I didn’t sleep much last night. Josh had reset his alarm for an earlier time so I could wake up and get started on finishing my paper. I ended up waking up several hours before the alarm and went ahead and got up. I asked if it would bother him if I was typing in our room. We have so many windows around that the living room is creepier in the middle of the night.

He said that was fine. I typed for a little bit on our floor but eventually moved into the living room after needing to change positions. Before I left I changed his alarm back to what he’d originally set it for. He left in the morning to spend some time with his dad at the hospital. After printing things out I left for class a little after 11 and told the kids dad would be back again soon.

After class I met dad and the kids at Jeremiah’s visitation. The older kids stayed there the whole time with Josh and after we had visited with others for a while the boys and I left to pick up some grocery items from the store. We ate supper together and afterward dad packed the van. The coach sent a text saying they were praying for everyone and for safe travels.

Ethan and I went out for supper yesterday evening. One of the things that happens in times like this is I start wanting to pass down every single piece of sage advice and life lesson I can think of. Before he went to high school I told Josh he needed to take him out and have whatever kind of talk he needed to have before then. I never asked what they ended up talking about.

So this time I figured it was my turn to say whatever it was I thought needed to be said. I thought I’d make up for all the things I never said or wished I’d taken more time to say over the course of the past four years. But I didn’t really end up doing that. We watched videos on my phone from another mom from when one of their friend groups had made a short movie for school

After that we drove to the park in Sherman. He asked what we were doing and I said, “I feel like…” and that was all I could manage. A few minutes later I tried again saying, “I just feel like this is basically the last…” And eventually I was able to say a few more things. We walked down the sidewalks and sat for a while on one of the benches by the pond. Then we came home.

We drove into Chatham this evening to get ice cream at Sabores. It’s a Mexican ice cream place is how I’ve heard it described. I liked it right away when I saw it. The colors are bright and the counter is full of fun looking ice cream and popsicle juice bars. I was sort of craving ice cream after we’d finished a family supper out. Ice cream is just one of those summer things.

My son said he knew where we could get some ice cream. The girl he went to prom with back in April has been in the picture since that happened. My husband told him that pretty Lutheran girls who show that kind of dedicated interest in you do not come along every day and that this was a big deal. If he had any interest in her at all then he needed to be letting her know.

Kids having significant others or anything resembling it isn’t something I imagined happening right now. I guess this is all practice for when the kids are grown up and have their own families. We will no longer be the core family unit that spends every evening and holiday together. I’ve been asked several times this week about going this way and that with Miles or Laura.

I’ve tried to be saying yes, and they always seem surprised. Between the two of them there has been going out to dinner after cross country practice, eating dinner with Laura’s parents, going to the last youth group gathering before college, the state fair, and watching movies. None of this accounts for the time that’s also been spent texting or emailing or discording.

I’m unable to keep track of their lives like before. This evening I asked if my son has posted anything on snapchat yet. He looked slightly confused and said you really don’t post things there. So then I asked if he’d made any snaps and he said yes. Of the cats, of the baseball field when it was covered in water. I don’t need to know everything, but I do enjoy when they share.

It’s been quite the unusual week to say the least. Josh left this evening to spend the night with his dad in the hospital. After another ER trip, and then yet another, they finally were able to get him admitted. I didn’t have a chance to write it all down then. This was supposed to be our family vacation week. It was blocked out long enough before we knew any of this other stuff was happening.

There really are times when life just feels heavier. This is one of those times, or at least in moments it is. The boys have pretty much been doing their own thing. I keep apologizing to them that the plans keep changing and that we haven’t really been able to do the fun things we planned. I am operating at nowhere near my full capacity. I keep thinking the business will all be over soon.

I’m not upset. This is just what happens, and for whatever reason seems to be the particular cross I bear in this life. My dad says we all have hands we’ve been dealt. I told him that in the Lutheran world we refer to them as crosses. Sometimes others can be there to support us, but ultimately the hands we are dealt are here to make us more like Christ. It’s the work God wants to do in us.

And yet I am upset a little. Not the kind of upset that is a waste of my energy, but the kind that says, “Lord, I need you here too.” So many others need you and I want you to be there for them in their needs. Tend to them first, but don’t forget about me, Jesus. I know when this comes it isn’t sympathy I need, or other people to think I’m strong. It’s the Lord himself, whatever he alone can give me.

When babies are born they teach you to breath through painful contractions. I don’t think I ever was good at that part. I’d get tense in the rocking chair and forget to relax. But relaxed or not there was no getting around what happens inside you. It has to happen, just like our pain does. It’s how he births us, how he frees us to where we can truly say just walk with me, Lord. That’s all I need.

My daughter and I went into town this morning to work on our papers at my in-law’s house. Our internet connection wasn’t working again, which happens sometimes when its foggy or rainy. Josh called the company and someone came out and looked at it. Apparently the problem was just two little cords that had been switched around on the outside antenna. Nobody we know of has been outside on the side of the house messing with the cords.

My husband thinks it’s the Camp CILCA ghost. One time he went down to main camp and found that someone had shut off the water that runs to the dining hall and bathrooms. The man switched the cords and the internet was up and running again. When we got home my son came and told me he thought his friend must have died in the night. He’d started seeing friends posting tributes on social media. They’d found a brain tumor two summers ago.

The visitation is Monday and the funeral Tuesday. The boys were supposed to be in Nebraska those days. After talking to the coach they worked it out that they’ll be staying for the visitation and leaving Tuesday morning now. The coach said his best friend from high school died from brain cancer when he was a sophomore in college. He was immensely understanding of the situation and predicament. This coach in my opinion has been nothing short of phenomenal.

I’ve seen a couple of tributes people have written on social media. All of them are thankful that Jeremiah is safe and resting in the heavenly home of his Lord. I remember Jeremiah having a unique sense of fashion and being the life of the party. I imagine him walking around heaven in a sparkly red jacket with a smile on his face. He was too young to drink so he wouldn’t be holding a beer, but in the same spirt would be saying to us, “Guys, this is great.”

This evening I made a picture collage for my son to take to school. We’ve got a checklist of things we’ve slowly been working on this week. Included on the list were mementos and comfort items. The only picture request he had was the one with Jeremiah from the graduation party. After graduation and two other parties, the two of us went to one last party for an absolutely beautiful memory I will never forget. From the grass and the car I watched them play.

Two of the kids ran our old homeschool PE mile course this evening. Both of them came home saying that they had cut almost half a minute off of their personal best mile times. Neither one of them believed that that could be right. It’s been a while since I mapped it out, but I was pretty sure what they’d run was a mile.

One of the boys and I went out and walked it after I downloaded a GPS app on my phone. It was a mile, though they both had started from a different tree than I started from which may have affected the time by five seconds, but not thirty. I don’t know where the running thing comes from. They definitely didn’t get it from me.

While this was all happening, another one was at the bike trail. Ethan and one of his school friends ran seven and a half miles. After that they stayed at the old high school where a summer baseball practice was going on. He said the practice was almost over and he was going to try and catch the coaches before heading back home.

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.

“And after years of hearing the heart-cry of women, I am convinced beyond a doubt of this: God wants to be loved.”
~John Eldredge, Wild at Heart~

Well, I took the advice of what others suggested and sat with someone else besides my family at the potluck. Josh was in Urbana filling in for a pastor. I sat with one of the couples who’d been in the marriage group that he and I led over this past school year. The flowers on the altar today were given in honor of this couple’s upcoming 49th wedding anniversary. In our group we had a semi-regular newlywed couple, along with four other regular couples who had all been married for 35-40+ years.

Earlier this morning I’d texted a woman from church asking if she wanted to come to the potluck. She and I have connected over potlucks before and the jokes we make about having to bring things. I told her I’d made an extra item she could have if she needed something to bring. She texted back and said she and her husband were in Canada on a cruise celebrating their 50th. I told her that was a good reason to miss, that there’d almost certainly be better food there, and to enjoy her time.

It was actually fine and I enjoyed my time too. This couple that I sat with was actually very instrumental in normalizing what I am currently going through with my oldest. On the night of our last marriage meeting, the topic of kids leaving the house came up. In reference to this, this husband said, “I remember there were lots of tears involved”. That opened the door for me to ask, “Can you tell me more about that?” And for the next half hour the wives shared stories of tears and the husbands affirmed.

I was very grateful for that night, because I think it increased my husband’s own awareness and compassion. He’s been very patient with my tears these past months, comforting me when I’m crying out of nowhere again. I know you’re not supposed to compare sufferings with others, but with myself I’ve started comparing seasons, wondering if this is worse than the time when they were all young and little. This is the first time since then that any season of motherhood has caused me to ask this.

From the time when my kids were very little, my heart was full of love for them. The things I did for them, the life I chose and lived for them, the life I chose to keep on choosing for them, the way I poured myself out for their welfare was done for one reason and one reason only–because I loved them. It was done without thinking about my own life or consequence. That did eventually start to come, but it wasn’t there in the beginning. I didn’t know what love was, what all the deepest of loves entailed.

Loving them was the first time I ever identified with Christ’s love. He suffered and gave his life, I was doing the same. I could look at Jesus and also see myself on the cross. Nothing else had even come close to that magnitude. Of pain. Of love. Of sorrow. Of brightness. For where Jesus was, my light was also. And I didn’t do it to be loved back. Loving them, just having them itself was enough. I do wish sometimes they’d love me more, and I can let that go too, because to love someone really is setting them free.

This is off topic, but I’d really like to serve the Lord. Whether up there or down here, I’ve got things I want to do. It’s interesting because when kids are little we talk about how forgiving they are toward our mistakes, and they are. We also talk about how much we lose ourselves, and we do. It can make me sad and make me feel like they did not fully know me. They know what they have seen, but they have not seen it all, because everything could not be seen at once, a fuller grace and truth for more than me.