videos of it in her stories. I think it’d be fun to go to one of her concerts. My sister tried to get tickets to the latest Eras tour at Soldier Field but they sold out almost instantly in the pre-sale. The resale tickets are thousands of dollars.

This weekend actually wasn’t too bad. The boys had a home game they lost 2-15. The player performance was this weekend which is where I saw the kind woman I mentioned yesterday, who when I thought about it more, I was almost certain I had somehow hurt her feelings. I texted her to say I was sorry for not being with it when we talked and for thereby not engaging with her very well.

I’ve noticed that people tend to overthink their social interactions at times. In the past several weeks I’ve had two moms text me apologizing for some kind of thing they deemed as an awkward encounter or something they messed up regarding what they did or shouldn’t have said. Neither time had been hurt or offended, or even thought much myself about the incident they were mentioning.

But I know what that’s like, so you try to reassure them that really everything is totally fine. On other occasions, however, people really do make legit mistakes and missteps. They’re not always easily determinable, and it really depends on the effect your action or inaction had on the other person. Sometimes you have no idea you did anything to anyone, and those are the worst in my opinion.

Because they usually end up coming out later, and you’re blindsided. The most painful experiences I’ve ever had in a friendship are when they pulled away and I didn’t know why. It happened before I realized there was any kind of problem, and by the time I did, the cut had already been made that to this day I think I will always be more reserved with myself and with my personality than I once was.

That’s not to say there haven’t been positive outcomes and growth. I learned personally from that experience and realized with them how unthoughtful I’d been and was assuming that just because I was having a blast that meant everyone else was too. That just because I felt perfectly free and comfortable being myself that they were also having the same positive experiences that I was.

This woman did not go out of her way to provide me reassurance, maybe that’s something they don’t do anymore. We learn to be honest and upfront about our feelings, even if it’s only acknowledging them to ourselves. Even now, 70+ years in, she has reasons it’d be nice if someone were kind and thoughtful toward her. It’s something very true of people all throughout their lives.

A kind and sweet older lady asked me what I was going to do to refresh my soul now that my school was out. I normally have no problems talking to her, but tonight I just stared, like she’d asked me a question I didn’t know the answer to but should have. Laughing in her face would’ve been just plain rude, as would’ve answering with some passive aggressive comment about all the busy things.

“I haven’t thought that far”, I said, when I finally found some words. People don’t normally ask me questions having to do with my soul. What I had been thinking about was how tired I was again, what I needed to be doing to rest and “listen to” my body who’d said “that was too much”. I haven’t really felt well for much of the week. Resting seems the main way of bringing energy back.

This isn’t the first time she’s mentioned it, the doing something for refreshment. I’ve got a note in my Bible that she wrote me several months ago, maybe a whole year ago by now, saying something along the lines of finding something that brings joy and refreshment to my soul. She’d sent me a note, a deep pink flower in a vase, and instructions on how to harvest the seeds to later sow in the wild.

The boys made a bench using two metal end pieces they found in the woods. I could hear them drilling through the bedroom window. When I finally saw it I was very impressed. The rusted screws blended perfectly with the laminate floor pieces they’d taken from I’m not even sure where they found them. They didn’t ask me, and I maybe could’ve used those floor boards for something.

You can’t really sit on it, or at least you wouldn’t want to sit more than one person. But they were satisfied with their work and so was I. The kids have found very strange things in the woods. On the corner of the road before you fully turn into the camp property, there’s a curve where the woods drop off into a sort of ravine. This is part of camp property too but not a part we frequent often.

One day while we were all taking a walk we saw that someone had dumped two leather recliners over the guardrails. Another time at that same corner somebody dumped a garbage bag of deer legs. If the recliners had been left up at the corner, someone could’ve picked them up from the road and probably used them. I don’t know what you’re supposed to do though with a bag of deer legs.

It’s been another full and very filled to the brim Saturday. I was telling a mom friend that this spring stretch that goes until the end of the school year might even be worse than the one from pre-Thanksgiving to the end of December. For many years we were blissfully removed from the rat-race of what I refer to as the tyranny of the school calendar. I have to remember that in days like this.

There was a track meet in Carlinville about an hour away. Josh took the kids. The boys stayed here with me. They’ve all been fighting off some kind of throat, cold, and sinus-type sickness so this gave them all a chance to sleep in. They really have been such good sports the way they travel around with us from place to place. The kids have always been good travelers.

I have a paper left to finish then I can put that aside for a while. The kids had their prom tonight as well. I did my daughter’s hair then we left to meet everybody for pictures. I wish now I could’ve been more focused on it for her. The boys and I then drove to the park where my son was. Josh came back from church and went to the senior walk. I originally planned to go but stayed home.

By April and May I was beginning to identify with people who described themselves as living with chronic illness. There were accounts on Instagram and YouTube as well. One day I was home, the rest having left for some extra-curricular event, which would be the way through the spring. There was a repair man scheduled to come look at the sink. At this point I could not yet be around strangers, or anyone who wasn’t in my immediate sphere.

A woman named Rebekah sort of moved in next door. She and her husband and homeschooled four daughters lived in a giant RV that they had sold their home for. Her husband was needing to be in town for several months with a job project. Her parents and family were long time supporters of the camp, and her husband mowed when he could as a way to give back. For several months they lived in the camp ground by the maples.

“This is so like God”, I thought, “He answered my prayer.” A woman from church had recently reached out, asking if there was anything she could pray for. I asked her if she could pray that I’d find a few friends, proceeding to tell her that it’d been lonely out here, that the homeschooling was wonderful but that I just needed God to bring a friend. I texted her the day Rebekah and the girls moved in, saying you’d never believe this…

She sold Juice Plus supplements as a side business with homeschooling. I hadn’t been able to talk to her myself yet, but she gave Josh three bottles to give to me. I was deeply grateful and desperate to try anything. At the time I was taking anywhere from ten to twenty different vitamins and supplements, hoping something would soon start to work. It was harder to take the JuicePlus, which at two a piece added six more pills.

I don’t know now if she was the friend that I prayed for. I certainly didn’t end up being able to be much of a friend to her. I couldn’t believe, a homeschool mom who was living that close, and I couldn’t even do anything with her. I sent her texts here and there, apologizing that we couldn’t get together. I was used to living out here with my kids, but for a woman living alone in a bus with four kids, with no other way to drive around, I could imagine.

In the three months she was here we only got together twice. I had thought for sure we’d be able to do something, soon when I was better, or at least doing better than what I was. We kept texting about trying to do supper sometime, which never happened. Once we had a day where the kids played outside in the athletic field. Another homeschool friend brought her four kids too. I sat with my blanket just outside of the house.

I didn’t try to describe it then, but if I did to anyone, I described saying that it was like my force field was missing. It had actually been shattered, broken. Your force field is like that invisible shield that surrounds your body, providing a buffer from outside sounds and energy. This part of us takes a very long time to grow back. People doing nothing but talking to me would create a terrible nervous–as in pertaining to the nerves–discomfort.

Around my own husband and kids, it didn’t happen. It was amazingly as though I was immune to their energies, unaffected by the normalness we’d grown so accustomed to. The only time it did was if voices were raised, which I quickly learned was something that absolutely could not happen. It was like an electric fence that would train my soul, and create the boundary I hadn’t been able to create for myself. There had to be a new way.

The repair man showed up some late afternoon. Still resting in bed, I’d been feeling pretty good that day. I answered the door, just hoping to be as normal as possible. The small talk stung, and I braced myself against the rush of moving air that happens anytime a person walks into a room. He needed to see where the basement pipes were, to find the place where he could shut off the water. I walked him down the stairs and then back up.

I did a very foolish thing when he asked for a vacuum, or a broom or something to clean up the sink mess. I walked to the closet and got the handheld vacuum, plugged it in, and bent down to vacuum the mess up myself. Somehow after that I managed to keeping saying words and sign the needed receipt papers. When he left I went back to bed, spent and exhausted. The trees weren’t fully green and I watched them often in those days.

The boys and I met Grandma at the baseball game today. Papa doesn’t come like he used to, but might be there tomorrow because he’s done in the field now. Dad had a meeting then Wednesday night church. Elianna had track practice, came home for a little bit, and then had play practice. I parked the van in three different spots before the boys were satisfied that it was in a spot where the foul balls would not hit the windshield.

They won their game. That puts their record at 3-13. This has pretty much been the way their seasons have gone. I know winning isn’t everything but it is nice to win every once in a while, or at least have the scores not have such a wide range. I really couldn’t tell you what the team’s “problem” is. They seem to have decent coaches and players, with one of the coaches even being a former minor league pitcher.

But it was nice to see them win. Even more so to see them having fun. The game went fairly quickly and we were on the road again by 6:00. He asked me if he could ride the bus back to school. I said that’d be fine and that we’d just meet him there. We beat the bus to the school, so the boys got out and played catch for a while in the grass while we waited. The bus was soon there pulling in. They unloaded the bus and then we drove home.