The next phase in my schooling journey is finding a practicum site for the fall. I had actually hoped to do it this past spring and had a site lined up at a drug rehab facility. The professor in charge of approving our paperwork wanted me to find a different site because students had recently had negative experiences there with not being able to get enough supervision hours. The practicum requires 100 hours total of observation, documentation, and face-to-face client time.

I have an interview this Wednesday with Memorial Behavioral Health director of the partial hospitalization program. It’s for people who come for the structured environment and therapy sessions during the day, but are able to return to their homes on evenings and weekends. Something I am interested in is group therapy, which is commonly done in outpatient or step-down programs like this one. It is a way of fostering and experiencing healing in community.

The bedroom cleaning project is coming along slowly but surely. I’m still in the first room, so the early stages of what I hope to get done. I feel as though I’m experiencing a sort of reverse form of nesting. I have gone into a self-imposed time of solitude where I am not interested in anything but what needs to be done here. Part of me says not to delude myself, that I’ve attempted projects and fizzled out on them before, that it’s pointless because it’s just going to get messy again.

About three in the afternoon I suddenly ran out of energy. I rested in bed, which I’d already done and fallen asleep in the later morning. I didn’t fall asleep the second time but wished that I would have. It takes away the sleepiness from my eyes and resets my body. Sometimes I get a second wind in the evening but I don’t think that’s going to happen today. I was telling my sister the other day, maybe back when we were at state, that my bed has become my favorite place in our house.

At least it is when I’m tired. For all the hours I’ve spent in the school room you would think that it’d be organized and spic and span right now. It’s currently become one of the temporary holding spaces for various things I’m moving around. Nothing heavy. Housework is something I really do enjoy even in the midst of all of these years of wondering how it is I’ve spent so much time here and still find myself surrounded by closets and rooms needing straightened. I cherish the mystery.

It was actually pretty amazing seeing the place where the raccoons went. The woman who took them had over 30 raccoons. She had an inside room for the smallest ones, and a room for the medium ones where she begins weaning them off their bottles and transitioning over to solid food. May and June are the busy raccoon season. Eventually they get big enough to go outside into the taller than human sized caged in living spaces.

She had bottles for them when we got there. I told her we could stay and help feed them if she wanted. I truly can’t imagine having that many raccoons to take care of. They drank their bottles and then had to go into a much smaller space than they’d been in before. I wanted to take them back. The woman who trained her has been raising raccoons for 30 years and is 83 years old. She has other animals too but raccoons are her favorite.

People really do have their gifts. The woman we brought the fawn too had five or six other fawns. She also had several owls and a fox. The deer had likely fallen into the lake and was swimming in circles when my daughter first noticed it. She and a friend kayaked out and made a V from behind where they guided it over to a side where there was shore. When it didn’t not stand up itself and get out, she picked it up and set it on the trail.

It’s hard to know when to intervene with animals. You can think you’re helping when in fact you’re making things worse. One woman I called recommended bringing it back to the other side of the lake where mom would be much more likely to find it. The other woman I talked to understood that but was also concerned about possible aspiration and subsequent pneumonia after being in the water. For that it would need antibiotics.

I decided to take her to the woman with the antibiotics. There was also a noticeable bump on its head that I did not examine super closely. The fawn ended up having a fractured skull with the bump being a puncture wound mostly likely from a coyote. After being in the water the deer had slept for a while, was awake and even alert for a while, ad then slept most of the ride there. They were very nice people and I was glad we had taken her.

We found a place to take the raccoons a little over an hour away. There was a lot of calling and texting around. I had actually started praying about it so I also need to mention that God answered that prayer. Yesterday afternoon my daughter and I drove them there once camp was over. We also had a fawn who needed medical attention. We took the fawn to her place first and then we brought the raccoons to theirs. She said they looked great and that we’d done a good job.

The fawn ended up dying after a rough day in the wild. I cried when we drove away from the raccoons because I can’t seem to remain neutral with things like that. Really I can’t stay neutral with any of it but if you grieved over everything you’d never stop crying. The mosquito guy came and sprayed around the house. I accomplished things here and there around the house. My daughter and I planted strawberry plants that a friend’s mom had given us and had been sitting out front.

Dad took the boys shopping for camp supplies this morning. He brought home some dirt for us to use in the raised bed where we were planting the strawberry starts. The camp kids went out tonight to go somewhere for supper. There are usually leftovers for them in the fridge but on weekends they seem to be ready for something different. Going out to eat on the weekends during camp was one of the very best parts about working here. The first place I remember going was Chili’s.

My schedule was all mixed up today. I was up for a while in the earlier morning. There wasn’t much to say or do or therefore now to recollect. I do remember feeling disappointed when I found out the camp breakfast was cereal and fruit. The boys were sleeping pretty soundly so I decided not to wake them. The other I had to wake up because he washes dishes and would have to go work.

So I went back to bed and stayed there until ten. I fell back asleep, but the rest of the time I just didn’t get up. I felt more depressed for whatever reason. You hear people mention the struggle to get out of bed. I think any actual time I’ve been legitimately depressed I have had to get out of bed because there were other people around who were also depending on me. This time nobody was.

The afternoon was fun. I had a play date with a girl who is here for the week. She was one of my sister’s best friends in high school. She’s had one of those lives that truly opens your eyes to the world. We went down to the beach and took the paddleboard out. It was the first time this summer with the perfect weather and breeze to do it. The rest of the day then was mostly good again too.

The Athanasian Creed really isn’t that long. I was thinking that yesterday during church when we said it. Every other year it’s always seemed long. I used to dread Trinity Sunday because you knew an already long service was just going to be that much longer. Our church services can go almost an hour and a half, which I still think is long compared to other area services. Maybe someday I won’t think an hour and a half is long either.

Yesterday I went to a reception for a high school friend who was recently married. She played the violin for our wedding and we both played clarinet in the band. A few other girls from my graduating class were there. With the exception of the twenty plus years we’ve lived apart, it’s funny how we all still relatively seem like the same people. One of them mentioned getting botox now. I almost asked where is it in town that she goes, as I have at times wondered about looking into it myself. We zoomed with a couple of other classmates who hadn’t been able to make it that day. It was a little weird and sometimes hard to hear but it worked.

It was a nice time and I didn’t end up feeling tired afterward so that was good. I’ve mostly stayed away from the camp things so far, taking care of my own meals and feeling a sense of focus on the room tasks I’ve started. I’m not doing a garden this year or anything outside needing any additional upkeep. The boys and I took a several bags to goodwill before lunch. After that we made a very quick trip into Walmart for clear shallow storage totes. I’m going for uniform storage this time. The idea is for everyone to have their two or three bins to keep their personal items that don’t need to be in bedrooms but they aren’t ready to get rid of.

We went swimming again this afternoon. I got in this time and it felt good to do so. I used to tell friends or family when they came that they have to get in or else they’ll get old. What I meant by that is there comes this point with outside water where if it doesn’t look the cleanest you stop getting in. That’s not why I got in this time. I was hoping it was going to be good for my nerves. Sometimes there are turtles but I didn’t see any today.

Today was a pretty decent Saturday. The kids slept in and I don’t remember what time I woke up. Josh got up early to spend the day in the hospital with his Dad in St. Louis. He’s been down there the past few days and will be there for another few at least. I fell asleep on the couch until everyone started waking up. My son had a college call with the track coach in Seward, Nebraska. If the Lord wills then that is where he’ll be going this fall.

I’ve started working toward moving around bedrooms. All of them are in need of a serious deep clean, something that just hasn’t been a priority over the past couple of years. There was a hierarchy of things that I felt needed to be addressed and other things had to come before house stuff. I feel like this is something I’ve been dealing with for a long time. The boys and I have tacked the first room in small bursts throughout the past couple of days. My energy is still a limiting factor in what I am able to accomplish at a time.

Something that sometimes gives me hope is that it took a while to get to this point and it will take a while to come back out of it. I’ve read stories about people who dealt with chronic fatigue and other varying symptoms for up to seven years before they started feeling better. We use phrases like this too shall pass in reference to times that stand out as harder or different. Prior to this there wasn’t really a category for this isn’t passing.

We went down to the beach around 4PM. The big kids were busy but the other kids weren’t. They swam in the deep end and I put my feet in the water. We stayed for a little while then went back up. The raccoons are doing well and have even grown throughout the week. After looking around for somewhere to take them I talked to a wildlife lady who said that they and the surrounding rehabbers are already full beyond capacity. She thinks ours are about seven weeks old and she’d be able to advise us on how to care for them.

After we came back from the beach we got in the van to go out for ice cream. All of the kids came plus one of the other counselors. We drove to Culver’s and since it was already basically suppertime, I gave them the choice of getting ice cream or meals. The older boys got meals and the others had ice cream. I got a kids meal because then I could have both, which the others had the option of as well. We stopped by Walgreens on the way home to get camp supplies for the big kids.

I read another post on Instagram today that goes well with the one I recently commented on. This one was posted by @feminine_not_feminist. Something about it stood out to me as true and relevant to the things that I’ve been thinking about for a while now as well. I have found for myself that my twenties was primarily the decade of processing motherhood, and my thirties was the decade of processing marriage. I don’t mean to keep using other people’s words as a crutch for writing, but posts like this help me with articulating what I still find hard to say. I will post what she wrote slide by slide in bold then follow with my own thoughts if I have something more to add.

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I’ve had some profound paradigm shifts this past year, and I think I’ve sat on them long enough to share publicly. So here’s the story…

…..

Several years ago, I began a journey of embracing radical responsibility in my marriage. No more excuses. No more finger pointing. I sought accountability, even when it was uncomfortable. God mercifully granted me awareness of my own sin and the problems it was causing.

Something I recognize here is the idea of a paradigm shift. I do not doubt for a single second that God renews our minds and thoughts. He cares about the way we think and wants to be loved by us with even our whole minds. A beautiful New Testament description of God is that he “desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth (1 Timothy 2:4)”.

I began writing on Instagram shortly after, chronicling my lessons in real time, publicly and openly. I saw the fruit (still do) of rejecting bitterness, entitlement and selfishness in marriage and I just wanted other wives to experience the same.

…..

But problems began to steadily manifest themselves. What began as a desire to be self-aware and honest with myself eventually morphed into a condemning relationship with my mind.

I can definitely relate so much to this. Just like women can become very critical and disliking of their own bodies, the same thing can happen with hearts and souls. You go under the knife for a nose job or tummy tuck. In her case she mentions the bitterness, the entitlement, the selfishness. These were all parts of her that needed to go.

I became obsessive about working on myself. I believed that any kind and every problem in my marriage could ultimately be traced back to me. I had a standard in my mind about what a “perfect wife” looked like and failure to live up to this produced in me a self-hatred.

Perhaps this isn’t true in 100% of cases, but most of the time where the teachings of biblical/traditional womanhood and femininity are involved, there is an outspoken contempt for and rejection of feminism. The “bad guy” in the story of the world’s problems is feminism, and the terrible women who defiled the world with it. The logic of this plays itself out in the individual.

In my pride, I believed that I could be the perfect wife. And that by being the perfect wife, I could resolve any issue through behavior modification. I not only assumed responsibility for my actions, but also for the response with which my actions were met. It drove me mad.

The greatest sin in my life, always, was obviously pride. Being able to admit that meant I was humble, that I was open to letting God do his work in my heart. I was open to God and his corrections of me. I was open to men and women and them telling me that women possessed a tremendous amount of power in a marriage. A man’s needs were sex, food, respect, and encouragement. Give him all of those and you would be richly blessed.

Ironically, trying to be the perfect wife made me less pleasant to be around. I didn’t give my husband the freedom to have bad days, because I made it all about myself and what I was doing wrong. What a heavy burden to bear.

Not realizing my own needs or knowing how to express them made me, at times, less pleasant to be around. Bringing up faults was not something you were not encouraged to do much as a wife, being directed instead to patience and prayer where God would indefinitely meet your deepest of needs. When whatever power you had did not seem to be working, when you could not impact your outer world to produce the radical adoration and love that you wanted or whatever basic thing you hoped for together but at the time there was no time to even now know it, the one sure thing you could count on was coming back to changing yourself, and especially changing the way that you think, to experiencing yet another paradigm shift that would help you make sense of things.

It’s one thing to encourage a woman to make positive personal changes that may improve her marriage. It’s another thing to promise her that it is within her power to make her marriage perfectly blissful simply by doing all the right things. That is a lie that hurts people.

It’s tough because there is a legitimacy to focusing on yourself and your own personal issues while being at peace with whatever ways that God is working in your spouse’s heart and life. I think for most people there is a journey you have to go on in marriage that is part of the experience of intensely knowing another person. When followed it leads to genuine change both within yourself and within your marriage and with these changes come a truly Christian love and joy in it. It is true that you cannot change another person, or rather, you cannot force another person to change. But God really does do his work in our hearts using people, situations, experiences, and his actual word.

I got caught up in “measuring up” when I should have been focused on walking with God. I forgot the part about grace. I forgot that Jesus’ yoke is easy and His burden is light.

We take love covers over a multitude of sins to be true about the sins of others, but why not also about ourselves? The focus on ugliness, obsessing over where God is needing to convict us, the confessing of pride to show we are open and humble. Christ has made us beautiful and whole again in him. This isn’t to say there is never a time to share more personal stories and the sin that is included there, but more and more I just feel comfortable, not in hiding from sin, but in knowing Jesus is the real one who covers it for me.

There is a kind of marriage advice which, when believed, becomes a tremendous burden to bear. It is a kind which I have both believed and passed along, and for that I am sorry.

In Christian love we forgive one another, just as God in Christ Jesus has forgiven us. I still think there is a place for teaching and learning practical skills in a relationship, that can be taught without it becoming a legalistic burden, and considers the thoughts and needs of each person while encouraging us to grow in knowledge and love.

The camp kids found a baby raccoon yesterday. I don’t know exactly what the details were of finding it. But before the church service started down at the outdoor chapel, my daughter was walking toward the house holding the raccoon wrapped in a towel. The next thing I knew we were looking for syringes to feed it the very little amount left of heavy cream I still had in the fridge.

Again, I don’t fully remember, as I was not fully with it. To no surprise at all, Sunday was pretty much a rest day for me. The hog roast came and went. The boys went down to the beach to swim. They came back when I was on the phone with my mom and sister who I’d called to pass the time with after I’d woken up from a nap feeling like I still couldn’t understand why it was like this.

Today I started feeling better again. They brought another raccoon home. Later I heard them talking about another and I told somebody not to bring home anymore. I’d already been receiving texts about how to feed an orphaned raccoon, someone had already gone to the store and bought kitten formula, and they’re saying that after nine more weeks or so they could wean and eat solids.

No one seems to understand that you can’t just assume these now three raccoons are going to live, that they are probably all now very dehydrated and are going to slowly starve without being able to nurse no matter how much liquid we’re able to get in them. I went to Walgreens and bought a few syringes, soft tissues to use for where the mother would normally help them.

I’m going to try and call an animal shelter or something tomorrow. They use their voices and climb around feeling. When they nap again you feel relieved, just as you did with a human baby, except you know their bellies aren’t full like they need to be. You would feed them if you could. There are frozen mangoes in the fridge. You know God cares for his creatures great and small.

For the past couple of years I’ve been operating under and finding comfort in the assumption that God is drawing me out of something old and bringing me into something new. Whatever we’re going through, whatever situation or pain we are currently in, somehow whatever it is seems bearable as long as we know it is not for nothing, that there is something better on the other side.

I suppose this is the thinking I’ve been questioning lately. People with cancer often undergo brutal chemotherapy treatments in hopes these treatments will extend their life, halt the disease or even cure it. For some, complete remission comes about, and for others, the disease progresses. It’s not a perfect analogy but it illustrates the pains a person will willingly endure if there’s a reason.

I’m still thinking about the track meet and all it entailed. When my sister’s fiancé Brandon died, we had a get-together here at camp on the day that was supposed to have been their wedding. It was me, my sisters, my mom, and a few of my sister’s friends who were also going to be bridesmaids. It rained on and off that day and I took it as a sign that God was crying with us.

It was during that weekend that I had a contentious encounter with my mom. It was also during that same weekend that I suffered a terrible feeling of regret, realizing that life was far too short to keep rehashing the past and clinging to resentment and unforgiveness, though I wouldn’t have been able to name it then. It wasn’t worth it. It wasn’t worth missing out on any more time.

I do remember learning that lesson then, and I do think it changed the way I think about my family. It made me not want to be so slow at learning lessons, to be a freer person unbound by things that didn’t need to bind me anymore. And even though I’ve tried to be a devoted, kind, supportive, and loving mother to my kids, I still have had to ask them many times for forgiveness and still do.

Yesterday was graduation. My son gave his co-valedictorian speech, which he wouldn’t have been able to do if they made the finals. As senior class president, he was also the one who led the tassel movement ceremony for his classmates. I actually barely cried at all, shedding all my tears along the way and even now. My parents, in-laws, and my sister and I sat together in the seats.

We went to a friend’s graduation party afterward. His grandmother saw me when we walked in, and she waved. I went over to her and we reminisced about the good times we’d had while we were living in Hoyleton. I’d take the kids with me to the nearby town garage sales. This woman’s garage sale was one I frequented each year, finding boy shoes and coats to store away for new seasons.

I remembered the 4×4 finals were supposed to be happening around this time. I pulled it up on my phone while eating my snacks and brought my phone over and we watched it together, decidedly rooting for the team of the town we were currently standing in, that had beat them in sectionals and every other time. Auburn ended up finishing third. “Man, we would’ve gotten smoked”, he said.

Ethan and I went early on Wednesday to the track meet. We met my parents in Taylorville and picked up my sister. I was super glad to have her there because it just helps to have another person sometimes. We pulled into the hotel where Josh had reserved us a room. At first I was concerned that the parking lot was so empty, like if it was going to end up being a sketchy place.

“Don’t judge a book by its cover, Mom”, he said, and I thought, “Well, whatever” and went inside. It was actually very nice. Simple but clean and would serve the purpose of getting us acclimated and housing us so we could wake-up nearby. The hotel was only minutes from the stadium, which we found after we had checked in and brought in our stuff. Two of the other boys were at the track.

It was fun to sit and watch in the giant stadium where there were other teams practicing their jumps, running, hand-offs, and blocks. The bleacher section was massive compared to anything we have seen for the other meets. My sister and I just chilled for an hour while the boys stretched and practiced their things. It was nice to watch them and I was glad we had come.

We went to Jimmy John’s afterward. The 6-inch Subway sandwiches are too small but the 8-inch Jimmy Johns ones are just a little too big if you eat the whole thing at once. Ethan got two 8-inch subs and ate them both. My sister ate all of hers as well. The rest of mine I saved and ate for breakfast. We had a good night’s sleep and were up and out the door to find another restaurant.

I didn’t want him to have fast food so we went to this little Family Restaurant place that was less than a block away from the hotel. I told them to order what they wanted and they had a good breakfast. I was already full from my sandwich, yogurt, banana, and granola bar I’d brought along for snacks. A couple of times I said, “You don’t have to eat it all. You can take some home.”

We didn’t have to check out until 11 so after breakfast we went back to the room. Dad and the rest of kids met us right as we had packed up and checked out. We found a free place to park that was further away. Hannah walked with me while everyone else went on ahead. We found a section of small and empty bleachers and watched the meet from there until we all moved again.

I’d found a spot by the 300M curve where there were trees and it seemed like a good place to sit. We camped out there and various people went for various walks to walk around. Eventually me, Hannah, and the boys sat by the tree while Dad and Elianna went up to the main bleachers. Once it was closer, the boys and Hannah also went up there. I stayed put and was fine doing so.

When it was time for the 4×4’s I walked away. Down the sidewalk toward the main part of campus. I could watch the whole thing live on my phone. They were in the last heat of the meet so there were four other relay heats before them. The times kept popping up and I was starting to think that they might actually have a chance at going to finals. My aunt was also staying updated.

She called when it was their turn so I kept her updated on the progress. When it updated the boys were in second place. They stayed in second for the entire heat and ended up placing 12th overall. It wasn’t quite enough to make finals but it was just enough to beat the old school record. We were all very happy they’d been able to do that. I was grateful to God for a special day.